Web Page No 2490

7^th July 2018

1^st Picture: Broken Biscuit Box

2^nd Picture: Milk Delivery

 3^rd Picture: Typical Corner Shop

4^th Picture: String Bag

Shops

Much of the packaging of shop goods in my 1940s and 1950s childhood was little different from how it was in the early 1900s, as used by our mothers and grandmothers. The main difference was that more goods were arriving in the shops ready-packaged, although this was still on a very much smaller scale than today.

Pre-packaging was mainly in tins, glass and stone and pottery jars, and there were far, far more lidded tins around than there are today. It was never difficult for my friends and me to get hold of an empty and reasonably attractive lidded tin for craft or to store things in or for making tin can and string telephones.

Even medicine came pre-packaged, in boxes (Beechams Powders) or in gall bottles in brown, blue and green. Green was for poisons. Liquid poisons were always sold in ridged glass bottles, so that even blind people could tell that they were poisonous. The bottles were usually green. I understood that anyone could buy poisons as long as they signed a poison book, but there may well have been restrictions that I didn't know about. Chemists made up doctor's prescriptions themselves. Pills were packaged in small brown glass bottles, and liquids in larger brown glass bottles, invariably labelled as 'the mixture', whatever happened to be in them.

Milk bottles were always made of glass.

Many goods were weighed or measured out and wrapped specially for every customer, just as they had been for years. Biscuits, for example, were sold loose for much of my childhood. This presented problems because they broke easily while being weighed out and in the paper bags on the way home. In fact ,broken biscuits were sold off cheaply. It was very difficult indeed to keep biscuits crisp because they were continually exposed to the air in the shop before we ever got them, because the large supply tins with the heavy glass lids had to be opened every time customers bought biscuits.

Brown or white Paper bags were the norm for packaging, and they came in several sizes, sometimes with the shop's name printed on the front. A wad of them hung on a string behind the counter and were torn off as required. Paper bags had a very limited life. They disintegrated if they got wet, either from holding damp produce or from rain, and they crumpled easily.

Boots the chemist wrapped goods up in brown paper parcels, tied with string. This was extremely labour intensive and was still going on in the late 1950s.

The lack of packaging in shops gave rise to something I recall with nostalgia from my childhood. It was the smell of shops: A grocer's shop smelled like a grocer's shop, a greengrocer's shop smelled like a greengrocer's and so on. The reason was that the food was open to the air. With the advent of almost entirely pre-sealed packaging in the 1950s and 60, all those wonderful aromas disappeared - and along with them, the individual character of the shops.

When shopping baskets got overfilled, there were no plastic bags tucked away for emergency use. The answer was string bags. They were made of ordinary brown string woven into a fairly large open net with a string handle which didn't take up much space in a shopping basket. Being brown string, they always looked rather dirty and were accordingly popular for carrying vegetables, which were never sold ready-washed. Potatoes and carrots were the worst offenders. We always had to wash them at home before peeling them, and the water ended up black and gritty.

Women also carried string bags for shopping. My mother's string bag would have the vegetables in it and would then hang on the back of the pantry door with the vegetables in it ready to use.

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Yours

Peter

gsseditor@gmail.com

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News and Views:

On this day 7^th July 1960-1965.

On 07/07/1960 the number one single was Good Timin' - Jimmy Jones and the number one album was South Pacific Soundtrack. The top rated TV show was Rawhide (ITV) and the box office smash was Psycho. A pound of today's money was worth £13.68 and Burnley were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.

On 07/07/1961 the number one single was Runaway - Del Shannon and the number one album was South Pacific Soundtrack. The top rated TV show was Harpers West One (ATV) and the box office smash was One Hundred and One Dalmations. A pound of today's money was worth £13.25 and Tottenham Hotspur were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions. The big news story of the day was Mario Dubois born.

On 07/07/1962 the number one single was Come Outside - Mike Sarne with Wendy Richard and the number one album was West Side Story Soundtrack. The top rated TV show was Coronation Street (Granada) and the box office smash was Lawrence of Arabia. A pound of today's money was worth £12.89 and Ipswich Town were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions. The big news story of the day was 94 die in Bombay air crash.

On 07/07/1963 the number one single was I Like It - Gerry & the Pacemakers and the number one album was Please Please Me - The Beatles. The top rated TV show was Coronation Street (Granada) and the box office smash was The Great Escape. A pound of today's money was worth £12.64 and Everton were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.

 On 07/07/1964 the number one single was A Hard Day's Night - Beatles and the number one album was A Hard Day's Night - Beatles. The top rated TV show was Coronation Street (Granada) and the box office smash was Dr Strangelove. A pound of today's money was worth £12.24 and Manchester United were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.

On 07/07/1965 the number one single was I'm Alive - Hollies and the number one album was The Sound of Music Soundtrack. The top rated TV show was Coronation Street (Granada) and the box office smash was The Sound of Music. A pound of today's money was worth £11.69 and Manchester United were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions.