Biography|Linda Jackson — The Holiday Job at Browns Lane That Became a Career

People date her industrial life from a Paris appointment in 2014.

The first clock she answered was in Coventry.

Jaguar's home from 1951 was the Browns Lane plant, a wartime shadow factory leased from Daimler, entered from what is now Coundon Wedge Drive.

Later interviews and company CVs put her there as a teenager on a holiday job, stapling invoices and learning the accounts office.

English notices usually say 1977. French notices sometimes say 1976, when she was seventeen.

Both describe the same decision: she had a university place, planned to teach, and stayed.

The Times later placed that first accounts desk at Browns Lane.

Jaguar was then inside British Leyland. The group would be renamed and broken for the next quarter century.

She stayed through those names: Leyland, Austin Rover, Rover, MG Rover.

The last car left Browns Lane on 1 July 2005. The assembly halls came down in late 2008.

The Jaguar Daimler Heritage Trust building on the site was demolished in 2012.

Housing called Swallow's Nest and a business park called Lyons Park occupy the plot.

The leaper is gone from the gate.

What remains is a documented industrial coordinate and a first job that refused to stay temporary.

Photo: David Stowell, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Alexander Migl, CC BY-SA 4.0, Paris Motor Show 2018.