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
those days you could buy stamps towards your telephone bill, your gas
bill, electricity bill, TV licence, all sorts of things, so this is how a
lot of them budgeted because none of them had bank accounts as such, they
just had the cash and allocated it for the various bits and pieces. Diversifying
- David Burrows Pensions was a
great percentage of the business. I would guess probably about 25 per cent
of the business to start with, when we first came here, and that was
really one of the reasons why we bought the place, because we had a look
at the books and knew that there was this good steady flow of customers
coming in. When we bought it the shop was virtually empty, they didn’t
sell anything at all hardly, so we knew that we could start something, and
we thought we would go into greetings cards, because, there again, two
brothers in the business, they could help us out with where to buy stock,
and what to buy, so we went into greetings cards and stationery, and it
proved the right thing to do. And there wasn’t much point in going into
groceries because we had the Spar shop next door. We could have gone into
anything, because the three properties next door – the Spar Shop, what
is now the Bicycle Shop, and the Hairdressers – are all owned by the
same owner, so their leases are so tied up that they cannot cross-sell
anything between them, but because ours is freehold, and it’s our own,
we can do what we like. We gradually built up our stocks and everything we
took in the shop, for the first few months, just went back into stock, and
gradually we built it up. Community
spirit - David Burrows Very often we might be the only people these customers saw, so we tried to give them time, and help them if necessary. Its a bit frustrating at times when you’ve got a queue to the door and somebody wants to talk, but at the same time we felt we owed it to them because, as I said, there might not be anybody else they’d seen all week. Plus we often used to get forms to fill in, ‘Can you just help me do this form?’ Which was fine, we were quite happy to do it. We saw it as part of the job, I suppose, trying to retain the community spirit, because I know the people previous to us, they were quite the opposite, they said, ‘We’re not customer-orientated at all.’ They had all sorts of strange rules and regulations like, ‘You can’t post parcels on a Thursday, because it’s pension day’! But fortunately, I’ve always been in a customer-orientated business, I like people and I like dealing with people, so it was good. And Jean used to work in a school, so she was used to dealing with children. And that’s really the way we saw it, as our chance to give something back into the community as well. I don’t say that boastfully, but that’s the way we saw it, we felt we ought to try and do something. We tend to be very private after hours, I suppose, we tend to look for our own company and close friends, but in business hours, we’d try and give it everything. Happy
times, sad times - David Burrows My memories are of
people, people, people all the time, and, I mean, such lovely people.
Happy times. Sad times as well. Sad times, when you’ve had a couple
coming in for the pension for ten years, and all of a sudden, one of
them’s no longer there. Very sad. Happy times as well, though, because
we’ve been privileged, I suppose, to share their happy times like Golden
Weddings, birth of a grandchild or a great-grandchild. And, of course
there’s things that we could share as well, we had a grandchild, or two
grandchildren. We retired in June 2003. I shall never be a Wivenhovian.
But, you know, we’re accepted, and I think we tried to do a professional
job, and I think we did it. Yes, we retained the customers, let’s face
it, so we didn’t lose customers. Riverside trades Hector Barr, sailmaker - Freda Annis Mr Barr, that had the sailmaker’s business on the Quay, he used to have the tan sails, when he did them, and they used to be tanned and they were hung where they’ve built the new flats there now. You went up the steps to his sailmaking loft there and they used to be hung right down from there, on the Quay, and used to see them with these great big brooms putting this stuff on. It was fascinating! It was hard work. They used to work very very hard, I think. But there was a lot of trade went on, it was all down the Quay, really, that the trades went on there like that. Jimmy
Lawrence Hector Barr was
sail-maker in what is now the Nottage, and I remember one of his orders
was for 80,000 kit bags! That’s a piece of order! He must have nearly
fell over - but this was Wartime, and that was for the Navy. And most of
the men had gone off to the War and so he employed the ladies locally, and
some from Brightlingsea used to come up here and work, and I think
that’s why he packed up, in a way, because before the War a man’s wage
was about £2-10-00 a week, and when they come back from the War, they
wanted £5 a week, and they naturally thought there was going to be a
slump at the end of the War because there’d been one at the end of the
First World War, they thought there’d be one after the end of the Second
War. Yachting had diminished a lot, and there was no people sailing yachts
at the end of the War, so he actually packed up. He thought he could
never afford the wages, he’d never earn it back again. So he packed up
as a very fit Naval sail-maker. And I think he was sorry for it afterwards
because he then used to come to Rope makers - Peter
Green The
Durrell family, originally, were rope-makers in The Avenue.Dad was born in
1905 and he mentioned that the ropes used to stretch all the way down the
Avenue. The Brown family, I believe, were latterly the rope-makers, but
earlier years the ropes were made for the sailing ships by the Durrell
family. Somewhere along the line the business went out of their hands. The
Ropery is almost opposite Hairdressers Learning
hairdressing - Jan Frostick I went to a hairdresser’s in town and I worked there for about two
months but all I was doing was really fetching and carrying and doing
nothing in particular. And my father was quite concerned about this and so
the proprietor asked, and he said I’d never make a hairdresser in a
hundred years. So when I got home that night he said, ‘You’ve left.’
