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3 Volume 73 Number 1
15 February 2021
My Work History
By Len Haffenden
n attempt to remember all the jobs I had in
A my life from 6 to 86...
Note: My family did not pay their children an al-
lowance. If you wanted money you had to earn it,
which made for an uneven playing field with the
neighbours’ kids, who did get
an allowance.
From age 5 to 9 there was not
much. If we sat very still when
visiting Great-Granny at Ken-
sal Rise, she gave us a penny
a coin about the size of a
Loony. There were two lesser
coins, the hape’nee, (half a
penny, about the size of a 25
cent piece), and the farthing,
(a quarter of a penny, about
the size of a one cent piece). It
was hard to sit still as the sofa
was polished leather and one
tended to slide off. My chief
memory of her was her huge
ears with swinging earbobs
and her severe visage looking
at me over her half glasses;
and all the while dressed in
long black clothes, shiny and
rustling - and boots! Some-
times visiting uncles and aunts Len Haffenden at age 15
gave us small change and told
us to go outside and play. The loss of a tooth was
a god-send; it meant a silver sixpence in the
morning (a sixpence was about the size of a
dime).
The bread delivery van was horse-drawn and the
milk float was electric. Quite often the respective
drivers let us do the final delivery; it saved their
legs a bit, for this we got paid a couple of pennies.
Once, while Grand-dad Haffenden was visiting
from Mayfield, I was to help wash the car; I was
ten or so, and was relegated to do the wheels.
This I did and declared my part finished. Father,
however, was not impressed. They are still dirty,
said he; to which I responded with no little heat:
“They must be clean because the water’s dirty.”
This remark made Grand-dad laugh out loud at
my philosophic statement. If the water was clean,
and the wheels dirty, and now the water in the
bucket was dirty, then ergo, the wheels must be
clean. I did them again and was paid with a
thrupny-bit, a multi-sided coin worth three pen-
nies, about the size of a nickel.
When eleven I got a paper round (paper route in
Canada) delivering morning papers before break-
fast. It paid real money, a couple of shillings a
week at least, which I wasted on sweets or comic
books. A shilling was a silver coin worth 12 pence,
about the size of a Canadian quarter. There were
20 shillings to a pound, called
a pound note or the slang
term of a “Quid”.
At age 13, I got a Saturday
morning job as one of several
monitors to help control the
hundreds of younger children
for the Saturday morning
show of cartoons and west-
erns at the Majestic Theatre.
At the conclusion of the pro-
gram the monitors were treat-
ed to sandwiches, tea, and
little cakes, stuff I never got
at home. I don’t recall the
payment, but I think it was
half a crown a week. A half
crown was 2.5 shillings; a
Crown was 5 shillings, both
fairly big coins. There was al-
so an in-between coin called a
Florin, worth 2 shillings. Like
most boys growing up in Eng-
land I belonged to a Boy Scout
troop, the 2nd Wembley, of
which I was a Patrol Leader, the Swan Patrol, ma-
roon and grey shoulder flashes. One way we
earned money was, on weekends, to canvas the
area suggesting odd jobs done for a shilling each;
it was called Bob-a-Job week. A “bob” was a com-
mon nick-name for a shilling.
Soon we were to emigrate to Canada, a whole
new world of work, and a different kind of money.
The Calgary School Board was not sure where to
place me. They decided on grade 10, based on my
being 15 years and three months; which turned
out to be a mistake as the course work was rather
juvenile, unlike the more demanding classes back
in England. Result, I got bored, unchallenged, and
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