Secretarial skills

Southampton Row was Pitman's flagship college

London life down the Pit

I guess nowadays you'd buy yourself an enormous pair of silicon tits and try to get on Big Brother, but when London-RIP was growing up, the default option for girls without an obvious career path was a bit more prosaic - you became a secretary.

For this, you'd need to learn shorthand and typing and the most established place to do this in London was Pitman's Secretarial College in Southampton Row. The Pitman organisation had other colleges both in London and outside, but this was its flagship, housing its admin as well as classrooms for the likes of us.

Stairway to secretarial skills 

The building, which is in the next block from the Hotel Russell, is noticeable due to its large clock and looks pretty impressive from the outside. I went there circa 1980, and remember a rambling structure, about five storeys high with our classrooms at the top of a series of winding staircases - and no lift. As the lifts at Russell Square Tube station were often broken, mornings were pretty breathless affairs .

Home for solanes

The secretarial students themsleves were an odd assortment of Sloaney types yah-ing their way through every course in London, girls filling in time before they went to college and a few people who actually wanted to be secretaries. The only man present was an ancient court stenographer who came in occasionally to demostrate his customised hieroglyphics to an audience who received his wisdom with varying degrees of interest.

We learned shorthand (2000), office skills, which we thought we were far too clever to benefit from, and touch typing (on nightmare, hair-trigger electric machines). I brushed up on the latter at Sight and Sound in Tottehnam Court Road, where they taught audio typing, and which is also long gone.

Dawning of a new era

Pitman closed the Southampton Row centre circa 1990, although the now-franchised training organisation has an outlet in High Holborn. It still teaches shorthand - as well as spreadsheets, IT etc, but I think the days of long, leisurely secretarial courses are gone, and I certainly don't come across many people who can do 2000 or New Era - it's all Teeline (pah!).

Myself, I was a lousy secretary but I can still touch type and do shorthand, which have, as my mother annoyingly predicted, come in incredibly useful. So those days toiling down the Pit weren't entirely wasted.

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