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It says "Webb had her first job at the age of fifteen, when the Mickey Mouse Weekly paid her 2d per answer to reply to children's letters." If she was born in 1914 then she would have been 21 or so when Mickey Mouse Weekly began publication in 1936. 2.31.162.62 (talk) 18:15, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I can't explain that, but it's definitely what the cited source (Felicity Trotman in the ODNB) says: "At the age of fifteen Webb wrote replies to children's letters for Mickey Mouse Weekly, receiving 2d. for each answer." Possibly she worked for a different publication with a similar title? GrindtXX (talk) 20:04, 5 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I've now looked at Valerie Grove's 2010 biography (available on the Internet Archive – here). She tells a lightly different story, but it's still problematical. She says Webb left school in 1930, aged 16, and shortly afterwards got a job as an office girl at The Times. Shortly after that, she started answering letters for what Grove calls "Mickey Mouse magazine" (but must surely mean Mickey Mouse Weekly: Mickey Mouse Magazine was American, and anyway only began publication in 1933). No exact date for Webb's Mickey Mouse work is given, but by implication it was before she became editor's secretary at the magazine Picturegoer, and then in 1933 (aged 19) was given the job of producing The Picturegoer's Who's Who and Encyclopaedia. So clearly there's much confusion. Both Trotman and Grove seem to have been relying on much later interviews with Webb, and possibly some draft notes for an unpublished memoir: perhaps Webb was misremembering what order her jobs came in. So no definitive answer, but I'll tinker with the article a bit to take account of what Grove says. GrindtXX (talk) 16:56, 7 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
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