Post by JEM on Jun 8, 2008 2:10:21 GMT
MY MEMOIRS of life based on CO-OPERATION
by John E Maddams up to 1977
Presented to the SAFFRON WALDEN JUBILEE CLUB
February. 2008
I asked Audrey what I might talk about and she suggested “The Co-op”
So I thought I had better dress up for the occasion. Over the 31 years that I worked locally for the Co-op I had a variety of uniforms ranging from white, brown, white and blue, light grey, bright red, and what I am wearing now the Daffodil Livery, green and yellow.
Unfortunately the material does not wear well with the years
As you will see if I lift the sweater. It has shrunk
It’s OK there is no risk of it being more revealing
The trouble I suppose is retirement., Although I am very active I’m 4 stone heavier than I was most of my working life.
No doubt most of you if you have lived in Walden long will have been aware of the Co-op, which closed it’s doors for the last time in May 1995, apart from the more recent appearance of the Co-op Pharmacy that took over a network of other chemists.
I wrote these words for the Saffron Walden Reporter , published by them on June 1st 1995
“On Saturday May 20th a senior member of our community finally died aged 93 years and 2 months
This aged personality was registered with the Registrar General on March 1st 1902 as
The Saffron Walden and District Co-operative Society
Number 3860 Essex and died as LEO’S
During their first year they recruited 223 members sold £1,857 of goods and distributed a shared dividend to their members of £87pound 15 shillings and 11 pence.
Their first annual report stated “ We have launched our boat” and we must all pull together”
It was launched in the Tap Room of the Bell Inn on the Southern side of Upper Castle Street, and from the word go it’s official rubber stamp symbol was A BELL.
The Co-op was based on Christian principles of fair trading, and locally was well supported by the two most working class churches in the town Castle Hill Primitive Methodists and Hill Street Baptists, both closed down. .
All the members of each district society owned the business between them. Ownership was not in the hands of 1 person, or one family, or a small group of well off shareholders having lots of shares but Every member had ONE SHARE in the BUSINESS.
They thereby shared in the responsibility of making it a success.
They were assured good quality produce often grown on Co-op Farms or made in Co-op Factories around the country and across the world whose workers were paid fair wages for a fair day’s work.
The products were favourable priced and all the profits were ploughed back into the business to pay the staff and the overheads and to fund new developments and growth, but each half year, a percentage of the profits agreed by an elected board elected by the members to manage the business was shared equally amongst the Members, dependent on how much they had spent during those 6 months.
This local Co-op opened their first shop at the bottom of the High Street where the Turkish Restaurant is today.
The members were mainly working class families who by uniting together could buy up products in larger quantities than a one man or family business could afford and benefit from quantity discounts.
Certainly by the time I joined a members share cost £1 but you could save larger sums on your share account, and interest was added. You could take your share money out each 6 months and spend it, or you could leave it in and let it grow with added interest.
For many people it was the way they saved. The Penny Banks,
They also ran Boot Clubs, Clothing Clubs, Coal Clubs or Christmas Clubs, into which you could save a sum of money each week to which interest would be added, and then the money could be used to buy shoes, or clothes, or coal or Christmas presents.
At 2.30pm on Saturday September 21st 1935 a new store was opened in the High Street opposite Woolworths and the Eastern Electricity shop with a very large crowd of friends and members
and 59 years later it closed it’s doors for the last time with one late customer and 5 members of staff in a deserted street. The boat had sunk,
It was some boat, second only to Acrow’s Engineers and Englemans Nurseries as the largest employer of labour in the town.
At it’s peak it had 9 shops scattered around Walden, Thaxted and Newport, a Bakery, a Dairy with door to door milk deliveries, a coal yard, a funeral service, a bank branch, a Women’s Guild, an Education Committee, 2 mobile grocery shops and a mobile butchery, and a host of horse drawn wagons and later delivery vans and trade bikes that served people in the villages over a wide area of North West Essex
and it employed in it’s 91 years hundreds of people.
