Page 27 - Colin Wheeler's Memories

My Palace Theatre and other Memories Redditch Heritage

I 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.

© Redditch Heritage 2018 Page: 27