Shops One of the changes in Wivenhoe life most regretted is the sharp decline in the number of shops, especially in the High Street, where there were twenty shops active in the 1930s, providing for all regular needs. However, then as now, there were also shops at the Cross and scattered elsewhere. We
had everything - Ellen Primm
My mother used to
say, ‘I don’t know what’s happened to all our lovely shops we used
to have.’ Because we used to go down shopping every Thursday and my mum
got her pension at the Post Office and my younger sister and me, we all
went down shopping, we went down and pay our papers and there were shops
you could go to, the butchers, the bakers, and all that – you can’t do
that sort of thing now. I think it’s a shame. Edna Wadley We had three
butchers – Mr Rivens, Mr Everett, Mr King. Three bakers – Miss Franks,
Mr Last, Mr Cracknell. And two lovely grocers shops –Jimmy Moore; and
Stacey Woods, beautiful grocers. You’d go in and you could smell the
coffee. That was always weighed. And then we had a household shop where
you could buy curtains, towels, sheets, anything in that line. A chemist
– Mr Corlip. Newsagents. Three sweet shops – Mrs Blutts, Mrs Barrett,
Mrs Stewart. And of course Mr Green, the fish shop. And there was a cycle
shop. Mrs Bailey sold clothes, shoes, anything to wear. And Mr Chaney,
hardware, all nails and hammers and paraffin oil. Really you didn’t need
to go out of Wivenhoe in those days. Now there’s nothing. Joyce Blackwood You had so many shops. You could really buy anything in the village when I was young and now you can buy nothing, except groceries. We always had a paper shop. And there was the radio and electric shop next to it. And there was a shop in Queen’s Road which went on for some time, but when I was little - it was the funniest shop out! I mean, hygiene standards weren’t observed at all in those days! You’d find sacks of sugar with little mice creeping about round them and nibbling holes in the bottom and that sort of thing! But it didn’t seem to affect us! We were all all right. FAMILY
SHOPS - Marjorie Goldstraw I was born in Black
Buoy Cottage, but they lived at the Tollgate and then they started the
dairy at Next door was the bakery where people took their dinners, because those ovens stopped hot and the cakes, and Christmas cakes, and every day people took their dinner there. Just stick it in the oven and it’d cook it, although the oven had gone off. Plenty of time. There were no end
of shops. The fish shop was opposite, and a hardware shop, that was
opposite. There was a butcher’s at the bottom, a Mr Ribbons. And then as
you go up The shopkeepers were the elite, weren’t they, if you had a business. I mean, all my mother’s brothers, they’d all got a business. We thought we were the poor of the place but Granny came to the Tollgate and then opened the dairy. Shopping
with a Ration Book - Olive Whaley At one point, I
used to go into All
the shopping was done here - Halcyon Palmer Nobody went to All the shopping
was done here, with very occasional forays into We had two hardware shops. We had Chaneys, who was on the corner of Queen’s Road and the High Street and he was a lovely man, he was charming. And the funny thing about him was that there was often a notice on the door, saying, ‘Back in five minutes,’ but, of course, nobody knew when he’d left! There were various kind of shopkeepers which were important. They
weren’t just shopkeepers, they were somebody in the village. They
definitely had a status. The most highly prized man was Percy Chaney, and
everybody used to call him ‘Uncle Percy,’ because he had the
ironmonger’s shop which is now an estate agents, opposite the old Post
Office, on that little corner. Well, that used to be his ironmonger’s
shop. And he had a paraffin store round the back so if you wanted paraffin
– which, of course, lots of the lighting was paraffin oil lights – you
had to go and get your paraffin from Mr Chaney. And he had this kind of
shop which had been stocked in about 1900 and never actually replenished!
And I went there in 1954 and we were doing up the house that we lived in
in the High Street, and I wanted a pair of two-way hinges. You couldn’t
buy them anywhere. It wasn’t anything that was made during the War. And
I went and saw Mr Chaney, and I said, ‘That’s what I want, Mr
Chaney.’ And he said, ‘I’ve got some upstairs somewhere’ – and
he had a loft to that place – and he went out and about 20 minutes later
he came down with two pairs of these magnificent brass hinges that had
been ordered for a yacht in about 1920 and he’d still got them in the
loft, and he knew they were there but he didn’t know where they were,
but he got them! They were actually fixed to a pair of doors in the
kitchen of Appledore in the High Street in Wivenhoe, where we lived – so
as we could go in through the kitchen both ways, without having to open it
and pass the door. He had a telephone in the shop. So if you needed a
telephone – not that we knew anybody with a telephone – Uncle Percy
Chaney would use it for you. You didn’t go round the counter. But I
can’t imagine anybody in Wivenhoe wanting to use the telephone, to be
quite honest. Home
delivery - Olive Whaley Mr Stickley the
greengrocer didn’t have a shop. He used to come round with a horse and
cart, he was the greengrocer. Mr Clarence, he was another greengrocer. Mr
Newman, he came a bit later, I think, because I’m talking really, now,
before the War, actually. And, of course, the coal was all brought by
horse and cart. And the Co-op had a bread van which came. It was horses
and carts very much after our childhood. The Co-op bread van, but the
Co-op bread used to come from Halcyon
Palmer When we moved here in 1963 we had a lot of people who used to call twice a week, with a van or a lorry, so on Tuesday and Friday there would be greengrocery, and on Wednesday it would be the butcher...there was a lot of that. A lot of people used it. It was terrific service, really. You don’t realise it until you haven’t got it any more. Shops on the Cross - Ray
Hall The shops on the Cross, as a kid there, what is now the Spar, was a
little tiny shop, with a little wooden affair on the side, and the first
people I remember in there, their name was Wilson, and that was one of the
first places I ever remember getting an ice cream, and they were Lyons, I
think she sold. And then Mr and Mrs Hart took it over, and after them,
another people by the name of A
self-sufficient community - Sue Kerr I think Wivenhoe was really a self-sufficient community, as regards shops, when I was a small child [in the 1940s]. My father’s wasn’t the only butchers’ shop in Wivenhoe, there were at least two others. One, the Co-op butchers, was in what is now a residential premises called Butchers, and near to the Black Buoy, run latterly by Terry Endean – another lad that used to go up to Colchester to school on the bus, I might say! The Greens were in the fish business for many generations, so fresh fish and fish and chips from members of the Green family. Our milk was delivered by Mr Lennox from Vine Farm, that’s now a dwelling house lived in by Dr Durance (?), and the Vine Farm Estate is named after the farm. But he wasn’t the only milkman in Wivenhoe, his rival was almost exactly opposite – Mr Watsham! Where the new Fire Station is, that was the other dairy farm in Wivenhoe. And there was certainly one, if not two bakers – Mr Ennew was the baker that we patronised. There
was a Co-op in Wivenhoe, in the same place the Co-op is, but a much older
building. My mother didn’t patronise the Co-op store in Wivenhoe but her
groceries came from Stacey Wood, a general grocer, whose shop was then
taken over by the Barton family. The shop was in the High Street, near to
the railway bridge, right on the corner of There
was also the odd shop on Spion Kop. There used to be a shop there that
sold until quite late, I would think, mid-Sixties/Seventies, I would have
thought. Mr Raven used to run that. He took over, for a while the Fishmongers?
