Changes

Prize winner in the Nancy Meggs' Writing Competition 2017

Changes

Recently I read a letter in a magazine where the writer was complaining about poor grammar in newspaper articles.  What caught my attention was her assertion that it was the fault of young reporters, ‘because all older people can touch type’.

Which set me thinking.  It was obviously nonsense, but how much nonsense?

Taking her ‘young people’ as being in their twenties and ‘older people’ in their seventies, I set about exploring what office life was like in the 1960’s, when the ‘older people’ were young.

Now I am a different world.  A world where the mothers of these ‘old people’ had been important workers in the war effort, only to be displaced back to being housewives when the men returned and wanted work. Most never had any paid work again, other than looking after other people’s houses or children.  In fact, the gender balance of the national workforce had changed little since the early years of the twentieth century, men expected jobs, women stayed at home or did less skilled jobs.  Such as typing.  Men simply did not type, so that was half the population discounted.

The early typewriters were advertised as having ‘keys made for dainty fingers’, and illustrated with groups of attractive young women happily typing. But, in those days it was regarded as unseemly for men to be working near women, ‘for fear of damage to their morals’, the men’s apparently. So typing pools had different entrances to buildings, different places and times for eating, and different times to start and finished work.

Bizarrely, the Post Office was among organisations that wouldn’t allow typists out of the building at lunchtime, right up until 1911. But it came as a surprise that, until the nineteen sixties, the Bank of England would not employ married women.  Any female employee getting married was immediately dismissed.

Figures for nineteen sixty-one show the UK population as almost fifty-three million, of which under two million women worked in offices.  Most of those would not have been typists; there were plenty of other jobs the men thought of as below their dignity. That could mean that the answer about how many touch typists there were, when the ‘old people’ were young, could be about 1.5% of the population.

But in the last fifty years this has changed dramatically, and this is how it happened.

In the sixties, the typing pool was a stepping stone for the ambitious girl who went to night school to learn shorthand, and landed that prized job of Secretary to a senior manager. The pinnacle of female success in the male-dominated office would be a PA, Personal Assistant to a director. The glass ceiling was about ankle level at this time.

Then came computers, those big mainframe grey boxes taking up whole air-conditioned rooms, with spools of tape winding first this way, then that. Fascinating flashing lights persuaded the male ego to accept the necessity of having to master a keyboard to control the beast. Surely, the job couldn’t be done by a woman? In fact, despite efforts of many pressure groups, it remained the case that most mainframe programmers and operators learned to type, and so protected a male domain throughout this period.

Meanwhile, the churning out of repetitive letters by individuals in the ubiquitous typing pool was under threat from the horrors that were Gestetner or Roneo stencils.

For the enlightenment of younger readers, these two machines could turn out ten to twenty identical copies of a document, just like a photocopier, except for the original. Instead of a word-processed A4 sheet, a much longer multi-part set of pages had to be reeled into the typewriter and typed on a ‘cutting' control which meant, instead of a neat letter on paper, the letter image cut through the first layer. Once loaded on the hand-cranked machine, the ink would be squeezed through this master to print the document.  The problem lay in making a spelling mistake. The whole paper set had to be wound slowly out of the typewriter until the offending letter or word appeared. It then had to be carefully dabbed with a nail polish brush dipped in a pink liquid that filled the cut image. When it dried the set had to be delicately wound back to the exact place where a correct letter could be overtyped. Even a good typist could end up with a sheet looking like it had smallpox.

Back to the plot.

The invention of electric typewriters, including the curse of the ‘golf-ball' and the ‘daisywheel', didn't make life any easier for typists. Managers took great delight in dictating a change of font every few paragraphs just to show off. Even basic word processors failed to change the routine that the male dictated, the female typed.

The real revolution came in 1981 with the invention of the IBM personal computer. A gadget of such wondrous mystery that every manager had to have one on their desk. A virility symbol and sign of prestige in the company hierarchy replacing their tooled leather desk diary. Of course, they couldn’t use them, so they did what they did best, they delegated. Secretaries were sent on courses to learn about clever word processing, databases and spreadsheets. Their bosses could then have pristine copies of their precious words ready for distribution in minutes, and the spreadsheet could generate coloured charts, things of beauty and awe at meetings.

Suddenly, the typing pool was no more. A computer could turn out any number of letters, correctly addressed and containing individual details.

Suddenly, the role of secretaries was questioned, except at top management level, why couldn’t managers type their own memos, reports, learn to do spreadsheets?

By 2017, typing, once thought of as the province of the lowest grade of office worker, and representing about 1.5% of the population in 1961, has become a skill used by around 80% of the population in their daily work.

That is some change.