Now in those days the regime in the office was quite strict in that all the young people who started were juniors, so we had this terrible junior system and we got all the dreadful menial jobs to do, one of which was to do the filing which was okay, but you had to be really hot on your alphabet because everything was filed in alphabetical order. So we had these enormous cabinets, rows and rows of them, with all the correspondence in with all these claims that the area I worked in dealt with. The area I went to was the Pensions Schemes area which was a very large part in the Norwich Union, they had hundreds of people working in that area, and the area I was in was the Claims Area which was a very busy area. So all the correspondence that came into the Claims and the Pensions Schemes I helped with the filing every day, but there were all the other juniors as well and there was definitely a hierarchy. The longer you'd been there you gradually worked your way from the filing. It was everybody‘s delight when a new person started because they had to do it then and maybe you could stop, but one of the things I really objected to was sorting out the envelopes into different sizes, different colours. It used to drive you mad, great piles of these envelopes, and I was a bit of a rebel and I remember I very boldly stood up to one of the older people in the office and told him I was not going to do his sorting of envelopes, which was to the delight of the juniors and to the consternation of the other people in the office. But it was agreed that it was an unreasonable thing to expect us to do, so I didn't have to do that any more, neither did the others but I had a black mark against me from this man, but never mind, I didn't care, I was so young and foolish then.
So what did we do then? Yes, one of the other jobs was to get threepenny bits from the banks for everybody. Now you may wonder why we wanted threepenny bits, but you bought coffee from the machine for a threepenny bit and us poor juniors had to go and get the coffee. So great lists of coffee as you can imagine, who wanted what out of coffee, chocolate, tea but you had to have a threepenny bit. Well, there were never enough threepenny bits so we were in constant demand to go down the banks to get threepenny bits but that did mean you could go out in the sunshine for a while and walk around, a short walk in Norwich and then come back with a great pile of threepenny bits - so that was an essential part of the office regime. So that was another part of the day and also then they put in food machines where you could buy crisps and Kit-Kats and that was absolutely wonderful as well, but I think then they were sixpenny pieces for that, that went up a bit for those, so there we were traipsing round for the six penny bits again. All part of life's rich experience in the office.
So this was how our day progressed, but we were trained very well, trained to do things properly, you know, have a method to do things because, not only did we go and get coffee from the machines endlessly, we also had a proper job to do which was to do all sorts of calculations for these claims that we were working on. People who left the Pension Scheme moved from one employer to another, some people died, so there was a death claim to be dealt with and I eventually worked on the death claims. That was a very interesting job, that was, bit morbid at first and I was convinced I was going to die very soon because all the people, the terrible things they used to die from, and we had to code them and so consequently you had to read all the causes of death and all the rest of it, so we got to be quite expert in where we had to code the causes of death. That didn't do us very good at seventeen to be finding out all the terrible things you could die from, but nevertheless we did, but we had to have a 24 turn round time with those death claims. That was part of the Norwich Union's boast, they turned them round in 24 hours which they did and we had to work very hard to achieve that, but in those days everything was handwritten so consequently it was quite a lot of writing to do. We had to fill in endless forms, remove records, and we also had to record the death claims in these enormous leather bound registers. You could hardly lift them, you were not allowed to make a mistake in them so if you made one tiny mistake you had to scratch it out with a razor blade and repair it so you couldn't see it, and I think once a week they were inspected by one of the executives and that was very tense that was, so that had to be absolutely pristine this register did. So that was one of the weekly events.
We were strictly controlled in the office, particularly by the Head of Department. You never, ever called your Head of Department by his first name, it was always Mr H, and my first Head of Department was a very strict man. He insisted on everything being absolutely right and to his standard but he was a very popular Head of Department even though everybody was half scared of him. But we used to have fun. I mean, when he walked in the room you could hear a pin drop but when he went to lunch that was a different story. A riot broke out then because most of us were all young people, I mean, there were very few people who were over thirty in the department. I mean most of them were in their late to middle teens, early twenties. But one day he went off to lunch and somebody had smuggled a radio in and plugged it in, using the office electricity - how naughty! - and then two of the other young people decided they were going to have a jive between the desks so we were all having this wonderful time and Mr H walked back in unexpectedly. The whole place just went absolutely silent, there was a thunder of feet as everybody rushed back to their places, the radio was quickly turned off and Mr H just sat down with just a slight grin on his face. Nothing was said and we all just scribbled away furiously for the rest of the day without looking at anybody and, as I said, nothing was said. So we did have quite a lot of fun.
Now the Head of Department was an autonomous soul in the working place. It was him who sussed out what you were good at and put your career down a path. If you were really good at Mathematics then you really got a lot of calculation work to do and would be put down that route, not that you particularly minded, you just accepted it. Some people were very good with words and constructing contracts and that kind of thing so they would go into another section. And some people were particularly good at doing a particular type of claim and those types of claims might require that you remember how to do certain things, you contacted a client and so you would do that. So your career then started to evolve like that, under the guidance of the Head of Department, and you didn't know where you were going to finish up.
