There must be some on here like me who worked in Cooksons Bakery in Lytham in the late 70s. It was where Jubilee House is now, right at the east end of Lytham Green. I used to work summer holidays when at college and also did a 6 month stint after graduating. It was one of the biggest bakery factories in the NW and produced all the bread for Blackpool and around.
It was always 12 hour shifts, 6 days a week including Sunday (but never Saturday since fresh bread was not needed on a Sunday), but the killer was that each week alternated as day shift and night shift. The one day off you got each week slipped forward 1 day for each week that passed. So there was a broken routine. But 72 hours every single week.
Every 7 weeks or so you might get the Friday day shift off and also the following Sunday night shift off so you were free from Thursday night until Monday night shift - the famous long weekend off. But the flip side was having a day off midweek, and having to work the Friday night shift until 0600 Saturday morning, sleep most of the day and then come in again at 0600 on Sunday morning. At least we got paid a night shift allowance and double-time for the Sunday but that stopped at 00:01 on the Monday morning.
The work was physically quite tough in temperatures of up to 80 deg F in summer because of the huge ovens.
Spooner 2 (oven made in Bradford) was the biggest making large square white for slicing. The ovens were a conveyor system with dough being mixed in enormous “Kenwood Mixers” which could create 200 lbs of dough in 3 minutes flat, which was then rolled on the cone and went into the Prover to rise before entering the oven, in a row of about 20 baking tins each with 4 loaves. The oven had about 30 to 40 rows in at a time and the conveyor took about 25 minutes to go through to bake them. So becoming oven controller was a responsible job, with about 3000 loaves you could burn if you got it wrong.
But Spooner 3 was the toughest job because it made all the small loaves such as Farmhouse, Hovis, Wholegrain Granary and Small White. Each type of bread had its own particular 4-loaf tins (yes, the Hovis tins were deeply stamped “Hovis” on the side and the bastard things used to stick together when stacked) and each batch ran for an hour or two at the most. Then you had to do a complete tin change on the gantry in the top of the factory - at least 40 minutes non-stop in taking about 1000 very hot tins off the conveyor (two at a time with glove bags on) and putting on the tins for a different loaf. That happened about 4 or 5 times a shift and was an extreme work out, harder than any gym routine. So I was as fit as anything.
In those days, the student grant did not count as taxable income, so I was earning tax-free until I reached my annual allowance. Then most of us used to resign ready to come back next summer. You could earn quite a lot fairly quickly. The older guys, who were career bakers, got the easier and more responsible jobs mixing the dough while us youngsters did the labour intensive hard work. So there was quite a high turnover of workers. I do remember a lad I worked with called Stuart Rimmer who was a mad-keen Seasider and came in one Sunday shift with a massive black eye, after a fairly combative away trip on the Saturday.