Well, we had Greens in Quite
self-contained - Martin Newell Wivenhoe was quite
self-contained. There was Bartons, which was great! It was just a
brilliant, all-purpose village grocery shop. This would have been
about’75/’76 of course. What we call the Deli now I think it was
called London Stores then, and it was a rather more expensive food shop,
and that was run by Mr and Mrs Fish, I think. God, there was Peggy Wools.
There was Carrington’s – this is typical Wivenhoe –a chemist’s
that didn’t have a dispensing licence, so you still had to go up the
top! They just never applied for it. That was Carrington’s. They had
everything – sunburn cream, sunglasses, but still everyone always had to
go up the top of the village! There was a carpet shop, there was a
women’s hairdressers. There was Alan Hayes, the family butchers,
although he never butchered my family! He burst into my room one day with
a meat cleaver, ‘Ahhhh! Your granny!’ And where Pam Dan
lives in Queen’s Road, there was a shop called Self’s. That was the
kind of shop that would be open on Sunday mornings when nobody else was.
It would have Mother’s Pride, tinned soup, dog food, bog roll, a bit of
ham, not as exotic as the Deli, not as fully comprehensive and practical,
but just a handy shop, the demand was there. There wasn’t a Tescos.
People didn’t have so many cars. There were little shops all over the
place, actually. They’ve gone. There was a shop on the corner where the
estate agents is – Spicer McColl – and just along from the fish shop
was an ironmongers run by Jack Mallett, and a jolly good one at that, that
sold bits of 2x4, and nails, and pots of paints. Change in the High Street
- Pat Smith Opposite to the
Greyhound has changed [since 1979], where the estate agents is, because
over there was Glozier’s, the barbers’ shop, so that bit has changed.
But apart from that, the High Street hasn’t really changed a great deal.
The shops have changed, I mean, what’s in them. We had Barton’s, there
was a shop opposite called Talismans, which was a gift shop. The
delicatessen, of course, is still there, although it’s become possibly a
bit more upmarket than it was when we first moved here. It was a bit more
of a general grocery shop really. It was run by a man who used to sail a
lot, and I think he looked upon it as supplying the boats a bit, that sort
of thing. We had Malletts, the ironmongers in Varieties of shop Groceries
and greengroceries The
Co-op - Olive Whaley If you had your groceries, say, from the Co-op, you’d have your
Order Book, and Mum would write down what she wanted this week, and
she’d send me across to the Co-op, and then the boy would deliver it,
and then she’d have to go across and pay for it. So it all worked all
right. And if you did go to the Co-op, Mr Jenkins, I think he was the
Manager, he used to wear these long white cuffs to keep his jacket clean,
and an apron that was buttoned on to his top button of his waistcoat, and
he was on the dry counter and they’d measure out the sugar in blue bags,
and the same with the currants and sultanas, and the tea was all measured
out. And on the wet side, of course, they all wore white jackets, and
that’s where you got your bacon and that sort of thing, but you had to
go each side and get what you wanted so if there were a lot of people
you’d got to wait twice! Sawdust on the floor. That was the Co-op. And
there were four or five butchers’ shops down at the bottom of the
village, all the sawdust on the floor and lots of flies in the windows,
but that’s how things were, wasn’t it! Supermarket at Vine
Parade - Lynda Edwardson We came down to
visit Gary and Christine one day, and When it was built,
it was actually a big supermarket, the building was built in about the
early 1960s. Of course, supermarkets, in those days, were quite a new
thing, so it was a big building for that sort of shop. I’ve heard tales
that it. At one time, part of it was a launderette - because the whole
shop actually takes up three numbers, it’s 1, 3 and 5, Vine Parade. And
I don’t know what happened, but history records that one part was a
launderette at one time. When we first took
the shop on we employed probably about eight or ten people. We needed, at
that time, a full-time butcher, and we had another chap who was a bit like
a manager, he helped us enormously when we first went into the shop,
because we knew nothing. And opening from eight in the morning till then
it was only half past seven at night, so you needed quite a few staff to
cover, and so Richard and I did about 12 hours each most days. And in
those days, we only worked a half-day Sunday – those were the days!
We’ve only extended till nine o’clock at night. We needed to, because
we needed to get in more money because we were slowly going bust, and so
we opened up and saw what time the trade sort of fell away, which turned
out to be about nine o’clockish, and we’ve stuck to that ever since.
