New Article: ‘ “Servitude at the Desk”: Walter Greenwood and Clerical Work’.

Greenwood first worked as a pawnbroker’s clerk aged twelve, before and after school. On leaving school aged thirteen he worked fulltime in the same job for a year before finding, aged fourteen, a new and better job as a clerk at the Pendleton offices of the Co-Operative Society. However, he was still extremely unhappy as a clerk, feeling like Harry in Love on the Dole that he was ‘damned by fair handwriting’. This article is about Greenwood’s writings about the lives of clerks, autobiographical, documentary and fictional. It has a happy ending – in that eventually Greenwood achieved his dream of using his fair handwriting not in commerce but in writing stories and novels.

See: ‘Servitude at the Desk’: Walter Greenwood and Clerical Work (1916-1967)* .

Enjoy, Chris.