At one time, children were sent to the corner shop with a jam jar or a basin for two pennyworth of mixed pickles.

Or, if you lived in the Daubhill district, they were perhaps sent directly to the pickle factory of Wm Charnley, Ltd., then on Bella Street near the level crossing.

However, in 1938, Messrs Charnley's, the oldest firm of pickle manufacturers in the North of England, moved from Daubhill to the Vale works, Daisy Hill, Westhoughton .

There, the production of all kinds of pickle - mixed, piccalilli, red cabbage, beetroot, silver onions, gherkins and walnuts - kept a staff of about 40 busy every day, summer and winter, and especially so in the two hectic months of December and January, when the demand for mixed pickles was so heavy that it was difficult to satisfy.

The firm had been established at Court Meadow Farm, Belmont, near the Waterman's Cottage, in 1872, by Mr William Charnley, who lived to be 90.

When these pictures were taken at Westhoughton in 1957, Mr Kenneth Charnley, William's son, who with Mr J.R. Kenyon was running the firm at the time, said: "Mechanism doesn't come into pickle manufacture. We can do the job quicker by hand."

And as proof, he took the Industrial Correspondent of the paper to the top floor, where, seated along both sides of the walls, were 13 women, all peeling onions just an any housewife peels them over the kitchen sink. "The difference," said the report, "was the speed at which they were working; incredibly fast, with never a pause to look up." Did they spent most of the days crying? No, it seems, because brine neutralised the acid in the onions.

Charnley's pickles were sold all over the country, and all the Fleetwood trawlers carried them as part of the ship's stores. During the Second World War, the firm supplied the Admiralty with large quantities of various types of pickle.

In 1976 the firm was at first refused permission to erect a new building because the factory stood in an area of proposed Green Belt land. The dispute went on for two years, and went to a public inquiry before the planning embargo was removed and the firm was permitted to build a new production unit.

Sadly, it seems, it came too late. The pickle factory found itself in a pickle, and in 1980 it ceased production, was put in the hands of a receiver, and 42 workers lost their jobs.

My pictures show various stages of pickle manufacturing, from peeling the onions to the finished product. The bottom picture shows the firm's book-keeper, Miss Joan Turner, framed in jars of pickles.