They may have changed their hairstyles and even their husbands over the years but a group of women are still the good friends they were more than 30 years ago.

The young apprentices of the hair and beauty salon at Hanningtons department store in Brighton were reunited yesterday.

Sally Atkinson and Ann Clarke organised the reunion at a Brighton restaurant for the women who worked in the hair and beauty salon between 1962 and 1998.

Some of the women were managed by Cecile Leaphard, now Mrs Edgley, who worked at the store between 1962 and 1969.

Lynda Ammar, who lives in Steyning and left the store to work as a hairstylist in the United States in 1969, said: "Mrs L used to bring vitamin C in with her and make us take it every morning because she didn't want us off sick with colds. She was just like Maggie Smith in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

"We called each other by first names but she was always Mrs Leaphard, although we called her Mrs L to each other."

Lynda also recalled tending to the actor Sir Laurence Olivier and his children who lived in Sussex and how the apprentice girls would hang their arms out of the windows on sunny days in an attempt to get a suntan in the North Street store.

Another former member of staff, Coline Denton, who worked at the store from 1969 to 1975, said: "The girls from Hanningtons were seen as quite special. When we went to college we were made to stand up and the teacher said, 'these are the girls from Hanningtons' and all the girls looked at us as if we were something special."

Mrs Leaphard said the store's clientele were mainly ladies in their 30s to 60s, but the girls did get to cut some of the styles of the era including beehives.

Mrs Leaphard, like many of the women, was sad to see the end of an era with the announcement that the store, which was sold for a figure believed to be in the region of £23 million, is set to close after 200 years.

She said: "Hanningtons was somewhere you could go for a light lunch, tea or coffee, have your hair done and if it rained it didn't matter because you wouldn't have to go out, it was all in one place. There's nothing like it any more."