WORKING in Northwich's salt industry may have been a tough job but a Pickmere woman would not change a thing after spending 55 years at a Northwich works.

Joan Webb, of Pickmere Lane, worked at New Cheshire Salt Works, in Wincham, from when she left school at 14 and joined the packing staff until she retired in her late 60s.

The 87-year-old said: "It was all physical, very heavy work.

"When I was 15 I could lift hundredweight bags, which were 112lbs, shoulder height.

"I thought I was the bees knees.

"We used to stack 120lb bags and I had muscles on my arms like knots on string, I'm not kidding you, but it was great – we had lots of fun."

Joan used to fill packs with salt ready to be transported.

"I would fill 24 a minute, which was good," she said.

"I always thought I was a clever one, you know how you are when you're age, you think you own the world, but as you get older you get wiser."

The salt was put in fine cotton bags and, before the works had sewing machines, Joan and her colleagues would stitch them up using darning needles.

They were then put in lined hessian sacks, weighing 120lb.

Joan said weights and measures became instinctive for workers.

"There were different sizes of shovels – they didn't call them spades – and each one had a different number," she said.

"To fill a hundredweight it was a number eight and three shovel-fulls.

"The men knew when it was popped on the scales that it would be right and nine out of 10 times it was a hundredweight.

Working hours were long and bosses were strict on punctuality.

"We had to start at 7.30am," Joan said.

"We were allowed three minutes so if you clocked on at 7.33am you were OK but if it was 7.34am you would lose quarter of an hour of your hourly rate."

Staff worked from 7.30am to 5.30am, with a lunch hour from noon to 1pm and two 10-minute breaks.

They also worked from 7.30am to noon on Saturdays.

"That was a 57-hour week nearly, never mind 30 hours and eight hours and all that sort of stuff they work now - they don't know what work is," Joan

joked.

Joan, who was promoted to a supervisor's role at the works when she was 19, also explained how different working life was without today's strict health and safety laws.

"The salt was very rough on your fingers," she said.

"You used to get blisters where you had to wrap the lumps because you were dealing with the raw salt all the time.

"The men who worked in the hot house lifting (which was lifting lumps into he packing room) they used to wear no such thing as gloves or uniforms.

"Anything to protect yourself, you provided it yourself.

"We used to wear our own pinny and the men wore their own clogs.

"The men used to use old car tyres and cut them to use them to pick the lumps up."

Pay was also very different.

"I was paid 12s 6d a week – in new money that's 62-and-a-half pence," she said

"What can you get for 62.5p? You can't even buy a loaf of bread now can you?

"That's how times have changed."

She added: "If I had my life over again I wouldn't change it."

Joan's memories about life working in Northwich's salt industry have been recorded as part of an oral history project by staff from the Lion Salt Works.

Kate Harland, learning development officer at the Marston museum, in Ollershaw Lane, said: "The stories about people like Joan will inform the living history characters at the museum, we can use them as a trigger point for schools and we can use them as part of our ongoing interpretation work."

Tom Whitehead, learning assistant at the Lion Salt Works, said: "What's good about oral history is that people can tell you about the past much better than a whole lot of documents can."

For more information about the Lion Salt Works, run by Cheshire West and Chester Council, visit lionsaltworks.westcheshiremuseums.co.uk.