In the 31 years I worked for the Co-op I knew personally of over 300 employees, and people come up to me in the street these days and say “Hello Mr Maddams”, or “Hi John” and expect me to remember who they are, while my brain’s computer goes into overdrive trying to remember.
Their Golden Jubilee booklet said “ Co-operation is the key to success in every phase of life”
“For all to co-operate would bring
the end of wars, with their consequent waste of money and lives,
and much greater happiness and comfort
and freedom from fear for people all over the world “
It is essential to ensure success through team work
the more we keep together the happier we will be”
I ended the article published in the newspaper with this sentence
“The shops have vanished but the principles remain to be re-assimilated and re-expressed “
I first recall the Co-op by being pushed around it in a push chair with the rack along the front of the counters with tins of biscuits displayed, and similarly so at Walker’s Stores on the other side of the road, and the comment “ keep your hands out of those tins” I never then thought I’d work in both shops. .
Towards the beginning of my last year at Grammar School it suddenly dawned on me that in 10 months time “You have got to find a job”, and I had no ambition.
The thing I was best at was growing flowers and vegetables and I later discovered that this “Green Fingers gift “ was in my genes, or as we used to say “in the blood” Inherited that from my Dad who looked after two allotment strips
my Grandfathers
one of whom Tom, made excellent home made wines but being unable to read or write his recipes died with him.
the one Harry won medals and certificates in Allotment Holders shows in North London.
My great grandfather Tom was a Nurseryman in Bedfordshire and before him were 3 generations of farmers.
So I decided I had better brush up on Botany with a view to going to Writtle Agricultural College.
At the end of the Christmas term, our form master, Spud Taylor the Biology and Botany Master set us an exam. Just before we broke up for the holidays, and before we gave him his customary gift of mineral water and f*gs, he came into the biology lab and shouted us “You have all let me down!. You have all failed the exam! And I don’t believe it! the highest result is Maddams with 49%, he’s never got that much, or that high, before!
Fortunately for me our neighbour Joyce Oxley got me
my first job as a Junior Clerk at Chater & Myhill’s Certified Accountants Central arcade at the princely sum of £3 a week.
The only problem of a job in accountancy is that you have to understand maths which was a closed book to me then, and I failed it repeatedly. I did learn how to file, how to draw up clients accounts and cook the books.. That means audit their annual accounts. That is when I learnt that many of our apparently wealthy farmers were putting on a veneer of confidence while whistling in the wind, being in debt most of the year round.
Another role I had seated at the front of the office which is now The Trawler-Man Fish and Chip Shop was to give the clients the illusion of our having an automatic door.
As they approached it, I had to pull a length of cord.
The boss called me to his office on one July morning and said “ “John we have come to the conclusion You don’t fit this job”
( How ungrateful after me pulling that cord all day every day”
I replied that I felt much the same way. So we parted on friendly terms with me on a fortnights holiday.
Around the corner I went and saw a notice at Walkers Stores”
“Wanted! Provisions Assistant. No experience necessary.
On job training given, £5 a week”.
Something inside me said “Take it”. After all it offered a 40% wage increase.
15 years later doing Family history research
I found that retailing was in the blood too. Mum before marriage had worked in the Boot and Shoe department of Quaker businessman Walter Robson in King Street where the Health Food Shop is today and Dad’s brother had delivered all sorts of things about town and villages for him on a trade bike including large sitting room sofa chairs.
Also my great great grandfather William had opened a Grocery Store in Biggleswade in 1840 which survived until 1936.
Just before he died he made a will leaving £8000. At the time I found this out I’d got about the same amount and felt a sense of kinship with him until I found out that in today’s money that would be about £300.000 plus the business, the farm, and a large town house with paddock garden and two large summer houses.
At that point something a bit like “how are the mighty fallen” swept over me.
So I joined Walkers Stores, which arrived at Walden in 1907 taking over the premises of Beard and Son Drapers, and since the 1930’s managed by the indefatigable Major James Cook generally called Jim who with his wife lived in a bungalow in East Street, and through the War he commanded the local Home Guard, and was Secretary of a Dancing Club and Treasurer before 1948 of the GeneralHospital Insurance Scheme. and shared an important role in organising the regular carnivals.
