Treasure Hunting on a Shoestring

I have been a hunter of treasure, of one form or another, for the past three decades.  I commenced searching in the year 1970 when I began to haunt junk shops and jumble sales in a quest to hunt down rock and pop records of the 1960’s.  In 1962 when I was fifteen years of age and earning the paltry sum of £4-5shillings per week as a labourer in a brewery, I simply could not afford the £1-12-6d shop price of a long playing record or even the 6/6d (32p) which was the price of a single.  My weekly lodging expenses amounted to £2-5shillings thus leaving me with the magnificent sum of £2 to buy clothes, cigarettes and bus fares to and from work.  If I was extremely frugal, I could manage a Saturday night at the cinema with my workmates followed by a fish and chip supper to round off the evening.  Simple pleasures for very simple minds.  This soul destroying employment was with Beasley’s brewery which was located in Lakedale Road, Plumstead, now long since demolished.  It was in this hell’s kitchen that we grafted through an interminable five and a half day week in what was akin to slave labour.  90% of the workforce were 15 year old kids fresh from a schooling system where all that was taught was how to become factory fodder.

On one occasion in the brewery, I was standing at the bottom of some steps when a wood and iron barrow came hurtling down and straight into me.  The iron handle hit me full in the mouth breaking two teeth and split open my lip leaving me unconscious.  I came to in the ambulance and was taken to the local hospital which was St. Nicholas in Plumstead where three stitches were inserted in my upper lip.  I was quickly discharged and made my way, very shakily, back to the brewery.  I asked for the rest of the day off in order to recover but was told by the foreman that I would be instantly dismissed if I left the premises.  There were no unfair dismissal tribunals then.  We had no knowledge of injury in the workplace compensation claims.  The brewery was a harsh regime run by ogres who looked upon us, the workforce, as scum.  We were little more than children.

I stuck to the job for eight long months, from August 1962 to April 1963 and never before or since have I had to work so hard for such pitiful reward.  I remember nothing of the Christmas of 1962, it came and went in a blur.  I think I slept through most of it.  Enforced overtime meant we worked long into the night, every night and all day on Saturdays in the period leading up to Christmas. It was a continuous slog that left me without spirit, in mind and body.  It seemed we lived our lives only for the specific well-being of the brewery.  It was like something out of Dickens.  The highest wage I received even with all that Christmas overtime was £6 –14 – 6d.  I still have the wage packet to this day.  On the day I left the brewery for good, I swore to myself that I would never again be exploited to such an extent.

Beasleys were eventually taken over by the big boys of Courages in the late 1960s for a sum above £2,000,000.  I trust the proprietors enjoyed the wealth. 

My next job was in a timber yard where my weekly wage rose to the dizzy height of £6-5s-0d but more important was the fact that there was no Saturday working.  It was sheer bliss to be able to lie in bed on a Saturday morning with the added bonus of an extra couple of pounds tucked away in my trouser pocket.  Pure heaven after the demoralising experience of the brewery.

I took a succession of menial jobs throughout the rest of the 1960s.  Then in 1969, came of the arrival of Cupid’s arrow followed in 1970 by the birth of my first daughter.  I was still in dead-end employment but now it seemed not to matter as much as it had previously.  Now I had something important to work for and 1970 was the year I finally grew up.  In that adult frame of mind came the first baffling twinges of nostalgia for the past so I started to collect it, pop records at first but then I started to develop and eye for other things.  In 1971,

I made my first purchase of a piece of furniture from the past.  This was a quality bookcase/writing bureau of the