Hello again,
Danny 
Whilst most Area students would have had a tour or two under their belt, there were certainly a few [a very few] who went straight into Area ... I'm looking at Course photos from the late 60s where there were quite a few plt offs. The manning requirement for the expanding Area world would have demanded that the better 'young ones' went there asap. (I was stuck at Tengah, on my 2nd tour, so had to wait until 1970 before being vacuumed up!). However ...
Area Radar tended to be older, more responsible, more experienced and more married
Well, professionally you are undoubtedly right. Certainly at ERD there was a high percentage of 'sensible adults' amid the ~50 controllers. There was also a substantial core of young [some single, some not] Fg Offs/Flt Lts who were perfectly capable to tearing up the Mess and the Patch with the best - and all the ATCOs were male, apart from Anne H****n. Watton Happy Hour was
never for the faint-hearted
Hmmm ... 2 fellow Fg Offs from my first time there ended up as AOC MATO, as did one of my COs. But then it was the Premier ATCRU
Strubby in your day was indeed famous/notorious for intensity. By 1965 it had metamorphosed completely into the 'Manby Satellite' era. We had ~8 Varsities [School of Refresher Flying] and a similar number of Canberras, I guess. Manby was now, apart from the College of Air Warfare, just another whining swarm of JPs [again, Refreshers]. But, as noted earlier, Strubby received loads of Practice Div traffic, and Manby JPs used us [quite rightly] for PFLs and the like to escape from
their busy circuit to augment the blunderings of the Varsities in the circuit. So not exactly 'all same speed/direction' that you get at a Jet FTS. And, inevitably, both our fleets of aircraft used to get in each others way as could be expected when the airfields were only 4.5 nm apart. So "Mixed Traffic" was the norm ... Varsity QGH from FL50, Jet QGH from FL180, IIRC. And half the Varsities were VHF only, and the jets were UHF, so 2 wiggly-traces on the DF at once, and a single earpiece and a handset for comms, and trying to remember which was which! I think we were deemed "Medium Intensity/High Complexity" when it came to the posting plot.