A bit of an austere man I recall him accusing me of shop lifting.
True at the age of 12 I had been a shoplifter but knowing what to look out for I was more likely to catch shoplifters. The till was short and he had noticed that when ever I went to the till I’d look furtively to the left to see, so he thought, if anyone was watching me. However this was the twitch learnt at Chater’s to be ready to open the door, and had become a habit.
Later in the great flu epidemic of 1961 when all our staff went down with it, he and I ran the store on our own for a couple of weeks and we both got to respect each other and became firm friends.
Also that year Rumsey’s who had the store next door and over the top caught fire one Sunday morning and the water from the fire hoses drenched our store and flooded our floor and we were there into the early hours of Monday cleaning up and tidying up, and George Brown , elder of Gold Street Chapel, and then Secretary of the SW Co-op offered us the use of what used to be Cro’s Stores the other side of what was then Sketchleys the clothing cleaners to take our stock, sort it out and dry the tins.
The District Manager came over and declared all the stock as a write off unfit for human consumption and listed it for the Insurance assessors, then shipped it across the road for us to dry it out, patch it up so it could go on sale again. After all most of it was OK.
In those days and since the War years the grocery shops in town had a barter system between them If any of them ran out of a line they borrowed it from someone else to keep their customers happy. So Cros’, Pennings, Home and Colonial, International, Walkers, Co-op, and later Budgens would co-operate with each other and at the end of each month we’d tot up what we owed each other and go from store to store selecting what stock we’d like to balance our accounts with.
That was when I first got to know the Co-op Staff
Fred Stalley (Trade Union Treasurer)
Wilf Clayden (Trade Union Secretary) Cecil Cornell, George Cornell in Bakery.. Stan Mallyon, Alex Randell etc
Walkers which in fact officially was World Stores merged with Greens Stores and became Key Markets, I rose in this to be Assistant Manager and when in 1964 they closed down 400 branches one weekend at a week’s notice Cecil Woodley from Littlebury as Manager and me, were both offered lucrative self service store management posts on the South coast but we did not want to leave this district.
So I went over the road and into the cellar to begin a new stage in my career as the bacon hand..
Alongside Peter Preece’s Mum Phylis Leggerton
I boned sides of bacon, cut up joints, boiled gammons, sliced up bacon rashers and cooked meats on different machines, cut cheeses, and handed them over to Phylis who laid them out on plastic wrap, sealed them, and put on the labels.
Down there one day on my own I dropped a boning knife on my left leg and foot and squelched up the stairs with a shoe full of blood to find Alex Randle in his office and the services of a first aider.
On another occasion I got a severe abscess in the back of a rotten tooth and Warehouseman Stan Mallion persuaded me to let him take me to his dentist, Mr Willan, he took one look, threw up his hands in the air and sent me to a private dental surgeon Mr Turvey, in Audley road, who described my mouth as a disaster area, and told me he’d have to remove all that was left in hospital
On the day the op was due at SW General Hospital I said “Farewell” to Alex Randle and said “see you in a couple of days”
Two weeks later a bit crestfallen I reappeared at his office to apologise for my absence
Alex said “I knew it would be more than a couple of days but I dare not tell you that, unless you refused to go ahead with it.”
It was as 3 hour operation and used up a lot of blood.
On another occasion I slashed a finger with a boning knife and had to got up the Hospital with my arm held up in the air like the Nazi salute and have an anti tetanus jab as well
In those days the cellar, lovely and warm in winter, and lovely and cool in summer, was supplied from the warehouse above by a service lift on ropes which we had to pull to move it about.
Down there we stored all the wine, spirits and tobacco
There were large central heating pipes from the boiler room through the cellar surrounded by a cladding all painted bright blue, which 20 years later was declared to be blue asbestos so 18 months ago I had to be X-rayed and scanned for a shadow on my lung thought to be asbestosis. Fortunately it was only pleurisy.
