In the first two buildings that Ralph Swimer Limited occupied, no white person would work, not even those without qualifications. The Swimer family lived above the first shop at 22 Whitechurch Lane and their living quarters were as disgusting as the business premises below.

Ralph Swimer had advertised in the Hackney Gazette for a Bookkeeper to Trial Balance but each applicant who turned up for interview bluntly refused the job when offered. He was glad, finally, to sneer me, a well-qualified young woman in her early thirties. At last, old man Swimer must have thought, I have found in this Mrs Pettigrew a dedicated and conscientious workhorse who would stay the course.

I was a pretty young-thing then: well groomed, educated and elegant, if a little too proud for my own good. But he would handle that pride with typical Romanian kid gloves, at least, until he had endeared himself to me. Since I was recently separated from my husband and a single-mother, too, that also would earn him some mileage. He would generously offer to pay me partly off the records and under the table–untaxed–cunningly disguised as a little more in my hand each week as well as a sincere attempt to help me make ends meet. In that way, he would not only avoid some national insurance contributions from his struggling business, but he would also not have to reveal exactly how much he had reluctantly agreed to pay this schvartze woman, whom he naturally assumed could not get a job anywhere else.

I had driven a hard bargain, and it would not do to upset his future English employees with revelations on the books about how much more than them I was earning. He knew that he would have to employ some English staff, and soon. The British would be far more successful at selling to the good old English public than he could ever be with his Jewish background and Eastern European accent, and he might as well start preparing his business for them from now. “After all, you’re here now, Rona,” – he had started calling me ‘Rona’ instead of Verona almost immediately – and it was my job now to cut costs, and help him expand his business, exponentially.

Unknown to Ralph Swimer, I had been offered another job nearby, and Mr Abrahams of Davis and Field was a real gent. His sole female employee, however, was a proper nasty piece of work. She did not think that I was the sort of person whom she wanted to use the same toilet that she sat on. And while Mr Davis did everything reasonably in his power to provide alternative facilities for me, I had objected to this English woman’s attitude, stating, “If I am good enough to do the firms’ books of accounts, then I am good enough to use the same lavatory used by the likes of you.” Davis, of course, would not sack his own relative and long-time employee, and so I walked out.

That was why it had taken me a whole week before I could pluck up enough courage to start working at 22 Whitechurch Lane. I had given Swimer some sorry story about being too sick to come in to work, but in reality, I did not want to be employed in such a rundown environment. My husband’s car, just a year before in 1965, had been far superior to Swimer’s Austin Cambridge and my former home at 32 Hartley Road had been a dwelling of which anyone would have been proud. Now with my marriage in tatters, and a young mouth to feed, I was forced to accept any old foolish job these people had to offer.

At Whitechurch Lane and Goulston Street, I had to hide from anyone I knew just to use the public toilets at Aldgate East station because there were no staff facilities at the office. Later, when I was going into Goulston Street in Whitechapel, then in the centre of the Jewish East End, if I met anybody I knew, I walked around the block to lose them, then walked back into the dilapidated shop front, hopefully, without being spotted. Like any other employee, I thought that as the company grew, I would grow with it. From a turnover of fifty-six thousand in 1965; seventy thousand in 1966; it went to seven hundred and fifty thousand in 1973; and I was the only office staff, apart from an invoice clerk. Whoever would have thought that there was so much money to be made in trimmers and trimmings, buttons and zips?

They did not start out well-to-do of course. Ralph Swimer’s father was a Rabbi, I believe, and his mother, whom I met, looked like some kind of peasant woman. We had an advert out for a cleaner and she just happened to choose that time to visit her son. Mr Grant came to my office and told me that there was someone in the lobby for the cleaning job, but that she looked too old, and I simply dismissed it. Shortly afterwards, Mr Swimer brought this woman round and said, “Mrs P, this is my mother,” and with mouth wide opened, I looked at the woman and somehow managed to stutter, “Very…p-p-pleased to meet you.” She was indeed a surprise. I had heard about her from Bright, the chap who did odd jobs for them in Highgate, and on seeing her, I could believe the things he had said. And just to imagine that she was Sue and Peter’s grandmother. The difference, you see, between a black worker and a ‘white highflyer’ is the fact that we would never have allowed our mother to go about looking impoverished in that way.

