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?

There werent so many rules or checks back then. You could make up any old shit 😅 tell porkies about jobs you had, give your mates address to give you a reference.
I started work in the school holidays from age 13, washing up in a hotel, most kids did back then. You were meant to have a work permit but nobody really bothered. Little in the way of health and safety. My friend working at the same hotel spilt a pot of boiling water over her foot. Caused a nasty burn. The hotel proprietor who was a nurse (allegedly) dressed her wound and she carried on working.
Some aspects of those times were great, others not so ☺️😉

All of that. I also think that most jobs recruited quickly and being paid weekly in cash and having a cash based society made it easier to be move around and try things out. In many ways it was better but in some ways worse.

You could grift more in those days. Borrow IDs etc, it had less consequence and risk.

Things werent enforced. Technology makes it far easier to enforce and to track people.

not the same but I was employed behind a bar when I was 16. I just told them I was 18. They didn’t ask for ID or anything.

Young people had very low expectations of comfort back then. I'm always astounded at what people think is a baseline these days - Starbucks coffees, paying someone to paint their nails and do their eyebrows, designer clothes, botox , fancy phones etc. As a teen in the 80s these were things that only rich people could afford. Normal people could live in a squat, wear jumble sale clothes, work cash-in-hand jobs, and get by OK.

@Holdinguphalfthesky "Do you think we’ve more lost something or more gained something?"

I can't really see what we've gained to be honest. My story is similar to others on here. Left school at 16 in 1973 and by 17 I was living in a bedsit and had a full time job. I had the time of my life and all the other young people I knew and lived with were too. Parents pretty much expected you to move out, but that was fine because we wanted to. I don't know anyone that had any help whatsoever from their parents, but nobody expected it or even thought about it.

My parents schools found them jobs. They just finished school on Friday went to the place they would be working on the Monday 😆 that would’ve been mid 70s

My grandad walked into a garage on a Friday at 16, asked for a job and they said he could start on the Monday. He got cheap digs living in the spare room at a widow's house. It really was that easy!

That’s because everyone is a rich person now in comparison to back then.

I think in Mariella’s case it’s worth highlighting that she’s disclosed significant trauma within her childhood, including parental alcoholism, a violent stepfather, and a lot of disruption during her parents’ divorce. Whilst it was absolutely more common decades ago for 16 year olds to be in work, it was decidedly less common for teenagers to leave their parents’ home without having a university place or a real job lined up and just land up in London winging it.

Many young teenagers who did this and were able to get by because it was easier to find digs and cash in hand crap jobs were running from traumatic backgrounds and abuse at home, and unfortunately ended up in a different cycle of abuse wherever they arrived. The attitude of the time which enabled them to do this was ultimately one of the reasons why child sexual abuse was largely brushed under the carpet and musicians having teenage groupies and girlfriends often went unchallenged in the same period: if a 14/15 year old is mature enough and knows their own mind enough to be living away from home and working then surely they also know their own minds when it comes to sex.

It's not so much 'opportunities'. I mean, is a squat and some cash in hand jobs an opportunity?

I'd hitched from home to the ferry, too!

Some of it was definitely that there was in safety net. In my house, I had a lot of younger siblings, and we shared a tiny house with three elderly relatives. It was time for me to fly the nest because there was no space or resources in the nest.

Some of it, as @VickyEadieofThigh says is that home was far from luxurious, so it wasn't that we were leaving comfortable parental homes for squalor. I'm not sure my Kilburn squat was all that much colder than home, which was heated until long after I'd left by an open fire and a Superser bottle gas heater.

A lot of young girls got into the clubbing scene and met older men who got them into the music business.

I remember Jonathan Ross who must’ve been late 20s/30 at the time going out with his now wife who was then 16 and worked at “Just Seventeen” (as you do). They’d call him names for that these days.

There was absolutely no safeguarding and pretty teenage girls were fair game.

Different times.