A couple of months after joining the Co-op there was a General Election and the Co-op offices became Labour Party Election HQ as the Co-op Movement fielded it’s own candidates as the Co-operative Party which was part of the Right wing of the Labour Party and later many of it’s members formed the Social Democrat Party which joined with the Liberals to form the Liberal Democrats.
For the election the Co-op car park was closed only to staff cars ferrying electors from their homes to the polling booths to vote.
The President of the Society Mr Sugden came round a few days before recruiting volunteers to be tellers at polling booth for the Labour Party to sit outside and ask people who they voted for ( supposed to be get their registration numbers to help find out who has not voted)
I felt duty bound as a good citizen to say “Yes”, everyone else said “No”
I later found out that that all or most of the staff all voted for the Liberal candidate and really could not stand Sugden who was regarded as a bit of a Communist.
I was assigned to South Road school for some hours. One of my friends a retired Baptist Minister walked up the driveway and then saw me sitting there with a large red rosette, took fright, paused, turned round and went home.
Highlight of each morning was the 5 minute Tea break in the old cafe by now the staff canteen, We went in, in groups of 3 and 4, at 5 minute intervals.
But when one lot came in the other lot did not go out.
So eventually most of the staff were in the otherwise deserted cafe canteen munching through crusty bread rolls richly layered with butter and grated cheese, and there we sat for a good half hour nattering as the queues outside got longer and longer until a very aggrieved Alex flew through the door to demand where the staff were.
Eventually this perk was taken away and the cafe closed. Edie and Hilda who ran it were found other work, and the cafe became part of the warehouse. Spoil sports - we were only helping each other, co-operating or doing union business or putting the world to rights. f
Later on to save going bankrupt Walden Co-op amalgamated with Cambridge and District
The new broom decided that it was not hygienic to prepare fresh foods in the cellar, so I got moved to the ground floor warehouse which had no heating and in the winter the temp dropped below freezing and in the summer it was like a sweat shop,
There were two skylights surrounded inside a wire mesh cage with glass with just a little free space between the under cage and the ceiling for wasps to fly in, where they’d get caught on sticky paper rolls, or swarmed round trying to find the way out until they dropped from exhaustion and died on the bodies of several year’s collection.
I left there in 1968 and was relocated at King Street in the Butchers shop where Ken Spall was in charge of the Butchery Staff and I was in charge of the new Grocery counter with Nancy Howell to keep me on the straight and narrow. I think Nancy was the widow of the only Staff member out of 35 who served in the Forces, that did not return home after WW2 - L/Cpl A A Howell, Royal Corps of Signals who died aged 30 on active service in India August 3rd 1944
We enjoyed much fun there This had previously been the Butchery shop of Wedd and Downham and the Co-op butchery when I was a boy was in Hill Street [about where the Salvation Army shop is now.- updated 2015]
From there I was sent to Pleasant Valley Store a few yards from where I then lived
Pleasant Valley branch was before the war Parrish’s Stores, and then he had to go and be a soldier and it lay empty, until after the war when someone started it again when I was a boy of about 10 they rebuilt it. so it seemed. on crates and crates of Tizer.
Then Harry Matthews bought it. He sold it to the Coop but stayed on as Manager and after him another man did it, and then Len Reed from the former Victoria Avenue branch was transferred there but he got in a terrible mess with the door’s electric alarm, and in the end just gave up.
Then I was asked to take it on and did so for 5 years. It was a very friendly shop with Eileen Halls from Summerhill Road, and Joan Blakeway from Rowntree Way, and Doris Hudgell from Shortgrove, Newport.
Sam Gilchrist or was it Littlejohn being area manager came over one Christmas and commented on how nice and tidy the warehouse part was until some of it fell on him from a top shelf. l
We kept several neighbours sustained weekly on bottles of sherry.
There were shortages and we could not always get the range of products people wanted.
There were people living in council houses, private homes and private rented homes There were poor people and richer people.
