Follow-up

rEGarDING the letters from Harry Pope and Pete Williams about their first week’s wages, I agree — £4 was a lot of money in the Sixties. I started work as an apprentice with The English Electric Company in Kidsgrove, Staffs, on New Year’s Day 1962 (it wasn’t a Bank Holiday then). I was 15, and for a 40-hour week my wage was £2/13/3d. at 19, I was posted to a drawing office and stayed there for the next seven years as an electrical draughtsman. On September 16, 1967, I clocked off at 4.45pm on a wage of £11. at 8.30am the next day — my 21st birthday, which meant I was no longer an apprentice — I clocked on at a wage of £17. Same desk, same drawing board, same chair and same office, with an overnight increase in salary of almost 50 per cent for doing the same job as the day before. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. David Wood, Stoke-on-Trent.