In Wivenhoe, we were the first ones to open till nine, and then where we
lead, others follow! No, not really! Tescos is a
different animal. People go in there for big shops, for big family bulk
buying, and they come to shops like us for extras and add-ons, and small
bits – you’re not going to queue up in Tescos for a loaf of bread, you
pop into the likes of Londis. Londis is a buying group. Originally, when
we first joined up, we bought a share in Londis, and every shop
which has the Londis logo had a share, one share, in Londis, and
Londis itself had warehouses and their own lorries, so they could then
approach the manufacturers and say to them, ‘ We have 1800 shops, what
deals can you do for us?’ The likes of Tescos, and Sainsbury’s, ASDA,
they go on market share, they say to the manufacturers, ‘We have this
much market share, we expect this much discount,’ and Londis were able
to wheel and deal on a similar basis, not quite as well, but they did
pretty well. It’s leased with
some lovely people who have been very kind to us over the years. It was
originally owned by a lady called Mrs Wadley. They helped us out hugely. I
mean, there was one time when we were really struggling, and they forewent
the rent for about three months. And then they fixed it for quite a long
time. Then when we put the porch on, we renegotiated the lease, because,
obviously, the porch is adding to the property – it doesn’t do Richard
and I any good, apart from the fact that it looks quite nice, you know. So
they’ve been very helpful to us. The sons now have taken it over because
Mr and Mrs Wadley have both died, unfortunately, but they’re very good
as well. Now we employ about
18 people in the shop, and we have a full-time manager manageress. I do
the paperwork. Richard oversees the shop more now, which is nice. When we
first took the shop over, it ran us, and now we run it. It was such a huge
learning curve, and a very big adventure for us, and it was interesting to
note, every now and again, you’d think, I’ve got control of that
portion of the shop,’ you know, ‘I understand where I’m going with
it now,’ and ‘I know how much to order,’ or whatever. So Richard
does most of that now, and I do the paperwork. Wivenhoe grows on
you! I loved Galleywood, where we lived before. We had a huge circle of
friends and acquaintances, and then to move to Wivenhoe was a very big
culture shock because we knew nobody but everybody knew us, because they
came in the shop. So you’d walk down the street, and you’d have to
have a big smile on your face because you didn’t want to offend anybody!
So that was nice, and people in Wivenhoe are very friendly. Greengrocers
- Pat Green My parents took the shop on in 1948, Taking
over, and moving to the new shop - Pat Green When I left school I went down and helped Mum and Dad full-time in
the shop. Gradually helped Dad decide what we wanted to buy because we
never went to We were there for two years, and the property opposite the side of
the road, near the school, was a off-licence, and that became vacant so we
decided to buy it. We paid £20,000 for the property! That’s We used to have half a day on a Wednesday in them days, and Sunday
mornings we used to open for a couple of hours, but that was before the
law was about, before the supermarket law. In them days, you could open
provided you didn’t sell any non-perishable goods like tinned-stuff and
things like that. You could sell fresh vegetables, fresh fruit, but you
couldn’t sell grocery and tinned stuff, unless you came off of a boat.
So if anybody checked up on us, we used to open a tin of peas, and say,
‘Right, it’s perishable now!’ You know, that was quite a good trade,
then, on a Sunday morning. We used to open from about 10 till one
o’clock. Then things got on and we decided that we’d start going to When we moved over, we were doing flowers, and we were still doing
wreaths, we were doing plants, we were doing greengrocery, we were doing
grocery – and that covers all the grocery lines – and the greengrocery
was full groceries. You get some of these grocers, now, like the Spar, do
greengrocery, but mine was full greengrocery, you know, it really was
everything, down to some of the unusual produce. Well, there was all the
usual stuff, and I used to have peppers and avocados, when we first
started, were quite an unusual thing, but we used to have those,
aubergines, anything anybody decided they want, we’d get - anything what
we liked the look of in the market, we’d get, and try to sell. All the fruits, all the different kinds of fruits, and always about
four different varieties of apples, two or three different sizes of
oranges, lemons, grapefruit, and pink grapefruit when they were in season,
pineapples, melons, pretty well what the supermarkets stock today, we
stocked. Over
to self-service Then I think we fancied some new fittings, and we had ones like
they’ve got in some of the supermarkets, that light up. So we decided to
go over to self-service but then we didn’t want to completely go over,
so we were at the door taking the money, because there were the groceries
so we did half and half. We thought, by going over completely like the
supermarkets by then, down Wivenhoe, it become not so personal. We wanted
to keep it friendly and personal. I didn’t want so many staff, and I
tried to avoid serving so much, because I wanted to be in the shop filling
up, tidying up the bins and the stands and all that, and chat to the
customers in general. Old
and new vegetables - Pat Green Going back to 1948, you never had much fruit, only in season. Just
after the War, you didn’t have bananas and you didn’t have oranges.
You only got bananas on green Ration Books. Me, the only child, I didn’t
get many. But after about 1948 the produce started coming in. You didn’t
get a lot, you may have got a few oranges coming in, but you never got the
countries where they came from beforehand. You mainly got the English
apples, because, in them days you had a lot more varieties of apples.
People only know Cox’s now, but you got D’Arcy Spice, and Blenheims,
and Charles Ross, plus the Cox’s, you know, and then you got the Bramley
and Howgate Wonders, and then you got the pears, different kind of pears.
You used to be able to get a little pear called a ‘Jolly Mount.’ It
was a very small pear, not as big as a egg, hardly. We used to go over to
Ardleigh, to an old place where there was a great big old tree, and they
used to pick them in buckets, on about Armistice Sunday, and bring them
back and store them in the shed, and then get them out about two weeks
before Christmas, and they used to be beautiful. And you could get another
pear which, when you put it in the oven, went pink, really pink. You got
so many different varieties of apples which all died out now. People only
know the foreign apples now. You’d never heard of avocados and things like that. You got that,
people used to come in the shop, ‘Oh, what’s that?’ ‘Oh, that look
funny,’ and you had to try to explain to them what it was. They had what
they called a Fruit Federation, we used to go to conferences, so you got
people all over the Essex area and East Anglia, and London, used to have a
two or three day conference at Harrogate or somewhere like that, and
people used to discuss things, so then you could pick up recipe books and
little titbits, and I used to buy recipe books and read about it, and try
to explain to them what you done with it, and how you could cook it. And
when the aubergines come in, you had to try to explain to them how you
cooked it, and what was nice. And, of course, being in a small place like
Wivenhoe, they’re all older people, it took a lot of them a long time to
pick up new ideas. Or even try to try them! Expanding
the stock - Pat Green Most of the stuff didn’t come in washed, like it do now, it came
in just as it came off the field, you know, nice and natural. The
housewife, now, has got to have it all washed and prepared. Towards the
very start, we did sell biscuits and they came in the tins, all loose. A
few tins of tinned vegetables and tinned fruits and things like that. And
then we gradually diversified into doing a little bit more and a little
bit more, and then we started on the soap powders, you know, and the
toilet rolls, and then we realised that half of that shop weren’t big,
so we had to take the front room, but then we started on more stuff. My
dad was a rare one. He was still in business, he’d go up to Cash and
Carry and bring some baking tins back, odds and ends like that, so we had
to have a little spot for all them kind of things. And as I say, I always
went and got some flowers. Some people said, ‘Oh, I wish you’d stock this,’ and ‘stock
that,’ and we stocked it and we found out it didn’t sell! So in the
end we stocked what we thought people would like. You got somebody who
would ask for something unusual and you’d get it for them and they’d
buy one, and you’d have the rest laying on the shelf. So in the end we
stuck to the general produce - lots of different coffees, lots of teas,
and the sugars and the caster sugars and the flour, and the butters and
the marge, OXOs and Bistos and all the soap powders, and the dog foods and
the cat foods, and you stocked that kind of general stock what people
wanted, but none of the unusual stuff in the tinned line. [There’s] pleasure in stocking up and making sure it was all nice
and fresh. And when we had the new fittings I used to make sure I never
had a load of apples together and a load of oranges together, I used to
put a orange and some lemons together, with an apple, then some oranges
again, so I had a green apple, and then I’d do an orange and that, then
I’d put a red apple. And the same with salad stuff, so one colour would
contrast the other one. And there’s the Spar shop now, they just shove
everything in there and they don’t keep an eye on it. Health
food alcove - Pat Green And then my daughter - under Jolliffe’s Yard, there’s those
shops and offices. Opposite the Post Office, that little arcade thing.
