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?

You would take a room/bedsit in a female house with a landlady. Completely normal. You could easily find a job in London then. Plenty of kids left school at that age.

And as kids weren’t wrapped in cotton wool like they are now, they were more savvy.

Simple.

@Jamesblonde2 It's weird but I left home at 17 in the 90's although to go to university. I was from a working class background and certainly not wrapped in cotton wool but not especially savvy either, neither were most of the people I knew. I think kids today are loads more savvy about things than I was at that age.

I think affordability, opportunity and expectation play a huge roll now in keeping kids at home well into adulthood.

In 1947, the school leaving age was increased from 14 to 15
▪ Between 1947 and 1973, the school leaving age was 15 in both nations.
▪ There were also ‘easter leaving rules.’ Under these rules, children could leave school at
Easter if they turned 15 between September and January (inclusive).
▪ From 1973 to 2013, the school leaving age was 16 in both nations.
▪ Easter leaving rules continued to exist up to 1996, when they were abolished.
▪ From 2013 onwards, the education leaving age was increased to 18 in England only.
I was born in ‘56 and could have left school at 15 but stayed to finish exam year (O levels as was) My sister was born in ‘58 and had to stay on until she was 16 even though she wasn’t taking exams

Yes, it was very different. All the CEOs of the business I worked for (I was there 26 years) started at the bottom and worked their way up to the top, none went to university. That's just how it worked then, and they learned all aspects of the job by actually doing it.

I left school just after my 16th birthday - the leaving age here was 15 - and lived with an 18 year old friend, her husband and baby, but lots of young people shared flats as we came from a very small town so moved to a bigger town to work. I started work in the school holidays and had to take a day off work to go back to school to officially leave!

I'm not in the UK but I left weeks before my sixth form exams. I just wanted to get away from school and start work. I had just turned 16 - in the mid 70s.

I was paid in cash for the first few months, then we got paid by direct credit into our bank accounts so I wandered into the nearest bank and opened a cheque account.

This was me too, at 17 - tho I had help from the state for a little while, unemployment and housing benefit (not many jobs where I lived, in Thatcher's 80s), then onto YTS for my first job, haven't stopped working since. Your last sentence describes it so well! I'm mindblown at how different things are now for my teenage DS, but then things were different again for my mum & dad - left school at 15, straight into factory jobs, married & buying own house at 19

Sali Hughes has written about this before saying she became a make up artist in London after leaving home in wales as a teenager and then worked her way up to become a beauty journalist. She makes the point now that you have to be able to do an unpaid internship in this and similar industries so only people with very wealthy parents can afford to do this. It’s an example of how social mobility has gone backwards.

Someone i know left home at 16, she said her parents had told the LA that they cant keep her at home anymore so the LAs duty was to find her a home,she got 2 bed apartment at 16, at 24ish? Got 2 bed newbuild house.

It's fantastic that she used to live in a country where social housing was readily available.

It was a lot more common in 1960s and 1970s to leave home very young. I think there might be a bit of truth stretching going on for 1980s onwards, unless in the case of running away from home etc. I’ve got a friend who claims that she left home at 15 in the 1980s which I don’t entirely believe. I heard my DB say recently that he ‘barely went to school’. I mean, he absolutely went to school on a very regular basis to the age of 17, I was there! But that’s become his story to himself.

Re social mobilty
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/live/bbc_radio_fourfm?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

I read something ages ago, on here I think... that the biggest factor in previous social mobility was the availability of jobs due to a labour shortage. People could work their way up. Much more pertinent than the idea of social mobility via education.

It certainly seems to ring true.

I long for the days where you could just pick up work easily. My life would be quite different now. (Having had years out due to illness and never managed to start a proper career since.)

