Anyone else old enough to have done this?

Yup.

Yes, our music teacher always used to suggest it when the other teachers were having their coffee.

Yup. 5p for cleaning windaes and cutting hedges. Those oldies sure knew how to exploit da yoot back then.

Me too.

Cleaning grates, washing the occasional car(weren’t many cars in our street), hedge clipping, all good fun, saving money for camp.

my kids wont do anything under £10

Yes, in the dark and distant past…

I cut a few lawns with push mowers and collected messages from Cissie’s shop.

A venture scout came to our door offering to do some weeding. My mum directed him to the flower bed needing attention. He triumphantly returned upon the job’s completion. My mum duely paid him and later went to inspect his work. He had left all the weeds and dug up all her newly planted seedlings.

Absolutely. Then it was renamed “Job Week” because too many folk were taking the piss!

Spending hours clearing a neighbour’s shit tip of a garden for 10p.

Happy days.

” all good fun, saving money for camp.”

On my first Scout camp, we loaded all the forms from the Scout Hall into the back of a pantechnicon. We then loaded dozens of old army surplus tents, marquees, pioneering poles, gas bottles, stoves and just about everything else you would need for a weeks camping with 40 scouts. We then climbed in among all this gear and set off to Loch Lomond.

The words Health and Safety were rarely seen together in the early 70s. I still remember the smell of musty canvas, sisal ropes and carbon monoxide from the trucks exhaust as we rattled our way west.

Ah, memories!

If you sprayed an aerosol onto the tent canvas, they would leak, thus ensuring that the leaders would get a soaking when it inevitably rained.

I remember going on one Scout Camp at Torlundy which was about 6 miles from home in Spean Bridge. My brother couldn’t hack it because he was homesick… I can also remember taking revenge on a bullying older boy. My mate and I got into his sleeping bag and rolled down a bank to get it liberally covered in cowshit. He was impressively pissed off about it but never did find the culprits.

On another camp in Yorkshire (Thixendale?) we spent most of the weekday evenings making nuisance calls to the local inhabitants from the red phonebox beside the field we were camped in. One of the big boys, Kenny Flop, had £30 pocket money for the week which was a staggering amount. He spent it all on Cornettos.

I know the 1970s were probably shit in lots of ways but I’d go back in an instant – Nous étions jeunes et insouciants!

Has it moved since then?

Biggest camp I was at was one of the Jamborettes in Blair Atholl.

Did anyone participate in Scotstrek? It was a Jamboree of sorts. Scouts from all over Europe spent five days walking the West Highland Way shortly after it opened.

Scottish Scouts back then were all male. Swedish scouts were almost exclusively blonde, blue eyed and female. They bathed topless in rivers which helped morale among the lame.

A mixed group of Italian scouts had a slightly different comprehension of the term hiking. They prefixed it with ‘hitch’, and speedily crossed Rannoch Moor by car as we were chased on foot across it by midges in the rain.

As a sojourn for those with enough energy, Buchaille Etive Mor presented itself as a side trip. We climbed in up the easy Curved Ridge. The Swiss Scouts sought out more challenging routes. How we all got back alive is down to nothing more than luck.

Halcyon days 🙄

I did bobajob whilst in the cubs.
I mowed lawns & helped clean out some garages and found a stack of pron! 😯
Not long after i was thrown out of Scouts for telling Skip to Eff off.
He was an ‘anchor!! ha.

Remember the paper labels you had to lick and stick on people windows for Bob a Job?
Jumpers for goalposts, long dry summers etc etc. Halcyon days!

ne participate in Scotstrek?

Scottish Scouts back then were all male. Swedish scouts were almost exclusively blonde, blue eyed and female. They bathed topless in rivers which helped morale among the lame.

ScotStreak maybe.

I remember the ‘Job Done’ stickers folk would put in their windows so that other Cub Scouts would know a property had already been ‘hit’. I also remember the stickers didn’t come off the windows very easily or cleanly.

The Guide’s/Brownie’s equivalent of Bob a Job week used to be called willing for a shilling. It apparently had the name changed when it was deemed no longer appropriate terminology.

no longer appropriate terminology

Whereas, Bob a Job… 😆

Bob a job =ed slave labour 🙂

Biggest camp I was at was one of the Jamborettes in Blair Atholl.

Druidh .. we were camped outside Atholl (over the iron bridge) when one of those was on .
Can remember being well impressed by the assault course they had built, and even more impressed by the size of the knifes that some of the Scandinavian girl guides had on their belts 😯

I remember our troop losing a footie match against a team of Swedish guides at the Poacher 82 jamboree. Happy daze!

Yes.

“I also remember the stickers didn’t come off the windows very easily or cleanly.”

I recently saw one still stuck in someone’s porch.

