Reviewed by John Freear University of New Hampshire

“You are to be a chartered accountant, dear. . . . You are a very fortunate boy” [p. 7]. With these words from his mother, Charles Kohler began the first chapter of this chronicle of his time as a London chartered accountant’s articled clerk between 1928 and 1933. I read the book without putting it down, not just because it is short, some forty-four pages, but because it is so refreshingly well written. I began my three-year articles of clerkship in Manchester, England, some thirty-five years after Kohler qualified as a chartered accountant. I was intrigued to find that we had experiences in common.

At that time, Kohler did not appreciate his mother’s view of his good fortune. Indeed, he suggested strong links between punishment and chartered accountancy training through the title of the book, “Five Years Hard!,” and through some of his chapter titles, notably “On Probation” and “The Gates Open.” The reasons for the analogy with punishment are not hard to find.

First, the young Charles Kohler wanted to be a teacher — but “Uncle Billy says chartered accountants earn much more than school teachers and the work’s a lot more interesting” [p. 7]. Thus, in 1928, at the age of seventeen, Kohler became an articled clerk in Uncle Billy’s office, knowing little or nothing of what he would be doing for the next five years. He did know that the substantial premium commonly required of articled clerks would be waived, and that he would receive no salary for the five years of articles. Second, early in Chapter Two (“Tedious Years”), Kohler stated, “My years from seventeen to nineteen were lonely, wasted years” [p. 17], leavened it seems by attend¬ing, in office time, lectures on bookkeeping and law held at the Institute of Chartered Accountants. He acknowledged that his loneliness was largely the result of his leaving the community of a Quaker boarding school and his friends to become a commuter from an anonymous London suburb.

After about eighteen months of “calling over” and “cast-ing,” Kohler’s spirits lifted as he acquired a new focus to his professional life — the Institute’s Intermediate Examination and a structured correspondence study program with H. Foulks Lynch & Co. He found the correspondence tuition “thorough but narrow: practical rather than theoretical” [p. 18], and derived more satisfaction from the evening lectures. These were con¬ducted by people such as H.A.R.J. Wilson and W. W. Biggs, names familiar to succeeding generations (mine included) of articled clerks, as authors of required texts in the Foulks Lynch correspondence study program. Kohler passed the Intermediate Examination, and the reader detects the first glimmer of hope — “I had now served half of my sentence. There was no remission of good conduct, but I knew that the future would provide more interesting and responsible work” [p. 21].

The more interesting and responsible work turned out to be bank reconciliations, sales ledger balance extraction, final ac-count work, including being present at discussions with clients, and travel to clients in different parts of the country. His journeys to South Wales and the Midlands, where he “encoun¬tered a different culture from that of the soft south” [p. 25], advanced his education. His brief descriptions of coal miners and of mine officials, and their way of life, like the descriptions of his colleagues and of London life throughout the book, are vivid and expressive. He also advanced his education by browsing through the Institute library, and attempted the pages of that “rather prosaic journal” [p. 30], The Accountant, in order to gauge his financial prospects on qualifying. These ranged from five or six pounds per week at a Far Eastern rubber plantation to about three pounds in public practice. Life was certainly becoming more exciting. He described games of office cricket, the misuse of the office adding machine for gambling purposes, and meals at the Lyons tea houses that identified him as a man with a strong constitution. Curried vegetable hotpot, a glass of milk and a portion of jam roly-poly pudding comprised his typical luncheon fare.

Kohler wrote the seven papers of the Institute Final Exami-nation in November 1933. In the following January, he learned — after initially reading the wrong list and being dejected to find his name not there — that he was one of the fortunate forty-three percent who had passed. At this point, and for the first time, he was to receive a salary, three pounds ten shillings per week.

In the final chapter, Kohler stated that although he did not choose to be a chartered accountant, he “harboured no regrets” [p. 42]. He regarded the first half of his article service as “largely wasted in ticking, vouching and the calling over of figures” [p. 40]. This he ascribed to the years of industrial depression, unemployment and the dole, which reduced the amount of available responsible work, and turned the articled clerks into a pool of free unskilled labor. I am bound to say that my own experience suggests that this was an over-generous assessment. At least half of my three years of articles was similarly wasted, and this in a period of relative prosperity some thirty-five years later.

E. Kenneth Wright, a past president of the Institute, and a long-time colleague of Kohler, stated in his introduction to the book: “Charles has produced a period piece which will be read with great enjoyment by his contemporaries. The present gener-ation may possibly pursue it with a condescending smile” [p. 5]. As someone in between those two generations, I read the book with great enjoyment, with perhaps a little — but not much — nostalgia, without condescension, but with a recognition that the profession has improved its practices and its training over the years. Yet some things remain the same. Through our training we did acquire, in Kohler’s words, “the essential disciplines of the profession: the capacity to concentrate; to be accurate and to be objective” [p. 40]. Further, we began to understand “the responsibilty of the practising accountant: a responsibility … that would test integrity” [p. 40]. Anyone reading this book — from my generation — will be the wiser for its account of, and commentary on, one period in the evolution of the accounting profession in England.

Charles Kohler really wanted to be a teacher. To judge from this book, his colleagues, his clients, his clerks and his readers will have found him to be a remarkably successful one.