In early January 1941, Commander Newman, the Navy's Director of Signals and Communications, visited the WESC headquarters on Clarence Street to test McKenzie's trainees.
Career Graduate trainee with Clarks in Street, Somerset and then joined the family footwear business, William Timpson.
"As a trainee in a high street firm, you get much greater client contact and responsibility," he says.
Elsewhere in the industry it was very different, recalls Muriel Siebert, who started on Wall Street in 1954 as a research trainee at Bache & Company.
Hundreds of junior doctors descended upon Downing Street yesterday evening to protest against changes trainee contracts.
Earlier this month, for example, trainee teachers took to the streets in Casablanca, Tangier, Fes, Marrakesh and Inezgane to protest new government measures that drastically cut their scholarships and take away job guarantees.
While many of his fellow trainees moved on to Fleet Street, Mitchell merely moved a few miles down the road to join the Dalesman, based in the nearby village of Clapham.
With the help of his uncle Elliot, who wanted him to go to Wall Street, he got a job as a broker trainee at Dreyfus & Company.
Nickolds has said she considered becoming a teacher after studying history at the University of Southampton, but instead she found herself following her father into retail, starting as a graduate trainee at John Lewis's flagship Oxford Street store in 1994.
The Wall Street firm's version of boot camp for trainees, described in the book's first chapter, don't sound exceptionally harsh unless you hate early meetings and have trouble with lunch orders.
