[224] Local Shops

[224] ‘Hallowed be thy Name.’

First issued February 2015. Updated and reissued September 2019

Another blog that has nothing to do with religion, apart from a passing reference to the local synagogue. If you have been following, you will understand the title in a few minutes. If not, wait until the end. I am going to talk about – our local shops.

Before I talk about the individual shops, I want to give an outline of the groups of shops we walked to two or three times a week.

Local Map

I need to say a little about the map above. The only significant change since we lived there is in the Port of London Authority (PLA) Recreation Ground. In our days, it was virtually a square area of green, reckoned to have a perimeter of one mile by those who ran round it for exercise. (Not me.) Now it has a school taking a chunk out of it. The rest of the map has not changed.

We lived in the Cathedral Estate, to the West of The Drive, where all the roads were Gardens, named after cities with cathedrals. (You can see Hereford, Lincoln and Chelmsford. There are many others. Houses in The Drive were bigger and posher than the cathedral estate.) You can see St Andrews Road on the other side, home of St Andrews Church, our local church.

[Lots about St Andrews to come in later blogs.]

For our nearest shops, we crossed the Drive, which didn’t have too much traffic, and took St George’s Road and Fairholme Road to Beehive Lane. You can see the route on the map above where I have marked the location of our local shops in red.

Beehive Lane Shops

On the map above, courtesy of Google Maps, you can see Beehive Lane – or you can search any map software for Beehive lane, Ilford. In the Fifties, this road used to have two sets of shops, north and south of the Eastern Avenue (marked on the map as the A12, one of the first major dual carriageway roads to be built in Britain). We just went to the small section at the south end, from the old synagogue to Cranbrook Road. It still has shops but they are all different. [The shops to the north included The Beehive, our nearest pub, and Packards, our local barbers.]

I would imagine that Beehive Lane is now quite busy. When we were seven or eight we would not only walk there, but we would cross freely to shops on both sides of the road. The walk was traffic free and I don’t remember any problems crossing Beehive Lane.

Typical Small Groups of Shops

It was a typical selection of shops of that time, perhaps a dozen or so shops on each side of the road. I feel that I ought to list them all, to illustrate what typical rows of shops used to be like. I know that I will get some wrong but most of my list will be right! (The generalizations are mostly right!)

We had a greengrocers; a bakers (Hirtes?); a butchers; a chemist’s shop; a grocery; a hardware shop; and a combined newsagent, stationers, sweet shop, and tobacconist. These were typical of most small shopping parades and all would be visited fairly frequently.

There were others perhaps not always found in small parades. I remember a ladies’ hairdresser; a bookshop; and probably a fishmonger, an estate agent and a funeral parlour. There may have been a shoe shop or cobbler’s. I am fairly sure that there were no clothes shops.

For less common purchases, we went further afield, to Gant’s Hill (the roundabout just visible to the northeast on the map) or Ilford High Road (southeast and off the map).

[Further West lie Wanstead Park, Ilford Golf Course and a wide, dual carriageway section of the North Circular Road that wasn’t there when we were young. To the Southwest, also off the map, is Highlands School.]

I will look the four main small food shop types next but I want to note two points. Firstly, there were no restaurants, cafes or coffee shops, or shops containing coffee shops. (No takeaway food shops!) Shopping was shopping, not stopping off for a coffee first.

Secondly, if there was something you wanted there was very little chance of two different shops selling it. You expected to have to visit a few shops for your daily shopping.

Butchers

There are some things about butchers I cannot remember clearly, so I will start with the definite bits.

Butchers sold uncooked meat – lots of different cuts of beef, mutton or pork, with a more limited selection of lamb and veal. It was all hunks of meat visible on slabs and the butcher would cut off a piece to order and weigh it for you, just wrapped in greaseproof paper. (Often he would use a large butcher’s knife and chop on a wooden block.) This would include offal – liver, heart, kidneys – and if you wanted minced meet, it could be minced through a mechanical mincer to order.

That was all the meat we usually bought. You could buy a whole chicken, not any part of a chicken.

Perhaps there were other meats available on special order. I am sure that the butcher also sold fresh sausages, with not much choice beyond beef or pork. I am not sure about meat products such as bacon (which you could get from a grocer), or the more obscure meats such as game.

The butcher may have had some refrigerated storage but most meat would have come from the markets of London overnight. None of the meat was frozen and those who bought it did not have freezers.

