To ask your help for a character's occuption (late 1950s) for my novel?

[Pushpins40]

I'm stuck. It's a minor point but I'm on the upteenth draft of this effing novel with a deadline looming. Google isn't helping, so I wondered if Mumsnet would?

A man, London, 1958, needs a fairly dull office job. Something that would be quite well paid. I thought accountant but I'm not sure I want something professional. I thought managing a department in a refrigeration company (which I thought might be growing post war). But my tired brain is addled.

Any suggestions welcome! Thanks so much.

Shipping clerk.

Office manager?

Civil servant

Law clerk?

Ditto Civil Servant. HMRC specifically (as I was for 34 years)

He's late forties by then - would shipping clerk be the right sort of job for a family man who went to university and who, now, has a daughter at university?

HMRC sounds good. Can you please tell me more? Would it have been a decent income? Were the offices in the city?

Well, he certainly wouldn't have worked at HMRC in the 1950s. The Inland Revenue, or Customs and Excise, on the other hand... (although the latter probably conjures too exciting an image for your purposes!).

At that time weren't HMRC based in Somerset House?

Working for a newspaper (but not a journalist)? Copy editor or something?

secretary?

Insurance clerk/manager. Bank manager like mr mannering in dads army?

I think someone who went to university back then would have a better job than a clerk.....such a small number of people went to uni then compared to now. Office manager of some sort? Civil service would be good.

My DH’s DGF was a HMRC civil servant around that time. Think he was sort of middling but sent his kids to private schools and ended up with a OBE which I think was fairly standard in those days provided you kept your head down and did a okay job for 40 years.

Assistant bank manager. Office manager in some kind of industry, coal or steel. Something in actuaries?

If your character has gone to university, then surely he would be professional? This was kind of the point of university in the 1950s, when only a small percentage of people went.

Warehouse/Factory manager.

If he's 48 in 1958 (say) then he went to university around 1928. This puts him in a small minority of the most able (and privileged) students. He should have a good, professional career unless there's some back story we don't know that prevented this expectation being met.

He could still be a civil servant at the Inland Revenue, but should be expected to be pretty senior (someone with more knowledge of civil service ranks at the time could suggest exactly what level he would be at).

Caspar has said what I was trying today, but better, and has thought through the timeline better!

insurance

Office/bank manager type jobs wouldn't have necessitated a university education. I would have expected someone with a degree in the 1920s to be an MP, doctor, barrister or research scientist.

Accountant in your fictional refrigeration company? One of my family was an in-house accountant for a big manufacturer in 1958.

But do you need it to be in "the city"? You'd need to look at likely locations, but I think London still had a lot of manufacturing then. Eg at the Hoover Building in Perivale.

You are all BRILLIANT. Thank you for doing my thinking for me.

What does pretty senior CS at the Inland Revenue entail? What might he spend his time doing? Need some meat on the bones, as it were.

And my family member did indeed have a university degree and some of his children were doing university degrees right about 1958.

No, it doesn't hve to be the city. I've got a scene which I can change.

Tressilan, what sort of big manufacturer was your family member an accountant at? And was this person 'comfortable' as a result?

Tressilans - how funny! Almost exact. Excellent. xx