This page explores all the jobs of the families, past and present.
Click on the Older, Middle and Younger generation buttons to activate a list of jobs of each generation of
family members.
Click on the Older, Middle and Younger generational decorative plates to activate audio and transcripts of
each family member.
Eve: And what do you do there?
Nicky: I’m a development support officer, so I work in the development team supporting all the officers. I do administration for all the new builds, all the new schemes that are going to be put up...to house people… yeah that’s what I do, I can’t really tell you more … I’ve only been there… two months
James: When we used to have a strike down the dock, and it was for a good reason, you’d never go against another dockie. You wouldn’t do the dirt on him.
Eve: What did you do down on the dock?
James: Like on the ships, unloading and loading…. using the crane and…
Mary: Oh he used to come home… what was that thing you caught, that itchy stuff?
Mary: No it was something he was unloading … Oh he came home with… and as he got in the bath he went red
James: I went red… it was an asbestos stuff. And we had to unload the boat we shouldn’t have done and they didn’t know it was on it was on it. I was itching all over … I come home and went in the bath and the bath went red
Mary: There was nothing you could do about it. It just had to wear off.
James: I seen blokes get killed down the docks just like that. I was talking to a bloke on the dock one day and we was on the bottom tier and somebody dropped a big crane load and it come down and I just walked away and it all went on top of him, just like that
Mary: Yeah cos it wasn’t like today where everything’s all safety control, health and safety…
James: No when you worked you worked
Eve: Did you work all your life?
James: Oh yeah I worked till I come out the dock and I went to do the job what I used to do.
Mary: He went down the council…
James: That’s what I used to do. My dad was a dockie, he was a crane driver down the dock so he got me in the dock
James: I learnt winching, but I never done the cranes, but you was pretty well known when you do a job down there, you had the gangs, the certain things they used to do, people knew that gang and that was it. If they wanted a special job, then they’d go and get that gang.
Mary: Half the time we used to say ‘Stand on the stones ’ and I thought there was all these big stones and they’d get the jobs but if he is… he never got a lot of jobs. His dad did, cos his dad was a drinker. He used to buy other people pints to get a job. Nine times out of ten he never got no job cos he wouldn’t do that. He said, ‘If they don’t want me for my work… and I don’t drink,’ so… do you know what I mean? A lot of times you daren’t come home.
James: I been on the ship Christmas time, there’s been like twelve blokes in the gang and there’s two of us at the end of the day working, the rest was all drunk.
Mary: He wasn’t the typical docker really.
James: I didn’t drink, so at the end of the day, when…
Mary: His dad used to… his dad used to say to him, ‘Don’t tell your mother how much I earn cos then they wouldn’t …… a man was a man. We never done that, we always pulled together.
James: What my old man done, I was the opposite. I could see how bad it was.
William also worked for most of his life in the docks:
William: I applied, with another bloke that my brother went to school with. I worked first as shore steward, then as marine rigger and then a deck hand and worked my way up through that. I learnt to drive the winches, the steam winches, the electric winches. Then I worked in the engine room, taking the engines to pieces, gradually making my way up.
Olga: Was it like an apprenticeship?
WilliamI wouldn’t call it an apprenticeship as such. It was more an apprenticeship in life, in learning things.
Eve: You said you learned to drive all these different machines. How did you read up about them? Was there a manual?
William: No, no, no. You read up about them, but mostly you had a man to teach you. It was mostly hands-on. I mean you couldn’t control it yourself at first. You sat in the chair and they would show you what to do. But you had to do it in a slow fashion. You had to be very careful. You’ve got to remember that when you’re driving something like that you could kill someone with it. So it had to be done safely but fast, because it was piece-work. It takes practice, a lot of practice to get to that standard. But you had to pass a driving test to get anywhere with it anyway. A mobile crane travelling on road or rail tracks, you had to pass a separate test for that. You had to have a separate test for a fork truck, for an automatic, for a driving crane, for the high flyers, you had to have a separate test for that. So all these things take time. Then one day I was asked to become a ganger because the ganger was retiring and I was the youngest one in it. The others, they were all years older than me. But they said, ‘Well, we’ve had a chat amongst ourselves’, because the men used to pick the ganger and I said, ‘But you’re all years older than me’. They said, ‘Yeah, but none of us really wanna do it. We’ve got other jobs and really, we think you’re suited to it, but we’ll keep an eye on you and if you need to know things, we’ll put you right’. And then I became the ganger. I had my own gang then.
Olga: What does ‘ganger’ mean exactly?
William: You were in charge of a gang of men. You picked ‘em up in the morning and went to find work. And you then went ‘on the stones’, what was called ‘on the stones’ and you handed the book in. You had regular gangs and you would pick them up. So you used to pick the men up and then go to the job, for however long the job lasted.