Bakers

Today’s lesson is about the history of breadmaking, which has been revolutionized by the Chorleywood process – named after the British Baking Industries Research Association, based at Chorleywood. This process, developed in 1961, enabled the use of lower quality wheat, thus allowing much more of our home-grown wheat to be used for bread. It has added Vitamin C and fat to the ingredients and uses intense, high-speed mixers.

Almost all British bread now uses this new process. Grumpy old men, like me, would say that bread made this way now does not taste as good as it used to. Superficially it looks the same! [US: Because the high quality of US wheat, this method has not spread to the US.]

Primarily what the old Bakers shop sold was loaves of fresh crusty bread, not sliced. A freshly baked large loaf would be handed over, wrapped in a piece of tissue paper, to be added to the shopping bag. It cost roughly 8p in modern money terms. A small loaf was less than a shilling. (If you don’t know what a shilling was, wait for my blog post about coins of the realm.) There were a few different types of white loaf on offer.

Most popular was a large, split tin. That’s what we normally had.

It had a very uniform, square cross-section which made it ideal for cutting into slices.

There were just a few other loaves available, including a brown split tin or a small loaf (half the size). Two that always stayed out of our requirements were Hovis (wholemeal, but we didn’t know that,) and the wrapped, sliced loaf, both far too expensive for everyday use. Our treat was a very occasional cottage loaf:

You could also buy white or brown rolls, freshly baked, and a limited selection of cakes (including cream cakes), again freshly baked. (Bread, rolls and cakes were fresh because they were baked early that morning, and were baked locally. There was not time to deliver across significant distances. I know I have a retired professional baker as a reader of these blogs who may comment!)

Bread did not have a ‘sell by’ date (nor did anything else.) It was baked early and sold on the same day. If you wanted to make breadcrumbs, you might be able to buy a loaf from yesterday (half price). Otherwise, no baker would think of selling day old bread.

We didn’t have to buy bread every day. It was delivered to our door, free, twice a week. With the exception of the wrapped, sliced loaf, which might keep for a few days, you could not buy bread elsewhere. Don’t even think supermarkets.

[I have to point out that Hot Cross Buns, associated in the Church with Easter, were only available on the morning of Good Friday, the Friday before Easter – all baked the night before.]

Fruit and Vegetables

You can have an idea of the greengrocers – fruit and vegetables – after seeing butchers and bakers. The greengrocer would have bought his fresh vegetables overnight in London – whatever was available. My main memory is of regularly asking for seven pounds of King Edwards and two pounds of greens.

‘King Edwards’ were potatoes. They may have been the only variety. We never asked for any other, except for the brief period each year when ‘new potatoes’ were available. Potatoes were covered in earth and had to be washed and peeled.

I have never discovered what ‘greens’ were, but that’s what we asked for – they were leafy and green, probably loose cabbage leaves. There was a period in spring when we asked for ‘spring greens.’ We also had onions, tomatoes and mushrooms. Sometimes there were peas, carrots, cabbage, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, perhaps even parsnips, turnips, swede. We only had whatever was in season – in the salad season: lettuce, beetroot, cucumber, celery and radish. Peas came in pods.

(I can’t claim to be an expert about green vegetables. I would never eat anything green until I was much older. I don’t eat most vegetables.)

All the vegetables were in open boxes and the shopkeeper picked them by hand and weighed them. They were of mixed quality and you could not pick the best ones. Nothing came in lots of varieties. If you wanted mushrooms you had – mushrooms.

Fruit was much the same. When in season – apples, oranges, pears, plums and melon may have had a couple of varieties. Everything was of fairly mixed quality. Fruit could include some with bruises or bits eaten through by insects.

Also rhubarb, cherries, blackberries and gooseberries appeared when in season. Strawberries appeared as a luxury for a few days a year. They were sold by the punnet (a small basket) not by weight.

We did not see exotic fruits like bananas, raspberries, blueberries or pineapple. Kiwi fruits, star fruits and many others did not exist.

Several tinned foods were available. At the greengrocers you could buy tins of garden peas, processed peas (what we now call mushy peas,) and baked beans. (Heinz beans have not changed – apart from becoming beanz!)

In the very early days of frozen foods, the first things you could buy were frozen peas, from the greengrocer. You would not have a freezer, just a small frozen compartment in the new refrigerator.

I can remember our local greengrocer explaining the laws about Sunday opening then. He could open on Sunday morning to sell food that would not keep. He could sell his fruit and vegetables but not tinned or frozen food.