I got a job in an office at Cullingfords, in the High Street in The wages from my first hairdressing job were £1 a week – which
didn’t even cover the cost of my bus fare and lunch so my parents had to
put some money in towards it. I was sweeping up, answering the phone,
making appointments. Cleaning. Cleaning and cleaning! Meths still brings
back the memories of cleaning all the mirrors and the windows, and all the
Venetian blinds and things. And gradually you learnt to shampoo, and then
you learnt to set - didn’t have blow driers! And then you learnt to perm
and colour, and cutting was the very last thing that you learnt. I think,
those days, your aspirations were a lot less than they are now, when you
first start work. You’re still a child at 15. I think my father was a
bit annoyed, he thought I was being exploited. But they were both behind
me, my mother and my father, a hundred per cent. Although they’d both
had grammar school educations, they wanted me to do whatever I wanted to
do, and I was determined to do this. Bouffant, French pleats, what they called an ‘Italian,’ which
was swept back a bit like the Queen wears now. But I used to go to quite a
lot of the fashion exhibitions for hairdressing, they used to hold them in
Colchester and A
freezing start in Wivenhoe - Jan Frostick I had my own business down in the village. We got married the 15th September, 1962, and I signed to take over the business the day before we got married. So a month after we got married I had the business, and it is now where the bookshop is now. And I kept it for two and a half years, until I was expecting my first child, and then I sold it. The shop was a hairdressers before. I bought it from Gay Tomlinson and her husband but it wasn’t very modern, even by those standards. I don’t think there was a shelf that you could stand anything on, and it had got a little poppy gas heater which I could only wash about two or three people’s hair an hour, so that’s why we changed it all afterwards. The shop was very tiny. I had three washbasins and a drier bank with three driers and a separate drier, and what they called a ‘Dressing Out Station,’ an extra one, and a little tiny desk, and that was it. And so you had to be very methodical. And it was quite hard work because it was quite an old shop. We modernised it about six months after we bought it but the first winter was very hard because it was the winter of ’62-’63, and all the water froze in all the pipes because the shop was built on the top of a basement and the old boy that had it before me had done all the plumbing himself and it was like Spaghetti Junction! There was copper pipes draped everywhere and they just all froze, so we were having to get buckets of water to heat up on my father’s gas ring in his shop, which was about two shops away, and carry it down and wash people’s hair. That’s the only way we could carry on for quite a few weeks. But after that, we semi-modernised it. Young
businesswoman - Jan Frostick But I found it very difficult for people to take me seriously.
Because I was only just 22 - I had to really stick up for myself and make
them realise that I may be young but this was my business. I found it, as
I say, quite hard - people really didn’t want to take me seriously,
especially if I had travellers come in wanting me to buy a lot of stock,
and I’d say ‘No,’ and they wouldn’t... ‘Would you like to go and
fetch your father?’ Or, ‘Who’s the owner?’ and I said, ‘Well, I
am,’ and it was quite difficult to make them realise. The
customers - Jan Frostick The customers were mostly older. The women that had gone out to work
after having their children, that were coming in and having their hair
done – as a majority. And so they all knew my parents, knew me when I
was a child, and were actually working in Wivenhoe or in There were occasionally ones that perhaps felt they couldn’t
afford it every so often, and they would come in, and I’d have to rescue
them, and sort it out a bit. But the same thing happened with colours.
But, on the whole, they were just regulars that came in every week. I did
Joan Hickson’s hair, which was quite an experience, because she’d sit
there and let you do it all, you’d get it just right, and then she’d
run her hands all the way through it and say, ‘Lovely, darling!’ and
put her hat on! Well, it was just Joan! I think it was about six old shillings for a shampoo and set. I
can’t remember a perm, I think it was about £3. Even though I was the
owner they would tip me. I think that’s gone out a little bit now, but
yes, they always did, and they always gave something to the junior, and if
they didn’t give it to the junior, then I gave my tip to the junior. I love meeting people, the conversations and I suppose knowing all
the gossip. I missed it dreadfully when I had sold it. That was the one
thing I really missed. But I didn’t miss the hard work. I think I’d
really worked very very hard for about two and a half years, and I’d
really had enough. So, yes, I think it was just the company I really
missed, towards the end. The
pub ladies - Jan Frostick I used to do what I used to call all the ‘pub ladies’ hair. They
all used to come down and have their hair done, so I made it a point of
every so often going in and just having a drink in the pubs. There was Mrs
Cabuche from the Black Buoy, there was the lady from the Station Hotel,
there was the lady from the Horse and Groom, and the Brewery, that was the
sister-in-law of the lady that worked in the Black Buoy. The Rose and
Crown – Mrs Sparrow. So I just used to go around and just have a drink
with them occasionally, just to feel that, you know, they were kind enough
to give me their business - not that they’d make a lot out of me,
though! But we all knew each other, that was the point. And now, I don’t
think people do so much, in the village. So
tired I went to bed - Jan Frostick When I was really busy I was doing a shampoo and set every quarter
of an hour. I had my junior washing one while I was setting another one,
and I would do that from nine o’clock in the morning until I went home
at lunchtime, at one. And then I’d start again at two, and I’d work
right through Thursday and Friday evenings until seven or eight, and then
I’d work Saturday mornings. And then, Sunday, I used to go down and
clean the shop. I can remember being so tired when I finished work – by
this time my husband wasn’t in the Army and he used to come and fetch me
on a Thursday evening, and I used to go to bed as soon as I got in, and
have my tea in bed because I was just so tired. You came home and washed
all the towels and you’d go down on a Sunday morning and clean the shop
right out, clean the windows and what have you. And I very often used to
