Martin Bowman
Martin talks about working at Walkers ('The Lion Works')

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What tended to happen at Walker’s - and I don’t know whether that’s what was happening really with the whole of British industry but - in quiet times, we didn’t spend any money on re-equipping the factory. They cut out a shift and got rid of some people and whatever and then, when the orders all flooded in again, because we had all this what Chancellor Brown now calls ‘boom and bust’, we went through these cycles of recession followed by tremendous increase in demand so it… When the demand was high we couldn’t… They hadn’t got time to actually get new machinery and sort of more people. They just had to get on with the best they could, churning it out on overtime or nightshift or whatever.

Very sort of patriarchal. We had a… Our Managing Director used to address us over the loudspeaker system and call us, ‘Hello, friends!’ or something.