Newsagent

They always called themselves something like Newsagents, Tobacconists and Confectioners. The word Stationers was there sometimes. I don’t know which came first or which provided most of their income.

They sold newspapers, the half a dozen main daily papers and perhaps a local paper – daily or weekly. [I will leave newspaper delivery to another post.] There were also some weekly and monthly publications, not many by modern standards. I won’t be specific in case I get them wrong – two or three women’s magazines; two or three children’s comics; a few well-known, popular magazines; a few hobbies like gardening. Many other specialist magazines were published but would only be held at the local newsagent if you ordered them in advance.

As Stationers, they were the place for envelopes and writing paper. (We wrote letters in those days.) You could also buy notebooks, pens and pencils etc., but not stamps. Stamps only came from Post Offices.

[OK, I missed out Post Office. Beehive Lane had a Post Office. Not now – wait for another blog!]

I could do a whole blog about sweets (US: candy) from the Good Old Days. (Perhaps I will.) Some you bought individually for a penny, a halfpenny or a farthing. (A farthing was a quarter of an old penny, very close to 0.1p now) Some came from big jars on the shelf – they would be ladled out with a scoop and weighed, sold in quarter of a pound portions.

[Sorry about units. A pound weight, 1 lb., divided into sixteen ounces, 16 oz., was a unit of weight, not to be confused with a pound sterling, £1. Sweets might have been 6d or 9d for 4 oz. That’s about 2½ to 3½ p for about 100 g.]

Jars were something like the picture but they were glass, not plastic.

There were several chocolate bars and tubes of sweets. Nearly all are still with us and have changed little – Cadbury’s milk, plain, or fruit and nut; Mars, KitKat, Marathon (now Snickers); Polo, Smarties (like US M&Ms), Opal Fruits (now Starburst) and Wrigley’s chewing gum. Maybe one or two more choices.

Tobacco included cigarettes, cigars etc. and matches. I am sure I will mention tobacco again. It was smoked more widely and carried no health warnings – but we knew it was not good for you. I can’t give figures but it would have been taxed less and much cheaper.

Even then, they sold other cheap articles to catch the eye of the shopper – small toys and souvenirs. I can’t give a full description as my eyes rarely moved away from the sweets! I think these shops were the opportunists. They sold what they could and added new things, becoming the general stores immortalized by Ronnie Barker and David Jason in ‘Open All Hours,’ sometimes now combined with service stations for petrol.

Of course, with the obvious familiarity with our Beehive Lane shops, you will now appreciate why we sometimes got the opening lines of the Lord’s Prayer confused. It did not start, “Hello, Beehive Lane!” See [203] Religion.

I had a feeling that there would be much to be said about shops. This post is already another record for length! I will leave the other shops to another post …

[223] Choice

[223] Variety is the Spice of Life

First issued February 2015. Revised and updated September 2019.

In which we consider the subject of Choice. Now we have lots of choices. Then – not so many. To be honest there was virtually no choice.

We have looked at information. Since the time I grew up, the world has changed from providing almost no information to providing too much – what we now sometimes see as information overload. We could not possibly take in all that is available to us.

The same is true of choice. We now have more choices than we can possibly manage. I am going to do a whistle stop tour round the life of the 1950s, throwing in lots of random examples. For dramatic effect, I will generally look at things in reverse, looking first at now and then the fifties.

Let’s go shopping, have lunch and a coffee break, manage our money, get married, set up a new home, go on holiday …

Coffee stop

Come on, be serious, coffee and snack comes first before the shopping.

• Now: In most shopping areas, there are more coffee shops than all the other shops put together – familiar chains like Starbucks, Costa, Nero, and lots of more local ones. Many supermarkets and shops have a café inside. We have a Marks and Spencers not too far away with four or five cafés in the store.
• Then: In a large High Street shopping area, there were about two large department stores with their own café/ restaurant. If you looked around you might find one elsewhere but you probably would not. People did not have the time or money for coffee.
• Now: Americano, latte, flat white, cappuccino, espresso, or mocha? Small, regular, or large? [Regular, another Americanism. If we had the choice it would have been medium.] Hot or cold milk? Full, skinny, semi-skinny? Extra shots? Syrups? And the latest choice option – would you like (to pay extra for) a special blend of coffee beans?
• Then: Coffee, pre-brewed, poured from a large pot. We couldn’t make decent coffee then. To be honest, for almost everyone it would have been tea, also pre-brewed, poured from a large pot, with milk. (No choice of tea or milk.) Tea was the national drink, although mostly we had it at home.

