There were several avenues that could be pursued. For girls they either went into domestic service and that was a very honourable sort of employment in those days. It wasn’t looked down upon as it very often is today. In the area where I lived—Sturges and Crescent Roads—I would say that at least 98% of the houses had a domestic of some sort. Either a daily, who went in for so many hours a day as was required, or a live-in maid. Many houses down there had a couple of live-in servants.
I knew a couple who lived and worked in the house almost opposite from us—two young girls in their twenties, I suppose. They came from Warfield—a farmer’s family—and I used to nip in the back door of this house to see these two girls. Usually I got a bit of fresh-baked cake or something like that. They seemed to have a pleasant way of living. They lived in a nice room and did the cooking. And there was a fair bit of freedom for girls who went that way.
The other way that girls went when they left school was probably as shop assistants. There were a few who went in for professional jobs. Some went nursing but none of them seemed to go in to jobs that were going to last for a long time. The fashion then was—as soon as the girl got married—she left whatever job she had wherever she was working.
Very few went into offices—became clerks or anything like that. And, of course, there were always exceptions to every rule. There were lots of jobs that they took in between. I would say that domestic servants on one hand, and shop assistants on the other, were the main places that these youngsters went to when they left elementary school.
As for the boys, many of the boys if they had some idea of what they wanted to do, obtained an apprenticeship. Most of these were obtained with builders. Of course, there were all sorts of different lines they might take in the building trade—plasterers, plumbers, decorators—all that sort of thing. They served about three years of apprenticeship, learning the job, when they only got pocket money. They then probably did a couple of years as improvers, and at the end of that time if they passed out, they were qualified in whatever line they decided to take.
Whatever line they went into, if they were carpenters or whatever, they got the price for the job. There was therefore no incentive to move from one job to another because everywhere the pay was the same. You might say, whatever pay they started with, never rose in the 1920s and 30s. There was no increase in wages of any sort so there was never any eternal annual scrabble for more wages with someone getting a greater increase than somebody else. It is a proper hassle these days but it didn’t exist then. There was no need because the prices of goods never rose either. The prices didn’t go up because the wages didn’t go up.
Those who didn’t have much ambition would probably end up as errand boys. Nearly every shopkeeper and every businessman in the town had an errand boy who delivered parcels and that sort of thing. If the youngster showed any promise at all he would probably land up with a somewhat better job—maybe a counter-hand or something like that.