Michael still works as a builder and decorator and William and James did this for a while too. Michael’s father worked as a steeple jack and his grandfather built some of the front walls of houses in their street:
Michael: You know like your mum and dad, didn’t they… they both worked hard… you know they wasn’t very wealthy… but I can’t say that some people… We wasn’t wealthy but we was all right if you know what I mean… and they both worked hard and I think you get that without realising it… you got to work for whatever you want
As a youngster, William worked for 2 years at Tate and Lyle’s:
William: When I first went to work, I worked in Tate and Lyle's for 2 years on the refinery.
Eve: What do you think you learnt there?
William: How to work machinery, different types of machinery you were trained to use. The bigger the machine and the more complex the job was you got men's wages for it so you got a man's wage for doing a man's job like working a really complex machine. I learnt a lot there as you used big machines which they taught you. One machine was a wringer and mangle. It was like a huge washing machine with sacks where the sugar was washed out and it used to go through this washing machine which was 40 foot long at least. At the other end was a huge mangle and a boy could work that. You didn't get extra money for that and you'd be standing at the back where the bags go through the mangle and that was difficult because it would be going round and round the rollers or you'd have to get up and reverse it and release the springs to get the sacks out and then it would go down the chute to a drying machine. You were doing that sort of work.
Eve: Do you think those sorts of skills are still learnt?
William: No, the jobs don't even exist. No, then we were loading a thousand tons in the silo. You were shoveling it in and putting it on the conveyor belt. You got a man's wages for that and you had to keep shoveling it one after the other and I used to work 6 to 2, 2 to 10 or 10 to 6 shifts. You got an half hour break but no matter where you was in the refinery you had to run to the canteen, eat your meal and run back ‘cos you was stopped money so all that had to be fitted into that time because they paid for the half hour. If you did the day work you didn't get paid for the half hour because the day work was considered to be 8 till 5. If you did a 13 hour shift on a Saturday and Sunday you got 2 half hour breaks and you worked 12 hours. And I mean work. It was piece work. I worked piece work all my time whilst I was there and you’d be running with sack barrows 3 hundredweight of cube sugar and you’d do that for 12 hours. Everybody smoked them days but they worked hard, they did work hard.
The youngest of this generation, David, is the only man who does not have a manual job. He grew up in Wales but has lived in Newham with his wife Susan who was born locally, for over 30 years.
David: I work in the Crown Court. I've been doing that for around 14 years. I've been an usher to a judge. I make sure that the courtrooms are ready, all the papers are ready, so I've seen quite a bit since like I started there over the years. When I first started there I would say that most people were English but now, what’s coming through the courts is Eastern Europeans. You get all these big frauds, credit card frauds and that and you can trace them back to somewhere in Romania or Lithuania. So much fraud performed by them. They are a burden on the state I think. When you have to get an interpreter, none of that comes cheap. You've got to introduce all different measures for them including interpreters. It slows cases down so at the end of the day the estimates on these trials is very high and the time…
David: You’re not allowed any negativity. We're not allowed to take any negative attitude. Because where I work, it’s part of the Ministry of Justice and you’re told you’re not allowed to say anything negative. We have these High Court Justices and the Minister of Justice. How is he supposed to know? How is the minister, when he comes to speak, supposed to know? How's he supposed to know how we’re living if we can't tell him? So if we're not allowed to say anything negative, all they want to hear is positive things …
David: But we haven't had a pay rise for 8 years and I think the last time we had one was 8 years ago which is a mockery. You're obviously not complaining like some people. Those professions that are complaining seem to get somewhere. I think what we done - cos look at the underground workers they get paid about £55,000 and we're just told to shut up, don't rock the boat
Debbie work as registered child minder:
Debbie: But you see, I’m registered child-minder.
Eve: Mind you, you could get that work anywhere
Debbie: People actually come to me, cos the name’s out there. The school recommends me as well which they’re not supposed to but they do
Women have had a variety of jobs: Mary was for many years a machinist, later did cleaning and is now a dinner-lady as well as voluntary Sunday School teacher:
Eve: Tell me about what you do.
Mary: What I did? When I left school, I went machining. I done that years and years. I had Lisa and I bought myself a big industrial sewing machine and I done it indoors... paid about a pound an hour, really hard work. And then in between I’ve worked in a baker’s, a baker’s yeah. Then I done school cleaning for 15 years but I hurt my back just before I was 40 so I couldn’t work no more. They kept the job open but I couldn’t go back to it. Then nothing really till I went back to work when I was sixty.
Eve: In the school?
Mary: In the school yeah and I’ve been there… I do lunchtimes with the children which is all right
James: She loves the kids.
Mary: Only an hour, an hour and half.
Eve: Which age are they, the children?
Mary: It’s like infants and juniors but mixed together but mostly I’m having the infants but I’ve done it all round.
Eve: So it’s quite big job then getting them to eat their…
Mary: Yeah. It’s a big school cos another school’s been built on it.
Melissa, William’s daughter:
Eve: Tell us about yourself. What sort of work do you do? Do you still live close by or if not when did you move away?