Well, when that was first built, there was a hardware shop, and a pet
shop, and my daughter had one of them as a health food shop, only a small
one, but she was working over the Cockayne’s apple fields, so my mother
used to go down and serve, but it didn’t really pay. There was more
outgoing than what there was coming in. We’d got a little alcove in the
shop over there, so I suggested why don’t she move over to us, and
we’d manage her little quarter, she had her own till, and owned that,
and she’d come and pre-pack the stuff up after she left off work, and
somebody would come in and they’d want something of Linda’s, so we’d
just go in her little alcove and sell that. Well, she’d always got loose
spices, she’d got about 60 jars, and you could buy just a little pinch
of something, and you only paid about 20 pence for a little bit, and
you’d pay about 80 or 90 pence for a jar. And all the soya stuff, and
all the pulses and tofu, so that was amalgamated with that then. Suppliers
- Pat Green By then, there wasn’t a lot of what I’d call local suppliers
going now. You see, now, you notice, you don’t see a lot of them. And
people who grew their own stuff, you’d get a lot of these farm shops,
which were a thorn in my father’s side, because when he was on that, he
used to say, ‘They don’t have none of the overheads, they don’t have
none of the rates to pay, they don’t have none of the overheads, none of
the inspections,’ that was a bit of a thorn in my father’s side, and
that became a bit of a thorn in my side as well. A farmer could just put a
stall outside one of his farm gates, and just sell it directly. And he had
no overheads, and that was a little bit of a thorn in our sides in the
early days. But now it’s completely different. When Mum and Dad first started out, a lot of it used to come through
a wholesaler and they used to pick up the stuff. But we used to pick up
cauliflowers local, and we used to pick up potatoes local. Carrots, well,
they never grew down this part, so you’d get Bedfordshire carrots,
that’s the best soil up there for carrots. The Fen country used to have
the best celery. We used to go and pick up our own potatoes or later on, when we were
selling so many in the winter time, we used to have about two ton get
delivered by lorry and put in our potato shed - we had a proper potato
shed and I could always do a man’s job by picking up a 55lb bag of
potatoes and putting it on my shoulder and taking it in the potato shed,
and I used to be able to unload that. And if a lady used to come up with a
car, and, ‘Oh, I want a half hundredweight of potatoes’ – which was
a 55lb bag - I used to go, ‘Right, I’ll go and get it.’ I used to go
in the potato shed, put it on my shoulder, and go and put it in the boot.
But what went down the chute had to come up the hard way, up the stairs!
So I had to bring 40lb boxes of apples up from the cellar and 28lb bags of
carrots up from the cellar. I never thought nothing of it. I used to have
a lovely flat tummy! But since I’ve retired now, it’s not! I don’t
think I could do all that lifting now! A
real pleasure to be in business - Pat Green But, yes, in the early days that was a real pleasure to be in
business. You knew everybody and it wasn’t such a hassle. You just sold
stuff and there weren’t all these rules and regulations and VAT to sort
out because that became a bit of a headache. My husband always done all
the books and I always done all the buying in and selling. It was a bit of
a joke - he was the brain and I was the brawn of the business! Mind you,
he was still pretty hefty, because he was over six foot and a big solid
man, but we managed, and we used to enjoy it. I’ve known us to be, on a
Saturday, to be in the shop by seven, to sort things out, open at eight.
Shut up at 5 o’clock, scrub the shop out, which we always done, cashed
up, and then in them days, we used to have our friends, and we used to go
perhaps to a dance or something like that, and we’d get to the dance and
I’d be dancing till 12 o’clock. I don’t know where I got the energy
from, sometimes! This is what I always say to this day, it’s not what you put on
the outside of your face, and the outside of your body, it’s what you
put on the inside. And I never smoked and I always had the best of the
vegetables and fruit and things like that. What we couldn’t sell, we had
to try to eat! Grocery van round - Ralph
Moss 1936,
I think it was, my mother and father-in-law decided to move here, into
this bungalow, 55 The Avenue, and I came with them, slept in a little room
at the back. Hadn’t been built long. There was only that one and this
one next door, and the next one, then there was a spot of ground where
Graham Wadley’s father and mother built the house while we were here.
