Alfred Gotts commentary continued:

I left that school in Dempsey Street when I was about fourteen, and when I was about fifteen to sixteen I got working in the City selling odds and ends and then I got recommended to go up to that place in Clerkenwell and learn to be a shoemaker.

I never did any more schooling, I learnt in school what I had to learn and then you learn yourself then. It comes automatically everything to me. You see, I learnt my trade, and I worked with a lot of foreign element Jews, and I learnt more or less to speak a bit of Yiddish from it. ‘Course they never spoke any English back to you, if they wanted anything they required they called out in Yiddish to you. So I used to say ‘what does that mean?’ and ninety percent of the words I asked for I never forgot. They told me bread was ‘broits’ and that’s like when I was working as a kid in the Welsh dairy they used to speak Welsh to you and say with welsh words. I was about fourteen then, and used to get up early then, four o’clock in the mornings to wash the cans and that. Get them ready for the first round. I earned a couple of bob a week, that’s all. I suppose I was about twelve to fourteen when I did that job.

I started selling newspapers after school, and went up the City – that was a sideline. If you had as a start a quire of papers, you see, they was ha’penny each paper, and you paid for three a penny. I think it was ninepence a quire, and twenty-seven papers in the quire, and you got back a ha’penny profit for every three you sold. And if someone give you a penny for a paper, which happened you see.

I sold The Star, Evening News, that was the most sold round that time, it was the Evening News and the Star. They were ha’penny papers. The Standard, they were penny papers like. The Evening Standard or the Daily Mirror was a ha’penny paper when I was a boy. The Standard was a posh paper. The Star and the Evening Standard were at different offices, so you’d go to the one you wanted to sell. ‘Cos you were the run boys, run through picking up customers. But those people that had regular stands, they stopped on ‘em you see.

We used to call out the headlines and used to get rid of most of our papers. We didn’t buy lots, and then there were these newspaper men on these stands after they’d sold their main lot they’d say ‘ stand here and sell these for us.’ Near Fenchurch Street the man had a big stand there on the corner, he’d say ‘stand here and sell them’. He’d give you half the profits, every three you sold you had a ha’penny profit see. On his stand. Well, we didn’t mind that, that would start us off. There were lots of stands in the City. After their main trade had gone, so they were satisfied. Or perhaps it might be a dirty wet day, they’d say here you are, stand here and get wet for a ha’penny for a time. I did that for a while after I left school as well.

It might have been worth while to do that for a full time job, plenty of opportunity in the City to sell things. The chief thing was having stock money to buy the stock with. If you went to buy something in Houndsditch, if you had a few shillings you was lords. See, instead of buying a small quantity then run back and increasing each time, which we have done, that was how it is. If you could buy a gross of picture postcards, for instance, instead of buying two or three dozen.

You could take some of the newspapers back, when you bought fresh supplies, one in every three you were allowed to change. What they called returns, see. Bumps. Then if we picked up any spare papers and they were clean and tidy, we put them in as well and got them exchanged.

Mostly we worked on our own. Each boy run himself. If I had to run up to Fleet Street for a quire of papers, the quicker I sold ‘em out the quicker I earned that there fourpence ha’penny didn’t I?

We used to walk right up there, or get on the back of a cart or a bus or anything for anywhere. That time you wasn’t afraid to get on the back of a van or a bus or jump off, because the traffic was only horse traffic. And those paper vans used to travel pretty quickly. And get behind a cab, the back of an old four wheel cab. Threw his whip at you and stung your ears.

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