TODAY’S photograph was brought into the office by Mrs Freda Hill.

That’s Freda, third from the left on what we might call the front row.

The picture was taken by the Bolton Evening News she told me, in 1978 or 1979 when the gentleman at the front, whose name she cannot now remember, was retiring from his job at Walker’s Tannery on Weston Street, Bolton.

Freda worked at Walker’s for eight years in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Walker Bolton which ran the tannery was a company set up from the ashes of Walker and Martin and which itself was wound up in 1982 amid a lot of fuss about the use of a workers’ charity fund.

Still, it would appear that the cheerful workers saying goodbye to their mate were not worried about their futures at the time the photograph was taken.