Interesting newspaper clipping 1955

[red750]

Note the wages in this clipping.

 

 

There are a series of photos of this aircraft, including one sitting on it's belly, at this address.

[onetrack]

My Dad got paid £15 a week in 1957 as the resident painter in the Palace Hotel in Central Perth. He was quite pleased to get the job and the pay, after he threw in dairy farming, because dairy farming didn't even pay wages, it was actually a loss-making operation.

The dairy farming looked good in 1951 when he started, then the State Govt tightened milk quotas around 1954, due to over-production, so that wrecked any possibility of making a profit. The milk quotas were introduced during the Great Depression (early 1930's).

We have an old saying in rural areas - "You've never known real poverty, until you've been a dairy farmer!"

 

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/46358586/3727394

 

£50 a week was a very good salary in 1955, and the pay rate of a Captain today is probably around 3-4 times the average salary, so the relationship to many things one has to purchase today, is similar. Cars are far cheaper today and much better equipped, but housing and property has gone ballistic, and skewed the relationship to many things.

 

A Captain of a big commercial airliner today has a lot more technology to deal with, but weather forecasting is much improved since 1955 - communications and information levels are instant and enormous, and the flying conditions would be vastly more comfortable today, than the piston-engine, unpressurised, low altitude era.

 

That was a very unhappy end to Captain Virtues career, and I trust he enjoyed the move into farming - but it would have been a lot harder, lower-paying work, even so.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Virtue

 

Edited 23 hours ago by onetrack