Yes indeed and wow I haven’t seen one of those stickers in years, can’t say i remember having a card, I must have done, when did it cease? I know decimalisation happened in 1971 but it did carry on for a bit. I often wondered about going back and being a scout leader, but it carried such dubious connotations for blokes in these modern times that just didn’t seem to exist back then or maybe we were just naive.

Cleaned many a window, run errands, cleaned cars (not that there were so many of them thank the Lord) the weirdest I can remember this bloke and his wife had us counting all these pennants his canaries had won in competitions, and writing them all up in a book giving the places and dates – bizarre, I didn’t even know you could race Canaries or whatever they did with them to compete..

Yep, I remember trimming a lawn with a pair of shears! Didn’t occur to me at the time the old giffer might have been having a laugh. Happy days.

yep, walking dogs, car cleaning, lawn mowing etc, life was so much simpler then……

Yeah did it in the Cubs and the Scouts. From memory it mainly involved gardening. Can’t say I exactly enjoyed it but people were pretty generous.

Love mcmoonter’s comments about loading everything into a truck and going off to camp. I remember the same; driving to camps hours away in the back of an old furniture removal lorry. Kids and kit in the back, leaders in the cab and no-one, including parents, seemed in the least bit bothered. Happy days!!

great thread .. i ‘d forgootten about the stickers in windows.. my first was in ’69 and i probably gave up circa 77.. and yes some folk literally kept you half the day for a shilling

Memories:) best job was chopping up firewood with an axe at the age of 12!!
Bloody hell, how things have changed:)

souldrummer – Member
Yeah did it in the Cubs and the Scouts. From memory it mainly involved gardening. Can’t say I exactly enjoyed it but people were pretty generous.

Love mcmoonter’s comments about loading everything into a truck and going off to camp. I remember the same; driving to camps hours away in the back of an old furniture removal lorry. Kids and kit in the back, leaders in the cab and no-one, including parents, seemed in the least bit bothered. Happy days!!

This..

We went to camp (and to and fro on the street) armed with 6inch sheath knives, short handled waist and felling axes, learned how to use them, picked up astronomy, first aid, tree & bird recognition, and a host of other stuff we thought we had no use for at the time, but hell kids today just don’t realise what they’re missing. The Scouts, long days of damming streams, wide games, building ariel runways, midnight hikes.. An excellent institution missing from society today.

BaJ +1. Great fun in hindsight. Plus first camp, my dad gave me a bottle of citronella to keep the midges away. I spilt the whole bottle and killed the whole midge population for the summer! The smell was so strong that no one slept all week.

Sheath knives at the ready!!!

The name does seem oddly inappropriate now though. How times have changes and not necessarily for the better.

You know the Snake Inn on the A57 between Manchester & Sheffield?

If you follow the track out of the far right hand side of the car park you can see the flattened areas off to the right, between the track and the road, that the Sheffield Scouts levelled for campsites between the wars.

My dad remembered helping to drag a handcart laden with camping gear all the way there from Sheffield.
That’s 17 miles – 😯

He also remembered popping into Ashopton and Derwent to buy sweets – both now covered by Ladybower Reservoir.

Hesley Wood was always my favourite – only 40 miles from home, but another world – archery, canoeing, the death slide. 😀
Perfect when you’re 8 years old.

Split the kipper! Can you imagine the furore if two kids were playing that these days… 😀

I remeber some of our senior scouts getting the felling axes from the qm and cutting some trees down on local estate for a guy. There was a proper hoo ha about that one as the trees belonged to the counci so thepolice and planning office got very snotty about the whole affair. Oh and the knives we used to wear, bloody great Bowie knives, you’d get arrested for even thinking about letting kids have things like that now.

Scouts and knives?

I remember guys turning up for camp with knives like machetes.

The times they are a changin’

If you turned up at camp with a knife less than three inhces long you may as well have rolled your own sleeping bag in cow shit and handed over all your Cornettos.

‘Bowing to intense political pressure, UK’s Boy Scout Association issued a “guidance” advising its members to no longer bring knives to camping events.

Troop leaders feel their leadership went too far with the outright ban. Prior to this ruling scouts were allowed to carry penknives with blades of less than 3 inches.’

UK’s Boy Scout Association Bans Knives

Great memories. I’d forgotten so much. Weeding seemed to be what I ended up doing most of all, which I hated, but I still remember how grateful some of the older people were.
I still have my Leaping Wolf badge somewhere in my box of stuff.

Ahhh – happy days !!
Our annual outing was usually a week in remote scotland.
20 or so piled into the back of a Luton van loaded with gear and rattling about in the back on church pews…
On arrival, usually about a 10 hour song-fest, we sorted out the camp, (massive STORM-HAVEN tents)and the week consisted of building bivvies in the woods, nighthikes, climbing, pony trekking and attaining various badges.
Brilliant adventures – think it cost about a fiver and costs were offset by bob-a-job funds….