Food-maker Heinz has long been famous for its 57 Varieties. And editorial staff who worked at 57 Wrawby Street in Brigg faced a 'Heinz Variety' of tasks when it was still the Lincolnshire & South Humberside newspaper office.
Reporters needed to be proficient in writing news stories and feature articles, covering a variety of sports, noting court and council decisions, taking funeral mourners' names at the church door, and assembling the market prices for potatoes, cereals, cattle, sheep and general Stennett's auction produce (then sold on Manley Gardens).
They also had to act as couriers, taking parcels of news and pictures to New Holland for transit, via the Humber Ferry, to Hull where the Times was printed on the presses of the city's Daily Mail.
Our first day on the editorial staff at the Brigg branch office was in January 1980. On a cold Monday morning we trudged through the snow, carrying a cardboard box containing a few books and other items we thought might prove useful during our stay at 57 Wrawby Street.
The newsroom was located behind the first floor windows (see pictures above) and the reporters had desks affording a fine view of Wrawby Street, which still formed part of the A18. The news editor in charge was seated on the other side of the room, close to the gas fire (no central heating), while the toilet was in the backyard.
There was a sizeable car park, accessed through a brick archway, where company vehicles were kept - two Ford Fiestas for editorial staff and a chunky van assigned to the branch manager who oversaw newspaper deliveries.
The van carried Lincolnshire Times lettering and was a familiar sight in the town and nearby area. New reporters had to take a 'road test' for insurance purposes, and we recall 'passing' ours in the van on Bigby High Road near the former Pingley Camp (used to house prisoners of war during WW2).
However, the air quality was generally much better in Brigg than it had been during our five-year stint in the Scunthorpe steelworks public relations department, located near the Appleby coke ovens. A film of black dust often collected on the desks inside that office. But it had a view of the landmark blastfurnaces close by and the main internal railway line on which hot steel ingots were conveyed to the rolling mills.
We say 'generally much better' because when Brigg Sugar Factory was going flat out during its winter beet-processing campaign, a distinctive aroma blew across from Scawby Brook. "What's that smell?" newcomers to the Times office would demand. Locals, of course, hardly noticed the 'pong'.
We joined the Lincs Times a couple of weeks into the steel strike which began in early January 1980 and was about pay and other issues; it would drag on for three months. As a member of the Iron & Steel Trades Confederation union, we never returned to the works after signing off on Christmas Eve 1979 and turned being on strike into a winter holiday!
We worked at 57 Wrawby Street until mid-January 1984 - switching to a senior reporter/sub-editor's role on the Scunthorpe Evening Telegraph's sports desk, based in the Doncaster Road offices. So the New Year twice meant new jobs in our case.
After the Lincs Times closed in 1985, the premises were sold by the company and later converted to residential and retail use.
The ground floor shop has now been vacant for a lengthy period, though a 'for sale' sign is no longer evident. Every time we pass 57 Wrawby Street, memories tend to flood back about our time with the Times, which could trace its roots way back to the 1860s.
In the early 1950s the paper moved to Wrawby Street following the demolition of the Times' former premises in the Market Place - undertaken to widen the entrance to Cary Lane for lorries and buses (between what's now Barclays bank and No 7 - the Georgian town house survivor).
The Lincs Times was a very traditional 'country' weekly in broadsheet format for all but the last few years of its existence when it became 'tabloid'.
However, hard economics led to its demise in July 1985 - that final Friday being a very sad one for all concerned and for those local readers and advertisers who had supported it to right to the final edition.