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?

Much of what's been written about moving out young rings a bell except that I went to university at 17, and didn't go to London until I was 20. But the rest resonates, and the same was true of my mid-20s in NYC.

DH left home at 17 and ended up working as a management trainee van driver, paying £7 per week out of £15 for a bedsit. Then went to the ME to save some money, which became the investment in the business he still has. He's always been determined that he was never going back to living hand-to-mouth.

I moved out at 19 to go to uni, never moved home and never had any issues getting a job or cooking myself dinner because I didn't move into a bedsit at 15.

Are you mixing up working class and low income? I'm working class as are a lot of our friends are plumbers, mechanics, electricians etc and they definitely have enough money for their children to not have to leave in their teens.

Not making kids move out doesn't mean you're paying for them if they have a job. Even if it is a office job which you seem to have much disdain for.

Of course they’d cope if they needed to- that’s the human condition isn’t it?

I live next door to a small children’s home- the chances of them being spat out of their own at 18 is high (yes legally there is financial support in place but if they are unable to comply with the conditions they’ll just fall out of the system)

This thread has got me thinking more. Back in the 70s, cash really was king. I didn't bother with a bank account until my late 20s. Any meagre savings were put in a building society account. Life was about the here and the now.

Nowadays, it's as if we are conditioning youngsters to accept that their life is a treadmill, and they will forever be trapped in the system. Go to uni and get yourself saddled with debt from the get-go. Save to buy a house, even though a mortgage may turn out to be a millstone around the neck. In the meantime, stay at home because it's unthinkable that a precious 20-something should experience any bit of hardship. Shell out for pension plans, insurance, car loans, etc.

And then life will be over before they have even sniffed the air beyond the prison door.

This is so true. Neither my parents or in laws have private pension provison, but as boomers made so much money in inheritance and their properties to be very comfortable. (plus- often not spoken about- tax dodging, which was endemic back in the day when you were paid cash)

if globalisation/ deregulation of the financial markets/ the booms of the 80s/90s and 00s hadn’t happened, they would be basically destitute. Living on state pension with no other provision.

They didn’t do anything particularly, the world just delivered. But with that came an obligation for their children and grandchildren to keep the capitalist cycle going.

But you appreciate it's different now? You can't finish school at 16 with a couple of GCSEs, find a flat in London for 2p a week and an entry level office job in a investment bank via a card in the newsagents window which will allow you to work your way up to a 6 figure salary by 40 with no A Levels, never mind a degree.

Ok I'm thinking more low income working class. Care workers shop assistants etc. Minimum wage jobs Skilled trades earn far more than many of the " middle class"

Didn't say the kids had to move out but they were certainly needed to make a decent contribution to live there and didn't get it back as a gift a few years later

I was talking about the kids that were living at home well into their 20s who are not charged anything, often have no experience with dealing with financial stuff and certainly no idea of financial struggles. Especially if they've had a very nice comfortable childhood to start. They wouldn't have a clue if suddenly plunged into homelessness and poverty. The people who've stood on their own feet since teens I suspect would cope much better

My late mum left home at 15. Infact all her brothers and sisters left home at that age.
Only one who stayed was the eldest as he would inherit the farm.
Mum started in Dublin and after 12 months moved to London.
This was in the late 1940's.
Met my dad and they moved to Cheshire as he got a good job with the railway.

I left home at 17, had a choice of 3 council flats. Choose one and lived in it until I was 20 when I bought first home with DH. I’m 50 now. It was a lot easier then!

And grotty bedsits were common - and cheap. No central heating (a gas fire with a coin meter for feeding it if you were lucky) and a shared manky old fashioned bathroom (no shower) probably on a different floor, with other people’s pubes in the bath.

I did like the little Baby Belling cookers though.

Well yes obviously if you let an adult child stay at home, not work, not charge rent, pay for their phone, not make them cook or clean then obviously that's not helping them but it doesn't need to be one extreme or the other.

I left school at 15, August birthday, i could have started work before 16 and people rented a room/lodged

Yes, even if you were lucky enough to have a TV it was coin operated!

