NextBackI then started work with a well know local jobbing builder called Jack Green who had a business opposite St. George’s Church in St George’s Road and spent the next two years being involved in the many different trades of building working on many of the properties later demolished to make way for the New Town. Many of these houses were managed by Edmund Hadley an old established local estate agent.
At the age of seventeen I decided I wanted to learn the trade of bricklaying, and so I started a five year indentured apprenticeship with the local firm of Ernest L Lewis who had premises on the former Front Hill (Evesham Street). In later years it was occupied by another of his former employees Howard Hill, the plumber. For the first year of my apprenticeship my pay was five pence an hour, and in that period the tradesmen were paid one shilling and eleven pence and the labourers one shilling and five pence. During my apprenticeship I studied building construction for one day and two nights a week at the former College of Technology in Suffolk Street in Birmingham under the excellent tuition of Mr Fred Miles and a celebrated Birmingham architect called Mr Snow, My employer had very old fashioned ideas and refused to pay me for the day lost each week and I was the only one of class of thirty students who didn’t get paid for the day. Ernest Lewis said “You don’t have to go to school to learn to be a bricklayer“. Derek Harrison was also a student at the same time but not on my course.