Career
Leaving school in 1939, she went to secretarial college and then applied for a job at the BBC in 1940. By bending the truth on her CV, inventing grandparents in Norfolk and describing her father's occupation as a "welfare officer", she succeeded in getting a job with the variety department, being paid £2 5s. 6d. (£2.27½) a week. Her first broadcast was on 21 May 1941, reading the poem "Spring, The Sweet Spring" by Thomas Ashe for the Empire Service programme Books And People.
Read more about this topic: Jean Metcalfe
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
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“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
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“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)