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?

I was still at school and home but had a weekend job at 13. I was living in a shared house in Birmingham by early 90”s. it was £50 a week between 3 of us. No central heating, we had a bath but couldn’t afford the immersion heater so used to boil a kettle, we used to have ‘a bucket’ a housemate would tip it over your head, no minimum wage, health and safety seemed to barely exist.. People could just work their way up as well. The postcode was one of the worst in the UK so we didn’t insure anything.

DS and his GF are looking to rent a house, they expect a really nice house maybe even 3 bed, drive, good area.

Very different times.

Start to see? HMO's are everywhere, every week I see, in the local paper, that there has been another application to turn what was a 4 bedroom house into a 6 or 7 room HMO, or the report of a landlord being prosecuted for having an unlicensed HMO. The difference now is that they are occupied by young (and not so young) professionals, who can't afford anywhere else or a desperately saving to scape together a deposit for their own place.

I think that Mariella Frostrup (63) was a bit of a fluke though, as she moved from Ireland to London aged 15. She must have told some fibs about how old she was, as in the UK in 1977 you were still legally supposed to be in school until you were 16. Her father was a journalist and her mother was an artist, so I'm thinking that there may have been some industry connections there (even though her father died) for her to get straight into the music industry and earn enough to somehow support herself.

I'm mid 50s and a significant cohort left not just my school but education at 16 in the mid 1980s. I certainly didn't know anyone that went to live in London or even the local big city and got an amazing jammy job in the music industry or anything else remotely glamorous. They went off to do YTS or start as the most lowly of the low in whatever area they were working in. None of them had enough money to live away from home.

Lol
Well they were not our babied and sheltered children of today.
But they were also not protected

She was at school in Norway and moved out of country when parents separated so not registered under any education system

Because they were brought up in an era that encouraged independence

She lived in Ireland from the age of 6. They had state education in Ireland then!

My dad started working up town in London from 15 in the 60's. I think it was just very different then, people didn't need qualifications, they learnt on the job.

I think there's a massive gulf between this sort of age and people like me (50 ish). I've largely lived with other people since I moved out of home and went to uni; DP and I own a house now but still have a lodger. Many of our friends of similar age either have or are lodgers/housemates too.
As for the young woman mentioned earlier who has refused to accept university accommodation that doesn't have an ensuite
I don't have an ensuite

There’s a bbc archive 1965 of 4 young women flat sharing. It was a 2 bed. One is leaving to get married and they are interviewing a replacement. She’ll be sharing a bedroom with a stranger and I think they said enough water for 2 baths a week as a selling point.
Lots used to lodge in houses. My mum did this at teacher training college, a widow with a disabled child let room for money.
My dad left school and started working week he turned 15. It was very much the norm.

The '70s were an adventure. I left home and school at 15 because I felt trapped by small town life. Got a job as a live-in chambermaid in London, but only stuck it for 2 days before moving into a hippy squat. Occasionally lived in 1-room bedsits. Nothing was complicated. Jobs were easy to come by, so were bedsits---landlords offered them on postcards in newsagents windows. Sex was considered more as recreation than a relationship. Visiting the clap clinic was no big deal. We drank, smoked weed, took amphetamines, hitch-hiked. We felt like adults because we lived like adults, albeit ones on the wrong side of the tracks. I am also astounded by how infantilised so many of todays teenagers are. It's as if they have had all sense of freedom and adventure knocked out of them.

Young single people in my experience still always start in shared houses? I don't know anyone who has ever moved into a private flat alone as their first rental on leaving their family house. What maybe is more common is people not leaving home at all until they're ready to move in with a partner.

I left school at 16 in 1979. I had been applying for jobs in London (about an hour's commute on the train from where I lived) for a few months beforehand. The neighbour next door would bring me Miss London and the other freebie magazine with loads of jobs - "first jobbers" and "girl Fridays" were the ones I applied for. I had a couple of interviews which my mom came to with me (not the actual interview). I got offered one quite soon, and started work a couple of days after my last O Level exam.

It was all pretty normal.