They liked a wide range of cheese, English mild Cheddar, English Cheshire, English mature cheddar, Canadian Matured, Australian and New Zealand.
We satisfied all their needs using English Mild. There was only ever the one kind of cheese but they all told each other how great the Canadian, Australian or New Zealand were that week,
and they were all satisfied.
We were always taught
“At all costs keep the customer happy. They are always right even when they are often wrong but unaware of it. “
Jim Cook at Walkers Stores told the story of when he was an apprentice at the family business’s Head Store in Warwick .
A customer came in to buy a breadboard and bread knife for a wedding present and was charged £5. He protested that he did not want a cheap present but something with a bit of class to it.
The assistant went out the back and he and the boss paused for a bit and then the boss came out with the same set and sold it for £10 and the customer was satisfied that he had bought something decent and went away happy. They only stocked one kind.
Towards the end of my time at Pleasant Valley, it became a bit of a ghost town, lots of houses became empty and their land lords sold them and this affected trade and there was competition from the new grocery shop in Rowntree Way, and the off licence suffered from the opening of the Crocus pub but I put in my reports that in time things would improve as a new housing estate was being built called Cromwell Road.
I got rather depressed there but it was convenient for country walks after hours.
When we as a family moved to Four Acres in August 1972, so I was transferred to Newport as branch manager on a higher salary.
In those days the flat above the shop there was occupied by a former manager of the Walden branch who had a bit of an affair with an female employee and had to be moved. When I was first there his wife was too, but after her death he lived alone. I helped him with his gardening, He was always there first thing in the morning to welcome us, and last thing at night he’d come down and check that the young manager had locked up. He bought about 200 f*gs a week but after his death we found .most of them stacked in his sideboard unused and loads of unconsumed food.
One Sunday morning I suddenly realised my shop keys were not in my pocket, so I cycled over to check and sure enough I’d left them in the front door, he’d found them and had them in a safe place.
On one occasion we had a lot of promotion papers to deliver around the village and the errand boy was sent off to do so and paid extra to do so but a lot of the villagers when questioned had not seen them.
He’d given up and lobbed a lot behind a hedge. When he reported in that afternoon for work I confronted him and he collapsed in shame and shock. I forgave him, I liked him a lot really and his behaviour was completely out of character.
I was at Newport during the 3 day working week that brought Ted Heath’s Government down We had electricity rationed to 3 hour bands, and in the daytime we had to operate at times without light, heat, or electric cash registers.
Also there was a sugar shortage and I introduced rationing and had 500 families registered with us for sugar for weeks and for miles around..
Then finally the Co-op could get no sugar at all, so some that week had their quota and some got none, and that caused a right royal row and they then forgot how we had helped them for weeks, some never normally came near the place.
There was a trap door in the floor there and a cellar beneath where we stored the soap powder and you could sit on the step as people walked over the top on the floor and listen to their conversations...Most interesting at times.
In high summer I used to use the trade bike and cycle out with my sandwiches to THE PIT a worked gravel pit filled with water and later enclosed and used for selling fishing licences.
Later I used to cycle down Wicken Road towards the motorway bridge but just before it turn off onto Green Lane, the old highwaymen infested London Road that went through to Rickling and sunbathe in a meadow there.
or shelter in the Parish Church which was like being in a fridge on a hot Summer's day.
While at Newport I put on several slide shows for the Ladies Club, and the church hall to raise money for charity, and on one occasion was invited to Shortgrove to photo the grounds in bluebell time.
I was at Newport the day my Dad died and the Walls Meats and Pies Rep brought me to Walden Hospital where he lay some hours in a coma.
While I was there I learned to swim, aged 37. Mrs Bush at the TV shop next door had just given up evening work at the Telephone exchange and had time on her hands so she would drive herself, 3 of our staff and me to the old Hill Street baths to have swimming lessons. We all enjoyed the first 3 months with our waterwings attached. Then the instructor said we would make no progress until we took them off.
Liar - that was when we made no progress at all, we just sank. like lead balloons. We said that was the end, we would not go anymore, but the following week we were there in force determined to meet the challenge and we all learnt to swim.
