Shops Ready to Serve You - Sepia Saturday

I pay little attention to the car in this week’s Sepia Saturday prompt photograph and  focus instead on the busy shop window and people standing in the doorway.

This stationer and newsagent fits the bill in terms of acrowded windows . In the 1901 census, John P. Weatherly was described as a 40 years old Postmaster of 73 High Street, Earlston,Berwickshire  in the Scottish Borders],  living with his wife, mother-in-law and children. Edward, Ellen and Margaret. The Trade Directory two years later adds to his role that of bookseller and printer.

But take a closer look at that newspaper placard outside the shop, which announces that "Crippin Removed to Hospital" - the big clue to dating this image.  Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen, was an American doctor  He was hanged  23rd November 1910 in Pentonville Prison, London  for the murder of his wife Cora Henrietta Crippen, and was the first criminal to be captured with the aid of wireless telegraphy.   

 Lochhead's watchmaker & jeweller on Earlston High Street.  Look at the right hand window for that unusual term "cyclealities". 

 

 

Staff at the local Co-operaitve store in Earlston which opened in 1898

The Co-op store in the 1950s.

 

The 1901 census for Earlston lists a William Donaldson, aged 37, a butcher at 43 High Street. with his wife Isabella and sons, John, William and Walter, and daughters Isabella and Helen. Two years later "Slater's Directory for Berwickshire, 1903" lists Walter Donaldson as the butcher.

You can just make out the sign in the stone above the frontage, with the staff in their striped  aprons - and is that a carcase hanging  in the window? 

A similar image.  with the delivery boy and his bicycle. 

 

Donaldson, the Butchers still serves  the  village today - but no relation to my family.  

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A crowded shop display in one of the many replica shops to be found at Beamish, the  large open air museum.  Set in 300 acres, it tells  the story of everyday life life in North East England from around 1880 to 1950, with a  High Street of houses, shops &  trades, vintage trams and buses, a  colliery with a pit village,  farm, manor house and railway station.  More shop interiors below: 

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 Shopping Memories 

•  Shopping with my mother in the 1950's in the Home and Colonial Store in Blackpool, Lancashire.  No self service of course  but wooden counters all the way around where you  waited patiently  to be served by the staff with your groceries.  Standards were different then with  the same cutter used for the uncookeed bacon and cooked cold meats.  Food was loose then, not pre-packed.    I loved getting a bag of broken biscuits in Woolworths - and hoped they would include some chocolate ones.
  
  
  
• My mother was a dressmaker and we often called  into a dark haberdashery store which intrigued me,   All  the walls were  lined  with drawers and cupboards, and the staff seemed to know where everything was.
   
• Another fascination was in the  stores  was with the money placed in little  canisters  travelling back and forth along wires above the counter to an unseen cashier who sent  change back the same way.  It is hard to believe but this was still the method  being used in the early 1970s in my local  Co-op store.
  
  My father's  account,  written down in his   "Early Life" recalled:
  
    -   "Leaving school in 1926,[aged 14] I went to work in a grocer's shop  where I had been the Saturday errand boy.  I graduated to delivering bags of corn 80lbs plus,  with the pony and trap - a Welsh cob called Tommy who was inclined to be lazy.  At night I rode him bareback to a field." 
  
    I cannot imagine my father on this job, as he never gave the slightest indication  of any affinity or interest  in  horses.  Perhaps that experience was enough! 

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To finish with  - a look at the main theme of the Month - old vehicles 

 

At the butchers, times have moved on from bicycle deliveries to  four wheels - though this van looks rather rickety!

 

 

 

 

 Looking more road worthy  Taylors Grocers opened in Earlston in 1908 and was in business until the mid 1950sm with members of the same family.   

 

 

 

 

 

The Co-op vans and their drivers, ready with their mobile shops to serve rural communities.   

 

 

With thanks to my local heritage group Auld Earlston 

for the images on the village. 

 

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Sepia Saturday gives bloggers an opportunity  

to share their family history through photographs.

     

 

 

 

 

 

Click  HERE  to find out what other bloggers have found

in this week's prompt photograph.  

 

 

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