When I left for two years after the son, Peter, took over and was invited back part-time in 1975, they had still not done what I had suggested they do to improve the accounting system years before. They would not listen. As long as they had workhorses like me, they used them mercilessly. I was dealing with six hundred invoices each month without the aid of a computer, most of them for one “special” firm, J. H. Smith & Company (Leyton) Limited. Their director, a Mr Sydney Caplan, used to own the company but sold it to a larger business. Caplan still did all the buying and had the Swimers jumping to his beck and call. In one month, he could have three hundred invoices. As he paid fifty times more than anyone else did, everyone was dancing to his tune and jumping at the sound of his voice.

Of course, I ended up with the unnecessarily heavy workload that meant I often had to take work home—depraving my two children of their mother’s attention because, by then, I had sent for my young son and brought him back to England—and now had an extra mouth to feed. But all Swimers had to do was use delivery notes each time Caplan phoned in with an order and then copy them onto an invoice later. In that way, they would have double records, but they did not like double records. If records were to be kept, then records would have to be checked, and some records would simply have to disappear–there was nothing anyone could do about it. False fires occurred. And the Government, run by some of their own people, did not seem to have the common sense to insist on back up records to ensure that revenues could be collected to keep much-needed public services running. That was why people like them built their businesses in areas around where they lived, and then moved out, leaving the buildings to rot for tax purposes.

They were the sort of people that Margaret Thatcher worshipped. She thought that because people got rich by trade that they made their money honestly. That may have been the case when her father had his shop in Grantham, but Mr Roberts must have been the honourable type. Thatcher may have been tapping into the aspirations of ordinary people when in 1979, she made her ‘St Francis of Assisi speech,’ but her first mistake as prime minister was to reduce the 85% tax rate to sixty per cent and the lower rate by five pence. A bold move would have been to reduce the lower rate to twenty pence thus honouring her pledge to enable ordinary people to keep more of what they earned. I did the wages and salaries at the time, and I saw the difference between the bosses rebate and that of the ordinary workers. I got a couple of pounds and was a ‘high earner’ compared to some folks.

The problem with J. H. Smith (Leyton) Limited was discovered when “the workhorse” left and their new recruit, our white former toilet and office cleaner, Joyce, had chased away the red-haired Jewish woman who did the sales ledger. By the time I was asked to return part-time, they had to get someone to help me because I had to deal with far too many invoices, and they still would not use delivery notes. Even the goods sold for cash were put on invoices.

With no accounts background, Joyce could not cope as a bookkeeper, even with a newly introduced computerised system (for which I had to pay my own training), she made so many mistakes that the accountants had to send their qualified staff to do the work that I used to do alone by hand. It was then that one Indian accountant told them what “Mrs Pettigrew has been trying to get you to do for years. If you separate cash sales from invoice sales, and use delivery notes, you will reduce the workload considerably.” The accountants, Morley and Scot, had used my accuracy to their advantage. They came twice a year to audit the books, and after the first week there was usually nothing for them to do, but they earned more in two weeks than I earned all year.

They all knew that my accounts were always 100% accurate. I checked the invoices we sent out, and the ones sent to us, and had no communications with my opposite numbers at all because there were never any discrepancies, unless of course, there was an invoice or cheque lost in the post. I was grossly underpaid, but they used the fact that the British were prejudice on racial grounds to employ me, and others like me, partly under the table and off the records at the lower end of the scale.

Brixton Riots (1981).

Most drivers who drove for firms at that time took the vans home but the black chap who worked at Swimers had to leave the van and walk or take the bus home. He got a job twice his pay and the use of the van, which was worth another forty pounds per week to him in those days. Talk about they were not racists because they employed blacks, but blacks had to work and they were usually the only employees at the lowest ends of the business, so their subsistence wages was barely enough to keep body and soul together.

