AN INTERVIEW WITH DAVID BARNSLEY - PART TWO

PART TWO- FROM CARLSON HOUSE TO JOSEPH LUCAS’S

After 11 years of his childhood spent at Carlson House School in Harborne, at the age of 18 David Barnsley left school and went to work at Lucas’s. David told us:

“The school staffs were going around local businesses looking for employment opportunities for school leavers from Carlson House and they went to Lucas’s in Great King Street. Mrs Marlow was the school’s second headmistress- she met with Lucas’s and told them they had a prospective school leaver with ‘o’ levels, so I was sent for interview and was given the job. I left school in July 1959 and started work at Lucas’s on 7^th September 1959. I was scared stiff before the interview, but they were quite pleasant. They said I could have a job in ‘supplier’s accounts’. Unfortunately I fell foul of the fact that I was rather slow. You had to put all the goods inwards and open invoices in alphabetical order and match them by 300 a day. A bloke came round with a book to check if you were doing it properly and it never occurred to me to lie like everyone else- they never counted them anyway, so I was deemed to be too slow and given all the dirty little jobs in the office to do instead. I stuck at it though because five pounds seventeen and sixpence was a lot of money in those days, which my father took £3 for accommodation and the petrol and oil for my trike was five and four pence a gallon. So even though they gave me all the dead filing to do, at least I had a job”.

After only a few months in his first job, David was to experience the dreaded cold shoulder of discrimination familiar to many disabled people of his generation. When new floor which could only be accessed by stairs. He was left virtually on his own:

“I stayed on M3 and they moved to G7. We were on the clock and I used to come up in an old lift to sit on my own. The supervisor would come in just to see if I was in then leave again and after 6 months I was pretty cheesed off sitting on my own. Eventually they all come back down and I was glad and I was glad of the company again. We had a merit rating to see if you were satisfactory at your job. The supervisor told me “you’re close to getting the push- you don’t know the section and you talk too much, so I ‘m going to have you sitting next to me where I can keep my eye on you”. Well of course I didn’t know the section as it was up on another floor!”

During his early years at Lucas’s, David got fed up seeing his colleagues being given promotion whilst he remained on a low grade:

“You’d see the supervisor taking people to one side and he’d tell them they’d got a rise, saying “but don’t tell anyone” and they’d all go into the gents and find they’d all got a rise of 5 shillings 25 pence. They put me on packing for a while which no one else ever did before or after me. I was packing orders which should have been grade 8 money, but I was still paid at grade 5 money. For the next few years people would come in and ask me how to do things and I’d tell them because I’d been there a long time, but then they’d get good high powered jobs and I’d be stuck on grade 5 money”.

A friend of David‘s who was a union rep eventually convinced him that the company were taking him for a ride and he demanded an interview with personel. After making his own enquiries about accessible parts of the company, David pushed himself forward for a move to Great Hampton Street and was finally put on grade 8 money:

“A manager there told me that because I’d been so patient they would give me the grade 8, an increase of £2 after 5 years with the company- actually the minimum for the grade. I recall that he was so pleased with himself that he came down three times that day to tell me I’d got the £3 rise”.

In spite of his shabby treatment, David was a loyal employee of Lucas’s, staying with them for 28 years. Eventually he became a supervisor, working at Great Hampton Street until 1976 before moving to Lucas Aerospace in Shirley. He left in 1988: “Looking back I enjoyed it and overall it was a pleasant time, but it was a different era. My life has been good and I put the basis of all that down to my childhood years to Carlson House school.