Sheree Ash was born in 1957, the youngest of five children of Vera and Kenneth Jevons. The family moved around Sandown, Lake and Ryde, and Sheree left school the moment she could.

She first worked as a nanny, at Fairway Caravan Park in Sandown and then for a family in Bembridge.

On a night out, a friend suggested Ronson’s. At 17 she was taken on after a five-minute interview, on around £20 a week, almost double her nannying wage.

“I love factory life. I enjoyed it.”

Finding the assembly lines too fast, she was placed in the ancillary department. In the “blow-off room” she used a foot pedal to blast sand out of freshly sandblasted plastic lighter cases.

She also pressed pins into lighter parts with a hand press, once driving a pin straight through her own finger while chatting.

Now and again she filled cigarette-holder tubes with filter crystals.

“None of us moaned about going to work.”

Life around the work mattered just as much: singing Ten Green Bottles on the works coach, chips and gravy in the canteen, horse riding with workmates, and dancing four nights a week.

“It wasn’t brain surgery, was it? My job. I could still do it with a hangover.”

She left only when she married and moved to Surrey, and later worked as a carer until she retired.