Betty Ferry, born in 1922, started work making tassels at Robinsons on Cambridge Heath Road. She had a great litany of jobs along the 55 route - Toddlers in Tudor road, Wray’s on London Lane (‘jumping with leather lice’), and Phillips’ on Mare Street. 

Betty recorded her story as part of Working Lives: Volume 1, 1905-45, by 'A People’s Autobiography of Hackney' group. Factory workers, radical historians, teachers, taxi drivers and school students got together at Centerprise to do oral history together.  'A People’s Autobiography of Hackney' was democratic, blurring the lines between those who did the remembering and those who wrote it up.