Working at John Allen & Sons wasn’t all about building cranes and other types of machinery.

Staff at the factory at Cowley, Oxford, enjoyed a good social and sporting life, as this picture shows.

It was taken at the annual dinner of Allen’s Sports Club at Cowley Conservative Club on February 10, 1939.

We can’t name any of the diners, but smartly dressed in jackets and ties, they were clearly looking forward to an enjoyable evening.

The photograph comes from Dave Gardner, of Kidlington, who worked for the company and who saved this and many other pictures of factory life from a skip.

As we recalled (Memory Lane, January 23), Allen’s roots can be traced back to 1868 when a company was formed to build steam ploughs for the prosperous farming industry.

A young John Allen, who was managing the business, bought it in 1897 and renamed it the Oxfordshire Steam Ploughing Company.

It branched out into other fields, notably repairing farm equipment and building steam rollers and traction engines. Its vehicles were exported all over the world.

After John Allen retired, his two sons, Major GWG Allen and Captain JC Allen, known to all as Major and Captain, took over.

The company had begun to make cranes in 1936 and this eventually became its speciality. A link was forged with the American Grove Cranes in 1966 and four years after the company’s centenary celebrations, Grove gained control.

Newly named Grove Cranes expanded and opened a factory at Bicester. But in 1985, all the work in Oxfordshire was switched to Sunderland. The John Allen name was revived when the site in Between Towns Road, Cowley, was developed as a retail park.

Do you recognise anyone or have memories of John Allen’s? Let me know.