be there and Reverend Gaye, who was then the vicar, used to come in and
sit and talk to me while I was cleaning, just before the Morning Service. Two
hairdressing salons - Helen Douzier
I was in Colchester for a few years, and I left school as soon as I
could because I didn’t enjoy school in My mother used to do the books for me and my father was very
helpful, obviously, and my husband was very helpful as well. But in the
meantime I bought another business on Vine Parade, the hairdressers up
there. We were so busy, so for a little while I was running two salons. I
ran both of them, which was a bit difficult, so I only did that for about
a year. The one down in the village was called ‘Flair’ and then the
one at the top, I think we called it ‘Helen’s.’ Hairdressing was very hard work but we had a very busy salon and it
was very enjoyable. We didn’t make a lot of money, we didn’t charge a
lot of money as they do now, but I got a little wage from it. Hairdressers: starting in
1969 - Penny Lear My parents, in the meantime, I think they wanted me to stay at home, so they’d been looking around for vacant premises, suitable premises, and found somewhere in Wivenhoe – at the top, next to the Spar, where the bicycle shop now is. And it was owned by the grocer next door, who owned the Spar. It was a slightly different set-up then, he was an old-fashioned grocer, Mr Humm, and Mr Pettit, a little kind of grocers where you could sit down, with a counter, and have your things in paper bags. That was ’69, and I opened November 27th, 1969. And I was at that premises for 18 years, and then the landlord gave me notice to quit, which was very panicky. Actually, he gave me notice to quit because he wanted to put the rent up. But he tried it, and I called his bluff, and found a premises that I bought, further down in the village, in the High Street. It used to be Carringtons. It was a chemist shop, not a dispensing chemist or a pharmacy, but a chemist shop that sold anything that a chemist was allowed to sell without dispensing, and toys and what have you. And it rather stood on its own, just below the Park Hotel where H2O is now. So I sold that two years ago in April. So in all, 34 years in hairdressing in Wivenhoe! There was another hairdresser, a woman hairdresser called Helen Douzier, who lives three doors away, we’re good friends now, and she actually had a business at the top of the village and at the bottom. So it’s where Hair Technique and it’s slightly below, near where the bookshop is, it was there. So there were two hairdressers owned by the same person. And we were virtually the same age, and very much in competition then. But no nastiness. You know, we’ve all got a living to earn! I’d been in Colchester, in hairdressing, for quite a long time, and my parents were well-known in hairdressing, so I was lucky that the name was known, and I gained a few customers for that alone, also although I’d been away two years, I still had old customers that came back to me, so I, luckily, made money from the first week, which was a good job, because after we’d paid for the salon set up, I think I had about a fiver in the bank! I started off with one junior, and we built up. But it didn’t take very long. And it was the time, in the late Sixties/Seventies, where people went to the hairdresser every week. Hairdressing was different. It was glamorous. You had long hair that you put up for an evening out. You had your hair shampooed and set every week. It wasn’t like it is now, where you’ve got a cut and blow dry that you only want to go every six weeks, or you can do a hairstyle yourself very easily. If you wanted to be smart, you went to the hairdresser every week. So it was a very very good time to start. A job I never regretted
doing - Penny Lear As long as you know what you’re doing, it’s a very easy job really – you go to work and chat to people! It’s very nice! And I was lucky with the last girl I had working for me, we worked together for 15 years, and she came to me as a Saturday girl and then started an apprenticeship, and she stayed with me until I gave up. Now she’s working freelance, and doing very nicely. I had a lot of those clients all the time I was in hairdressing, which to have a customer for over 30 years is quite surprising really. Obviously some when I started were a lot older than me, and they died off, and some were the same age as I was, and they’re the ones that, obviously, I kept, or a few years older than me, perhaps ten years older than me. But, of course, you start off when you’re young and very enthusiastic, as the girls in H2O are now, and you get older with your clients, so your clientele changes, it’s not so exciting, but then you know them very well and you have a very nice time at work. It was a job I never regretted doing and enjoyed until the day I retired. Giving up - Penny Lear
I’d just had enough. It’s funny, I thought about it the year before I was going to retire, and I thought, ‘No, no, I don’t want to give up. I couldn’t bear it! Going out to work every day, I really enjoy it.’ And somebody said to me, ‘One day, you’ll wake up and think, “Right. That’s enough. Had that.”’ And I did. Also, my husband’s a bit older than me, and he felt that he’d been retired for five years, and he felt it was a bit silly that we couldn’t do things together - we wanted to do a bit of travelling. And also, it was the right time to sell, so all in all, there were several reasons, but I don’t regret it. I enjoyed working, and I enjoy retirement! Antiques Impecunious but
aesthetic? - Halcyon Palmer [Margery Dean] became interested in making a little business selling antique furniture. The reason that she started this little business was that, at the end of the War, and during the War, everything was rationed, including furniture, which you had to buy with coupons that were issued to you. And all these people, all these soldiers coming back, and either meeting up with their wives, or getting married, of course had needed a lot of furniture, which they weren’t able to get. And if they could get it, it was not, perhaps, particularly pretty. My mother had the idea of starting a mail order business for the people who wanted something that looked a bit pretty, but didn’t cost the earth. So she used to go around all the local salerooms, and stately house sales, and she would buy very country furniture, which didn’t have a huge intrinsic value because it wasn’t fine antiques, it was simple cottage furniture, but was very inexpensive, and very attractive. And that is how she started her business. She
began by advertising in the New Statesman, a little advertisement which I
can remember perfectly clearly, which said, ‘Impecunious but aesthetic?
