Page 171 - Redditch People

Redditch People

On leaving St Luke’s School at the age of fourteen my father was most anxious for me to
have a job in the fresh air and to learn a skilled trade, I did not realize the significance of
this at the time, but many years later was told my mum was on the TB register when I
was a baby.

His ambition was to enter the entertainment business, because he had been stage struck
from an early age, his second wish was to join the police force, but his dad sensibly
pointed out it was better to learn a skilled trade first as it was always something to fall
back on.

His Day Job

So at the age of seventeen he decided he wanted to learn the trade of bricklaying, and so
started a five year indentured apprenticeship with the local firm of Ernest L Lewis who had
premises on the former Front Hill (Evesham Street).

For the first year of his apprenticeship his pay was five pence an hour. During his
apprenticeship he studied building construction for one day and two nights a week at the
former College of Technology in Suffolk Street in Birmingham.

His employer had very old fashioned ideas and refused to pay him for the day lost each
week and was the only one of a class of thirty students who didn’t get paid for the day.

On the 3rd February 1947 he reported for work on the first pair of brick houses to be built
on the Mayfields Estate, they were the last on the right hand side of Parsons Road, it was
the beginning of the worst winter that he can remember. He says “It snowed, and froze
and thawed repeatedly in that order for six weeks and the working conditions were
intolerable.”

After a period of National Service, he served two years in the RAF, he returned and set
up his own small business as a jobbing builder and operated as such for the next twenty
years.

He then became the general foreman for H Edmunds and Son, Dudley, and was involved
in constructing the last sixty council houses for Redditch Council before the Development
Corporation took over the house building.

Next he joined the Housing Department of the Redditch Council and was appointed
Planned Maintenance Officer, and was responsible for administering and supervising the
repairs to the then Council’s housing stock of three thousand and seven hundred houses
He served the Council over twenty years before taking early retirement.

As an Entertainer

As we said, his ambition from a very early age was to enter the entertainment business
and about this he says……

“My first memory of visiting the theatre was in 1937 when as a very small child my dad
took me to see the Great Levante, real name Leslie Cole. He was an Australian and was
internationally famous magician and illusionist and had just returned to this country from
a world tour. He had a spectacular supporting programme.

© RLHS 2015 Page: 171