I worked in a place that not only had British & French bank holidays, but also you could have upto 7 days paid off sick but only 3 consécutif without a doctors note, strange how many of those days were before or after long weekends or when a bank holiday was on a Tuesday / Thursday…
Not just sick days. Also strikes, in France.
I wuzn’t - my first pay cheque was in Oct '76 - Salford College of Art
My first job aged 16 (1977) was as a school lab tech employed by Croydon Education Committee, and salary was by bank transfer.
Feb '79 I moved to Wellcome Research Labs in Beckenham, and guess what - a pay packet just as described containing cash. They had 2 canteens on site, with one reserved for monthly paid 'career-grade staff (graduate or higher qualifications) and one for weekly paid. At my induction the person doing the site tour was a bit put out by my cheek suggesting that I should use the monthly paid canteen, but up to that point apart from a brief metal-bashing job, monthly pay was all I’d known.
About 2 years later they moved everyone to monthly pay by BT and the distinction quietly disappeared.
Happy days
Though I didn’t use any of this until my last year.
Only two canteens? Distillers and Unilever had a senior management dining room, a middle management canteen and staff canteen. BP had an excellent canteen in the City. A shilling to eat there. It served more people than the company employed in London. 
Distillers had the poshest of properties at Barry where the drinks trolley was free. Being young and foolish that was where I discovered how gin and orange can give you a very nasty hangover.
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That was one thing the US Multinationals got right when they set up in Ireland …a single Staff canteen .a few of the older companies had specific different eating arrangements for plebs and the higher ups ..
Visiting different companies we were sometimes ignored, or treated very well, with a full range inbetween.
We used to load tankers with sweet red wine in Frontignac, near Sete, tip out in Devon, and reload the finished product to take to the bottling plant, which was then in London. It took hours to tip and reload the tanks so we ate in the works canteen, or refectory, as the Monks at Buckfast Abbey called it. I only did the UK leg the once.
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Colleges and universities also call it a refectory.
That is true.
Is the use due to educational establishments having roots in the clergy being the educated classes at one time, I wonder?
Someone who used to do some heavy-duty brush cutting for me recently had his 2 metre long trailer stolen from behind his house.
Use of Latin perhaps, as it’s a Latin word. And Latin being used in education and religion.
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British education has roots in Greek and Latin, and it’s natural that traces remain. The connection with religious orders may not be coincidental but also not direct.
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Unfortunately, in recent times many have chosen to update things by giving refectories some stupid, uninformative name like ‘The Place’ or ‘The Whatever Centre’.
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Wonder no more … In the Western world education and Christian Orthodoxy are totally entwined .. look at the names of any of the European Universities including the major UK ones including the upstart Cambridge .(.invented for the Reformation ). The names of the academic terms, the titles of the Officers .. Rector and Burser all come from Roman Christian terminology. In fact post graduate students …the Dons were actually monks ..that is in Simple Holy Orders rather than as fully ordained Priests , and were subject to vows of chastity ??? and Poverty ..Being Simple vows they could be released . Likewise the Islamic tradition which predated the structure of Western Education , it was also Religious
Tss tss Cambridge university was founded about 300 years before the English reformation. I suppose you went to the other place? And didn’t read history.
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Cambridge university history:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/University-of-Cambridge
Apparently founded 1209.
@Dan1 mentioning factoids seems to be a habit. Can I ask why you do it?
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Perhaps you might have preferred had I said REINVENTED for the Reformation … The wealth in Cambridge and it’s subsequent development was predicated on the suppression of the Monasteries .
Vero & Ancient Mariner …Perhaps you might have preferred had I said REINVENTED for the Reformation … The wealth in Cambridge and it’s subsequent development was predicated on the suppression of the Monasteries .
I think Henry just pocketed the profits from the dissolution of the monasteries, it’s interesting that there are 17 or 18 colleges founded before the reformation trundling along doing their thing, and then nothing until the 18thC. You’d think with all that lovely monastic lolly sloshing about there’d be a bit more splashing the cash… I suppose my old college got a nice rood screen (the fan vaulting and stained glass were already finished) out of it. And I suppose Trinity as a monument to the ogre 
And obv later on you’ve got Shaks waxing multi-layeredly allegorical about bare ruined choirs where once the sweet birds sang. So not all doom and gloom.
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