Anyway, we moved here and I went bought a van and went round selling all
my wares. I didn’t bother about towns at all. Mersea, I joined the Army in about 1936/37, Territorial. It was part-time, I’d still got my round. In 1939, they called us all up. And I didn’t go. I couldn’t, I’d got all my rounds to do and I kept putting it off! Lasted till the Military Police come and got me! I went off in the Army and got married. When I
had my own round I had all this land on this ground at the back here, one
and three-quarter acres, it’s all built on now. I used to cultivate
that. Had a tractor. Pig sties. Ducks. Chicken thing. Oh dear me! I was a
busy man then! Or busy boy, rather! Used to do all that myself. Then when
I went to Bakers The
smell of bread - Halcyon Palmer There were two bakers - real bakers that made the bread, and there was Lasts, which is where Valentino’s now is. There was Cracknells, where the Bakehouse is. And if you went there in the morning all the bread would be warm, and that was lovely! It smelled lovely! And they had their proper bakehouse at the back, and it was real bread! Bakers’
delivery boys - Walter Wix I wasn’t a great academic achiever by any manner of means! But eventually when I did leave school, which was at 14, I first of all went to work for a Miss Franks who ran one of the small bakeries. I was a baker boy and it was a marvellous little job because there was only three bakers in the place at the time – there was her, Billy Cracknell, and Duffield who had taken over the Last’s business, where my father was. So the round wasn’t all that big but it was sufficient (she was a spinster) to bring her in an income to live on, and she had a particular chap who baked for her and all I had to do, once I learned the ropes, was to do the round and deliver the bread every day which eventually I managed to do by lunchtime, and every afternoon was my own! And for that, I got ten shillings a week which was quite good money at the time. And that enabled me to spend a lot of time on the Quay, getting to know the ferryman in particular, which was a Mr Sainty and, of course, I got interested in boats and things. Mr Sainty was a very genial old chap. He ran the ferry for a considerable number of years and he got me interested. He used to take me for rides in the ferry boat, and eventually, afternoons when he’d go for a sail, he’d say, ‘You coming for a sail, boy?’ and, you know, I’d go and enjoy a trip down the river. So that worked out quite well until the situation altered, because Miss Franks’ baker had been ill with a recurrent problem and I was only there filling in. I forget who used to do her baking in the meantime, but he was a chap by the name of Harold Payne, and when he came back, of course, he did the baking and the round as well, so that put me out of work. But at the same time as that happened one of the other bakers, i.e. Mr Duffield, whose baker and manager was a man named Arthur Cork, needed an additional baker boy, so I went from one bakery to the other one and stayed there until I was 16. There was a time in Wivenhoe I knew everybody in the place and if a property became vacant you kept your eye on it until you saw somebody was going to take it over, and if you could be on the door first to offer your bread for sale, you were! Glendower Jackson
Miss
Franks had a bakery in Cycled and cycled - Charles
Tayler I was 13 when I left school. If you’d got a job you could leave school in them days. I left school in the August, summer holiday, and I started work the next day for old Ernie Cracknell. He used to have the bakery down the church and the son took over, Billy. Six o’clock in the morning I started work, and sometimes you never used to finish till eight or nine o’clock at night. We were still on the round. I cycled and cycled and cycled. I worked there until the War started . I came home in 1945, and went straight back to the Bakery, and that’s where I stopped till 1956. When I
started work I earned five shillings a week. I used to give my mother
three shillings for board and lodgings and had two shillings for myself.
It was only three shillings, but three shillings was a lot of money in
them days, that was. A loaf of bread was only fourpence-ha’penny, a
large loaf. I went round delivering. Bert Sawyers had the van and I had a trade bike and I used to go back to the van and load the trade bike up, and do all the country lanes, I did. All the outer places I used to bike away on this old bike. It was lovely until one day I was biking up the Cross, I’d got a basket full – a big bike that was – and I had a basket full of hot bread just come out the oven, and there was thick snow on the road and I hit a skid, and I went in the ditch and the bread and all! Well, I got the bread out, that was soaking wet through, weren’t it! I was so scared I didn’t know what to do! Because a whole basket of bread had soaked all the snow up into it! I had to take it, go back to the van. The bread had to be dumped, didn’t it! I weren’t very popular . Christmas
box - Charles Tayler There
used to be a lot of rich people in Wivenhoe in them days. I can remember
when I was doing the bread round at that time, working for Cracknell, Mr
Loveless and Dr Radcliffe’s wife. Mr Loveless give me a half-sovereign
for Christmas once! Well, that’s worth more than one whole year in
wages! But I always got five shillings off Mrs Loveless and Dr
Radcliffe’s wife. I got as much money as I was earning at work, off them
two, for a Christmas box! Oh, I thought it was great! To get five
shillings! I was only getting five shillings for working six days a week!
I always got Mr Loveless those little crusty Taking
over the bakery business - Charles Tayler When I
came back from the Mr
Mortlock the miller - Sue Kerr The
Mill House, on the corner of Butchers
and Slaughterers High
class butcher - Sue Kerr My
father was Cecil Amos Everitt, and my mother was Kathleen Grace Everitt,
formerly In his
youth, working with his father in the water meadows in the My
father kept the shop in I can
remember the Wivenhoe shop very clearly. It was a double-fronted shop –
a window on either side. The big walk-in cold store was on the right-hand
side. I was always rather frightened of these big walk-in fridges, which
had a door like a safe-deposit, almost! And I was rather frightened that
either somebody, or myself, would get locked in. Straight in front of the
door was the cashier’s desk, and the working block and serving counter
was on the left-hand side. My father had a manager called Bill Rule, who
lived in I
didn’t see very much of my father, he was very busy. He went to market
in He bought local and he knew the business through and through, because his family had been in the business for generations. He’d learnt the retail side of the butchery business from his father, and his father sent him up to Smithfield Market, to learn the wholesale side of it, as a young man. He did try to interest me in the business. I think he was a little disappointed that his first child was a daughter, and that I wouldn’t be able to follow in this very long tradition of the family business. But nothing daunted, he still interested me in it, perhaps hoping I would be on the administrative side of it later on. My
father traded under the name of C A Everitt. Neither he, nor my mother,
liked his two Christian names – Cecil Amos – and my mother called him
‘C’ as his nickname. He bought his meat from Colchester Cattle Market
but he also went to local farms and bought direct from farmers, and I
remember him taking me to the Knowing
anatomy - Sue Kerr My father’s knowledge of anatomy was second to none. He used to bring home, for instance, a hip joint of a creature and say, ‘Feel this. This wonderful smooth cartilage. Feel it. Look how it slips one bone against the other. Isn’t it wonderful?’ And when he chopped the foot off the dead chicken he would pull on the tendons to show how the chicken’s foot was articulated. He would sometimes bring home an eyeball and take out the lens - it was like a biological dissection really - and he’d pop it on the newspaper, and say, ‘Look at that. Look how it magnifies the print on the newspaper.’ And so I was never squeamish about either animal or human bodies. My interest in anatomy stayed with me and I think it laid the foundations of my own career as a physiotherapist, and anatomy, the learning of human anatomy, was paramount in my career. It was
