General Chat

Wages were in little brown envelopes, you got paid on Thursdays and you were skink by Monday. ;-)

I remember that too. The boss would come out with a box and hand each of us our wages. Rich for a day :-)

It is much more easy to organize your money if you are paid weekly I find.

Our benefits are paid weekly.

I agree, Sharron. My son is paid monthly and he finds it hard to budget.

My first wage was £8 a week, gave £5 to my Mum and I thought I was loaded.

Mine was about that too and I gave around the same to my mother. I still managed to buy clothes and makeup and go out on a Saturday night :-)

Yes you didn't get into debt, you budgeted and when it was gone you waited for the next pay day.

Luxury. I think mine was about £3.

We won't even look at the money to the mother fiasco.

My first weeks wages was £2:9s:8d for a 46 hr week at a Builders/Plumbers Merchants. Hodding bricks and digging foundation and pipe trenches. (by hand may I add) :-D

"The good old days"..., Not :-P

Some of the girls I was at school with started off in office work, hairdressing, then realised I had more money than them (working in a factory) they left that and came into factory work too.

My first weeks wage was just under £4. I remember the little brown envelopes too. Not least because I used to put the money in them and hand them out for the dockies in Pompey. (Well to their foremen).

At least it gave the maties something to do, opening their pay packets.

Happy days!

When I started work for a bank, one of the branches I was at was in the middle of some large industrial companies who paid weekly in cash. The amounts of actual cash in the branch was staggering, could be in excess of half a million pounds at holiday/Christmas time. The sheer volume was enourmous, filled several large cash safes. It was in shrink wrapped in bundles of 5000 notes. The factories were persuaded to take £10 instead of £5 notes which reduced the bulk considerably, but it was still a full time job for 2 people to look after it all,

Andy

I used to put weekly wages into those little brown envelopes when I worked at a large Woolworths store.. I enjoyed my work there.

Remember the "cash runs" Andrew. You used to take 3 tons of pennies and haypennies to a bank down the road and exchange them for a 10 shilling note.

I once walked along West Bromwich High St from Midland at the end to our bank (National Provincial) with two small packages in my suit pocket about half a mile I should think). Both packages contained £5,000 in £10 notes. No security, total trust. To me it was just stock :-)

My next wage packet will be an old age pension. And that is 4 weekly. Heavens knows how you budget for that :-S

I also did the banking when I was at woolworths. Used to walk round to the bank carrying a largish brown leather bank bag containing hundreds of pounds sometimes even more at busy times of the year. Can you imagine anyone doing that these days. I think not.

Mine was 15shillings a week take home 12/6d a week used to buy a workmans weekly ticket on the railway to travel up to london . you had to be there by 8am. we started work at 8.45 so we would go and have a coffee first at Cannon Street station buffet before travelling on to Blackfriars .

I started work with Unilever at their head office as a filing clerk , would travel with my elder sister who also worked for them in their Coast Staff dept . this was for staff who worked in their offices in Nigeria and the Gold Coast and Sierra leone.

I gave my mum 5shillings from my paypacket and spent 2s6d on my train fare and 2shillings for the tally man that I got big items from like coat and shoes .This left me with 3 shilling for my own amusement !! Once a week trip to the flicks was all I could afford after buying toiletries etc .

This was in 1952

I remember the brown envelopes............ I also remember searching lots of stationery shops until I found some.

My father said I had to contribute 1/3 of my pay......... he was a selfish man, didn't hand over very much in the way of "housekeeping"....... I learned to lie about what I earned. When I got a pay rise I only handed over half of it...... with a different amount scrawled on the new brown envelope.

Many years later I confessed this to my aunt (dad's sister) and she howled with laughing........because she did the same thing to her mother (that was in the days when they handed over the full pay packet and got handed some "pocket money").

My Dad used to lie to my mother about exactly how much he was paid.

Mum was very proud of the fact that he always handed over his pay envelope on a Thursday unopened, and waited for her to give him his "money" for the week

I remember hearing her tell neighbours that.

After she died, Dad told me that he did open the envelope, and extracted 10 bob or a pound ......... he told Mum that he'd opened the envelope to check that it was correct. But he never showed her the pay slip, so he never told her the exact amount if he got a pay increase.

The, when she ran out of money on Tuesday or Wednesday, he could hand her a few bob which "I haven't had to spend this week"


I gather she never cottoned on to it :-D



I remember getting paid for my Saturday job from 1952 to about 1957 with the money wrapped in a piece of paper ............... on there would be marked my base pay plus anything I had earned in commission (it was a ladies and childrens dress shop). It wasn't even an envelope!!

Every job I did from then on involved money being handed to me ............ delivering mail at Christmas, working in hotels, etc etc

By the time I got my first full time real job, teaching, in January 1965 .................... I got a cheque every month. That meant I had to find time to get into the bank to pay it in!