Job dreams have come true for just one in three workers
JUST a third of workers are in the field they dreamed of when they were a child, a study has found.
A poll of 2,000 employed adults discovered that just under one in three saw their dream of being a teacher, doctor or train driver become a reality.
In fact, more than half of those polled have a job with no links to the career they wanted when they were younger.
Forty-five per cent of respondents regret not chasing their dream job, and a fifth have attempted to re-train or completed further education to get them on the right track.
Samantha Rutter, CEO of distance learning provider Open Study College, which commissioned the research, said: “Having passion for your job can be life-changing, and it is never too late to try and achieve your childhood hopes and dreams.”
The study also revealed some of the top careers today’s adults wanted when they were children, including teaching, nursing or becoming a vet.
Others had dreams of working for the police, being a musician or actor, or even being a ballerina.
And 13 per cent were convinced their future lay in being a professional footballer.
Despite dreams of being a professional athlete, zookeeper or train driver, six in 10 adults considered their childhood job goals to be perfectly realistic.
AUDREY Withers was appointed editor of British Vogue at the height of the German Blitz on London in September 1940. For the next three months, hastened by the sound of the air raid sirens, she and her small but energetic staff commuted between the editorial offices and the cellar. The November, December and January editions of Vogue were all published from the basement of their offices in One New Bond Street despite the disruption of the fire bombs.
Harry Yoxall, managing director of Condé Nast Publications in London, had been awarded an MC and bar in the First World War and saw the Blitz as an annoying interruption to daily life. Like Audrey he believed in carrying on regardless.
But what was the point of a fashion magazine in the Second World War when clothes were rationed and makedo and mend was the order of the day?
The answer lies in the Government’s need to get its home front propaganda message across to women. The way to do that was through the pages of their trusted magazines – Woman & Home, Harper’s Bazaar and, of course, the queen pin of them all,Vogue.
Over the course of the Second World War the Government influenced women’s thinking on everything from how to dress, to what to grow in their gardens, where to send their children to keep them safe and how to wear their hair.
By the end of 1942, the Board of Trade was in charge of all clothing, even underwear, and could dictate the length of men’s socks and the width of gussets in women’s knickers.
Audrey conveyed all these messages to her readers alongside features on the women’s services. She ran upbeat articles on how Londoners kept going to the theatre and cinema despite the bombing.
There were photographic spreads about the countryside and how women were coping with evacuees and food production. And of course, there were fashion shoots.
Audrey had the smallest wardrobe of any Vogue editor before or since. She once told a journalist that she had three suits which she alternated with blouses and scarves. She had a cashmere dress for evening wear and trousers and weekends.
Her fashion statement was hats. She was photographed in the bomb cellar wearing a Chanel coat and a black hat. One of her favourite photographers was Norman Parkinson. He liked to photograph models on his farm where there was always a risk of a slip in the mud.
Her star photographer, Cecil Beaton, roamed London on Audrey’s instruction, looking for interesting juxtapositions for his photoshoots. A famous one featured the BBC announcer Elizabeth Cowell, dressed in a Digby Morton suit, photographed against the ruins of the Temple Church in the Inns of Court. The result, Fashion is Indestructible, was one of Beaton’s most famous photographs from the war.
“I had long wanted to get Cecil Beaton to do a photograph of a smart girl against some such background, as I felt this would show so dramatically how it is possible for Vogue’s entire world to carry on even amid such wreckage,” Audrey recalled.
Bbaggy
‘Audrey looked beyond the superficial and took risks she believed would pay off’
jumpers for
EATON’S work for Vogue took him all over the country. He was embedded with an RAF squadron in Yorkshire. In Knights Of The Sky he told readers how he had begun to get used to the spectacle of bombed-out civilians and prematurely aged children. But the RAF pilots, living with the everpresent threat of death, turned another screw on his emotions.
Audrey was delighted with his piece. It brought grit and glamour into Vogue. She could persuade her readers to think about the impact of every aspect of the war.
When Beaton’s work for the Ministry of Information took him overseas,Audrey was left without her best-known photographer.
But there was another rising star waiting in the wings. The American ex-model, Elizabeth “Lee” Miller, had been working for Audrey since 1940 doing fashion shoots and Blitz scenes. When Vogue’s pattern building was destroyed in May 1941, Miller scrambled to the fifth floor of a building opposite to get the best shot she could. All the time she was up