The late Bob Mortimer recalls being a telegram boy in Brandon’s Post Office.
In 1933, aged 14, I left school and got a job at Brandon’s Post Office, along the High Street, as a Telegram Boy. I wore a uniform, which included a hat with a red button on it, which, to begin with, I found very embarrassing. I would often hide my head in a comic, pretending to read it, so that people did not recognise me when I was out and about. Although I hated that hat to begin with I did slowly get used to it.
When there were no telegrams to deliver then I would be given odd jobs to carry out. I remember having to disinfect the mouthpiece of the public pay phone outside the Post Office building and make sure the pay phone box was clean and tidy. I also remember on occasion I would have to run across the High Street to a shop called Footers, where I would have to get a chocolate sweet for one of the women clerks who worked on the Post Office counter. You see back in those days Brandon had everything you ever wanted and there was no reason to go to another town for your shopping.
Being a telegram delivery boy was not always easy. I remember a couple of old ladies who lived near Town Street, and they were quite scary. Every Saturday at half past five in the evening I would have to cycle along Manor Road, turning right to cycle past de Lotbiniere’s Brandon Hall and keep going until I came across a dirt track which led to Pit Cottage. This was quite hazardous in the dark winter nights. At the cottage I would knock at the front door and one of the women would open the door just enough to see me and take the telegram. Every Saturday this would be my routine, but I never knew why they had a telegram at that time, because all telegrams were sealed and I never opened them. One Christmas Eve I was given a telegram to deliver to a woman at ‘Shaker’s Lodge’ in the middle of the forest. It was the middle of winter and very dark, and of course I got lost after I delivered the telegram. Talking of Christmas Eve, when I was a kid our family would walk along the High Street late at night, at about 10 o’clock, and it was a wonderful sight. There might be bands and buskers, who would come into town from elsewhere, and we would have to walk in the gutter around them as they played outside the Post Office and International Stores, and all the shops in the High Street were lit up.
My boss at the Post Office was a lovely man called Mr E.G. Noble. He and his wife did not have any children so I guess they took a shine to me and treated me like one of the family. Mr Noble took me to a Norwich City football match and they also bought me sweets and sometimes comics. The trouble is Mr Noble didn’t like me reading too many comics, because he thought I could better myself and would learn nothing from them. As he once put it, “I’ll find you something better to read,” and then produced a book on geography for me and would often set exams for me to answer questions about my reading material. From then on he would tell me off if he ever saw me reading a comic, but I had the last laugh because while he passed me and thought I was reading the geography book I had in fact tucked the Beano comic inside it and was reading that instead.
The Mount family ran a business extracting lime and whiting from a pit along Thetford Road and on one particular occasion I had to deliver a telegram to their home. It was a very wet day and so I changed into my coat, which meant I had to take my belt off to do so. Upon putting my coat on, I replaced my belt and went off to the Mount’s home. I knocked at the door and Mrs Mount answered, I told her I had a telegram for her and as I felt down for the satchel that should have been attached to my belt, it was not there. I had left it back at the Post Office and the telegram was in that satchel. Although this was highly embarrassing for me Mrs Mount didn’t make any fuss and was fine that I went back to the Post Office and collected it for her.
My wage at the Post Office was 10s 5d, about fifty-five pence in today’s money, and I gave mother about half of that. By the time I was 15 I could go to the pub and spend ‘tuppence on a beer and five Woodbines and a trip to the cinema would cost ‘fourpence. Just about everyone smoked in those days. For men it was deemed necessary to do so as it proved your were a real man, although for myself I never really took to it, although I for a while I did have a favourite cigarette to smoke purely because I liked the cards that you got free in the packets. When I was then working at the Thetford Post Office a postman named Harold Bowes, persuaded me to smoke a pipe and I have done so ever since. Incidentally Harold was a very good musician and played the coronet at private parties and with his friends he formed a band playing dance music. He later went to work for Tom Green in Brandon, who I believe was his father-in-law, and became the bandleader for Green’s band . They became very well known in the town at the time and Harold auditioned all the musicians to get that band up and running.
This brings me on to my time at Thetford. While I was at Brandon I took, and passed, an exam in the Post Office, which meant I could change my job. I was now a Sorting Clerk, and worked at the Thetford Post Office. I was now 17 years old and knew every street in Thetford because I had to sort the mail for the residents. Generally speaking we were a young staff. In the late 1930’s I had some great times whilst working at the Thetford Post Office, but the Second World War put an end to that, and it was from here, in 1940, that I got called up to join the Army, joining the Essex Regiment.