It could be summed up neatly as ‘All work and no pay’.

Staff at Brown’s Restaurant in Woodstock Road, Oxford, decided they didn’t want just to serve their own customers – they wanted to help the wider world.

These waiters and waitresses toiled with no financial reward all day one Sunday in 1984.

They had agreed to give up their pay and tips and hand all the money to an appeal for families suffering famine in Ethiopia.

What’s more, they wore T-shirts with ‘Feed the World’ on them and plastered the restaurant with posters to encourage everyone to support them.

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With a constant flow of customers throughout the day – some estimates put the number at about 1,000 - £800 was raised for the appeal.

Waiter Rob Green, who thought of the idea and persuaded his fellow workers to support it, said: “People were amazingly generous – some left £20 tips after coming in for a cup of coffee.”

Customers weren’t the only ones who gave freely to the appeal – restaurant managers decided to chip in too.

They were so impressed with their staff’s goodwill towards the needy and agreed to double whatever figure they made, pushing the final total to £1,600.

‘Feed the world’ was a phrase from the Band Aid single Do They Know It’s Christmas? in 1984.

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Bob Geldof and Midge Ure put together a supergroup to record the track to raise funds for famine relief.

It was released in December 1984 and went to number one, staying there for five weeks.

It became the fastest selling single in UK chart history, selling a million copies in the first week alone, and passed three million sales on the last day of 1984.