A couple of the girls in the office were renting a small flat and if I had wanted to I could have moved in too. I chose not to as my boyfriend was living and working in my home town.

So getting a job and leaving home at 16 back then was nothing out of the ordinary.

But rents were a much smaller percentage of a typical wage.

Ok wikipedia must be wrong then

Echoing pps. I left home at 14 (almost 15) and moved in with friends in a squat type situation. I got some cash in hand cleaning jobs and then worked in a supermarket when I was 16, moved in with a boyfriend and carried on from there. Leaving home at a young age even in the 70s was rarely glamorous.

I mean specifically with the landlord living in, like Leonard Rossiter's character in Rising Damp, not an HMO.

Not on here. Apparently they all living with mummy for free or a pittabce until they've saved a deposit to buy their own house

I left home over 20 years ago (aged 18) and throughout that whole time have either lived in or been aware people are living in HMOs. In the more expensive areas it's absolutely the norm until people are coupled up in their 30s. (And there's plenty of them in less expensive areas too!)

I never understand people who think this is a new (or returning) thing, or who go on about young people living in their own flats. Young people have been sharing houses for all these years! In fact it seems to be the older generations who got their own places at a younger age!

Re. The OP - the big difference is work availability. You can still rent a room or something if you know where to look, even if it's not quite the same as before. But the lack of work opportunities is vastly different. You can't just pick up work anymore, let alone something you can work your way up in (even when I left home in 00s this was easier than now). This, I think, is the main thing older generations don't realise. They think young people are lazy, but can't comprehend there just aren't the jobs.

Two people in my team at work have worked here ft since they were YTS at 16. We were telling yr 10 work experience and her mind was blown that they had been working ft from just a little older than her.
I left school early 90s and my daughter is incredulous how few went on to college or uni. Some went to YTS schemes, some factory work.

DH left school at 15, went in the army until 17, then lived in lodgings until he married his first wife, then private rental, for peppercorn rent. The house was owned by someone who inherited it and wanted to rent it out to keep it lived in until their child turned 18. Rent was half council rent! They then got a council house. He was shocked at how expensive council housing was!
My best male friend left school at 17( summer after A levels, summer born baby) and went to London, into digs while working for a government department. Quite a few of our contemporaries had full time jobs at 15/16 and were living more adult lives.
I on the other hand was very sheltered, I left home at 19.

15 was school leaving age for a lot of youngsters and unlike now, some( not all) were far more mature than todays infantilised young adults.

The wikipedia I am looking at says that she lived in Ireland until she was 15! In an interview in the Belfast Times she herself says she came to England on her own aged 16 - so who knows!!!!!

Ah, what I think is more common now is to think that renting is 'throwing money away', and so people living at home until they buy - and obviously it's very complicated and pretty inadvisable to buy as a group. Which is slightly different to young people only wanting to live in self-contained flats.

I do find that quite a sad attitude: I don't think the money I spent on rent rather than living with my parents in my 20s was 'wasted' because it was so integral to my life experience. But I think the attitude that it's irresponsible to rent is very much pushed onto young people from their parents, it doesn't come from the young people themselves in my experience.

I agree with this. My childhood was also tough, despite being very middle-class - I was kicked out of home at 18 to fend for myself. I lived in the most squalid houseshares for years. One, which cost £25 a week, had really bad black mould and I became asthmatic. I did manage - well, you have to - but it was really difficult until I got to about 30. I definitely didn't want that for my own children and so have given them the childhood I wished I had! I don't think they're spoilt or entitled though and I think they'll do just fine in life - it's not their fault or mine that everything is insanely expensive these days and well-paid jobs (or even just jobs!) are few and far between.

Married couples would also live with parents in my mum’s generation until they got enough together to set up home.
Certain jobs would come with accommodation eg nurses homes.

It's just soooo much more expensive to rent these days as rentals are disappearing. That's another reason kids are staying at home until they can afford to buy. Mine probably will as I'm easy commuting distance to London and I'd prefer they saved for a deposit than spent an absolute fortune on renting.