How did people leave home at 15…

[Holdinguphalfthesky]

… move to London and start working as a music PR? Just reading an interview with Mariella Frostrup and it says that’s what she did. Even back in the 70s, how would someone have done that? I seem to remember in Caitlin Moran’s book How to be a Woman, she also walked into a job in music journalism at a very young age.

Is it unreasonable of me to ask how they did it? What’s being glossed over in the retelling?

That rule changed half way through my course.

DH was born in '62 and left school aged 15 in '77. He wasn't expelled.

MF lived in Ireland, where 15 was the legal age to leave school, and moved to London when her dad died early. Maybe she was at private school, and had to leave and get a job when he died? She's done well for herself regardless and I think she should be proud of that!

Sali Hughes also did this, moved to London at 15, and managed to get a job assisting a makeup artist. I think she initially slept on a friend’s floor ? Not sure though.

@LeedsLoiner I'd forgotten that people could do that. I had friends who claimed unemployment during the holidays. I worked in a pub during the holidays and remember telling my father that I'd probably be better off claiming unemployment and he went berserk!!! Had completely forgotten that. And so many think that benefits are too generous nowadays!!!!! 😂

I did this. My mum had a 'once you're 16, you're out' rule, and my sister had already gone to London (we're from near Hull), and was living in a grotty flatshare in Crouch End, so when I was 15, I moved in with her and her boyfriend. Got an interview within a few days, and worked full time in a supermarket near Baker Street tube station. This was 1985. For the next few years it was super easy to find jobs. I remember working in Tesco in Hounslow in 1989, having an argument with the manager, walking out, down the street, and found another job within the hour!

My mum moved to London from a small village at 15 as an apprentice in a niche industry for a high end business. Bespoke/in magazines/known service provider to the queen. Indeed mum worked on something for the queen. This was in the 60s. It was just how things were then I think.

Me too. I worked for some holidays but no need to rely on parents.

Her birthday is in November, so my point still stands if she was in the UK - which she apparently wasn't.

Rose-tinted spectacles, I fear.

Road deaths were much higher, including children and pedestrians.

Child abuse was rife, and was brushed under the carpet.

The Flying Squad was corrupt, and cosily in bed with organised crime. Racist violence was common, even in green buses carrying groups of cops.

In the 1970's it was possible, and "normal" for a young couple on average earnings to buy a house, though, and for a bright school leaver to get a "job for life" in a decent company with a pension and the probability of long term promotion.

Absolutely, if you watch the film "!0 Rillington Place" about serial killer John Christie, it was filmed in Notting Hill, just before a large demolition programme in the 1970s

Rillington place, demolished in '72 was a typical street in Notting Hill of 3 storey victorian terraced houses, let and sub let as slums, there were large factory premises that were by that period derelict.

I grew up in London in the 80s, and as a kid we played in derelict warehouses that are now prime location real estate. Its changed a lot!!

Also, I grew up in an age where children were seen and not heard. You were desperate to be an adult to have some autonomy.

Fascinating thread. On the subject of gentrification, I remember in 1980 hearing a woman talking about a house she'd been to look at in what she'd been told was a rapidly up and coming area, but she had her doubts about it as it all seemed very grotty. She and her husband and children were in a small but decent terrraced house in West London and looking for somewhere bigger. I often wonder if they took the risk, because if they did they would have cleaned up.

It was Islington.

I knew people in Islington and Stoke Newington in the late 70s. They lived in big houses that were squats or bed sits. They'll be millionaires' houses now.

Being on the dole as a young person or in the university holidays would probably have worked as a univeral basic income?

Work experience was much easier to come by too. These days most schools put a week aside for the year 10's but lots of pupils don't get a place. Schools don't help organised it, local councils and large employers don't have a scheme to support it in out town.

I left home at 17 in 1971 and moved to London. Spent one night at my sister's house in Battersea, and then rented a bedsit close by in Clapham. Got a job as a runner in the film business in Soho. Great days. My friends soon followed. They worked retail in the big department stores like Barkers in Ken High Street, Dickens and Jones and so on. You could literally walk out of a job on the Friday and walk into a new one on the Monday.

