A Midland Odyssey - Part Seven - The Interview

Like thousands of other teenagers up and down the country, my younger daughter is currently preparing for her A levels, just as I was forty years ago. But while Sarah intends going to university after she leaves Sixth Form, in 1976 I was looking for a job. And like many of my peers I had applied for a job with a bank - well, two actually, National Westminster and Midland.  Both offered me interviews; the first one I went to was with Nat West. It did not go well. I got lost on the way from Liverpool Street Station to Goodman's Fields, where the interview took place, and was a nervous wreck throughout. I was not offered a job.

My second interview was with Midland Bank, on a grey, damp Friday morning in the Spring. I donned my new Burton's suit - grey check, two buttons, wide lapels and flared trousers, as was the fashion back then - and set off, making sure that I was in good time and had a map of my destination, Suffolk House in Laurence Pountney Hill, EC4. In an early example of my fear of being late, I was ridiculously early when I got off the train at Liverpool Street, from where Suffolk House is but a fifteen minute walk. Having time to kill, I walked to London Bridge and then back and forth across the river in the drizzle a couple of times before deciding that it was now not too early to get to my interview. Despite the fact that forty years have passed, there are some things that I remember quite vividly from that interview; not so much the meeting itself, but a couple of odd coincidences that sprung up.

Laurence Pountney Hill. Suffolk House is long gone.

Some people say there is no such thing as coincidence, that what we see as coincidence is actually just the Law of Attraction or the Frequency Illusion in action, but there were two incidents at my interview that I think can only have been coincidental, in fact downright spooky. The first came when I sat in a reception area with a number of other equally nervous teenagers, waiting to be called in to be interviewed. An interviewer emerged from somewhere; "Mr Woods?" she asked. "Yes," I answered...and so did someone else. "Oh, so we have two Mr Woods. Mr Michael Woods?" she asked. "Yes," I replied...and so did the same someone else. Puzzled, she consulted her form again. "Michael Grant Woods?" she asked and this time I had to shake my head. Off trotted my namesake for his interview. I often wondered if he got a job with Midland. I accept that my name is not exactly uncommon, and years later I came across others in the bank who shared my name, but the odds on encountering one's namesake at a job interview, in a pool of less than a dozen other people must be very long indeed.

The second coincidence occurred when it came to my turn to be interviewed. I sat down opposite the interviewer and realised that I had met him before. Back in the 1970's, when all the banks seemed to recruit on an industrial scale at the end of each school year, Midland Bank would visit schools in an effort to encourage school leavers to apply for jobs with them, and when the Bank's caravan had visited my school, Forest Lodge in Collier Row, one of the members of staff who came with it was now sitting on the other side of the desk from me. I cannot recall anything about the interview itself, although it must have gone much better than the one at Nat West - or perhaps Midland were not so picky - because I was offered a job. Of course it might have been that the job should have been offered to the other Michael Woods, or perhaps it could have been that the interviewer was simply impressed by the fact that my memory was good enough to have remembered him from his visit to my school. In any event, by the time I came to sit my A levels, I knew that come August I had a job to go to.

Like Suffolk House, my old school - Forest Lodge - is also no more.

Nowadays the idea of a job for life is becoming less and less common; one in three workers stay in a job for no longer than two years apparently, but in 1976 there were certain industries, and banking was one of them, where long service was the norm. And whereas my parents were both factory workers - they were employed by Thorns (later Ferguson), my Dad as a French polisher and Mum on a production line assembling television circuit boards - my getting a job in a bank carried with it a certain cachet, more so than nowadays I suspect. The fact that my parents worked in a factory (although my Mum had been a secretary with a firm of solicitors before I came along), that we lived in a council flat and I went to a comprehensive school made me consider our family to be firmly working class. Today, notions of class distinction are much more blurred - if they exist at all - and they aren't something to which I pay attention anymore; at best they are irrelevant, at worst divisive, demeaning even.

In 1976 the rate of inflation stood at 16.50%, down slightly from the whopping 24.20% which it reached the year previously, and even before I had started work I received a letter confirming that my starting salary would see a double digit percentage rise following negotiations between the National Union of Bank Employees and the bank. And even before I had set foot in a branch, I was transferred! My initial letter confirming my employment as a Grade One clerk (subject to the usual six month probationary period) advised me that I would start at Midland Bank 126 High Road, Ilford but hard on the heels of that letter came another transferring me to the strength of the bank's staff at 412 Cranbrook Road, Gants Hill (just over a mile away).

Midland Bank, Gants Hill is now a pizza restaurant.

So in August 1976, after a week's Induction Course at Midland Bank's Training Branch in Holborn (see A Midland Odyssey Part Four), I took the 247A bus from Collier Row -where I lived at the time - to Gants Hill to embark on what might loosely be called a career with Midland Bank. Funny to think, had my interview with Nat West turned out differently, or had there not been two Michael Woods at Suffolk House that Friday, or had I not known my interviewer, I might now be looking reflecting on a very different past.