Sprouts were grown for Bird’s Eye, and Bernie Ellis and John Tallowin recruited 25 village women (including one of our Voices,  Joan Greenacre) to trim the sprouts off the stalks ready for the freezers.  This was an arrangement that went on for 6 or 7 years.

The men worked in the fields, de-leafing the stalks and bringing them in for the women to process on piece work rates:  Bernie reckons  that they were earning a really good wage, albeit on piecework,  for those times (late 70s, early 80s).

At the end of the season they had a party (“annual sprout do”,  as Bernie describes it) that usually got a bit raucous…