Write to Margery Dean’s catalogue for antique furniture at…’ and
that. And she had these catalogues printed, and she would list all the
things that she knew that she could get - if she’d sold that one, she
could go out and buy another set just exactly the same – six chairs, you
know, a drop-leaf table, a mahogany chest of drawers, all this sort of
thing, all antique - all now worth a lot of money. But that is how she
started. And a lot of people came down from She used to keep this furniture, first of all, in our playroom, and then as the business got bigger and bigger, she hired what has now become the St John’s Ambulance Hall, and when it then became bigger than that, she moved into the old chapel, which had originally been the jam factory, and before that, the Swedenborgian church! By this time, we were ten or 15 years on, and she’d learned a lot, more and more about antique furniture, and particularly about Continental antique furniture, which the local dealers, on the whole, weren’t interested in, and in the end she went and exhibited, for several years, in London at the Chelsea Fair, and the Grosvenor House Fair, and was a member of the British Antique Dealers’ Association. So it was quite amusing, it had started in a very small way, but really took off. And she was actually very knowledgeable. Bookshop Wivenhoe
Bookshop - Penny Bell We
moved to Wivenhoe, into a house in Living on the premises I found myself working up until midnight and the local policeman – when we had a lovely local policeman – he used to knock on the front window and pop his head round the door, when I’d gone to open it for him at midnight, and say, ‘Just making sure you’re okay!’ Jean Harding I had
no particular urgings all my life, to run a bookshop, or to be involved in
books; I was much more interested in the theatre. But after a time spent
in Penny Bell Martin
hadn’t even finished the house in Belle Vue Road, he wanted to do all
sorts of different things to it to make our living very spacious, and then
one day I said to him, ‘Martin, there’s this house for sale in the
High Street. I think it would make a wonderful bookshop.’ So he, bless
his heart, agreed that we should move out. It had to be that way, because
I had two children, and they were both at the Boys’ High School in The
house wasn’t very large. It had a wonderful basement from the front to
the back. Apparently, once upon a time, it had been a butcher’s shop,
and there were still hooks down below, and the brick floor had an
indentation, where presumably the meat would drip down, or be washed or
something. On the ground floor, there was the front entrance, which we
turned into the Bookshop, and a back room, with a nice great big inglenook
fireplace. The house was probably built in the early 17th century, I
should think. And we used the room at the back of the Bookshop as the
lounge. And there was a sort of lean-to kitchen that had just been built
on, with wooden steps going down to it as well, so there was a tiny little
kitchen at the back of the living area. And that was how it was, to start
with – which was a bit of a shock after our house in The
importance of the University - Jean Harding [The University] was a very important part of it. It came to be much more so than we had realised, later on, because the Library was wonderful in giving us quite large orders, right from the beginning. These included a lot of very difficult academic titles from remote publishers whom we’d never heard of. Although most of them were far too erudite and expensive to buy for our stock, nevertheless, it did open up areas which we might not have dwelt upon or thought about, helping us enormously to develop our range of publishers and our stock. Sometimes we did duplicate the orders if we found them appropriate for our type of bookshop. Michael Sommerlad, in particular, was very helpful, and it was a good experience for us. Although we had a very small mark-up on academic books, it gave us a solid basis to the stock, and of course, it encouraged the academics to come to us, which was just what we wanted. The Launch - Jean
Harding We went invited some useful and some notable people to the first party to launch the Bookshop. Christina Foyle was one, with whom my husband was working at the time, the owner of Foyles Bookshop, which claimed to be the largest bookshop in the world. So Christina Foyle very kindly came over from Maldon to open what we described as ‘probably the smallest bookshop in the world’! And we had, obviously, a lot of people from the University, and any literary people that we happened to know, and the odd publisher came, I recall. One of the first to come, so keen, was Hilda Taylor, who was then the Headmistress of Broomgrove School. She was wonderful, so supportive, and from there developed our interest and involvement with schools later on. So we sent for the catalogues from all the publishers, and each of us made our selection. It was a relief to find that our separate choices coincided largely and our ideas on strategy. We hadn’t realised how important it was. It would have created real problems otherwise in such a small selective bookshop. Having opened accounts, we started ordering within our limited means. Small amounts of money would be spent on each publisher, until we were bold enough to spend perhaps £40 an order, which no doubt compared with nowadays, would be quite remarkable. I’d borrowed a thousand pounds from my mother to stock the shelves, Penny and Martin had provided the premises. Less than a month after we started, Michael Parkinson happened to be in the village staying with George Gale, so he came down and signed a few books of his – on football I remember, our first author!! Local authors
- Penny Bell In
March 1977 we had a local author’s week. We had Michael Frost, John
Leather, and Alan Watts, all of whom were sailing people. John Leather
used to come in very regularly and check the shelves, to make sure we’d
got a full complement of all his books! We had a very good stock of
maritime material. Frederick Raphael, who was actually living at Langham
at the time. Hervey Benham, of course, who everyone must know. David
Brook, Roger A. Freeman, and Bob Fisher. Well, that was a mixture of
sailing and flying, actually, because Roger A. Freeman’s books are about
The Mighty Eighth: the Book signings
- Jean Harding and Penny Bell Beth
Chatto, who was also local, of course, came on several occasions to launch
her plant books, as did Elizabeth Jeffrey (Olive Whaley) with her
well-researched local historical novels. Welcome too was Ronald Blythe, a
friend whose books were always notable. Hugh Brogan, a very familiar
figure, came several times as his books appeared, while Nicholas
Butler’s well-known history of Wivenhoe was always kept in stock. Phil
Redmond came down, who was, at that time, famous for Grange Hill but he
went on to do We went into schools a lot, because we felt that this was what books were about, taking them to children, you know. And we actually had a number of school bookshops, in the little school in Brightlingsea and Millfields as well. The two times I remember real queues, once was Delia Smith. People in Wivenhoe didn’t seem to be very interested in cookery books but they came to see Delia Smith. Of course, she was always on television at that point. And then later on, when John Ryan, the Captain Pugwash writer came on several occasions, and I’ve got pictures of crowds of people gathering, waiting outside the Bookshop for John, for Captain Pugwash! Retiring
- Jean Harding I continued for ten
years after Penny left the Bookshop, expanding it through into a back
room, increasing the staff. I became the Chairman of the Eastern Regional
Booksellers Association which was a new challenge and widening my spheres.
