A ONCE high-powered financial troubleshooter has given up a massive salary in the City to make sausages in a humble terraced house.

Before moving to Brotton, east Cleveland, Dave Burton worked on major financial problems at some of Britain’s biggest companies, including the Prudential.

His wife, Jackie, 47, also worked in London for an overseas finance director, and Mr Burton recalls living the high life where he and colleagues would hire the Natural History Museum for their office party.

His employer’s last contract at the Prudential was worth £250,000 a year and Mr Burton was later offered a job with the insurance firm.

However, a holiday trip to North Yorkshire changed the couple’s lives.

Mr Burton said: “It was a strange feeling that trip. We knew we had to stay here.

Within a month I had turned the job down and we had sold our home and moved. We had no job or anything.

“I used to travel into work by train every day for 13 years.

Same seats, same people, but no one ever spoke to each other. It’s much friendlier up here.”

The couple took on a number of businesses and jobs, including towing boats along the coast and gardening.

As a hobby, they began experimenting making sausages on the kitchen table, using a 1940s mincer that once belonged to Mr Burton’s father.

They also smoke their own bacon using oak.

The results proved a big hit with friends and they now supply 250 people and work at farmers markets across the Tees Valley, including in Saltburn, east Cleveland, this Saturday.

Mr Burton, 47, who has a daughter, Emma, 16, said: “We have never worked harder in our lives, but it is worth it. I look out of my window and I see sky, I see my wife and daughter every day and when I talk to people, they’re friendly and talk back. It is not all about money, and people up here are not just motivated by money. You do not know what you’ve got round here.”