On my 38th birthday I was in the pool on my own, the others had gone back to change and I stayed on a bit. The attendant reckoned I was safe so climbed back to his office and I capsized at the deep end and sank like a stone.
Surprised, I thought “Fool, are you going to drown?” So I stood up with the top of m head just below the water and walked until I found the ladder and climbed out.
At Christmas Eve we used to take a long lunch break and watch the queue form outside the shop and the staff had Christmas Lunch at the Star and Garter
On one occasion we had a report from Head Office that the Grammar School had reported that they had got a group of boys who had confessed to shoplifting. Little tykes had been systematically thieving and got several pounds worth. We got told off for lack of vigilance
The Deputy Head caned the lot of them over their buttocks and then marched them down the shop to pay for what they owed. One boy who had owned up had only stolen one Mars bar, but got caned just the same. I felt very sorry for him, but still they probably didn’t do it again, and after all the cane was no big deal really, once you’d had it once. It’s greatest value was as a deterrent. Fear of it deterred people misbehaving, or at least getting caught.
One afternoon I decided to spring clean the fridge. I had everything out in the back room on a counter while washing the fridges down just as a Public Health Inspector walked in
He seemed OK, but his report caused concern at Head Office and the district manager called to see me. He said that he was not impressed with my having had an earwig in the fridge.
I thought I have seen a lot worse, such as at Walkers we used to have fly eggs and maggots in bacon that we had to cut away and clean with vinegar.
I could not make that out what the fuss was about until one of the staff said that he said not “ear-wig but air-wick”
I left there in 1977 and the first lady assistant Jean Peters was promoted manageress.
by John E Maddams up to 1977
Presented to the SAFFRON WALDEN JUBILEE CLUB
February. 2008
I asked Audrey what I might talk about and she suggested “The Co-op”
So I thought I had better dress up for the occasion. Over the 31 years that I worked locally for the Co-op I had a variety of uniforms ranging from white, brown, white and blue, light grey, bright red, and what I am wearing now the Daffodil Livery, green and yellow.
Unfortunately the material does not wear well with the years
As you will see if I lift the sweater. It has shrunk
It’s OK there is no risk of it being more revealing
The trouble I suppose is retirement., Although I am very active I’m 4 stone heavier than I was most of my working life.
No doubt most of you if you have lived in Walden long will have been aware of the Co-op, which closed it’s doors for the last time in May 1995, apart from the more recent appearance of the Co-op Pharmacy that took over a network of other chemists.
I wrote these words for the Saffron Walden Reporter , published by them on June 1st 1995
“On Saturday May 20th a senior member of our community finally died aged 93 years and 2 months
This aged personality was registered with the Registrar General on March 1st 1902 as
The Saffron Walden and District Co-operative Society
Number 3860 Essex and died as LEO’S
During their first year they recruited 223 members sold £1,857 of goods and distributed a shared dividend to their members of £87pound 15 shillings and 11 pence.
Their first annual report stated “ We have launched our boat” and we must all pull together”
It was launched in the Tap Room of the Bell Inn on the Southern side of Upper Castle Street, and from the word go it’s official rubber stamp symbol was A BELL.
The Co-op was based on Christian principles of fair trading, and locally was well supported by the two most working class churches in the town Castle Hill Primitive Methodists and Hill Street Baptists, both closed down. .
All the members of each district society owned the business between them. Ownership was not in the hands of 1 person, or one family, or a small group of well off shareholders having lots of shares but Every member had ONE SHARE in the BUSINESS.
They thereby shared in the responsibility of making it a success.
They were assured good quality produce often grown on Co-op Farms or made in Co-op Factories around the country and across the world whose workers were paid fair wages for a fair day’s work.
The products were favourable priced and all the profits were ploughed back into the business to pay the staff and the overheads and to fund new developments and growth, but each half year, a percentage of the profits agreed by an elected board elected by the members to manage the business was shared equally amongst the Members, dependent on how much they had spent during those 6 months.
