OUR feature on DeHavilland Propellers brought back many happy memories for readers who used to work there.

David Pye got in touch to talk about his time at the firm which was also known, affectionately, as "DeHappyland" and provided both a source of work but also a source of social life for many thousands of local folk.

The local people who, like David, were employed at the factory included Maureen Nealon who also attended Sunning Hill School as he did.

"He will remember my late brother Michael Ridings, known as Titch, who passed away in 1987," explains Maureen.

She also went to Bolton Technical College and then started work at DeHavilland as a shorthand typist.

"I remember typing stock details in FPS (Finished Part Store) and the turning shop.

"I eventually moved to the business office.

"I wonder if anyone recalls the girl who collected and replaced the clock-in-cards. She was so fast in replacing the cards back in the slots," says Maureen.

There was also a woman who came round with a tray of biscuits, sweets and chocolates for sale, she recalls.

Regularly the office girls had to walk through the large assembly workshop and they were wolf whistled "which was a compliment in those days".

You were not expected to chat in the office, says Maureen and the window in the manager's office was frosted glass, half way up so that the bosses could keep their eye on the workers "and tell you to get on with your work".

"Every day I caught the De Havilland bus at the bottom of Deane Church Lane in Daubhill.

"There was a lovely man who was blind who worked in the large assembly room. I used to guide him (or so I thought) to his work area every morning.

"One day I was chatting away to him as we walked through the large room, we turned down the aisle and I stopped at what I thought was his work area. He asked why we had stopped before informing me it was the wrong work bench," she says.

The canteen was huge, says Maureen and served saucer-sized potato cakes dripping in butter. In the sports' bar they served the "best meat pies I've ever tasted".

"When I was there we were dealing with the Blue Streak Rocket. We also did work, sometimes, for De Havilland in Worsley Road in Walkden.

"My brother-in-law, Dennis Jackson was an electrician and met and married my late sister Patricia Ridings who was a secretary there.

"De Havilland was a prestigious place to work and I count it, along with British Rail and the Royal Manchester Children's Hospital, as the best jobs I ever had. Happy days!" says Maureen.

Rees Gibbon, who lives in Little Lever, explains that he was also a member of the 1955 apprentice intake and knows David Pye "very well". There were 110 apprentices in that intake, he says.

Rees was on the electrical side, he explains and also in that year was Frank White MP.

He believes the Comet fly-over was in around 1955 or 1956 and recalls being given time off from training for this historic event.

"It was, after all, the world's first passenger jet airliner, and it flew over every DeHavilland site in the country," he says.

In its day DeHavilland was the highest paying company in the Bolton area, says Rees and the large pay packet was known as the DeHavilland Rupture.

"It would be good to organise a reunion of that year," he concludes.