£650 per annum. Or was it £450? I couldn’t quite make out the hand-written figure. Whatever, I was delighted. I was offered a start as an articled clerk in the small practice of Ernest T Kerr & Co, Chartered Accountants who had an office in Cornwall Street, Birmingham city centre. It was early 1972.
So for four years I learnt my trade, in particular the arcane science of double-entry bookkeeping. I half believed my early instruction from a fellow clerk that Debit was nearest the window, Credit nearest the door. After six weeks it all sort of fell into place. Once I understood that Debit could be either an expense or an asset, Credit a line of income or a liability, I was flying.
Virtually all our work was preparation of accounts from incomplete records – collating all the client’s paperwork into Profit & Loss Account and Balance Sheet. Finished a job? OK, the next job’s in that box over there. Barry’s Garage was a classic. Every single document or piece of paper Barry would file on a huge metal spike. There were years of them. Produce a set of accounts for Barry’s Garage and you could do anything in life thereafter.
So we’d sit in the clerks’ office, four or five of us, high above Birmingham’s streets. Me, Pete, Arthur, John, Colin. Mr Farley and Mr Nock were the partners with their own offices. Mr Ricketts, an older accountant, also had his own office. It was the job of one of the clerks to sharpen Mr Rickett’s pencils every morning. Presiding over all was Miss Pilley. No personal telephone calls and if you needed a new pencil you had to present the stub of the old one to her.
No computers of course. Technology amounted to a shared adding machine. It was quicker and easier to learn to cast rows of figures in one’s head, unless you needed a tally roll as a back up for your working papers. If there was a power cut (regular at one time) then out came the candles and you would work on without a pause.
Along one wall sat the arcane Private Ledgers of clients, lockable with tiny keys. These would contain entries not deemed suitable for general viewing – Capital Accounts, Reserve Accounts, Drawings etc. All the entries beautifully made by clerks who had gone before us, dating back decades. I’m afraid our motley crew couldn’t live up to their standards.
And there were road trips out to the larger clients. There were factories out in the Black Country, part of a landscape that has now largely disappeared. Acres of belching smoke adding to the morning mist as you coughed your way into work. There was a shop in Wolverhampton High Street where we ticked and scribbled happily in the shop window. A foundry where the blokes worked in Hades-like conditions. They worked in pairs on piecework and shared the wage. But one big, silent guy worked alone, earning as much as the pairs did. You’d keep out of his way.
And us articled clerks were studying to become Chartered Accountants, mostly in our own time through correspondence courses. Our comrades in the bigger firms were sent off for weeks on end to Caer Rhun Hall in North Wales to be hot-housed. But after work we’d head for the Reference Library and study, maybe testing each other on case law and stuff.
And, when the library closed, we’d head for the pub. One Thursday evening in 1974 we decided to skip the pub. That night the IRA blew up one of our favourite spots, the Tavern in the Town.
My four years were up. I left Ernest T Kerr & Co who have now become a footnote in history. I spent a year with the firm of John W Hinks & Co of Smethwick. And somehow I scraped through my Final exam at the second time of asking. The world is your oyster, they said. They were recruiting hard for young (therefore cheap) professionals in the Channel Islands. In June 1977 I was headed for Jersey.
Sudesna (Sue) Ghosh said:
Wow! Thanks for sharing🙂
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Roy McCarthy said:
Thanks Sue 🙂
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Jill Weatherholt said:
I’m relieved you all skipped the pub that night, Roy.
“The world is your oyster, they said.” I believe they were right. Thanks for sharing this, Roy.
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Roy McCarthy said:
Thanks Jill. All very strange looking back…
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candidkay said:
Oh my goodness–skipping the pub. Thank God, right? Do you remember why or whose decision it was? Things like that always fascinate me . . .
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Roy McCarthy said:
Hello Kristine. I remember very well. It was just me and Pete in the library. We’d been working, studying and drinking hard all week. When the library closed Pete said ‘Drink?’ But I was exhausted and we agreed to have an early night. 21 killed, 182 injured, a horrible night.
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Jane Fritz said:
This is a wonderful accounting of an accounting life, Roy. Love it. Very glad this is just Part I!
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Roy McCarthy said:
Thanks Jane. Funny how life unfolds in a way one never expects. We may think we plot our destinies but it’s just not the case.
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Browsing the Atlas said:
Loved this flashback in time, when office work was written in ledgers with pencil. It’s hard to even imagine it now.
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Roy McCarthy said:
Thanks Juliann. Yes you’d pencil in the entries to the ledgers and go over in ink once you were sure the figures were correct. But I had great admiration for the clerks who had gone before with their impeccable pen-and-ink handwriting and who never seemed to make a mistake.
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equipsblog said:
Fascinating look into the past.
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Roy McCarthy said:
Thanks EQ, not so very long ago either. After many years when the work methods hardly changed things have been transformed entirely in recent years.
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luisa zambrotta said:
Great!
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Roy McCarthy said:
Thank you Luisa 🙂
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jennypellett said:
Loved this account of your early working life. Thank God you were exhausted that night in 1974. I remember the news footage. Guildford suffered the same fate.
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Roy McCarthy said:
Thanks Jenny. Yes it was surreal, like being extras on a film set. But of course life quickly moved on for those not directly involved.
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Annika Perry said:
Roy, a fascinating glimpse into your early working life … your memory serves you well. Such interesting detail – hard to believe you had to present a pencil stub for a new pencil! Oh, the candles remind me of my mother trying to buy pretty candles for our new home in the U.K. In Sweden then as now we always had cosy candle lit dinners … but the local shops panicked about power cuts and there were just these short stubby white ones for sale! Thank goodness you and your friend decided to forgo the pub that night … horrific loss of life I read. An arbitrary decision that probably saved you both.
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Roy McCarthy said:
Thanks Annika. It was faintly Dickensian and no doubt things had moved on a little in other places 🙂 You’d struggle to buy simple, utilitarian candles these days I think – they were standard in old offices. And indeed the pub bombings are still fresh in the memories of those affected.
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roughwighting said:
I think it’s important to share these vignettes of ‘what it was like back when.’ Of course, to people like you and me, ‘back when’ was just a flash ago. But look how much has changed. To anyone under 40, ‘back when’ was prehistoric.
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Roy McCarthy said:
Hi Pam, I suppose I just wanted to sum up those 47 years before consigning them to history forever. Yes, the workplace has evolved beyond belief, and too quickly for me.
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roughwighting said:
Not sure they should be “consigned to history,” though. I still think time marches back and forth on a lilting thin line. What comes around goes around. What once was still is. That’s either depressing or brilliant, huh? ;-0
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Roy McCarthy said:
I love history but I’m now set on forgetting my years chained to a desk. I’ll be like a lifer released at last from jail into a changed world 🙂
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A.M.B. said:
I can’t even imagine working in an office with only a shared adding machine! This was very interesting to read.
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Roy McCarthy said:
Though at the time it was perfectly OK. It’s only looking back one scratches one’s head and realises how office life has changed.
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