Crookes: Long-serving Sheffield barber retires after 52 years in the same shop

But now Denise Gillyett-Marshall is cutting her career short, after almost 53 years in the same small salon.

Denise, who turns 71 in December, has been snipping styles in her little shop in Crookes since she was a teenager in January 1972.

Back then an adult cut was 27p, a child's was 20p, and OAPs' a discount rate of 17 pence.

Now they’re a still reasonable £8.50, £8 and £4.50.

She works full time, on her own, five days a week, sometimes putting in 10-hour days - and counts clients from the early years among her returning regulars.

"My oldest customer is 101, and I've got some who've been coming in since the beginning," said Denise. "They are all friends to me.

"I really enjoy cutting hair. I love to see them come in through that door, and go out again looking different."

The styles - the flat-tops and crew cuts, mohawks and mullets, and the various incarnations of David Beckham - have come and gone over half a century. 

But little else has changed at Denise's tiny tonsorium at 251 Crookes.

The wall-to-wall mirrors and custom-built tool-shelf are the ones she inherited, aged just turned 19, when her dad Harry bought the business for her for £150 from an old Italian barber named Ferruccio.

She still has hand-clippers from her first year of training in 1969 - though her 90-year-old cut-throat razor and sharpening stones are no longer used for health and safety reasons. 

"You can't ever get them 'clinically clean'," she said.

Above the constant company of Radio 2, she doesn't spend long asking customers what they want. Usually, they've been coming in that long, she just knows.

"Sometimes I ask out of politeness, in case they might want something totally different this time," she laughed.

Denise was born and bred in Sheffield but emigrated to Australia in 1964 with her Ten Pound Pom parents, voyaging to a new life in the port city of Whyalla.

After school Denise trained as a barber, partly by radio in the early days of distance learning via a college 250 miles away in Adelaide. 

She was engaged to an Australian boy, and planning to get married, when her parents decided they were all coming home to South Yorkshire.

"I didn't want to, but my dad bought me this shop to make sure I had more reasons to stay in Sheffield than go back!" she said.

As a state-registered senior hairdresser of 25 years' standing, and holder of a Master Craftsman diploma from the Hairdressing Council, Denise has little time for barbers who only know how to use clippers.

"When I trained we had to do it all with scissors, cutting and tapering," she said. 

"It does frustrate me that people are earning a living who don't know how to do any of that.

"I also had to learn wig-making and head massage - not that there's much call for either of those today!"

Denise, who lives in Stannington, is now looking forward to a well-earned retirement with husband Darroch, 70 - who comes in every Friday for ‘a number four all over'.

"I will miss my customers though," she said. "It's like being a therapist sometimes - they tell me all sorts.

"In the daytime I get lots of older chaps who've been coming here for years. Later on it's busy with students. 

"I've got dads who came in as little boys bringing their own sons now - sometimes three generations.

“With the youngsters now it’s all skin-fade buzz cuts - a number one at the sides and a number three on top, blended in. 

"Boys will ask for their hair like a certain footballer, and I have to get them to look in the newspaper to show me who he is.”