I lived in Islington in a basement flat in the seventies. Two doors down the house was owned by a notorious landlord who was so abusive to the tenants that the council bought him out. They offered the house ( four story Georgian house in a garden square) for £15,000 to a couple who were living there but they turned it down as they didn’t want to take on a mortgage. The houses in that square go for £4 million plus. I do wonder if the young couple ever think “if only”.

as an Irish teenager I worked a summer in London with lots of people from my home town , the boys lived in squats and signed on and did labouring work , my friend and I weee chambermaids and lived in in a terrible hotel basement in Euston .
a fact my kinds use against me whenever I wouldn’t let them do something as teenagers. I actually don’t know
what my parents were thinking

I lived between home, shared houses and squats when I was 15 and moved to a different city at 16. This was 99/2000! I claimed income support and my boyfriend worked.

I left school - quite legally - at 15 and 2 months. If my birthday had been in late July or August, I’d have left at 14 (still in the school year in which I turned 15). 16 became the minimum age in 1972, but all that meant was that my brothers effectively left at Easter, when they were both still 15, and were only supposed to go in to sit exams. One of them didn’t bother, one showed his face 5 times in the summer term, both were working full-time.

By 17, I was living in digs, which was essentially a room in someone’s house. Some people rented out multiple rooms, some just one to help make ends meet. I was in the latter, and shared the bathroom and kitchen with my landlords (a youngish married couple, then a single mum and her young son) It was mostly great.

I’m surprised more people aren’t mentioning council houses. By the 80s the estates had developed a reputation but even so I knew people who’d got themselves pregnant as teens and got a council house. Lucky so-and-sos got offered the place cheap under right to buy and made a killing selling high; they’ve made a total mockery of those of us who had to work.

London became an unaffordable place only in the 80s, before that it was not the world-beating famous celebrity place it is now. Other cities and towns were equally viable economically. The miners strikes only came in the 80s as the mines were shut. Celebrity culture then was very different with fewer divides between people and more accessibility to all, especially for men; it’s become very plastic and nepotistic now. Even by the 90s you had to be lucky and in London, meaning well-off, to do anything.

My mum left school at 15 in the 60s, and got a job with no qualifications, just in a local factory, and stayed at her parents’ home until she got married. She could barely read in fact. She always resented me staying in school and aiming higher, she never has recognized how much the world has changed.

I left home at 15 and lived by the seat of my pants, not in London, but moved to another large European capital city. Earned little bits of money and lived in shared accommodation and essentially winged it until I thought better of my trajectory a few years later. It was not unusual.

It's so difficult for them to get Saturday jobs and the like now. I was born in 1974, went to university in 1992- the first one in my family, but I'd had a Saturday / Summer holiday job in a shop (even cashing up the til and taking the money to the bank) from aged 14. I babysat as well. My daughter is desperate to get a job when she's 16 but no one takes them on

@CaptainMyCaptain
I squatted there in the early 80’s, we might have gone to the same pubs! Islington is still a very deprived borough

Tell that to the miners 😭 social mobility isn’t the same as moving location though.

As a teenager in the 90's I knew a few people living in pretty grotty bedsits and shared flats. Some worked others were on the dole and got housing benefit, some probably even got some housing benefit or even dole money while working if it was cash in hand.

I'm more interested in how Mariella Frostrup came to London at 16 and immediately started working in the music business? Her Wikipedia states she was a trainee tape op on the Rolling Stones mobile studio and worked on a Simple Minds Album!

I listened to desert Island discs the other day with celebrity photographer Richard Young, who in 1974 landed his first ever photography doing the photographs for a book by John Cowper Powys. At this point he doesn't even own a camera or know how to use one really so the first two rolls of film he shoots come back totally blank. Amazingly he is given a few weeks to learn how to use the camera and keeps the job. I'm a photographer and that would just be impossible these days, utterly impossible, you'd be laughed out of town and your name would be trash.

Apparently most of Richard Young's contacts came from working in a Saville Row tailors after leaving school and meeting some bigwigs through that.

I think opportunities must have been far more abundant back then for people than they are now. Along with much cheaper accommodation and cost of living.