National Service Looms

The prospect of receiving seven shillings (35p) a day as a regular instead of the measly four shillings a day paid to National Servicemen settled it for me

When the family arrived back in Wakefield in January 1953 it was decided that I must find another temporary job to tide me over until I was called up for National Service. After just a week I got work at the West Riding County Council motor vehicle licensing department in St John’s North, a 15-minute walk from our new home. From the office where I was working I could hear the Wakefield Town Hall clock strike every hour, and very long hours they seemed. The office staff comprised an office manager, a couple of senior clerks, another junior and me. We juniors were treated like schoolboys, which of course we very recently were.

Unlike today, when all vehicle details are stored on a central computer allowing access within seconds with just a few key presses, in 1953 there was a bulky file plus a hand-written index card for each and every vehicle. There were about a dozen pairs of letters which indicated that a vehicle had been first registered in the West Riding of Yorkshire. We maintained a card for every one of ‘our’ vehicles whether it was currently kept inside the county or anywhere else in the United Kingdom. If the vehicle was kept in the West Riding, we had its file; if it had been transferred to another area, its file went with it. There was a separate suite of drawers containing the thousands of cards for vehicles that were currently kept in the West Riding but had been first registered elsewhere. Files for these vehicles were kept in an adjacent store room. We even retained the card when one of ‘our’ vehicles was subsequently scrapped or permanently taken off the road. I imagine there is a dusty archive somewhere where all the record cards for scrapped, crashed, and written off West Riding vehicles are still stored.

The card indexing system was straightforward because all registration marks, apart from those on very old vehicles, consisted of either two letters followed by up to four numbers, or three letters followed by up to three numbers. When all the numbers up to 9999 had been allocated to a particular letter-pair, the letter A was added in front and the numerical sequence started again.  Thus WY9999 was followed by AWY1 to AWY999 and then BWY1 and so on. BWY902 was well known to me because it was an immaculate Morris 10 saloon owned since before the war by the father of my best friend, Peter Moore. By the time I left that job and joined the RAF I could tell you where almost any vehicle was first registered. I can still remember many of the tell-tale letter combinations although the system nowadays is quite different.

The tens of thousands of hand-written cards had to be kept in strict alphanumerical order in dozens of drawers. When the seniors in the office needed to refer to a card for any purpose they either fetched it themselves from the appropriate drawer or, much more likely, shouted for one of the juniors to fetch it for them. When they had finished with it, they simply dropped the card into their out-tray. Towards the end of each day there were usually several hundred cards awaiting re-filing and the worst part of my job, as one of two juniors, was doing the re-filing.

When I had been in the job for several months, I was deemed to be sufficiently reliable to be allowed to deal with incoming telephone calls and that made my job marginally more interesting. Most of the calls to our office were from police forces up and down the United Kingdom – the 1953 equivalent of today’s PNC checks. I was pretty good at rapidly locating individual cards. I could take down the details of the request, find the card, and get back to the telephone in about a minute. The index cards showed, amongst other things, the current registered owner and his or her address, and whether or not the vehicle was currently taxed. The rest of the office staff were impressed by my speed, except for my fellow junior clerk who had difficulty with the principles of alphanumerical order!  Perhaps he was dyslexic but I don’t think dyslexia had been invented in 1953. He certainly thought I was far too keen for my own good.

At that time I knew almost nothing about any of the armed services; I could recognise the different uniforms and that was about it.

‘Tony,’ said Mr Webster, the Office Manager, one day, recognising that I was rather down in the dumps, ‘you should sign on as a regular for the minimum three-year engagement and that way you can have the choice of which service you want to be in – and get paid nearly twice as much as a National Serviceman. If you wait until you’re drafted you’ll have no choice about whether you go into the Navy, Army, or Air Force and you’ll end up in whichever job happens to be available. You could end up as a clerk in an office again! With your six GCE O Levels, I’m certain you can do better than that.’

I hadn’t thought of it like that. The prospect of receiving seven shillings (35p) a day as a regular instead of the measly four shillings a day paid to National Servicemen settled it for me.

That day I wrote in my diary, ‘I’ve never been so bored in all my life as I was today. Mr Webster talked to me this morning. About 1230, during my dinner hour, I went to the Army Recruiting Office in town and picked up a pamphlet on careers in the Royal Army Education Corps. Since Monday of this week I have personally filed over 1,300 vehicle registration cards.’

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