Football, tennis, horse riding, shooting, dancing, reading, piano playing and photograhy are some of the spare-time activities of the members of the Wigley family who work at East Tilbury. One of them even says that every day is a new adventure.
Working in the factory are brothers Ken (left), Len and Jim Wigley, while well-known to hundreds of women workers, and to Bata Estate housewives and children, is June Wigley, Ken's wife, who has the women's hairdressing establishment at the Bata Hotel.
Ken works in the spreading house, where adhesives are mixed for the rubber factory, and his cheery personality and zestful outlook on life make him popular with everyone.

June is a full of life as her husband, whom she accompanies on many a happy jaunt on her father's farm. She has been dressing hair at East Tilbury fortwo years, and says she could not wish for a better type of client than the factory workers and Estate residents - and she knows what she is talking about, because, after training at her mother's salon in London, she was in the beauty culture department of a big Oxford street store.
"What do I do when not working?" she said. "Anything and everything - dancing, reading, shooting, horse riding, tennis and watching Ken play football; I like to feel I am a dutiful wife sometimes!"
As cheery as his brother and sister-in-law, Jim (below) is assistant iron and steel stock-keeper, to which position he graduated after working as a clicker in leather manipulation, and in the oil stores.

He came to British Bata eight years ago, from the Anglo-American Oil Company at Purfleet, but was known to many Bata workers before that, because he played football for a Grays boys' team against Bata Juniors, and made other friends when he later played for Grays Athletic and Tilbury.
He was glad of the opportunity to join his Bata friends, and soon made manymore. He started in the sundries stockroom, and then went to paper stock. For the past two years he has been in charge of the room in which adhesives are mixed.
Ken has been a regular member of Bata Sports senior football team for five years, and is one of the keenest and most popular members of the cllub, training regularly twice a week and always keeping fit.
During the war, he served in the Royal Air Force, and played for his group, and for the South-Eastern Air Command.
But he does not confine his activities to football. He rides and shoots nearly every week-end at his father-in-law's farm at Stock, near Chelmsford, and, as audiences at the "Opportunity Knocks" concerts well remember, he is an entertainer, with Al Jolson type of "mammy" songs, of no mean merit, "I did them in the R.A.F.," he said, "and still enjoy doing them."
He enjoys everything. "Why not?" he asked. "Every day is a new adventure."

He came to Bata just after Ken and has never regretted his decision.
For more than six years Jim served in the Royal Navy, and was leading cook in the battleships Iron Duke and Frobisher, being on the latter ship when is was torpedoed off Normandy on D-Day and managed to get to Sheerness under his own steam. He played football for the Fleet Air Arm, and there met Ditchburn, the Spurs and English international goalkeeper.
Now Jim is pianist in a dance band which plays regularly at the Tilbury Dock Working Men's Club and Institute - "the Tute".
Oldest Bata Wigley is Len, who came to the leather factory in 1937, and in the same year, went on a course at Zlin for six months. Before his present job of faire-stitching on men's shoes in Dept 473, he worked in several other departments, and is an exponent of several operations on men's leather footwear.

Steady and reliable, he is just as friendly as, if a little quieter than, his brothers, and has the same eager mentality.
Len's hobbies are dancing and photography, and he is an expert with his camera, which he takes almost everywhere. "I photograph anything which stikes me as being attractive," he said, "and have no special subjects. I have a varied collection of pictures, in several albums, at home."