The official school leaving age hasn't always been as high as it is now. DGF, born 1900, left school at 13; DM born just before the outbreak of WW2 left at 15 to work in a mill, I could have left at 16 on the 1980s but stayed to do a levels.

I had a classmate who had only just had her 17th birthday when she went to uni (we were at a private school where extremely bright girls could sit the entrance exam a year early and she had a late summer birthday).

My DM left home at 16 - she got a nannying job and moved into her employer's house. It also was far more common for people to rent rooms as digs - no real checks on this - or to sublet rooms. I don't think landlords had to keep records or do checks on tenants.

School leaving age rose to 16 in 1972. I remember my DF telling me that a lot of kids in his older sister's year were annoyed about having to stay on until 16. Before then, loads of kids left at 15: if you were going into a trade, or into your family business, there wasn't much point in staying on longer and families couldn't always afford it.

Completely agree with this. For every mariella there was a young boy groomed into sex work straight off the train at King’s Cross who was dead within 10 years

I’m glad that teenagers generally don’t need to live in squats or slums anymore, but I feel like we must’ve lost the learning of life skills along the way. Most teenagers I know simply wouldn’t be able to look after themselves if they left home and got a full time job at 15. I wonder if that’s better because they have a longer childhood or worse because lots of people now don’t learn those skills until they get their first job after university

I left school at 16, sister left at 15. Worked full time, just got on with it and had a bloody great social life, in pubs from 15 etc.

I'm horrified at some of the babying of teenagers that goes on, for example all this nonsense about the parents having to hold the kids hands through exams, not going for holidays during exam season etc.
It's only 15 years since my DS was doing GCSEs and 13 since A levels. both times DH and I were on another continent on long holidays, it never occurred to us to hang around just because he was studying.

Young people grew up faster in those days. Those 15 year olds in the early 70s, born around 1955/58, probably had parents born late 20s/30s who had lived through the war and rationing and possibly lost a father themselves. Very tough era.

Don’t forget though- they’ll live longer at the other end. Maybe 10,15 years more life expectancy?! So they’re just changing the pattern / timing of things. Who wants to work another 10 years at the end of your life as well as the start?!

Oh definitely re the landlord thing, I found a park home with a massive hole in the floor covered by carpet, it was £8 a week. I just gave the guy the money and he threw the key over at me. No checks either way.

It was brilliant

Maybe both. I certainly think that kids have lost the resilience, the maturity and the independence they had in those days. We baby kids far more now than we did in the past. I think there probably aren't the opportunities for a 15 year old now but even if there was, I doubt many would be capable.

I think you could leave school at 14 in the 70s couldn't you? I'd have bloody loved that.

There was less paranoia about danger back then. Young people were rebelling against their wartime value parents and there was more of an attitude of 'let's go and do something exciting, let's make something fun happen'. That's how my mates from that era describe it. I think it would be been cool to be a yp back then in some ways.

This may be rose tinted glasses but I think young people of my generation (I'm early 60s now) had a hell of a lot more fun than this gen

DM left school after GCE/CSE’s at 15 as a summer born baby. She then had to wait until her 16th birthday to start work. The age of consent at the time was 21 so getting married required a parents signature as did emigrating, you couldn’t join a pension scheme etc. I’m not quite sure what that would mean from a living perspective trying to rent somewhere or if just being able to pay a deposit and a weeks rent up front was enough.

Far more people identifying as middle class and infantilising their kids

the difference is not just teenagers though is it?

take landlords. Landlord of the 70s if your tenant did a midnight flit, trashed the house, stole the entire contents of the house, used it as a crack den etc… you’d just have to shrug your shoulders and clear up. Often, you’d have some heavies who would violence to threaten or collect.

now, look at the landlords on MN for example, often hysterical because tenants don’t live the way the want them to. They can’t cope with non payments, damage, asb, anything.

that’s nothing to do with teenagers resilience