Melissa: I actually work in a psychiatric PQ mental hospital for females which I've done for the last year and a half, about 30 minutes away from Dad's in the car, subject to traffic, and I actually moved away approximately 1996. I did actually previously live next door to Dad to the right of him but that was before we had children when we rented a property right next door.
Karen, Susan’s daughter, also works in local government:
Karen: Well where I work, I work in a very multiculture, industry anyway, so...
Eve: Where do you work?
Karen: I work in Tower Hamlets
Eve: Oh right, yeah... so in the …
Karen: I work for local government.
Lisa, Mary and James’ daughter, works as housekeeper in a private school:
Lisa: I work in a private school. I’m a housekeeper so I make the kids’ tea, and childcare. It goes up so it’s from pre-school, so from three to eleven. So it’s a private school on the Island.
Eve: Have you worked there for a long time?
Lisa: Six years.
Brian: So, I work in the International Development sector. I think my parents don't understand exactly what I do. It is kind of related to charities. It's a private consultancy and we do projects for various governments or multilateral bodies, for example, and UNICEF, the World Bank… Sometimes we do projects for private sector organisations. We do a lot of work for the Indian government as well, so it's a private company that I work for but it's in the development sector so it covers a wide range of things, like urban development, women's empowerment, agricultural development and that kind of stuff; sanitation, that’s sort of where I am now. So I'm stationed in South India, in Chennai. I've been here since February… my job is here and I've done a fair amount of travelling. This will be my seventh time in India and I do a lot of work here and travelling here. I've also been travelling around the world, to Jordan for example, but more in the leisure capacity. I've been to the US, Morocco, Norway, Thailand, Nepal, France …
Eve: So you've moved a long way from your roots really…
Brian: Yes I have. It's sort of where my jobs are taking me really. There are certain countries where I wouldn't want to stay any longer than a couple of years. This is not a permanent move anyway. I will be going back to East London when I come back.
Christopher, Brian’s brother
Christopher: I got a job there (Tate and Lyles’) so, since seventeen till now that’s where I’ve been basically I suppose, spent most of my time there.
Eve: What do you do there?
Christopher: It’s not very nice but insulation, so it’s quite itchy, so that’s basically it. It’s also metalwork as well, so we design and make metal as well. That’s the most difficult bit, but other than that, it’s pretty itchy.
Eve: I can imagine. And do you like the company you work for?
Christopher: erm.. For a while I enjoyed it… probably not so much now … even though I’ve been there for a while, it’s got samey samey… I enjoyed it at first but… whether I’ll change I don’t know. I’m not sure whether I’ll change I don’t know whether I’ll stay there or not but… it might change... I might start enjoying it again, you don’t know…
Jason: Currently, I’m a researcher in TV so I work on TV production doing the paperwork and clearance, the logistics side of television programming. Before that I was an adjudicator at the Financial Ombudsman Office which is like a regulatory service in Canary Wharf and before that I was a researcher and advisor in the Houses of Parliament.
Eve: So what made you leave those other jobs?
Jason: Well I left the first because I would say there’s too many politicians in politics. It can be quite a frustrating place to work if you’re trying to fix things and change things. It can sometimes be very frustrating to toe the party line
Eve: Yes.
Jason: It can be quite frustrating if you disagree with the current status quo which it seems many people try to keep going.
Eve: Were you attached to any particular MP?
Jason: Yes, I worked for Romford’s MP and then North Swindon’s MP and for a brief time Thurrock’s MP so it was sort of MPs fairly local. I was attached to those, yes, so after I left there I saw another job advertised online with the Financial Ombudsman. They’d done a big recruitment drive and it sounded very interesting to go over and do and it was similar to the work I’d been doing already, with case work, so I went over there for about a year and a half but I grew quite bored with that because it was very process-driven. Instead of looking at individual cases and helping people and looking at things from a holistic point of view it was very much about running through the motions of a set process and that's what frustrated me with that and I just quitted my job without knowing about where to go next and I had always enjoyed television and I was talking to a friend about a job in TV and she said, ‘Have you actually thought about it as a job?’ and I said ‘Don’t be silly. People don’t actually work in TV’ and that implanted the idea then and I followed it through.
Eve: What do you actually do in TV?
Jason: All of television’s freelance, on a freelance basis, so my role does change from job to job. Primarily, I change between writing the questions for quiz shows which is one aspect of it. Another part I work in is what I call production so that means compiling scripts for production so any show that’s got a script, so usually comedy shows, and production, that basically means, it’s the logistical side of it, you know there are many branches of TV, you know, the lighting department, the camera department, the directors, but there are the production teams that bring it all together with the logistics and the scheduling and the time-planning. They do all the paperwork and some of the more boring bits and bobs to bring the show together.
Eve: OK, it's very interesting. But you studied something else didn't you? Didn't you study law?
Jason: Yes, I did.
Eve: I see. You didn't want to go into law?
Jason: From the second year, I thought I couldn’t become a lawyer. It’s a very demanding job because one of my friends is doing it and he doesn’t finish until 10pm or 11pm every day.