Tony tells us about his long business career, starting in accountancy at an engineering company through selling ducks to Denmark and ending in a company that gave him the opportunity to travel the world and provided vital equipment to the NHS during the Covid-19 pandemic. My early life, education and starting my career I was […]
Business
A farming heritage leads to a life in estate management (1945-1996)
Martin qualified as a chartered auctioneer and estate agent, coming from a farming background He joined Savills and moved to Norfolk as a young man and now enjoys retirement. He is happy to have been able to use to the best of his ability the talents he was born with and the agricultural inheritance he […]
A head for figures (1967-2010)
Margaret talks about her working life from her first steps in accounts at John Mackintosh to the challenges she faced juggling the demands of childcare, the home and work. She also describes her thirty two years dealing with the accounts of Building Equipment and how she dealt with the introduction of computers. Landing on my […]
A member of today’s Mile Cross community (1945-2010)
Betty remembers growing up in Sprowston, pinching apples, decorating chocolates, and frying fish, and talks about living in Mile Cross today. Childhood in Sprowston I grew up in Sprowston and I must admit I was happy because a lady who lived near my mum used to think I was wonderful. She used to look after […]
A New Zealand Adventure (1949-2004)
Elizabeth wanted to see the world and emigrated to New Zealand in 1952. She had a happy life there working in offices and running a shop with her husband and looking after children in a children’s home. Homesick for the snow, she returned to England in 2004 and settled in Thetford. Starting out I started […]
A Sackable Offence (1950s)
Sheila worked as a comptometer operator in Manchester. At the age of fifteen, in 1952, I took a job in an office of a Textile Company in Manchester. Part of my responsibilities included invoice production. I was sent for a one week course at a Comptometer School on Deansgate. A Comptometer, for those who have […]
A very different working world (1962-2000)
Anne describes the working life of a grammar-school educated woman with secretarial training working for an optician in Bury and then for a well-known Thetford building, undertakers and commercial business. She took on all the responsible work, including arranging funerals, working out wages and paying them before the days of calculators or computers, and there […]
An entrepreneurial life (1970-2006)
After starting as a secretary for a bishop and marrying young, Anne took a degree in counselling, having been a Samaritan. Later she ran a successful property management business ‘from her bedroom’ as she had some issues with her health. I was seventeen and I didn’t know what to do as a career. My father […]
Dancing shoes and selling groceries (1940s-2014)
Pauline talks about her working life in the shoe business and keeping a shop. She also remembers being part of Madame Osina’s theatrical troupe and dancing in pantomimes. Pauline’s daughter Janet introduces the story: She was born around the now Hotel Nelson (Norwich) area to a very hard life. She met and married my Dad […]
Farming to factories (1940s-1988)
George recalls his working life on the land, in the Home Guard and factory work. Farming as a boy I was born in West Wretham, near Thetford and lived there at Hall’s Yard. I was the youngest of five, two brothers and two sisters. My oldest brother was a gardener and left when he got […]