My niece, Maureen, started working at Swimers at £35 a week. It was a lot more than Sainsbury’s but five years later, she was not earning much more. Joyce hated Maureen, and I knew that she would be out as soon as they had managed to get rid of me. Joyce encouraged her daughter, Lesley, to slim down to take on the new receptionist job. So, when I asked Peter for the job for Maureen, Joyce was hoping mad. She used to take note of every minute that Maureen was late getting to work. She complained about the fact that Peter gave Maureen a lift in the evenings, and after Maureen met her Greek chap, Joyce was even more jealous. She said that Maureen didn’t need the job any more, but still Maureen was taken in by her and told Joyce all of her business. She told me about Mehmet, too, but I just left them to it. Then afterwards, I bullied her into leaving, and she got a job at £75 per week, twenty or twenty-five pounds more than she was earning at Swimers.

They were supposed to have trained her by law, but they only collected the grant from the government saying that Joyce had trained her – the very idea! Joyce did not come anywhere near Maureen in intelligence. All she could do was turn around and say, “Well, I did offer to train Maureen, in office practice, filing, typing, and how to use the computer, and she had a good little handwriting and could do quite well with figures, but they claimed she wasn’t bright enough.” Her daughter, Lesley, the cleaner was bright enough though. I was furious, but Maureen did not cling to me, she clung to the white people, thinking somehow that that would elevate her. I was on my own, so I kept quiet. I could have told her that Memet would never marry her.

Maureen was just another example of how the black staff were never promoted. You were in charge as long as you were on your own. Once someone white came along, you became his or her assistant, or you had no job title but all the responsibility without the corresponding pay. All the clients and auditors knew that I was the one in charge of the accounts department at Ralph Swimer Limited throughout my twenty-odd years with the company, but I was without a name, without a title, and without sufficient remuneration. Yet I knew all that there was to know about how the business operated and how they all became multi-millionaires.

I wanted all that exposed at the industrial tribunal but I could not sell my flat to get the money to employ a lawyer to sue the bastards. Margaret Thatcher’s government had decreed that employees must not get legal aid for cases against their employers. One had to go through the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS) and that was a SACA organisation run by, you know whom, for the benefit of ‘you know who.’ One entered the process and got nowhere.

As I said to them at the industrial tribunal—following my unfair dismal after two decades of devoted service to a company now managed by the son for whom I completed his university application because the family couldn’t write English well enough, and to whom my children donated their cast-offs:

“A country’s duty is to its citizens and vice versa. A country’s leaders collect taxes from the rich to run services on behalf of its entire people. Taxes are not a new thing. Joseph was on his way to pay his taxes when Mary gave birth to Jesus – and maybe there is a moral and an irony in that for everyone here today. But how can people live in a country and make their money in that country but expect their taxes to be used only in the areas in which they live? It doesn’t work that way at all. Joseph was on his way to Bethlehem to pay his taxes. He did not live there. He had to travel a long way to get there. It is obvious, therefore, that even back then; all taxes were collected at some central head office and distributed according to the needs of the various communities. Not just for the benefit and concerns of the rich folks and the areas in which they live.”

I represented myself at the hearing and that kind of feisty talk, I know now, would never get a claimant far or endear her to the panel. It was well beyond the jurisdiction of this employment tribunal and far beyond the interest of the imminent and well-appointed lawyers, barristers and judges representing the Swimers.

This is my experience, the honest to God truth of my working life in Britain, and the loss of my claim for unfair dismissal without recourse or recompense for the many years of service given to my Eastern European employers in the East End of London. It is ironic that had I received any compensation based upon my long years of service or level of pay at the time of dismissal, it would have been at a fraction of my actual earnings (or worth) over the years, since my wages were still being paid under the table and off the records—a mistake for which I take full responsibility, but it seemed like a good idea in 1966.

Now you may think that times have changed, and stories like this could never happen again in modern Britain, but ask yourself how far we have come in the labour market since the 1950s and 60s. Why are black people still at the bottom of the economic pile after all these years in England? The experience of recent African and Caribbean migrants, or even that of my British-born children/grandchildren¹ and yours, would have you know that the more things change is the more they stay the same.

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1. Recent research shows that almost half of young black people are unemployed, well over twice the rate for young white people. [↩]

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