But when it actually came to leaving, although I still loved it, it was
high time. I was getting tired. It’s very hard work, and I also realised
that I was needed at home. And what did I miss? I missed the people. The
hurly-burly of the Bookshop life was so different from my country life.
But the Bookshop has survived and flourished and in many different ways,
which is a great delight to all. Over
the Sofa - Annie Bielecka Ginny Walters, who
runs the Bookshop, has decided to have this little gallery called ‘Over
the Sofa Gallery.’ It’s quite a small space but for the last two years
she’s invited local artists to hang their work there for a month at a
time, and she’s had a retrospective - she’s had two now and she had
one at Christmas called, ‘The Seven by Nine Retrospective,’ where we
all had to produce a piece of art no bigger than seven by nine inches and
there were about 20 of us there. Tessa Spencer-Price, Jamie Dodds, Robina
Taplin, Eliza Kentridge, Dale Devereux Barker. I hung a large painting
there called, ‘The Suffering of Women at a Time of War,’ and I
didn’t want to sell it, but I hung it for the month when we went to war
in Iraq and it had a lot of response. It’s quite a dark painting and
it’s been picked up on the Internet – it just shows the power of the
Internet – by Schoolboy rounds - Peter
Sainty I was always
brought up to do a paper round, and my paper round consisted of High
Street, Stanley Road, and what we know as the ‘24 Row’ across Spion
Kop. In those days you did the round in the morning, and the Standard
paper was a special delivery at, say, 4-5 o’clock on Friday afternoon
– so you did it all again. I also had a job at the butchers, and I would
do a butchers round till ten o’clock and then go and work for a grocer,
name of Yoverts shop, which is where the delicatessen is now by the Video
Shop, and I would have six or seven special deliveries which took me out
as far as Alresford Grange. I would be in a hurry to finish this, because
I wanted to get to play football at two o’clock. Delivery boy - Alan
Green When I was 14 I
was a paperboy during the War, on a Sunday, and I used to go to the
Shipwrights’ Arms to collect my papers, and go and distribute them
afterwards. I used to be quite an industrious lad! I used to be a paperboy
in the mornings, during the week – Monday to Saturday. A paperboy on a
Sunday, for a different person - the Shipwrights’ Arms, and then
eventually to Hall’s, in Queen’s Road. Then I used to also deliver
groceries for Jimmy Moore. I was Jimmy Moore’s grocery boy – on a
bike. And that was an hour every afternoon, except Thursdays, plus
Saturday mornings. Who did I deliver to? I hate to say the word
‘class,’ but a few of the uppermost paid people, school teachers, the
Curator of Helping as a child - Pat
Green As a child I used
to have to help in the shop, going out the back trimming cauliflower. The
celery used to come from the Fens, with all the tops on and all the
bottoms on, just tied up with string, and that was my job Saturdays and
any spare time, to trim all the celery, trim the cauliflowers, help Mum in
general. I started when I was about 10-12 years old, just help lightly.
And after that Dad used to have a van where it was all set out, where he
used to go around door-to-door, see what they want, come back to the van
and weigh it up, and then go and take it to the house. When I was at We did everything - Lynda
Edwardson We did everything
in the shop. You serve customers, you wash up, wash the floor, clean the
loos, cut up liver. It’s disgusting! At that time we had a fresh meat
butchers counter, so I’ve made sausages. well, I don’t think there’s
any job in the shop that I haven’t done, or Richard, that we now ask
staff to do! Quite early on we kind of went our own ways. Richard did most
of the ordering for the shop, and I would order, like, the frozen food. I
did the paperwork, which I don’t mind, I’ve always enjoyed doing that,
and I’m the queen in the counting house, I count out all the money! So
we kind of found our own paths within the shop quite early on and stuck to
the demarcation lines, really. I’d been a Saturday girl in a shoe shop
when I was 15, but that was a long time ago! But, no, Richard worked in a
bank, and I was a nice happy little housewife, doing a little cleaning job
for 12 hours a week, came to Wivenhoe and started working 12 hours a day!