high class trade because he served the Lexden area and that side of My father was sometimes paid for the meat in kind, not only the poorer folks would pay him in kind but also some of his customers in the more affluent part of Colchester, who were perhaps down on their luck or lost money, perhaps in the Depression, or something like that. My mother had a lovely Persian rug in her bedroom which had been a payment for a meat bill, and a set of very dainty little silver coffee spoons which had also come as payment! Slaughterhouse
- Glendower Jackson The
slaughterhouse is down the bottom of Fish
trades Selling and smoking fish -
Ken Green When I
came out of the Army and I’d got no boat to go back to, I decided that
I’d go into the retail trade myself. And so, eventually, a shop came up
in When we started there we were buying the Wivenhoe fish, but you can never rely on any one source for fish because fish is seasonal in certain areas. Seasonal in that they’re always on a spawning cycle, and they’re moving round from one place to another. Eventually we decided to buy a trawler of our own in the late Sixties/early Seventies. We got Ernie Vince, who was a local fishing and yachting skipper, lined up for that job. Wivenhoe
smokehouses - Ken Green We had
a smoking kiln in the new shop that we built in I’d
got two kilns in I
started to accumulate trawlers again, in conjunction with two other
fishing skippers. And brother Smoking
the By far
the best flavoured herring was the Yarmouth/Lowestoft herring, second to
none. The local herring, which are a smaller breed round here, certainly
haven’t got the same oil content and are certainly not as flavoursome as
the Yarmouth herring. But because of the method of plunder those shoals
didn’t last long after the War. Great tragedy, because that type of
herring were superb. They’ve been fished out and do not exist. So you
can say the East Coast for fishing of herring are now gone. And in
Wivenhoe, when we used to import direct from Lowestoft, the Fish
round the curtain - Olive Whaley Green’s, the fish shop, I think you could get wet fish from him but it was mostly fish and chips, but you had to jolly well queue for it then. And during the War, of course, there was a problem because of the blackout and you had to get round the curtain and don’t show any light so that was a bit tricky, but of course, they managed to find a way round it. You could get a piece of fish for sixpence and a penn’orth of chips, and you’d got a good meal. Greens had always been a fish name - Brian Green I had a picture of the smack, Elise in the fish and chip shop, but I didn’t let that go when I sold the shop, because that had got quite a family history to it. That belonged to my grandfather, the Elise, and, oh, she was broken up about 60, 70 years ago. I left fishing when my father died and took the fish shop. But my father had a stroke just before we packed up and we had the chance to take the shop. He’d worked there as a boy, he knew the fish trade and that sort of thing backwards. And he said, well, he can take it easy and I can do the graft. So we said we’d sell the boat and take the shop. Well, we sold the boat and he died. So I was then left with the option of taking over the shop – which I didn’t know much about, and didn’t know if I wanted to know that much about it, not on my own. But, anyhow, I started the shop going and I thought, ‘Well, stay there for six months,’ just get it up and running and get another boat and go back to sea. But then the fishing got worse and I was making a living where I was and I was beginning to enjoy what I was doing there. I stayed there for 36 years! But I only went for six months! I met Carol and we ran the shop for years and we sold up about five and a half years ago now. I miss the regularity of going to work. The getting up at six every morning. I still find it easy enough to get up early in the mornings, and I hate laying in. The shop was a struggle in the early days, because I didn’t really know what I was doing. I can remember, when I was a kid, thinking, ‘Cor, I’m glad I haven’t got to work in a shop!’ because I knew nothing about the money side. I suppose I took to the cooking because I quite like cooking, actually, and I think if you like something, you can make a job of it. But my father had worked there when he was a boy – it did belong to the Green family. That was my uncle who, inadvertently - none of the rest of the family knew it - sold it to a Mr Dickerson of Brightlingsea. So really, we were quite pleased that we thought we could get it back and put it back into the Greens again. You know, I suppose we were a bit big-headed or something and we knew Green’s had always been a fish name in Wivenhoe. Grandfather and all of that, like, had had boats, and that was fishing. There was no other shop that done the same sort of thing. When I started there was no restaurants in Wivenhoe, so by the time the restaurants had opened up I was fairly well established, so we got by without anyone taking too much of the trade, I suppose. Dairies Milk
delivery from the ferry - Marjorie Goldstraw The
milk came from a farm over the ferry and they came over the ferry with it
twice a day, because nobody had milk, just a lot of milk for one day, they
had to go round with it twice, and measure it out with a can. They used to
put the jugs out, and measured it out with a can, a half pint or a pint,
just whichever you wanted. We delivered it. I had to do The
milkround - Ivy Knappett I
delivered milk for a person name of Payne, and they had a little shop in
Nellie Gates, the fish shop down there in Two of us had to hold the trolley to push it and it was ever so heavy because they had a lot of milk in those churns. And, of course, I was going up, bottom out, pushing it. One day all the boys was whistling! And I thought they were whistling me. They wasn’t, they was whistling Gracie really! And so I turned round and waved to them and they called out, ‘Not you, skinny! We want somebody what’s got some meat on!’ Would you believe that! Oh, did that worry me! I went home and told my mother. I sat down and I ate and ate, my mother say, ‘You got a worm? Come on, let me have a look up your bottom and see if you’ve got worms up there!’ Bottling
milk - Glendower Jackson In Mr
Sainty’s ice cream - Olive Whaley Mr Sainty had a shop, a wooden little hut. That was on the left-hand
side, a little before the turning to go up Ice
cream maker - Ray Hall We used to have Mr Wombwell come along with his ice cream van in the
afternoon and stand at the end near the school. He used to do
Brightlingsea Secondary Modern at lunchtimes and then get here in the
afternoon for when this little school turned out, and I should think he
was one of the few people who I can remember selling ice cream. He first
started to manufacture it in Chemists The
Pharmacy - Peggy Carrington How we come to have the shop, my in-laws were Clactonians, and they
evacuated from Van
round - Peggy Carrington After the War my husband came back into the shop, but we found there
wasn’t enough trade to do two families, because there was two families
then, you see. So he decided to buy a van, take the products out to all
the outlying district. Alresford, Tendring, Elmstead. That was unique,
because nobody had ever thought of that, I don’t think! All what we sold
in the shop. We were a chemist, but not dispensing, so we couldn’t call
ourselves a chemist, we had to be a drugstore. I was almost looking after
the shop, because my father-in-law used to come backwards and forwards to A lovely old man used to come in the shop after his pomade for these whiskers that used to, you know, go out there! That was to make his whiskers stiff! Like hairsprays now, I expect. They used to stick out like that! He used to come in with his bowler hat on! Pomade on his hair as well, you see. We used to sell it in a jar. We used to keep it in for him! Artistic
windows - Peggy Carrington My husband was very artistic with his windows, and we had all these
lovely dolls, the Cabbage sort of dolls, he filled the window absolutely
full of those! Absolutely full! And sold all those. People kept coming in
and bought them. ‘Would you save me that one?’ ‘Would you save me
that one?’ Oh yes, we had good fun! And he done a window once, decorated
the window for Christmas, done Father Christmas coming out of a chimney.
