companies house made easy

Last weekend I had great time in Cornwall and while I was there I visited the Lost Gardens of Heligan. In the head gardeners room was a register showing the weekly earnings of some of the 25 or so gardeners who worked there in 1902 and I was not at all surprised to learn that even the most senior ones only earned 4 shillings a day, which is if you don’t know £1 per week.

This clearly fulfilled my expectation of worker exploitation because £52 per year was not much of a wage even then. So today I decided to look at how that compared with earnings in 2010. Well £52 per year in 1902 equates after inflation to about £5000 per year today which is about the level at which you start to pay tax in 2010 and also near the level of basic benefits and also of our state pension. It’s also true that very few families in 1902 had more than one adult earner in the home so the total family income was effectively limited to something like £5000 in today’s money.

For many people this was probably as good as it got for all of their life and yet we are all here to prove they made a go of it in difficult circumstances. Hard as the next few years’ looks from here in 2010 I don’t think any of those gardeners at Helegan in 1902 would be daunted by what lies before us and neither should we. Without any NHS, pensions or a welfare state these people made it through difficult times and the worst we can expect is a reduction in what we are used to.

They did it because they helped each other and perhaps that’s the answer for us in 2010. The question that gives rise to is how do we get people to pull together today rather than look for scapegoats in our own cynical age. I have an idea but I’ll save that for another blog.