Tudor Crisps Factory.
L-R: Denise Mason, June Coburn, Denise Haswell, Helen White and Roz Pitman.
About six months after giving birth to John I got a job at Clix Fasteners, which I heard about through a friend of a friend who worked there. It was in packing and distribution filling the orders. I left after six months. The pay was poor, and I was a single mother, with a baby, a dog, and my mum to keep now that she was having to look after John while I was at work. From Clix, I went to work in the Tudor Crisps factory on Stephenson Road. I absolutely loved working there. There’s a circle of us who still meet up and keep in regular contact. To make extra money, I also joined the cleaning squad. I cleaned the mezzanine (the flavour floors) every Saturday 6am-12pm and every other Sunday. It was time-and-a-half for the Saturday and double time on a Sunday, so it made a big difference to my take home pay.
In 1985 I became a ‘white coat’ working in quality control. This involved checking things like the oil and the potatoes and the calibration settings on the cookers. If you weren’t happy with something, would halt the production line, which didn’t make you very popular. There was many a time I came into conflict with the floor managers. They tended not to like having a young woman telling them how it was!
Walkers Crisps bought out Smiths in 1989. Because I worked in ‘the Lab’ (quality control) they wanted to stop my overtime work on the weekends. Well, I couldn’t afford not to! Because I’d been on the cleaning squad for so long the union backed me. To cut a long story short, I left Walkers in 1990 with a redundancy payment of ten thousand pound. The day after receiving the money I went to the bank and paid off the balance of my mortgage.
June Coburn