Yes, it's another nostalgia page and welcome to the 1950s, where the weekly shopping was delivered by the grocer who actually owned the store where you shopped. My Grandad was such a grocer and is seen below, leaning on the counter of the shop with Mum who, before I came along and was followed by my brother, used to help out as assistant in the shop.
It was not a large shop even though it was on one of the main shopping streets in Rochdale's town centre. Think corner shop size. Also you can see many of the goods stacked on shelves behind the counter. People didn't just pick up what they wanted and take it to the counter - they asked for it and he would get it for them. Personal service, delivered with a smile and clothed in a white coat! There were no refridgerators to keep goods cool. Just a marble top that Grandad would keep things like butter and margarine on - all waxed paper or foil wrapped - plastic tubs didn't exist yet. Foil was incredibly thin and called "silver paper". Lots of things were wrapped in it including chocolate and cigarettes, which had a layer inside the packet. Silver paper had two layers, the thin metallic-looking wafer thin layer, loosely attached to a thin layer of tissue paper. The nearest thing to it now is the foil that wraps individual chocolates in a box.
Butter also came in large barrels that Grandad would split down by hammering off the hoops so that the staves would fall apart. The barrel stood on the marble counter top to keep it cool but in the summer the butter would melt and go rancid in a very short time. Any that ran off would be scraped back - a never-ending task. It was sold by weight into waxed paper bags and he sold it whether it was solid or liquid. In October he would save the butter barrel staves for our bonfire on the 5th of November! We ate rancid butter as a matter of course - there wasn't any other option on hot summer days.
Bacon came rolled and tied with string and he had a big red hand operated slicer that I always wanted to play with but he wouldn't let me. The circular blade was incredibly sharp - it wasn't unknown for a grocer or butcher to lose a hand. All it took was a moment's lack of attention. There was a sliding adjustment on a scale and customers were always asked how thick they wanted their bacon. No.6 was the most popular. 
Again in hot weather meat and bacon went quickly off. There was a butcher's shop two doors away and Grandad didn't sell meat apart from processed sliceable meats such as ham, corned beef and bacon. When maggots appeared he would pick them off and dispose of them out the back but the bacon would still be sold. And before anyone shrieks and wails, he always used to say that when he had had to remove maggots, that was the time customers came back to say how tasty the bacon had been! I always remember bacon as having much more taste than it seems to in 2006 (when this article was originally written). Mind you, we lose taste buds as we grow older but even so... It was certainly not pumped full of water and additives as it is these days. Lots of things were sold from sacks or large cases by weight. Sugar, tea, coffee, even biscuits. The shop had a coffee grinder and when someone wanted coffee they were sold the beans by weight and then Grandad would grind the beans for them for free. The smell was gorgeous! He and Nanna had a big electric coffee percolator at home which was silver with a glass knob on the top. It used to come out on Sunday mornings and it always fascinated me watching coffee splash against the inside of the glass knob.
Tuesday was half-day closing in Rochdale and all shops closed at lunch time. Wednesday and Thursday afternoons were Grandad's delivery days. He took orders from customers for their weekly shopping and would pack the goods into cardboard boxes that tinned goods came packed in to the shop. On those afternoons he would load the boxes into his car and drive all around the town delivering them. I always enjoyed going with him as a youngster because it was a chance to sit in the front seat. Boxes would fill the boot and back seat and we would go back to the shop a couple of times to fill up again. And yes, that's me above "helping" load the car.
At these times the shop would be looked after by Mrs Gallagher, his assistant. The law required shops to have somewhere for female staff to sit and so there was a single wooden chair provided - which older customers used much more than Mrs Gallagher!
In the 1960s I became aware of Grandad being worried about something called a "supermarket". He joined a buying group called Mace and became a "Mace Grocer". They advertised on TV with a cartoon figure called Milly Mace and I was dead impressed that my Grandad should be part of something on TV! They even supplied him with pencils which were triangular instead of hexagonal and had Milly Mace and the logo stamped on, gold over dark blue. Totally impressive for a young lad! I'd never seen a pencil that wasn't either hexagonal or round!
The supermarket opened a couple of hundred yards away from his shop, closer into the town centre. It was a bit like a Spar shop is now, a large shop but only about twice the size of Grandad's but it was filled with shelves and bins and people had to rummage and get all their own stuff and then take them to the counter where they were put into paper - not plastic - bags. Grandad hoped that this lack of service would lead to its downfall but as we all now know...
Every woman carried her own shopping bag. It might be a wicker basket or a sturdy affair - Mum had a leather one that lasted ages. They were exensive - they had to last ages! There were no plastic bags or carriers. Paper carrier bags with string handles and metal eyelets to stop them ripping were charged for often and in any case ripped if anything heavy was put in them. Large goods were wrapped with brown paper and string. Brown paper was used for so many things... We saved it and used it again. We drew on it. If we hurt ourselves sometimes we had it wrapped around us - remember the second verse of the nursery rhyme "Jack and Jill"?
He went to bed to mend his head with vinegar and brown paper
Brown paper had something in its chemical make-up that actually did have beneficial effects on sprains, bruises and aches. There was a line in one of the Sharpe TV historical episodes where Hagman, the old soldier tells his new officer, Sharpe, about the benefits of "...oil of parafin and good brown paper." Vinegar was widely used from ages long past as a disinfectant. In times of plague, money was dipped in it to try to prevent the spread of disease. I'm going back a bit now - I can't remember that!!! My brother Frank and I used to sit for hours though, dipping pennies and ha'pennies in vinegar to restore the bright copper colour.
Rochdale had a couple of department stores, Iveson Brothers was one that I would later work in for a year and a bit, but for sheer shopping luxury most people caught the bus or train to Manchester. The No.9 bus took longer because it was a "stopper", or the 24 would take you there much quicker. It was always a treat to go on the top deck and if Nanna was with us she would fascinate me by "talking" to people she knew who she saw on the pavement whenever the bus stopped. Nanna had been a mill girl and they had all learned to lip read because of the noise of the factories.
Manchester had Lewis's store and Paulden's (which was taken over by Debenhams in the 1970s), each of which had large toy departments with model railway layouts and hands-on areas where kids could play with toys and then pester to have one bought! Best of all, one exit from Lewis's led to an arcade which had a huge window display of Bassett-Lowke's toy shop with a huge life size clown and a train layout that you could "work" by dropping a penny in a slot. It was always a disappointment if other kids had put a penny in and your parents deemed that enough!
As kids we never realised why the arcade always seemed so busy - it was (I was told much much later) a favourite patch of Manchester's "ladies of pleasure". Dad used to tell of one who came up to proposition him whilst on one side he held my hand and on the other was my brother Frank. "I'm a little busy..." he pointed out.
Manchester also had trolley buses! Trams had disappeared around the time I was born but trolley buses were still in use and it was fun to ride on them as they were so quiet in comparison to normal buses.
In the early 1960s the shop next to Grandad's became available and he moved into it as it was slightly bigger. The lease on the other shop was kept on and Mum opened it as a wool shop, selling balls of wool, buttons of all shapes, sizes and colours and she and Nanna spent all their spare time knitting furously - cardigans, tops, baby clothes... We would go there after school, I remember Grandad Burke used to pick us up from school sometimes and we would walk to their house.
We had a collection of toys at the shop and we would play in the back room whilst Mum looked after the shop.
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