Yes, it’s a blow-up one. He comes out every Christmas, except for two or
three years back we lost him, because, you see, Den went off so quickly,
he’d put things away and I didn’t know where they went. And all of a
sudden, we came across it, or one of my grandsons did. And he had a model
railway running in the window, and the kids loved it! All looking in the
windows. Yes, that was nice. Clothes Haberdashery
- Freda Annis For my first job
when I left school, I went into Mrs Lily Parker’s drapery shop. My
mother had always known Mrs Parker and, unbeknown to me had said to her if
Doris, this other girl, is leaving any time, ‘I’d like my daughter to
come and work with you.’ ‘Oh,’ said Mrs Parker, ‘I’d like it.’
And as soon as she knew this other girl was leaving she saw my mother and
said could I start? And I got on ever so well with her. It was quite a
biggish shop, really. It sold clothes, socks, children’s socks, knickers
and underwear, and wool, and materials, almost everything, because people
didn’t go in to And the first thing
she said was - it was about November time, I think - ‘Can you knit?’
she said, ‘Well, I know you can, really.’ I said, ‘Yes, I can
knit.’ So she started me off knitting these bed-jackets and that, for
Christmas. But I took to it all right. I still like my knitting. Lily died during the War, in about 1940 - she was only 46. She had a bad heart. I carried it on for nearly three years. I got my papers to be called up but Mr Parker wrote in. I would have liked to have got out of it but I felt that I’d had a good job with them and I thought it wasn’t quite the thing to leave him in the lurch. Well, then a cousin of his, that lived in Wivenhoe, decided she would take it on. But she didn’t keep it very long, and another young woman took it on and made quite a success of it. But she didn’t carry on with it, so a woman from Tiptree had it and had quite a nice shop but that went eventually, like the way of all of them now. Coal Coal
merchants - Betty Govan I had two uncles,
and they ran the local coal business, it went under Jolliffe, and they
lived in the arch in the High Street. The coal used to come in on the
train, where they call the Engine Shed now, it used to go in along there,
and it used to be unloaded out, and they used to take it down and store it
on the marshes. I can remember, being a little girl, going to Ellen Primm
Mr Gladden was a
coal merchant. Eventually Mr Waite was the coal merchant – John, who’s
got the shop, his father was a coalman. But Mr Gladden lived in Hardware
shop - Jack Mallett My first job was in a land agent’s office in Colchester, Mr
Girling, and he used to look after people’s property including Sir
Charles Rowley’s land at Nayland, and I was there for about a couple of
years. And then I got a job at Paxmans, in the Drawing Office, in 1939,
and I was there until about 1964 when we bought the hardware shop. We were
living in Wivenhoe all that time. I got married in 1952 and I met Joyce on
the tennis court at Paxmans. She had a shop in When we bought the hardware shop it was an existing business. Mr
Newman, he kept it, and before that was a Mr Chick. So it had been going a
few years. I was always interested in tools and do-it-yourself, they had a
few bits and pieces, but it was a lot of household ware when we bought it,
even cleaning goods and coffee and vinegar and things like that. But we
gradually changed it over to hardware and timber and tools. It was here,
in Corner House where I live now. The whole of the downstairs was a shop
and we lived upstairs some of the time. We eventually finished up, as I
say, selling timber and tools, and used to sell a bit of everything in the
hardware line. In fact I was just looking up some of the old orders which
included wallpaper and glass and all that sort of thing. I did wood
cutting and things like that. The shop ran until 1986, which was the year
that Cook’s Shipyard closed, but we had quite an interesting time. Met
lots of people and even dealt with the Shipyard as well. They mainly
ordered things that they’d run out of - tools and things like that. We
sold paraffin and paint and wallpaper and most of the things that the big
shops like B&Q sell now. The shop closed in ’86 because I got to
retirement age. And when you’ve got a business you don’t get much time
for leisure, so we thought we’d live it up! We converted the Corner
House - originally we converted part of it and still kept the shop for a
year or two, and then we converted the whole lot to living accommodation. In
the TV trade - Tony Allcock I’ve been in the
TV trade all my life. I started in it at 15 years old, served my National
Service, and then came out and went back to it again. After I came out of
the army I married Carol, a local girl, and came to Wivenhoe in 1959.
Manor Road was my first married home. I worked for a company in In the early days, of course, people were still listening to radios.
I started when accumulators were still around. I remember the ‘Cat’s
Whisker,’ that was the first one. When we started we were nearly all
black and white TVs - there were very few colour sets around. The boom
times were a couple of years ahead of us, and then we were selling an
awful lot of colour TVs because once mass production got going our
business took off, and this ran along right into the early Eighties. We had a rental content, which was very healthy, but as TVs became
more reliable rental went into decline quite a bit. We did diversify –
we tried hardware after our local hardware shop closed down but that
wasn’t us. So we done what we knew best, and tried to stay with it all
the way. Today my wife Cynthia after 20 years has got used to these odd hours
I work, and she knows that possibly I wouldn’t be the same person if I
didn’t. And it’s not easy for a woman. This is why, now, I’ve
retired at the grand old age of 66. I’m trying to compromise if I can.