Now when I was nineteen I decided I was going to get married. Now this meant that I actually had to resign from my job because they didn't employ married women, only if you were good enough. Now Mr H decided that I was good enough, but at that time girls couldn't join the Pension Scheme until they were twenty. No I've got that wrong. You went into the Marriage Dowry Scheme when you were twenty. Now there's been a lot of controversy about the Marriage Dowry Scheme recently, and this is a particular one which would run into trouble now. You couldn't join the Pension Scheme until you were thirty if you were a woman, but you were in the Marriage Dowry Scheme. All the boys went into a pension scheme and they actually had to pay a percentage of their salary towards it I think. As they were poverty struck anyway I don't know how they managed but they did, they paid towards the scheme. Girls were not allowed to go into the Pension Scheme until they were thirty. Anyway, I duly resigned from the permanent staff, got taken back on the permanent staff and given a new contract. Now I was told that at the age of twenty I'd become a member of the Marriage Dowry Scheme and so I then had another working contract which was fine.
Being a woman I couldn't have a mortgage until I was at least twenty-eight which was a bit of a blow really, but that was what it was, you couldn't have a mortgage. I certainly did not have equal pay with a man at that time. So here I was, nineteen, part of the Marriage Dowry Scheme which meant if I got married before I was thirty I would get a certain amount of money for each year I'd been at the office and if I took the money, but I couldn't have at the time, because I was only nineteen; it was twenty so it was fairly useless to me. But I rather messed the system up a bit because I divorced my husband when I was twenty-six. So here I was, I was free again and on the marriage market again and two years later I got married. I didn't take the Marriage Dowry because if I'd taken the Marriage Dowry I would then have cancelled out all my years of service for the Pension Scheme and being a member of the Pension Schemes Department I knew that would happen. So that was luck rather than judgement. I thought , well I won't take the money, I'll keep the years of service but then I got married again and things changed rather.
Equal pay came in, I think that was in the '70s at some stage and all the years I'd been there, then I'd been there since I was sixteen and I was now twenty-eight, I had had incremental salary increases based on your birthday. So that was nothing to do with what job I was doing, it was based on how many years I'd been there which was fine, I didn't think anything about it but I was working with a man who had been there twice as long as I had, and so consequently he was earning twice as much as I was but, by that time, I had worked my way up and was in charge of a small section of people and doing a fairly responsible job then but not really taking much notice of the responsibility of it with regards to salary. It was just one of those things, but then we had this equal pay thing come out and at the Norwich Union the equal pay thing meant equal pay for men and women. They didn't discriminate at all and so overnight my salary literally doubled and I couldn't believe it. I looked at this figure and I went to see my Head of Department and said "Is this right?", thinking a big mistake had been made and he said "No, it's fine " and, of course, the man who worked in the same section as me who I had just left behind was absolutely livid and didn't agree with women getting equal pay with men, but I was very satisfied and kept my head down and was very pleased that I had finally got a decent salary.
So there I was, equal pay, and I have to say that all the young men I joined with and who I had worked with throughout the years, they had no objection whatsoever. I was just another colleague working with them and they were as pleased as punch that I had made it the same as they had and never had any objection, and through the years we just were in friendly competition, not so friendly at times, over the different positions that came up, so that worked wonderfully well. And, of course, then later they had maternity leave come in and that covered all sorts of things that gradually changed women's working lives for the better. And then of course they had equal opportunities come in which meant completely equal opportunities for pensions schemes and all the old rigmarole about not being able to go into a pension scheme until you were thirty and all the rest of it, that just hit the deck, and women were allowed to go into the Pension Scheme, but because I had not taken this marriage dowry I had not forfeited any rights to any years, so in actual fact my service counted from 1961, but a lot of women who later came back to work they lost that because they'd taken this marriage dowry thing and I hadn't. As I said that was rather more by luck than by judgement, because I worked continuously for nearly 38 years and without a break so I had a continuous career and that made a big difference to my pension. I had never given anything up so I made one very good decision there.
Now if we just have a few words about the equipment and the calculators we had which was quite funny because really that was virtually non-existent. The section I first went into, everybody had a slide rule which was two barrels, cylinders together with a prong and an inner cylinder that moved and you could do the most involved calculations on this cylinder. It terrified the life out of me to start with but I was taught how to use it and I, who absolutely hated mathematics, got on wonderfully well with it. Accurate to three or four decimal places. It really was good and everybody treasured their own slide rule and you got one of your own, it was brilliant. Every so often it was sent away to be cleaned from all the greasy fingers and everything on it and then it came back pristine and, throughout my years at the office, mine came with me. It's a Fuller calculator made in England. Wonderful piece of equipment, it's probably an antique now but when I retired I brought it home with me. It was given to me and I absolutely love it, it will be an heirloom. From the slide rule we went on to Ohdner machines which weighed an absolute ton, your arm nearly fell off from the number of rotations you had to do. Also accurate, made a hell of a racket, but that was another good thing that we had and then we moved on to these machines where you pressed the keys and then yanked a handle down. All very, very archaic when you look at them now and then of course we started to get digital calculators and that was everybody's dream to have a digital calculator. I mean I suppose they started off the size of a suitcase and they finished up the size of a tiny mobile phone now, and then of course we eventually had computers. You all had your own computer. Everybody dreaded to get one because I think at some stage it was assumed that you'd know how to use these things and you'd know by osmosis, nobody would tell you, you know it would just come to you how to use this machine, but we did get by.
That was the equipment. We had photocopiers and all sorts of things. We started off with our letter writing. You would dictate a letter into this fabulous machine, make a record and send the record down to the typing pool and it would duly be transcribed and sent back to you and sometimes poor typists couldn't hear what people were saying and had to phone up and so we had lots of fun with that. But a lot of the fun games were at Christmas time. We would make a record for another department which was something like we would sing a Christmas carol, speed it up to a hundred times the normal speed so we sounded like a load of chipmunks, and send this record through to the other department, all very illegal in the eyes of the office but good fun!
