Summer Job working for Birds Eye
An interview with David Cooke
By Richard Dade
In this interview David Cooke reminisces on his summer time job working for Birds Eye, testing the peas in the field to make sure they were tender.
"Birdseye paid the best wages that you could find in the town. I was probably 18 by then and was probably one of my last summer jobs in Great Yarmouth and we were on 12 hour shifts from 6 in the morning to 6 o'clock at night or 6 o'clock at night to 6 in the morning so you had to alternate.
The wage went up to about 2 shillings to 2/6 for 12 hours; that's 25 bob a day. They had all these pea vining machines and every hour on the hour I had to go round to all the different machines there was about 6 or 8 machines in this field and you had to take out a sample of peas and put them in a box and you had to put these peas in a machine called a "tender-o-meter" .
Now if the peas were not tender enough, cause this is Birds Eye remember and the adverts on television fresh as the time when the peas went pop or something like that on their advert on television so they had to be fresh straight from the field straight to the factory to be frozen and so that was my job to test the peas.
So you could reject them reject this load of peas and you had to go out and tell the man on the machine that these peas were not tender so the whole lot got dumped and it was up to me to decide to do it and I had just come straight from school which was a bit crazy really. Anyway I did the job properly and at the end of that period of 6 weeks I had earned enough to buy my first car and I bought a Hillman Husky".
Photograph of a Great Yarmouth Corporation bus parked on Beevor Road, Great Yarmouth. This is outside of Birds Eye Foods at the riverside end of Beevor Road before this section was fenced off and became part of the factory site. It would have been possibly in the late 1950's or early 1960's. Maybe some of the Birds Eye ladies will recognise themselves or their colleagues.
Courtesy of Bill Ditcham