[Maybe this isn’t the time to mention that a pot of tea – enough for two or three cups – would have cost 1p in today’s money. Coffee was twice as expensive. Perhaps that was one reason why we had tea!]

Shopping

Let’s pick a few examples from food shopping, household items and clothes.

• Food:
• Now: We go to the nearest supermarket or shop on-line. Taking a few examples, Tesco on-line offers 102 types of sliced bread, 77 cheddar cheese, 224 fresh milk, 58 sugars, 843 soft drinks, 113 pizzas (fresh or frozen), 65 prepared sandwiches and 398 yoghurt. [I’m not going to check the web and update the figures for 2019. They are just for illustration.]
• Then: There were no supermarkets. At the bakers, we had a few different versions of proper, crusty bread but just one sliced, white bread. (We never bought sliced bread. It was too expensive. It was not for ordinary use.) At the grocers, cheese came in a few different types, one of which was Cheddar. You probably had a choice of strong or mild Cheddar, cut to order. (Not available pre-sliced.) Milk was milk, what we now call full-cream milk. (You could also buy Jersey milk, with even more creamy fat.) Sugar was either granulated, castor, icing, soft brown or Demarara. Soft drinks covered two or three types of fruit squash and a few (expensive) fizzy drinks, certainly not bottled water. We did not have pizza or pre-packed sandwiches and yoghurts had not yet become available. Pasta – not sure. We definitely had spaghetti and macaroni. (See illustrations!)

[Lots to come about shops and what they sold.]

• Household:
• Now: Continuing in the modern supermarket, here are some more statistics from Tesco. Washing powder, 53; washing capsules, 52; washing liquids and gels, 89; fabric conditioner, 97, and toothpaste, 139.
• Then: We had about half a dozen makes of washing powder. (No liquids, gels or capsules!) No conditioner. There were two or three makes of toothpaste, each of which may have come in two or three sizes.

• Clothing:

There are many examples and I will deal with clothing in a lot more detail later. If I want a new pair of blue denim jeans today, I go to Marks and Spencers, and have a choice of about ten styles with sizing choices for waist and leg length. On-line I have about fifty choices for jeans at M&S, and there are another ten or so suitable shops in the High Street.

When I bought my first pair of jeans, there was one little shop in Ilford, tucked away down a side street, that sold them. It was the only shop selling jeans. I used to turn up a few inches because leg lengths were not a size option. (Of course, in those days, only men of up to about twenty would wear jeans. I have never stopped wearing them.)

It was the same with other clothes, generally from department stores. Trousers were grey, flannel trousers; shirts for work were white shirts. We didn’t have a choice and we didn’t spend time being fashionable.

[Yes, of course it was different for women. Women have always felt more of a need to look good and the fashion industry knows where the market is. Most of the high street shops today that are not coffee shops are women’s fashions. I notice that! But their choices in the Fifties were very limited.]

Incidentally, I also noticed that M&S has 392 fragrances for women, and 114 fragrances for men. There were a few perfumes around in the Fifties for women. (Sorry, I can’t be precise. As a seven-year-old I was not into women’s perfumes.) For men, no way! After-shave as a Christmas present for men crept in slowly later.

Lunch

Time for a quick lunch.

• Now: As well as all the places where could have had coffee, (nearly all of which will do at least sandwiches, cakes, Danish pastries and biscuits,) we have lots of pubs, restaurants and fast food outlets for pizza, burgers, Chinese and Indian cuisine and lots more.
• Then: We had the same, very few cafeteria restaurants that we could use for coffee, mostly in large department stores – also a few in parks and stations. Pubs did not serve food. Most restaurants, which were few and far between, were relatively expensive. There were no fast food outlets. The only takeaways were fish and chips. [Transport cafés were for lorry drivers only.]

• Sandwiches:
• Now: The 65 sandwiches available from Tesco is perhaps a wider selection than would be available in a restaurant, but expect an array of complex filling mixtures. Now you also have tasted sandwiches, baguettes and probably even a choice of bread types.

• Then: Ham or cheese? (Not pre-packed, generally made while you wait.) You could have plain white bread or a plain white roll. That was cheese, not cheese and tomato, not cheese and onion, not even cheese and chutney. Things were definitely easier.

