When the springs dried up at Malvern Water, John Birchley was let go and found another summer job as a catering assistant at Strensham service station on the M5 southbound in Worcestershire.<\/p>\n
Birchley, who got the job after spotting an advert in the paper, said the service station could be chaotic with coachloads of people coming through. <\/p>\n
“The first shift I did, there was a queue over the motorway bridge at that time. It never lessened, it was a queue half over the bridge,” he said. <\/p>\n
“And drivers in those days had to sign in, because I think they got a free meal and I think we had 150 coaches that day.”<\/p>\n
Birchley described how some customers at the time were not sure if their cars would get to their holiday destinations due to the heat.<\/p>\n
The drought was “unprecedented” in those days, he added.<\/p>\n
“It was hot and stuffy, you could go outside on breaks but there was just concrete to go outside to, so it was not the best conditions.<\/p>\n
“It was a long shift, eight hours, but we got used to it I suppose.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When the springs dried up at Malvern Water, John Birchley was let go and found another summer job…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":728079,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[1397,90,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-728078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/728078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=728078"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/728078\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/728079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=728078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=728078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=728078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}