Lutton’s Brian Burrell, born in Spalding, retires aged 85 – after a last role at G Shearer & Son, in Holbeach

At 85 years old, Brian Burrell must surely be in the running for the title of oldest butcher in the country – although now after 75 years in the industry, he is hanging up his apron for good.

Brian, of Lutton, was ten when he landed his first job as a butcher’s Saturday boy in 1948 – back when George VI was King, Clement Atlee was Prime Minster and the NHS had just launched.

During his long career the great-grandfather has worked at several independent butcher’s shops and meat factories – including George Adams & Sons in the 1960s, which attracted butchers from the surrounding area, who visited to marvel its revolutionary sausage linking machine and other hi-tech equipment.

For the past decade Brian has worked a couple of days a week at G Shearer & Son, in Holbeach, upping his hours to full-time during the festive season when he worked from 8am to 5pm, helping to fulfil customer orders.

“I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my career,” said Brian, who decided to call it quits on Christmas Eve to concentrate on other projects. “I didn't think I would still be working at 85. It just happened and then became a regular thing. It’s been quite exciting at times – one of the large factories I worked in after leaving school was at the cutting edge of technology.

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“During the early 1960s we had a lot of hi-tech machinery including a pie-making production line and a sausage filling and linking machine. Other butchers came from all over to see them work and I would stay behind late once a month to give talks and demonstrations to groups like young farmers.

“I also specialised in was making hand raised pork pies – sadly the first prize at the East of England Show always eluded us, but we came a good second every year! I still make my own every Christmas.

“I can still do everything like prep the pork, beef and lamb, but now I’m much slower and there are other things I want to do with my time.”

Brian makes shepherd crook walking sticks and is running a course to show others how to make them and also wants to write some books about his family history and working life.

He was born in Spalding in 1938, the oldest of three children. His father worked on the land and due to this the family ended up moving house every couple of years. He was ten when he got his first job as a Saturday boy at Parkinson’s Butchers, in Crowland.

“Butchers did van rounds back then, serving from the back of the vehicle,’ he recalls. ‘It was the Saturday boy’s job to run around to the back door of the houses, shouting ‘butcher’s here’ and then everyone would come out with their meat dishes. Rationing was still going on at the time.

“Everyone was allowed ten pence of meat, per person, per week – that was in old money and less than a shilling back then - but you could get a pork pie, haslet and sausages.

“I wasn’t there too long before my parents moved and took over The Dun Cow, in Cowbit, so I joined George Adams, in Spalding. I started as a Saturday boy and moved up to errand boy.

“I left school in 1953, when I was 15 and worked at Adams full-time. It changed my life – I began to learn the trade properly and completed a six-year apprenticeship.”

On his 21st birthday Brian received his National Service papers, and from 1960 to 1962 was posted to different camps around the country with the Army Catering Corps, mostly working as a butcher, prepping meat for up to 600 troops at a time.

On completing his service Brian returned to his wife, two young sons and his old job, where he clocked up 37 years’ service. He became floor manager, overseeing a team of ten butchers and 20 other staff, but left in the early 1990s after the factory was extended and a new facility built in Fulney Lane.

“By then we were dealing with some of the big supermarkets. They would come to look around the factory at what we were doing and demanded certain things,’ says Brian. ‘Although I’d been there a long time, I’d never been to university, I wasn’t able to talk to them about the microbiology and things like the bug counts in the meat, so I left.”

He got a job at Abbey Cuisine, a deli, in Crowland, and then Jackson’s butchers, in Holbeach, where he greeted and served customers and also met his second wife Margaret. The couple moved to Yorkshire for a time, working in a meat factory outside Whitby and then returned to Lutton to be close to family.

Rather than retire Brian worked part-time at Shearer’s, in Damgate, where he’s been for around ten years.

“I really have enjoyed my work – I never wanted to do anything else. From a young age, I always wanted to do what the big boys did, like killing the animals on the farm during the war and then butcher them. I never wanted to work on the land.

“My work became a way of life, but now I’ve noticed I’m getting slower, and I’ve got other things I want to focus on,” says Brian, who also enjoys clay pigeon shooting and is a keen taxidermist. “But I’ve still got my knives, so if I was asked to come out of retirement and help out, I probably would!”