So it was a bit of a culture shock. It’s like another life. Family fish and chip shop
- Barry Green Dad owned the fish
shop, so we lived there. Must have lived there for 25 years, I should
think. Yes, that was open all day, or mostly in the morning for the wet
side of the fish shop. Yes, he done his own bloaters in the back garden,
yes, and smoked haddock, when it was available from Husband and business
partner - Pat
Green We tried to sell the business for five years. And the people who
came and had a look were husband and wife, and they said they’d never
been in the greengrocery business before and he used to think, ‘Oh,
that’s simple, you know, just buying and selling,’ and the wife would
run the business and the husband would go out to work. It weren’t till
we show them around and told them about what the potatoes was, and what
they had to do, they realised that it is a two-man job, it’s a husband
and wife - it’s a partnership. My husband and me have always been like
that. It’s been partnership, give and take, and we’ve always worked
together. My husband was very very placid. Honestly, in the 46 years we were
married, I honestly don’t remember him losing a temper. We always just
agreed - he was the most placid man a-going! Yet he never lost his temper.
We just got on in business. Yes, a lot of people said, ‘How can you both
be working and living in one another 24 hours?’ I said, ‘Well, we just
did.’ We just got on, worked round one another, and we were just suited
to one another. He gave and take and I give and take. It wasn’t a case
of ‘Me, me’ all the time, we were proper business partners as well as
husband and wife. It worked out ideal. My father had a
ships’ chandlers shop, and he was on a damn good thing when he was young
and all the yachts were about. But it fell through after the First World
War and he sold the shop and he worked in an office in a sand works at
Fingringhoe after that. The shop was a corner shop, with steps right on
the corner and Mr Bowes’s cows used to make a mess on there every time
they went round! It was a small shop - double-decker, you’d got a store
room up top. Used to sell paraffin and paints, ships’ paints and screws
and - well, everything. My grandfather was a skipper on a big steam yacht
and so of course all the yachts used to get the paint from Dad’s, to
please grandfather I suppose! And they were Masons, I think! Business rivalry - Jan
Frostick There was another hairdressers, Cyril Brown’s, he had the shop on
the corner of Egg lifter - David
Burrows One of our old
pensioners used to toddle along to the butchers for his weekend joint.
Now, the butcher always had trays of eggs on the customers’ side of the
counter and this pensioner, he used to slip a couple of eggs into his
pocket, unbeknown to the butcher. Till all of a sudden the butcher latched
on and once he had, he sauntered out from his side of the counter and he
accidentally nudged this particular customer in the pocket! And needless
to say the eggs stopped disappearing after that! In 1947 Wivenhoe
was completely cut off with snow. The Armed
raid - David Burrows In the first week
of our existence here, we suffered an armed raid. It was almost closing
time on a Wednesday, because we used to shut half-day on a Wednesday then,
and I think it was about ten to one. We were both behind the counter,
starting to count up stuff, and all of a sudden, a couple of characters
burst in with masks and hoods and great big holdall, and what appeared to
be a gun. At the time you think, ‘Oh, this is not happening to me
really!’ Everything seems to go in slow motion, so I’d got my back to
the counter, and Jean was facing the counter – and they came over to my
side and said, ‘Hand over the money,’ and I thought, ‘Well, this is
not happening to me,’ and I turned around, and all I did was pushed the
panic button, which sent the alarms off, and they scarpered. But it
doesn’t do your heart too much good at the time! So that was my
experience of an armed raid! Fortunately, nothing happened. But it could
have been a lot worse, I suppose. As a result of that, eventually they
were charged. It took a long time, it must have been about 18 months, a
couple of years, before they actually managed to tie it up. They pleaded
guilty to that and several other offences as well. I know we didn’t have
to go to court on that one. They were from Broome Grove! So, there we are!
You just don’t know, do you? Then the other one,
another armed raid, we weren’t exactly involved in, but the money van
that comes round to the various Post Offices was actually held up outside
our back gate. Oh, it was probably about five or six years ago, maybe more
than that now. They got some money, I think. There was a tip-off about it,
because the place was swarming with police and that’s about as much as I
know of it. I know the whole thing was parked right outside and it was
actually outside our back gate when it all happened. Unfortunately,
that’s the way Post Offices are, they’re rather vulnerable. Whatever
you do for security, you’ve just got to be on your guard all the time,
but not get neurotic about it. Supermarket
bread - Charles Tayler There used to be three bakers in Wivenhoe, and now there’s not one. All the bakeries finished in this area when the Home Made Bread Company and all these companies come in, supermarkets and that. I call it ‘flour and water’ what they made - we was getting about a hundred and odd loaves out of a sack of flour, they’d get about 150, and they could undercut your loaf. You couldn’t make a loaf of bread for the price that they sold that. I feel bitter about it, in some ways because if they’d got large families, like some of them have in Wivenhoe, they’re not going to buy a loaf of bread off a baker and pay about a pound a loaf for it when they can go up the supermarket and get one for about 40 or 50p. New estate agent - Ann
Quarrie A little shop came
up in Wivenhoe and I decided to go for it, and then hit the worst
recession that the housing industry had ever had for seven years! So that
was an absolute nightmare for several years. I opened in February ’88.
