Rem Hard Times!
Friday 4:46 p.m.
My auld maw was telling me she worked picking rhubarb on a farm in Mount Vernon (towards Glasgow) just before she got to leave school. She was born in 1919, so would have left school circa 1933, perhaps not the best time to look for a job. For picking rhubarb she was paid eleven shillings a week. She got a job when she left school in the Woodend Hotel in Mossend and worked there from eight in the morning till eight at night. She was paid £1 a month and food.
She said her brother got "fee-ed" out to a farm nearby. For that he was paid five shillings a week and had to live on the farm.
For those of you who didn't have any money before about 1971, five shillings is the same as 25 pence and eleven shillings is about 55 pence.
She said you had to stand in line at the farms and the farmer would pick you out or send you home with the ones he didn't want.
My auld maw thinks she'd comfortable in her old age because she's voted Labour all her life and I think she's dead right on that one. The Iraq war doesn't really concern her. She says there are no poor pensioners anymore.
There's only about fifteen daily visitors to this bloggy just now, but every couple of days folk arrive looking for vase breathing, or the vase breath. Doing the blog is worth it for that. I'll write more about vase breathing later.
My auld maw was telling me she worked picking rhubarb on a farm in Mount Vernon (towards Glasgow) just before she got to leave school. She was born in 1919, so would have left school circa 1933, perhaps not the best time to look for a job. For picking rhubarb she was paid eleven shillings a week. She got a job when she left school in the Woodend Hotel in Mossend and worked there from eight in the morning till eight at night. She was paid £1 a month and food.
She said her brother got "fee-ed" out to a farm nearby. For that he was paid five shillings a week and had to live on the farm.
For those of you who didn't have any money before about 1971, five shillings is the same as 25 pence and eleven shillings is about 55 pence.
She said you had to stand in line at the farms and the farmer would pick you out or send you home with the ones he didn't want.
My auld maw thinks she'd comfortable in her old age because she's voted Labour all her life and I think she's dead right on that one. The Iraq war doesn't really concern her. She says there are no poor pensioners anymore.
There's only about fifteen daily visitors to this bloggy just now, but every couple of days folk arrive looking for vase breathing, or the vase breath. Doing the blog is worth it for that. I'll write more about vase breathing later.
posted by Hotboy at 4:45 PM
2 Comments:
As a schoolchild of the evil bourgeoisie, I always used to wonder where Mount Vernon was. It was the end-destination of one of the corporation bus routes. Number 58 if I'm not mistaken.
Enjoyed the lesson on decimal currency conversion, I could paste it straight into an exam paper. "If hotmaw is paid five shillings a week and hotuncle gets a pound a month, who's better off?"
Onan? Is it you? Mount Vernon was the first bit of Glasgow you reached coming from Bellshill. I think they might have had a dog track once. Hotboy
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