It's certainly true that jobs were easy to come by, if not necessarily great, and I suspect that some of the "office junior" type of employment would nowadays need a much greater number of qualifications. I did one clerical job for the holidays on the strength of about 20 minutes of being "shown the ropes". Mind-numbingly boring admin which would probably be done at the press of a button nowadays; I and a fellow student cleared a six-month backlog, before returning to our studies with a fresh appreciation of our life prospects.
I think of the holiday jobs I did to augment funds as a student, and I would guess that many of them are now done by machines, or have been outsourced to countries with lower labour costs.
Certainly true that it was possible to leave school in the school year that you reached your 16th birthday; one girl at my grammar school did just that, and it caused uproar, as parents were supposed to agree before you enrolled that you would stay until at least "O"- levels, but they couldn't legally insist. As a summer-born, I was only 15 when I sat the exams.
Some pupils at secondary modern would not even be entered for any formal qualifications at all, and they could still find jobs of some sort.
My mother was clerk to a Rent Tribunal, (those were the days!) and had many tales of what was considered fit for human habitation in London back in the day - but the rent was low.

And the world of work was tough, even if it was easier to find a job. This thread reminds me that I was talking to my mum on the phone recently, just telling her about my work etc and something I said about a colleague who was being dismissed made her recall when she was in her late teens and working as a bank cashier (a very good job, back then, for a young woman from a working class family) and the bank manager was King. He’d come in with a hangover, or feeling angry, and berate employees who just had to meekly take it unless they wanted to be looking for a new job the next day. He fired one of her young colleagues on the spot because he thought her dress was too tight and told her she looked like a prostitute and he wouldn’t have that in his bank. Totally normal. No ACAS, no tribunals, you just collected your coat and left quietly.

Blimey, dh and I knew no such luxury! Mind you when I first met him he was paying 32/6d a week (£1.65 IIRC) for his student bedsit in Sheffield. (Late 60s)

Interesting thread. Another important difference is that 16-18s could access unemployment benefits until 1988 and these were higher thro 70s & 80s relative to COL. So there was a better financial safety net for young people leaving home because they weren't considered their parents' responsibility. I was born early 60s and remember a culture during 80s of people who wanted to be in a band, or 'opt out', living in squats on benefits. The flip side of this though was much higher unemployment levels (double digits) in the 80s and real hopelessness about the future for working class youngsters in areas where industry was decimated during the Thatcher years.

Experiences of young people differed then as much as they do now according to class, religion, family, culture... and my memories are coloured by my own experiences, but I think teens were lower down the pecking order then than they are now. The Victorian 'seen and not heard' had gone but we were still expected to sort ourselves out rather than rely on parents or expect that they would always put our needs before theirs. It wasn't simply that we were expected to be adults, nor that parents were selfish. They partly saw their role as teaching us our place in the social order and indulging young adults was seen as not good for them or for society. My experience of independence was a funny mix of being expected to cross minor roads to run errands from reception age but then having a 10pm curfew when I had a boyfriend at 17. I'm not sure either was ideal preparation for adulthood, tho I enjoyed the first much more than the second.

Jobs in investment banks, 100k+ salaries and the London of today are not aspirations for everyone. Besides which, investment banks bleed an economy. They do not operate for the general good of the people

My mum worked in a bank and had so many stories like this. The manager would come back from lunch completely wasted and they’d have to barricade his office to keep him away from customers.

however, she did get a staff discount on her mortgage 😱

it’s like the brink mat gold being laundered through a random bank branch in Swindon or wherever because bank staff had no responsibility for finding out where your money came from (I don’t think they noticed in until he’d paid in £10m or something 😭)

Yes, I was exaggerating for a mildly comic effect.

In 1978 there were 1.5 million unemployed. Schemes like yts and tops helped people into work. The 70s ended very differently to how it started and was different to 1964.

When I attended university in the early 1980's during the vacations I could claim unemployment benefit and housing benefit to cover the rent on my student house.

You were allowed to leave school at the start of the term in which you turned 16 in the early/mid 80’s. Several girls in my year did that - I could never fathom why they left literally weeks before their O Level exams, but I remember our Head Girl did - was pregnant and getting married that summer too. 🤯

A friend of mine worked "in the City" and the staff mortgage rate was 1/2% (half a percent) they used it as a way of keeping staff tied to the company.

Yes. My sister had an August birthday and left at 15 in 1973.