Both my parents left school at 14 and got jobs. I was talking to my mum about this the other day as we were talking about rental checks.
She said she used to just find a job ad for a room or flat, call the number, go in and say you wanted to live there and pay the month up front. There were no ID or credit checks. If you wanted the room you just said so and handed over cash.
Likewise with jobs, she said she would just walk into any store along the high street and ask if they had jobs, if yes then you can just start. Wages were weekly in cash in brown envelopes noone checked right to work or age etc.
also with council Housing, she said yoh just walked in to the council offjce and asked for a flat and there were loads of flats and you just moved in.
This was late 1960s

I actually didn't leave home but was working in the music industry at 15 part time in the 90s. I literally got the yellow pages out and called every number under the recording studio entries until someone gave me a job for 3 hours a week doing admin and cleaning mixing desks.
I got my next music industry job when working in a pub glass collecting and a regular had a small record label and I got talking to him and he gave me a job, i worked there doing all sorts, marketing, PR, posting out cds for a few years while i was at college. I moved out of home the day I turned 18 as I just wanted independance. I bought a flat by working three jobs to show income and getting a 100 percent mortgage on a 60k flat in london suburbs. I then went to uni whilst working and just paid for myself.

Back in the day, bands usually had a range of day jobs that were flexible or related to music. My other half was a graphic artist working for a studio that did almost all the advertising for all the clubs in NYC. The drummer's day gig was driving a limo; the bass player was a line cook. Our brass section filled in on Broadway shows when people were ill.

I did, claimed housing benefit and lived in a group home till 16

It's not totally one or the other, but I think to a larger degree we've lost something.

I'm happy we have increased workplace safety standards, for example. But the fat that it was possible to move into a place like a rooming house at a young age and support yourself and work up from your mid teens - I think that was positive.

Kids now are in school so long, and yes, they don't really seem to come out knowing much more (maybe less?) about reading, maths, writing, history, or politics. And when they go into jobs later, they don't seem to be any better. A 21 year old university graduate often seems wore than a 21 year old who had been working since 15.

Loss of years of earning, massive debts, and a kind of learned passivity, seem to be the result for the extended childhood we now insist on. And they don't seem happier either.

Partly true. There were no ID or credit checks to rent a room but, on the other hand, many of them were complete hovels *I lived in a few in the 70s) and there was next to no protection for tenants.

You can still get a job going round businesses, my grandson got a Saturday job in a cafe by going round town and asking. My daughter got a full time job in a shop in the 90s by doing the same. It's probably less common now, but again there was little in the way of worker's rights in the 60s.

The availability of council housing would vary according to where you lived. I grew up in a New Town and it was very straight forward getting a flat like that. I got a council bed-sit in the mid 70s. Not so much in big cities.

Our band marketing was sending postcards for each and every show we did to a mailing list that we worked hard to develop. We sent about 150 + cards for every performance, and hoped they would bring friends to spread the word and enjoy the show.

With huge apologies to all the mums here who want their kids to be safely cossetted and looked after, the 1970s really didn't allow that option. You got out there, followed your instincts and swam. Most people are okay IMO, but everyone needs to be a bit sceptical about the few who promise the moon on a stick.

There wasn't much in the way of rights, but we learned to look out for ourselves younger.

I mostly lived in hovels in London between 19 and 24. I didn't have a place that was exclusively mine until I went to the US, where I had a two bed flat in Jersey City overlooking the world trade center and a 40 minute commute to Midtown Manhattan, for $240 per month, heating and hot water included.

Agree.

I think 15 or 16 is often when kids are most motivated to be independent. When that is stymied, many become accustomed to being dependent.

I have three that are 16, 18, and 21. Realistically I think they could all have made their way at 16 ig given the chance - the eldest actually went to work the summer she turned 16 at a summer camp and was responsible for 10 kids 24 hours a day, and rose to the occasion.

I think that landlords and employers were in some ways much more likely to take a chance on young people when they could easily turf them if it didn't work out. Now, it is a huge deal to fire or kick out a tenant, and so accepting someone is a risk.

London used to be cheap. Very cheap. You could live fairly centrally, in digs or a squat for very little.

There were lots of jobs which didn’t require a degree and which don’t exist now. Journalism used to be known as a trade, not a profession. Chutzpah and hanging around in the right pubs in Soho or knowing the right people could get you a long way.

I think the UK is impoverished at the moment, and so I hope that we shall go back to being bright, sparky, creative and adventurous. Because there's nothing to lose.

By taking shit jobs (3 of them, 1xft & 2 p/t) & sofa/floor surfing , same as yp do now