[2005] POST-WAR YEARS

0056 – Our Corner Shop -1945 to 1951

When we moved, in 1945, to Bromborough Pool village, we bought all our groceries from the local corner shop.  This was only about quarter mile away, at the other side of the village.  It was in fact a co-operative, owned by the villagers, although it was a standalone one - with just the one shop - where most others by that time had several branches. In fact it was one of the earliest co-operatives, started in the 19th-century. But otherwise it was very similar to all the small shops which then dominated the retail grocery trade.

It was in a Victorian building, which was the same age as the rest the village - built somewhere around the middle of the 19th-century.  It was next door to another traditional local shop, which was a drapery. This sold wool, cotton and textiles, as well as some items of clothing. My mother got the wool there for her knitting. Her speciality, for charities to sell at the local fetes, was baby dolls in knitted clothes. All four MacKenzie girls next door had these at various times as very welcome Christmas presents. I rarely went into this shop, though, and in fact it did not do much business. The woman who ran it only opened it a couple of afternoons each week, which was in those days typical of many similar smaller local shops. Again it was owned by the village. 

The grocery shop was one of the old style counter-service shops, which existed before self-service came along.  Inside all was dark stained wood. An L shaped counter faced you, as you went in, with - on the left - the bacon slicer which all these shops used to have. Behind the deep counter were rows of shelves, on which the products were stacked, or drawers where they were stored out of sight.  The products in those days weren't the bright branded products that you now get, and you certainly could not serve yourself to anything! They were packaged in the cheapest way which would protect the products themselves. Only a few of them had branded covers. Instead, most of them were sold by weight as commodities.  So, if you wanted your sugar, you were given a packet of sugar carefully weighed out into a blue bag, which was very distinctive with the top folded in. The same was true of other things. Butter was wrapped up by hand in the shop. Sometimes even soap, especially for washing clothes, was cut off a bar.  As I say it was about the bare essentials of life, about the commodities you had to buy because you needed them!

On the premises they baked their own bread so it was beautifully fresh.  Of course it wasn't sliced, and it certainly wasn't steamed as it now is. It was traditional oven baked bread. As a result it was really delicious, tasting as bread really should do - but never has in recent decades. But they also used to do other things.  I'm told that they used to make trifles for the whole village every Christmas and they also cooked their own ham.

As I have already indicated, they only provided bacon sliced off a whole back of cured bacon, almost half a pig. You said how thick you wanted this and how many slices; when the rationing allowed you to do this. They didn't though sell meat.  Instead meat came from a butcher's van, owned by a shop in the local town, which sold door to door around the village.

The shop was, as I have said, a co-operative; which meant it gave you a dividend every time you bought anything. In this way, you got a receipt for the amount you paid, and this was also recorded on a carbon copy which the shop kept. All of this was recorded on something not much more than the size of a cloakroom ticket. At the end of the year you got the accumulated dividend paid out; which many of the customers used to pay for their Christmas needs.

Many shops in those days were co-operatives, but this corner store was somewhat unique in that it only served the village; though it paid the dividend exactly as elsewhere. Indeed in the 1930s my grandfather had been the chair of the committee that ran the shop, though he was disgusted by how inefficient it was!  It was, in my day, run – much more efficiently - by a little man called Wilf Green.  I can remember him running around in his grey overall coat, handing out the sugar and the bacon and loudly ordering around the 2 or 3 women who also served in it. In those days being a manager of even a small shop was an important job, or so it seemed to me!

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