Hourly rate

But presumably those prices for the services of a queens councillor includes the support staff in the office, unlike the insolvency practitioners who are charging at least ninety quid an hour for the office staff opening the post and typing letters etc. as separate itemised charges.


Andy B

Sheffield eh? Well, they have to fund their policies somehow, and boy do they have some weird policies.

Sparking, like you I was a 70s apprentice and what you said was interesting and I concour. I was 16 on £9 a week gross, a 15yr old was on £5 and the apprenitceship ended on your 20th birthday and providing you`d passed the exams then wow you were now on a skilled wage. Until you were twenty your unskilled friends were earning far more than you though.

The Inland revenue gave a nationally agreed tax allowance for tools and your employer expected you to buy your own to some extent. They could buy them for you and you could pay back a small amount each week. Wages were weekly in cash in sealed see thru envelopes and for ease of reckoning etc were paid to the nearest 10p upwards.

Next week the overpayment would be deducted. That meant that during the whole of your employment no one was overpaid more than 9p a lifetime.

PS- your apprentice % rates seem far better than mine so I am jealous

When I was eighteen I had a girlfriend who was sixteen turning seventeen, she had a elder sister who was eighteen.


The eighteen year old sister was a secretary for the boss of a reasonable sized factory in the village and her fiancée was also eighteen and worked in another factory, both having been at work for three years . Between them they had got a mortgage and had bought a house that the girls dad was helping them to do up, but neither set of parents had helped them to buy it as far as I know.


Later in life I ended up meeting my wife who left school at sixteen already having got a job at a Building Society with an agreement that she would do a business studies BTEC day release at the local college , I met her when she was eighteen and a year later when she was nineteen we went to get a mortgage for our first house and the building society she worked for gave us a staff mortgage based purely on her earnings, as she met the 3.5 x earnings = mortgage ratio and it was easier to ignore my earnings as I was already self employed.


Back in the 70’s the earnings potential of kids leaving school at fifteen and sixteen by the time they were eighteen, particularly if they went into an unskilled factory job is unbelievable to kids of today. The message we got from school though was that if you took an initially better paid unskilled job you would be stuck for life and whereas if you accepted lower pay for training and qualifications you would win in the long run.


When I did the electrical courses in my forties there was a guy training with us who had stood on the same two foot square piece of rubber matting operating a press in a factory making lorry wheels for twelve years and yearned for the freedom of being one of the maintenance electricians in the same factory, as they had the freedom to walk about and have a bit of banter throughout their working day, but becoming an electrician would potentially mean taking a pay cut.


Even though I went to a grammar school the idea of going to university was never a really serious consideration for many people I was with. I did consider it after I did the C&G Technicians certificates and went to a Birmingham University open day, I was had an application form for the British Antarctic Survey team as a maintenance guy, but in the end decided to carry on working around home. There’s a couple of what ifs!


 Andy B.

Yes Andy, much as I found too. It was a different world back then.

Like you Grammer School (ish - It was actually a "Secondary Technical School" - same standing as a grammar school , you`d got to pass the 11plus and be selected), not many even thought of going to Uni. I did craft apprenticeship but technicians course with ULCI/C & G and coulda got the converted to a C & G full technological certificate but although I was certain to get it the cost was £9 each year to have the post nominals, that money was better spent as a young man with a young family.

Yes back then you could leave a job in the morning and have another by the afternoon no problem, OK it might not be the job you wanted but you`d get paid and be looking for another job. The only unemployed was by choice back then.

There was no tinternet and folk talked to each other and walked to each others houses to go out etc. An alien concept these days!