THE1950s
0072 Lever's Laboratory, 1955
My first formal job albeit a vac job - came at the end of my year in the fifth form. This job was arranged through the local youth employment service. It inevitably was with Lever Brothers - since they dominated the local job market. It was in the soap-making laboratory of the main Lever Brothers plant.
Lever Brothers had settled on its position, not far away from where we lived - in fact at Port Sunlight, in the late 19th century. It was there largely because of its access to the raw materials which came from abroad. Eventually it had its own port, just a few hundred yards from our house, but it had originally used Liverpool docks -- which were then the most important in the country. There the materials were transhipped to barges, which were floated across the Mersey and right into the factory itself. For most of the century since its inception the factory had been based on soap making, from natural raw materials -- and was still so when I went there. It eventually moved onto detergents, based on petroleum derivatives, but these were only just coming in.
Even at that time Port Sunlight was becoming the production headquarters of Unilever; though its head office was at the northern end of Blackfriars Bridge in London. It had earlier merged with the Van Den Burgh margarine corporation, whose UK plant was a couple of miles away; and it was already starting to take over other companies, to become the massive multinational corporation of nowadays. Mind you, it is something of a myth that it has only recently become a multinational for as early as the 19th-century - it had already branched out worldwide; and become the employer of hundreds of thousands of people trading across Africa. Thus, it had been a multinational for a long time, but this was in colonial form rather than the modern one.
Anyway, I went there, to earn the princely sum of three pounds a week, for doing product testing in the soap-making laboratory. This was, I suppose, much like any other laboratory you might have found in those days -- or at least any chemical laboratory. Our work comprised almost entirely in checking the standards of the materials being processed through various stages of production together with the finished product. As such it meant that the bulk of our work followed the usual titration processes; using a burette to gradually introduce more and more of the indicating solution until some change happened. In practice it was a remarkably primitive process. We were given the product, which was - in this laboratory almost always soap in one form another; usually as a hard block of material, like the toilet soap you have in your bathroom. We carefully shaved it into pieces, put these on a watch glass, and carefully weighed them until we got exactly the right weight. There was nothing subtle about this. It was just a matter of using a scalpel to shave ever more soap onto the electronic scales. Then we put these into a flask, adding water and dissolving them, before titrating whatever marker we needed to use. We then entered the results into our books and informed the department involved of the various levels -- so they could make their necessary corrections.
It was interesting for the first hour or so, but thereafter it was then mind-blowingly boring! From there on in it was just another repetition of the same process: get the bit of soap, cut it into slivers, dissolve it, titrate it. Then get another sample of soap, dissolve it, titrate it and so on. But many jobs in industry in those days were similarly routine, and many still are.
This, though, counted as a white collar job; which people then felt was somehow better than a blue-collar job. I remember seeing, in the John Summers iron works, the steel strip coming along - at the end of a strip mill - and hitting the buffer which temporally stopped it. At this point shears came down and cut it, so that it dropped on the pile below. The important difference in those days was that they were operated by a man who - when the strip had reached the right position - hit a button to operate the shears: several times a minute, all day long, every day. And it was his job for life -- and was his future. It paid his wages, but scarcely gave him any fulfilment.
In some respects the same was true for my job laboratory job. It was repetitive in the extreme.
I don't remember much about any camaraderie we used to take our mind of the boredom. But I do remember the end of the day. This was signified by sounding of a siren, which we called the hooter. For five or ten minutes before that happened, you would find us, and many other office workers, hiding behind the buildings at the main gate. As the hooter blew we all rushed out, in our hundreds, through the main gate; and away to home. It was all to clear that very few of us were dedicated to our work!
There were two of us taken on for the vac work, replacing the half a dozen or so people who were our holiday (and thus saying something about their productivity). My colleague was offered a job at the end, I wasn't, since it was clear that thank god I was destined for better things! I wondered about what sort of future he faced. On other hand, my father started in Prices laboratory in much the same circumstances, and over the years he had risen to be supervisor and then manager; so perhaps progress was not impossible.
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