With my type of business I can get away with that because a lot is done on
the telephone – people phoning in, wanting me to go along and look at
their TVs. It’s become more workshoppy as the years have gone along,
rather than shop, but we still sell TVs and all the batteries and bulbs.
After all, when I go into the house, if someone’s TV is past it I’ll
suggest buying a new one! So you sell yourself and sell the product! Attitude
to customers - Tony Allcock Running a business like we run you do get to know an awful lot of people. When I go to someone’s house I go to their lounge, into the heart of their home. So you do get an opportunity to talk to people, and they get an opportunity to talk back, so you do get a lot of friends out of it. I don’t class all my customers as just customers where I go to make money, I like the people, that’s very important to me. Some people just call in to have a chat and it’s rather nice they do that. I would hate that to stop. You always get a few problem customers. You’re never in business without them! But generally speaking, any problems we did have, we got over them smoothly. We made sure of that, because the last thing you want is an argument with a customer – over anything – and you must listen to what they’ve got to say first and then sort it out afterwards. That’s my approach to customers. Don’t fall out with them, go face-to-face, and bring them to your level, rather than you go to their level at that time. I never wanted the business to get big - we were always going to be happy with a small business. Sell yourself first, the product second, and you’ll get there. I think you can be the hard businessman but it doesn’t always work for you if you are, because you’re going to be a very lonely person at some time or other. If you can be friendly to everybody – and it doesn’t take a lot of energy – you generally find the public respond to you. Early on in the business we did have tremendous support from Wivenhoe, from local people. Without them, we would never have existed. But as time goes along people change and more new people move into the area. Lots of people have said, ‘Well, it must make a big difference when you get all these people moving in.’ Well, yes, it gives us extra work, but nowhere near as much as anybody would think, because most of the people bring their own TVs with them. They are not going to be buying new TV’s. But if someone moves in and they call you round to connect their TV up, we go and do that. I like to think that you give a good first impression. And with our trade there’s always been advancing. We came into the trade with loads of colour TVs selling well, and then videos were introduced so we moved on into them and hi-fi equipment, and CDs – compact discs – came in, taking over from the records and the tapes. Everything was advancing very very fast – and still is. We’re
a local firm, we’re here to help you if we can, and advice comes free.
This applies not just to me, but also to Waites, the other TV shop in
Wivenhoe. We’ve always worked side by side. After all, they were here
before we were! They’ve always been more on the electrical side -
we’ve always been TV, but we’ve always got on well together. Post Office Starting
as Postmaster at the Cross - David Burrows Immediately we were made very welcome, and we thought, ‘Well, this could be the right place for us,’ and it was! We started at the Post Office on 31st January, ’86. We had a trainer with us for one week, and he shew us a little bit of the things that crop up, but the training was hit and miss and if it didn’t crop up, you didn’t know anything about it! We were fortunate, I suppose, in that having two brothers with Post Offices, I could always get on the phone and say, ‘How do you do this?’ The first Thursday I can always remember, and it was something I hadn’t quite bargained for, in the pure number of people who came for pensions on a Thursday morning! I’d spent a couple of days in my brothers’ Offices, and it wasn’t quite like it was here! This enormous queue built up, obviously we were much slower at dealing with everything, in those days, because we were so new to it. The queue went out of the door, and past what was the hairdressers then, and we just worked our way through it. And one of the funny things – funny now, I didn’t think so at the time – but this great big voice at the back of the queue said, ‘New Postmaster’s taking his time! Does he think we’ve got all day?’ I thought, ‘Whoever’s this?’ And in actual fact, in later years, this whole thing carried on, and he used to stir me up, and I could stir him up, and we had a great relationship. In actual fact, we found out our birthdays were on the same day as well! I didn’t know how to take it to start with, I suppose, and he was just winding me up, which was fine! But in later years, I could reciprocate and wind him up, just as easily! One of the nice things, on the very first day that we opened on the Saturday morning, I suppose it was about 11 o’clock, a little old lady came in, Aileen Style – she used to live in the Ropery House just along here – came in with her tin of cakes, and just said, ‘Welcome to the Cross,’ which was really nice! And that made us very very welcome. In later years, when she was on her own, we could reciprocate by taking her a Christmas dinner when we dished them out. Friday night was always a traumatic night for the first few weeks because you had to balance the books on a Friday night, ready for the next week. We were taught the official way, which means you didn’t start anything until after the office had shut, so at half past five, you then started to count everything down to the last penny stamp, to make sure that everything tallied and what have you! So I suppose it was about ten o’clock by the time we finished, so having not having had any food, the fish shop down here was always shut, so I’d nip over to Alresford fish shop to get some fish and chips, something to eat, and then that would be it for the night! Getting
ready - David Burrows Jean used to get up
first, take the dog out. I am not very good first thing in the mornings,
I’ll tell you! And she knows best not to talk to me! I’d get up, have
a little bit of breakfast, cup of coffee, have a shave and a shower and
get ready for work. We used to get everything out of the safe, get all the
cash out, make sure everything was done ready for opening time at nine
o’clock, make sure we’d got enough notes, coins, and fill up the coin
hoppers, make sure all the paperwork was up-to-date, ready to go, and we
used to get all the forms filled out, as far as we could, for each day,
before we started, all the blank forms, and wait for the nine o’clock
panic! And every nine o’clock was a queue on the doorstep! Pension clubs - David
Burrows And after a few months/years, I suppose, you virtually knew who was going to come in, in what order, because it was like a club out there, particularly on Mondays or Thursdays, in the old days. In the old days all the pensions were paid on a Thursday but in the latter years, anybody new coming on to a pension was paid on a Monday. So you had almost two clubs – the more elderly were on a Thursday and the younger pensioners were on a Monday. And they were like a Thursday Club and a Monday Club really! And you could almost tell who was going to come in next because they came in in the same order virtually, because they’d been chatting outside, came in to do their bits, get their pension, pay the bills and buy stamps, savings stamps, in tho |