STEEL, PEECH & TOZER

The Ickles, Rotherham, Yorkshire

Part of the Jackson Family History

I stayed on at school to take the General Certificate of Education examinations, as it was then, but I was not very successful, only passing in Book-keeping.  However I had passed the Commercial examinations with good results except for the Pitman's Shorthand Examinations where the best speed I could muster was 80 wpm.  The school arranged appointments for all students with the Labour Exchange staff and I had the good fortune to land an interview at Steel, Peech & Tozer, in Rotherham, a large steel manufacturing company. 

I started work there after leaving Mexborough Schofield Technical School, as a Junior Typist in 1956 and eventually became Section Leader on the Audio Typing Section of the Central Typing Department.  I left Steel Peech and Tozer (or British Steel, as it became on Nationalisation) in  1969.

This company was one of the largest employers in the area and they were excellent employers, paying good wages and having excellent welfare facilities. In charge of the Central Typing Department was a formidable woman named Marion Homes (not sure of the spelling, could be Holmes) - she was a married woman - married to Norman Hobson but known to all as "Miss Homes". She ran the department with the assistance of several other equally formidable women - who ran the Filing and Post Rooms.

Coming straight from school this was fearful place to work. But as mentioned the pay was good,  the work was interesting and I liked the girls who worked in the junior typing pool.

Eventually I was transferred up to the Central Typing Pool on the shorthand section, but this was shortlived as I was scared stiff. I was sent to one man for dictation in the invoice department, he was quite a nice man but he had a warbly voice and I was scared to ask him to repeat anything. Going to Mr Walton in Accounts department was totally different - in the end I was not confident enough to keep taking dictation and I asked to be transferred to the Cost Section. 

The Cost Section was run by another formidable women, Miss Edith Caudron - she was nice sometimes but to me at that time she was quite frightening. I quite like doing the work which involved typing figures and columns in tables and we had two typewriters - the ordinary ones with extra long carriages for wide documents and a billing machine which printed in small or large capital letters and figures - no lower case letters. I stayed on this section for about a year when a new section was formed, a small group of typists were required to type orders all day - these were obviously very important and every typist had to start the day typing orders until mid morning. It was then decided that we ought to have an order section, a few typists who would continue typing orders all day. I volunteered to transfer and there were three of us who moved from the cost section to the new order section.

Eventually the orders were transferred to dictaphone belts so we then moved from the vicinity of the cost section to sit with the dictaphone typists and work in what we called the Extention - this was the same huge room but

If anyone wants to get in touch with me regarding anything on this site please contact me at - hilary.jcksn "followed by" @googlemail.com and if anyone objects to anything being included on any page, or if you spot any errors/assumptions made, please also let me know.

Updated 23 January 2011