The Role of Women

Today I found some curious documents in a book published in 1947. Headed CLERICAL POSTS IN BRANCH "B" OF THE FOREIGN SERVICE, it gave details about joining the Civil Service.

The starting salary for 'both boys and girls at age 16 or 17' was listed as £150 per year. I have no idea whether that was good or bad in those days, but I suspect the latter. The document then mentioned annual increments and I was appalled to see this:

In the middle four grades, the highest salary a woman can earn is still less than the entry level for a man. How motivating, and yet that attitude would have seemed entirely reasonable in 1947.

Even twenty years later, things hadn't changed that much. I remember my mother telling me that she was awarded a 'dowry' when she left the Civil Service to get married.

On another piece of paper, I saw some details about the Civil Service Entrance Exam, which tested the literacy, numeracy and IQ of all applicants:

Why did the examiners need to be aware of the exam candidate's gender? I can understand some sort of positive discrimination in favour of ex-servicemen, as many of them had an awful time when they returned to civilian life, but why identify women? What's even scarier is that the Civil Service was probably one of the more forward-thinking employers of the time.

Harry Enfield's parodies of 1930s public information films are clearly humorous, but sometimes they are uncomfortably close to the truth:

Of course it's all different now. Women are still frequently paid less, but nobody dares to put it in writing.

An important message from Ray Craft...

I won't bore you with the reasons, but I've spent most of this week in a warehouse dealing with hundreds of boxes of books. It's the hardest I've ever worked. To make things worse, on Friday I was subjected to eight hours of Michael Jackson.

This can't be right. I'm a white collar worker and have the cut-glass accent to prove it. I'm sure there isn't anything in my contract about this. On the plus side, at least the lads in the warehouse now call me 'mate'. I shall miss them when I'm back in the office.

Out of the thousands of books that I looked at last week, I found a disappointingly small number of unusual bookmarks. Here are some of the more interesting ones:

What is the meaning of this post-it note? I have no idea and wish that I could ask its former owner, a Mr T Bicker.

No cycle clips? He'll get grease on those immaculately-pressed trousers.

In the days when the word 'zany' wasn't used in a sneering, post-modern, ironic way, this man was regarded as the zaniest radio presenter of his time. Like Rock Hudson, Denholm Elliot and Jimmy Edwards, he was 'outed' in the most traumatic way of all.

This piece of paper single-handedly solves the Mystery of the Garish Trays. Once they were ubiquitous. Now they're as rare as honest MPs.

I'm proud to say that I achieved the lowest mark for Welsh in the history of the University of Wales. My college was in a Welsh-speaking area and as a goodwill gesture, I decided to learn the local language. It was a disaster.

If you've ever wondered why people aren't addicted to drugs any more, here is the answer.

It was all going terribly well until they mentioned the Excellent Toilet Facilities.

Attention all colonials! Please send regular supplies of chocolate to the Mother Country (if you're in Canada, we will accept male syrup).

And finally, the important message from Ray Craft...

What events led to the suspension of the 'Bisquit Club'? I love notices like this because they refute all of those people who moan about the declining standards of English.

Rovering to Success

My nine-year-old son has just had a sex education lesson at school and seems to be quite traumatised by the experience. I'm not surprised. I have vague childhood memories of watching a video of a baby being born and I can't say that I particularly enjoyed it. It's even worse for the girls, who now know what's in store for them if they want to have a family.

Why are schools so intent on teaching young children about sex? I appreciate that the Government want to reduce the number of teenage pregnancies, but is scaring the hell out of small children the answer?

When I was nine I had no interest in how babies were made and several days after seeing a sex education video, I forgot everything I'd seen. I spent another few years in blissful ignorance, convinced that I'd popped out of my mother's navel.

Then adolescence arrived.

Within days I seemed to go from not thinking about sex at all to being obsessed by it. I wanted to know what this big, grown-up secret was all about and used to sneak downstairs to watch Jean-Luc Goddard films on BBC2 (you can always rely on the French for superfluous nudity). I thought I was being discreet but my parents must have noticed because one day, my father handed me a book saying 'This helped me when I was your age.'

The book was called 'Rovering to Success' and it was written by the founder of the Cub-Scout Movement, Lord Baden-Powell. The book was over 50 years old. I hated old things, but out of respect I started to flick through the chapters. This is what I saw:





It came as no surprise to discover, some years later, that Baden-Powell's marriage was not a conventional one.

Another Day in Paradise...

I found a rather enigmatic book of photographs yesterday. It was called Mostecko and was entirely in Czech, with no publication date. At first I couldn't see the point of the book, but I gradually realised that that it was about the building of a new town.

The fashions clearly pointed to the late 1970s, but given that the setting was communist Czechoslovakia, it could have been as late as 1982. This was during a time when Czechoslovakia was one of the most hardline regimes in eastern Europe, so this book is not only a souvenir but also a work of propaganda.

Although my Czech is a little poor, the layout of the photographs created a fairly straightforward visual narrative and the book seemed to be heralding Mostecko as some sort of socialist utopia. Here are a few examples:

How nice to live somewhere where you can stand in the middle of the road without getting knocked down by a car

Making Polonium 210, to deal with the enemies of socialism

The bustling heart of the New Town district

This man used to be Professor of Philosophy at Brno University, but following a slightly critical article he wrote about the 33rd Party Congress, he has been demoted to operating the sausage roll-making machine in Mostecko

Mostecko's residents had to wait years for their Skodas and they've already broken down

Didn't the book's editors notice that the boy in the background is painting some sort of psychotic, Munchesque face?

A special tram line built to take relatives to visit political prisoners in the nearby gulag

'I am sorry comrade, but the Central Committee have decided that Dr Seuss is an imperialist lackey. Your daughter must only read books that are on the new list.'

Perhaps I am doing Mostecko a disservice, but the overall effect is of a socialist Purgatory. Why is nobody smiling? The pictures may have been intended as propaganda, but they tell a different story.

If I lived in the Mostecko of the 1980s, I think I'd have to develop a serious drinking problem to cope with the excitement of living there. I wonder what it's like today?

Mostecko does have an Old Town district, which if this picture is anything to go by, isn't quite the bustling metropolis it might once have been:

In fairness, there are some awful new towns in England and I'm told that the suburbs of Paris are an object lesson in how not to design a place for people to live. Why is it that planned towns are usually so vastly inferior to those that have evolved over time?