It was freezing cold. There was no heating in the shop. I’d got one
really crappy old desk a friend had given me with a twizzle chair that I
fell off every time I turned round! The phone wouldn’t reach the desk
and I daren’t move the desk to where the phone was because I thought
people won’t see I’m there. And I had the door open all the time so
that people would come in but nobody did. I was sitting there in my
sheepskin jacket and gloves and woollies because I’d never been so cold.
But after a couple of weeks I got four houses - they were friends of mine!
The
Co-op came and our takings dropped - Peggy Carrington The big Co-op came, and our takings dropped. And we thought,
‘That’s no good.’ And my father-in-law, had died, so Den said,
‘We’ll try and sell it, shall we?’ Because he was 65, ready for
retiring, and I was 60, and he said, ‘I’ll try and sell it.’ We
tried and we did, we sold it, but they didn’t keep it as we did, for
long. They sold it to a hairdresser, Penny Lear. Struggling
and closing - Pat
Green The last five years
of our trading we were struggling. Supermarkets being allowed to open on
Sundays was one of the nails in the coffin. Trade dropped a lot. And then
the last nail in the coffin was when Tescos opened at Hythe. After that
our trade went down. And when we actually retired we never had no capital
by us but the shop belonged to us. We tried to sell the business for five
years and in that five years we only had about ten people come and have a
look. We couldn’t sell it as a business and we just said, ‘Right,
we’ll put it up as a house,’ and that went the next day to a cash
buyer! Trading initiatives We had our own trade organisation, Wivenhoe Traders’ Association, which had a meeting once a month. We had a Chairman and a Committee. It was very good for us all, in the early days, because that was the only contact we had with other business people, basically because we’re, so we used to take an evening and meet upstairs at the Greyhound. Among the members were ourselves, the local hairdresser Penny Lear, Ken Green, who was the fish merchant, Brian Green, Pat Green from the grocery stores, and her husband. At one time there was about 30 members. The main things we used to be concerned about was car parking, to let customers park. We had all the double yellow line problems come and hit us so there wasn’t a lot we could do about it. Christmas events - Tony
Allcock At Christmas time all the businesses used to take part in decorating the street and providing a grotto for Father Christmas, raising money for the Mayor’s Fund. The grotto was held once outside my shop, in a passageway, and next time in an empty shop on the corner - Grosvenor Hotel. We organised stalls down from the railway bridge into the Square, right down to the quay, but now they have it in the churchyard. Each shop used to do their own thing; shops like the Delicatessen used to give out home-made punch. We had lucky dips and a draw. Restaurants would be giving out mince pies and wine. It was a terrific evening. We had the Father Christmas in the grotto – a gentleman named Stan Thurgood. He moved away from Wivenhoe but I suppose I could call him a figure of happiness because he would volunteer himself and he used to love doing it. And he was the ideal man because he had the white beard. A lack of support - Tony
Allcock Wivenhoe Traders’ Association ended about seven or eight years ago, I suppose. Mainly it was lack of support, in all honesty. Sometimes you grow out of things. You can understand that people couldn’t turn up to meetings because they were doing other things. And, after all, business doesn’t just stay in the shop, business carries on after the doors close – with bookwork and things like this. Trading hours - Tony
Allcock One thing we did get straightened out was to get our shops opening and closing at the same time. But, of course, that is still not right! We did get it in line once but individual shops have to work how they feel is best for them. Some local people would say, ‘We never know when the shops are closed or open.’ Well, I agree with them to a certain extent. I’m not perfect in any way, over this, because I’m now closing on a Monday. What we’re trying to do, at the moment, is do a four and a half day week. I hope it works out, in one sense, and so does my wife. I suppose a lot of people think, ‘Well, cor dear! He’s four and a half days a week,’ but I’ll still be working most probably six because after I close the door I start work because I don’t always get enough time during the day. I never mind that, mind you, I’ve never put a stopwatch on the time I work because I don’t believe in the eight hour day – I never have done. I always believe if a man wants to work 14 hours a day – if he’s self-employed, that is –that’s up to you. But it would be nice if we could get these opening hours correct somewhere along the line! Business Association - Colin
Andrews The Business Association goes way back. Chevy Semprini was the first Chairman I believe, when he had the Talisman Arts. We got together and formed the Business Association. Tony Allcock was also a member, myself, and Mr Bolton, the dentist, and the Manager of Barclays Bank at that time – we were the founder members. We were trying to promote business in Wivenhoe. Some people were trying to join us using two hats though, some were politically minded which I didn’t favour much – I’m a bit single-minded that way. If you’re going to wear a hat you can only wear one hat, in my mind, so there was a bit of dissent from time to time. I suppose that’s healthy in it’s way, but it hasn’t helped at all in the long term, in hindsight. I think they still promote the Open Evening around Christmas time, when the Christmas lights are switched on. There’s still a little bit of harmony, I suppose, but we just don’t have a balanced shopping atmosphere here any more – with another estate agent opened. Once we lost the bank it did a lot of harm. If people visit to go to the bank then they stay to go round the shops. Wivenhoe First Project
2000 - Peter Hill I was Mayor in ’95/’96, and aware, then, that the traders in
Wivenhoe were having a rough time - the recession in the late 1980s/early
90s hadn’t been kind, obviously. Wivenhoe’s never been an affluent
community, the shops have been, I suppose, in their own way, well
supported, but the loss of Barclays Bank, as the banks rationalised a lot
of their smaller branch activities, was a negative step for the trading
community. A lot of people came to Wivenhoe from outlying places, because
they could park a car and nip across the road to the bank, and pop in and
buy a loaf of bread from the bakers, and do one or two bits of shopping.
