Today is our 57th wedding anniversary but it is a very low key affair given the other milestones that we have celebrated. Our 25th wedding anniversary was held in Mexico but for our 40th wedding anniversary we really pushed the boat out and had four celebrations in total, one in Harrogate in Yorkshire (primarily for members of my family) one in the Midlands for friends, neighbours, one in Southampton for our friends, neighbours and work colleagues and the final one in Santiago de Compestela in Northern Spain for our Spanish friends. For our 50th, we had a fairly large celebration here in Bromsgrove and then we had organised on in Santiago de Compostela which I attended but Meg could not because at that time she was plagued by a succession of disabling migraines, which have nor fortunately ceased. Today we made track for 'The Lemon Tree' where we have promised ourselves some goodies for the day and tomorrow, when we see our Waitrose friends we shall some celebrations delayed by a day and share some cake with our friends. On our way down into town, we bumped into a couple of our Church friends who came round with some Prosecco to help us celebrate in the late afternoon which made a wonderful day for us. We also acquired some goodies from the AgeUK shop across the road which is often the case.
The question might well be asked what happened to terminate my period of association and employment with the Old Swan Hotel in Harrogate and the short answer to all of this is that this association ceased when I started work at the Central Office of Information in London. Although I was more than happy working at the National Lending Library, from the ages of 17-19, I really wanted to see the world and I found out that I could do this by joining the Foreign Office as a Grade B6 clerical officer where I would almost certainly be posted abroad. You would have thought that it would have been quite an easy job to transfer from the scientific to the home (domestic) civil service but there seemed to be some 'silos' in place to make this difficult. The simplest way to achieve my objective was to enter the Civil Service Open competition which were set at a more or less GCE 'O' level standard. I was obliged to take English and Arithmetic as two core subjects and then chose to study French, Physics and Chemistry and I still have the examination papers that I took in my files at home. I do not remember doing any real preparation or revision for these exams and I am a fairly confident examinee in any case and then the results were published. The total marks of in the five subjects I took was 900 and I scored exactly 600 which makes my average percentage mark very easy to calculate at 66.67%. The Civil Service Commission published a list of the entire 6085 candidates and everybody slightly above a certain mark would be offered employment as a Clerical Officer and candidates in a lower tranche of marks would qualify as a clerical assistant. My position in the list was 77th which out of 6085 candidates works out as the 98.735 percentile point (i.e. 1.265% candidates scored a high composite mark than I achieved) So having achieved a degree of success I was then offered a list of ministries in London of which the Central Office of Information seemed to be the most interesting. This was the post war successor of the Ministry of Information and proved to be a very interesting and exciting period of my life. When I was chatting with some of our younger care staff, one of them asked my if I knew my IQ. As it was, I did not and I have always had rather a disrespect for this metric as I undertook more studies in the social sciences. There was a massive expose of the work of Sir Cyril Burt, the so called 'father' of the IQ test who believed in the 'heritability' of intelligence, now a discredited concept. In order to prove this statistically, one needed to compare the measured IQ of the young person with that of their parents but Burt had not taken any measurements of their parents. So Burt estimated what the intelligence level of the parents might be by studying the IQ of the school children he tested which was evidently no sort of objective test at all. This was all exposed in a great investigation by the Sunday Times in the 1970's but by this time, the formation of the post WW2 school system which was based upon grammar schools for which to pass the infamous 11+ examination had done its best (or its worst). It has been argued that the whole of the school system was based upon the Platonian concepts of 'Men of gold, men of silver and men of brass' and the IQ test was a way if identifying which was which and selecting for the 'appropriate' level of school. Nonetheless, being asked about my IQ and certainly not wanting to take a rather spurious 'know your own IQ' tests, I reasoned to myself that the Civil Servant Open competition examinations and identifying where one stood in the pecking order so to speak, one could probably quite easily concert my position of 77/6085 into an IQ score. There are masses of online calculators from which I derived a figure of 133 for what that it worth. But when I thought further about it, the sample of individuals putting themselves forward for five GCSE type examinations must be a skewed sample of the entire population as one would not expect many individuals at the bottom of the hierarchy to put themselves forward for five examinations. So I did some quick investigations and discovered that in 1964 some 17% of the population gained 5 passes at GCSE 'O' level. Then taking this into account and attempting to correct for what initially was a skewed distribution, I then consulted some online calculators that now came up with an IQ score of 143. So I am prepared for settle for 140 as a reasonable mid-way figure although I am still not convinced that it has real utility. In my later years of teaching, I discovered an index of 'emotional' intelligence which I suspect is a far better guide to how well individuals function in practical work situations than an IQ score the currency of which I feel is now spent.
© Mike Hart [2024]