That’s enough about lunch, but while you sit over your coffee and sandwich, you probably glare at your phone or tablet. (Even I now have a fairly modern mobile phone.) You may browse the Internet; check your emails; log in to Twitter, Facebook, or Youtube; play Candy Crush or other games; or just take a few selfies. At many cafes, you borrow their papers to read. We used to talk to each other!

Money

• Banks and Savings account: Now: Hundreds to choose from – fixed rate, variable rate, index-linked, short-term or long-term. Banks and building societies offer similar facilities.
• Then: We had more banks to choose from but they were all the same. Two options for savings, a Savings account (instant withdrawal) or Deposit account (30-day notice). All gave same interest rates, linked to Bank Rate. There was no point in changing your bank. Building societies were not the same as banks, but all were the same as each other. They met monthly and publicly to agree rates.

[Today’s quiz question: Why is the word ‘publicly’ unusual?]

• Mortgages: Now: As for savings above, we have lots of options for interest only or repayment mortgages from banks or building societies.
• Then: Repayment mortgages were the only option. Only building societies did them. Rates were identical because they fixed them between themselves as for savings accounts. Rates were closely linked to the Bank Rate.

• Credit Card: Now: We have hundreds to choose from. Forms to open new accounts arrive, unsolicited all the time. Many people have several cards that they carry around with them, and pick one at random.
• Then: Credit card? What’s that? (Diners Club and American Express appeared about 1960 in the US. They did spread slowly to the UK, to a very small, rich minority. They were never the same as credit cards as we now know them.)

As I update this in 2019 I note that as well as credit cards we also have debit cards, loyalty cards, contactless cards and numerous other ways to pay via apps on your phone. Of course none of these existed then.

Getting Married

[We did things in the ‘right’ order then. Get married first, then set up house together!]

• Location: Now: Pick a hotel, country house, restaurant or almost any public building. Choose your room and setting. Spend thousands of pounds.
• Then: Some people used Registry Offices but I think the rest of the world looked down on such unfortunates and didn’t talk about them. Usually you used the church where the bride was a parishioner. You could pick the bridegroom’s church. Any other church would need to be negotiated with its minister. (The church and minister cost about £10. A choir was extra.)
• Service: Now: Design it yourself. Write your own vows.
• Then: Church of England Book of Common Prayer version – including ‘love, honour and obey.’ No choice of wording. You could pick the hymns, with the approval of the minister. Entry and exit tunes rarely varied.

[I could well do a whole blog about weddings.]

New House

We need to sort out a few things for the new house.

• Gas provider and tariff. Now: Lots of both to choose from. Incomprehensible to choose the best. (Tariffs aimed at getting people to change provider.)
• Then: No choice involved. Your provider was determined geographically. Unless you were a business, you went on the one and only domestic tariff. [I’m not sure whether the payment rates were the same throughout the UK. There may have been slight variations between regions.]
• Electricity: As for gas.
• Telephone (landline): As for gas
• Mobile phone and Internet: Be serious or pay attention! No chance of either then.
• Television: Now: Cable, satellite, freeview? Extra channels? Pick you recording device.
• Then: BBC only. ITV came from the late Fifties. No satellites, no cable TV, no TV recording of any type. [Expensive and poor quality reception. You probably didn’t have it anyway.]

Holidays

• Now: We have a vast choice of international destinations, air flight options and hotels, and also pre-packaged cruises and holidays.
• Then: We had seaside destinations in England, boarding houses and a very simple train ticket system. [More about holidays soon.]

Miscellaneous

A few more random topics.

Doctors

We did not have the option to choose an appointment to see the local GP. We went to the surgery and waited. If we needed to go to a hospital we were given an appointment. We did not choose the date and had no choice in the hospital.

Politics

Choice of who to vote for in elections – Conservative or Labour. Only in a few constituencies was there a Liberal (now Liberal Democrat) candidate. No Green Party, No UKIP. We waited until the age of twenty-one to get the vote.

One final area of choice, Telephone Number Enquiries: now we have a choice of many service providers, with their 118… numbers, competing with each other but all charging exorbitant rates. We had books, (Telephone Directories,) provided free and a Directory Enquiries number to call, also free. (Weather forecast and test cricket scores by telephone came a bit later, also free.)

Not everything about choice is good! (I warned you about being a Grumpy Old Man.)

‘PUBLICLY’: OK, look at words like magic, electric, cryptic, fantastic, supersonic … There are many of them and they all add ‘-ally’ to make an adverb: ‘magically, electrically …’ Not so for ‘public.’ There won’t always be a quiz question, but be prepared …