So that was a bit of a death knell. And the building of Tescos at the
Hythe meant that a lot of people no longer used the local Co-op. So the
traders felt very much under threat. I guess the other thing which had
happened was that a lot of the shopkeepers in Wivenhoe don’t own their
own property, they have a landlord that they pay ever increasing rents to,
so their costs were going up – Council Tax, rents were going up,
Business Tax – so their cost base was growing and their revenue was
decreasing, even though the size of the population had grown. So when I was Mayor in ’95/’96, for the second time, ‘Wivenhoe
First’, or ‘Project 2000’ as I called it initially, but we then,
working with the Traders Association, called it ‘Wivenhoe First,’ with
the idea of getting people to think about checking out the shops. First of
all, to recognise that there are shops and businesses and Wivenhoe. It’s
not just the shops, there are lots of businesses as well – today,
there’s probably more than 120 different businesses in Wivenhoe, but
they’re all small – and people tend to go, very naturally, to Tescos
and the other places. And we tried to encourage the idea that at least go
and check out the local shops to encourage the shopkeepers, themselves, to
smile a bit more – even though it’s difficult at times! But to
encourage the idea of quality of service, so we’re pushing things for
the shops. We were doing a number of campaigns - people might remember we got
50,000 green plastic carrier bags, with a picture of Wivenhoe in gold on
it, with the logo, ‘Wivenhoe First,’ and people still see the
‘Wivenhoe First’ logo around on various things, so this concept of
‘Wivenhoe First,’ to try and get people to use the shops more, and to
try and do things. I think we had, under this ‘Project 2000,’ the
overall project, I think we did 54 mini projects. Like investigating
whether we could get more car parking spaces, whether we could free up
some car parking spaces that could be rotated, so that people knew they
could pop down the village – a lot of the people at the top felt every
time you went down to the bottom of the village, you couldn’t find a car
parking space, so why go down there? The Landscaping Project came out of Project 2000 – ‘Let’s make
Wivenhoe more attractive.’ Ever since ’95, we’ve had planted tubs
around the village – that came out of Project 2000. A number of areas of
Wivenhoe, I think ten in all, with an interest in gardening, so let’s
make some of these places more attractive. So we planted boats outside the
William Loveless Hall, and so the Landscaping Scheme is run to make
Wivenhoe more attractive, bring more visitors into Wivenhoe, build up
things like the June Market and December Market – those are very good
trading days for people at the bottom of the village. So it was a whole range of initiatives, as I say, about 54 in all,
and bring the attention of people to what’s on offer in the shops. I
created ‘Wivenhoe Orange Pages,’ which competed with the ‘Wivenhoe
at your Service’ booklet, but it was trying to get across to people just
how many – not just the shops, but how many businesses were present. Really, in a way from that, stemmed the idea of the Wivenhoe
Website, which I created in May 2002, run under the name of the Wivenhoe
Town Council, but I built it on my computer here, with the help of Paul
Alden, who’s been my technical support. There’s a trade section on the
website, and I’ve been happy to build pages for the local traders, to
try and help promote themselves, and use the web to get things across. In
a way, it’s quite gratifying. In the last two weeks I’ve had two
people ask me to remove their entries off the website, because they’re
just getting too many inquiries, they can’t handle them! One is someone
who runs a bed and breakfast in Wivenhoe, and the other one’s a
decorator, but they get too many inquiries to deal with! But I know lots
of the traders have got business out of people doing a search. It’s good
to see that Wivenhoe has a new florist. The new owner of the business said
to me, last weekend, that she’d got a wedding booking out of it, so,
someone searching for a florist who will do weddings, and that’s one of
Jane’s specialities, so that’s been gratifying. But that really, in
its own way, came out of my interest of doing something to help support
the people in trade and business, who I’ve known over the years for
various reasons. Certainly anyone who runs a small shop here is at a disadvantage,
because they generally have rented premises, and that gives you an
immediate overhead of paying rent to a landlord. For example, the
hairdressers, I suspect, have quite a few customers that live outside of
Wivenhoe, because one advantage Wivenhoe offers is that, unlike
Colchester, where it’s difficult to park in Colchester, and you can’t
pop into Colchester, if you come here, either to the one men’s
hairdresser’s or to the ladies’ hairdressers, there’s some parking
around. So you can park, without charge, and pop in to meet your
appointment without having to go to the appointment an hour beforehand. If
you look at Sharon Crickett’s operation with the health care services
and sun bed centre that she offers, again you’ve got that advantage,
she’s by a free car park. It’s difficult, in this country, these days,
to find a free car park. I think my colleagues and I on the Town Council
will fight to make sure that the Wivenhoe Car Park remains a free car
park. But the businesses that can survive here are people that need an
office or somewhere where it is attractive to work. The one thing you’re
not going to get here is passing trade. The rates in Wivenhoe, the
Business Rates are a lot lower in Wivenhoe than the centre of
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