ROSE Taylor and Carol Rhead, who both worked at the former Fownes Glove Factory in Worcester, had not seen each other for 53 years.

But they had a surprise get together last Saturday night (November 21) when they returned to their former workplace which was later converted into a smart city centre hotel.

The occasion was a reunion of former factory employees and their families organised by manager Mohamed Khalil and his team to celebrate the hotel's forthcoming 30th anniversary.

"It was wonderful to meet up again after all these years," said Rose, aged 69, of Norton, Worcester who was 17 when she became a machinist sewing gloves at Fownes.

Also there was her husband Len, aged 74, who spent six years as a fur cutter in the factory.

Carol Rhead, now aged 70, of High House Drive, Inkberrow, who was 16 when she went to work at Fownes remembered doing her friend Rose's hair in their lunch breaks.

"I worked in the fur room where we received the skins of Leopard, ocelot, goat, mink and beaver but there wasn't any use for the ocelot tails so I used to take them and give them to the boys for their car and scooter aerials," she recalled.

"They all wanted them so in the end I had a waiting list," said Carole whose job it was to sew the skins back together when imperfections in the skins had been cut out.

The reunion also brought memories flooding back for Denise Addison whose late father Charlie Danter went to work at Fownes as an apprentice cutter in 1910.

"He was at the factory for 50 years with the exception of the First World War when he served in France carrying ammunition up to the front on horse drawn vehicles," she recalled.

"In later years my father inspected the gloves and actually rejected a pair of white leather ones which had been made for presentation to the Queen when she visited the factory," said Denise, of St Peters, Worcester.

"They had to make her another pair so my father gave me the ones which did not come up to his standard," she said.

By coincidence another reunion guest Joan Bird remembered working with Denise's father in the inspection department and that he liked to smoke Old Holborn in a pipe.

Joan, aged 70, who now lives in Welland Garden, Welland, near Malvern, was only 15 when she left the local Nunnery Wood Secondary Modern School in Worcester and started work at Fownes.

"My first job was tacking the gloves together and I can't remember just how many pairs I used to do in a day before I moved over to work under Mr Danter's supervision," she said.

But the undoubted highlight of Joan's working life at Fownes came after she had left to take another job with a local jewellers and had then returned to the factory as a machinist.

"I was selected to represent the company at The Ideal Homes Exhibition in London and spent my time on the stand demonstrating glove making," she said.

There were four other glove factories in Worcester in those days and Mike Ricketts, now aged 80, of Winfield Road, served his four-year apprenticeship as a cutter at rival I&R Morley before they closed down and he and several colleagues transferred to Fownes.

"We were all on peace work in those days and we had a great time but after four or five years there my health began to suffer because it was a dusty environment so I left and became a postman," he recalled.

Fownes played an important early part in the life of Richard Sheward and his family who now live in Northampton but travelled back to Worcester for the reunion.

His father George worked on and off at the factory all his life beginning as a wheeler whose job it was to convert leather into suede for driving gloves and then going on to do maintenance work .

"He was also the factory's shop steward and used to meet regularly with the managing director and I think it was my dad who got me my first job at Fownes when I left school at 16," said Richard.

He spent a year as a trainee in the factory's advertising, Counting House and glove supply departments before leaving.

Richard and his brother Douglas presented Fownes manager Mohamed Khalil with their father's indentures certificate, a Fownes Football Club record book from 1891 and a cricket fixtures programme.

Bill Garbett, aged 76, of Eastnor Close in Battenhall, Worcester, left Fownes well over 50 years ago but still has his cutting scissors which he brought to the reunion along with books containing pictures of the factory cutting shop where he was apprenticed for four years.

Like several other guests he went to the factory straight from school at 15.

The Fownes Hotel manager said it was a great pleasure for him and his team to have met so many people who had known their wonderful Victorian building in its original form.

All the guests gave a big hand to Mohamed and his team for laying on a sumptuous buffet with wine, a special reunion cake and a Christmas gift of wine.

• Fownes Bros & Co was established in 1777 by John Fownes and the gloves made at the factory in Worcester were mainly of leather.

• Raw materials came on barges using the nearby Worcester-Birmingham canal and the finished products were also exported that way for many years.

• The hey-days of glove making in Worcester were between the 1790s and 1820s, when the city had more than 150 glove firms employing 20,000 people. They produced more than seven million pairs of gloves each year.

• In 1826 a ban on imported gloves was lifted and there was "the great glove crash" as UK companies folded.

• Two survived in Worcester, those set up by John Dent and John Fownes, and thrived for many years until trade declined again in the 1970s and they merged.

• Production finally ceased at the combined Dent Fownes factory in 1973 and it remained empty for 12 years until being transformed into the Fownes Hotel in 1985.