Office Cleaners Make a Stock Market Killing with Some Rubbish Tips!

This charming British comedy film, which has strong Ealing comedy vibes, is from 1963 and stars Harry H Corbett as a ruthless property developer and Peggy Mount as a stereotypical battleaxe char lady who cleans his City office, among others.

Mount is cleaning Corbett’s office when she picks up a discarded but unused cigar. A perfect gift she thinks, for one of her others clients, daffy old Colonel Whitforth (played by Robert Morley) who dabbles unsuccessfully in the stock market and is somewhat down on his luck recently.

She wraps the cigar in a random scrap of paper she fishes out of the wastepaper basket.

The Colonel is delighted to receive the cigar, but more interested in the scrap of paper – actually a telegram containing secret information regarding an imminent company takeover. He rushes to buy share in that company and soon nets a cool £5000 profit (over £100,000 in 2023!)

Initially refusing the Colonels offer of 50% as a tip, she soon changes her mind when she finds out Corbett’s plan to pull down all the houses in her street and replace them with a new luxury office block.

She conscripts her colleagues to go into business with the Colonel (under the guise of Ladezudu Ltd, get it?) and the ladies are soon literally cleaning up – collecting scraps of paper from office bins and passing them to the Colonel for evaluation and investment.

There are some twists and turns along the way, culminating in the ladies pitting themselves against workmen and their machinery to save their street.

The longer they can delay the works the more chance that the developer will miss an important deadline and have to take a high interest loan, making the project unprofitable to continue, thus saving their homes.