This local Co-op opened their first shop at the bottom of the High Street where the Turkish Restaurant is today.
The members were mainly working class families who by uniting together could buy up products in larger quantities than a one man or family business could afford and benefit from quantity discounts.
Certainly by the time I joined a members share cost £1 but you could save larger sums on your share account, and interest was added. You could take your share money out each 6 months and spend it, or you could leave it in and let it grow with added interest.
For many people it was the way they saved. The Penny Banks,
They also ran Boot Clubs, Clothing Clubs, Coal Clubs or Christmas Clubs, into which you could save a sum of money each week to which interest would be added, and then the money could be used to buy shoes, or clothes, or coal or Christmas presents.
At 2.30pm on Saturday September 21st 1935 a new store was opened in the High Street opposite Woolworths and the Eastern Electricity shop with a very large crowd of friends and members
and 59 years later it closed it’s doors for the last time with one late customer and 5 members of staff in a deserted street. The boat had sunk,
It was some boat, second only to Acrow’s Engineers and Englemans Nurseries as the largest employer of labour in the town.
At it’s peak it had 9 shops scattered around Walden, Thaxted and Newport, a Bakery, a Dairy with door to door milk deliveries, a coal yard, a funeral service, a bank branch, a Women’s Guild, an Education Committee, 2 mobile grocery shops and a mobile butchery, and a host of horse drawn wagons and later delivery vans and trade bikes that served people in the villages over a wide area of North West Essex
and it employed in it’s 91 years hundreds of people.
In the 31 years I worked for the Co-op I knew personally of over 300 employees, and people come up to me in the street these days and say “Hello Mr Maddams”, or “Hi John” and expect me to remember who they are, while my brain’s computer goes into overdrive trying to remember.
Their Golden Jubilee booklet said “ Co-operation is the key to success in every phase of life”
“For all to co-operate would bring
the end of wars, with their consequent waste of money and lives,
and much greater happiness and comfort
and freedom from fear for people all over the world “
It is essential to ensure success through team work
the more we keep together the happier we will be”
I ended the article published in the newspaper with this sentence
“The shops have vanished but the principles remain to be re-assimilated and re-expressed “
I first recall the Co-op by being pushed around it in a push chair with the rack along the front of the counters with tins of biscuits displayed, and similarly so at Walker’s Stores on the other side of the road, and the comment “ keep your hands out of those tins” I never then thought I’d work in both shops. .
Towards the beginning of my last year at Grammar School it suddenly dawned on me that in 10 months time “You have got to find a job”, and I had no ambition.
The thing I was best at was growing flowers and vegetables and I later discovered that this “Green Fingers gift “ was in my genes, or as we used to say “in the blood” Inherited that from my Dad who looked after two allotment strips
my Grandfathers
one of whom Tom, made excellent home made wines but being unable to read or write his recipes died with him.
the one Harry won medals and certificates in Allotment Holders shows in North London.
My great grandfather Tom was a Nurseryman in Bedfordshire and before him were 3 generations of farmers.
So I decided I had better brush up on Botany with a view to going to Writtle Agricultural College.
At the end of the Christmas term, our form master, Spud Taylor the Biology and Botany Master set us an exam. Just before we broke up for the holidays, and before we gave him his customary gift of mineral water and f*gs, he came into the biology lab and shouted us “You have all let me down!. You have all failed the exam! And I don’t believe it! the highest result is Maddams with 49%, he’s never got that much, or that high, before!
Fortunately for me our neighbour Joyce Oxley got me
my first job as a Junior Clerk at Chater & Myhill’s Certified Accountants Central arcade at the princely sum of £3 a week.
The only problem of a job in accountancy is that you have to understand maths which was a closed book to me then, and I failed it repeatedly. I did learn how to file, how to draw up clients accounts and cook the books.. That means audit their annual accounts. That is when I learnt that many of our apparently wealthy farmers were putting on a veneer of confidence while whistling in the wind, being in debt most of the year round.
Another role I had seated at the front of the office which is now The Trawler-Man Fish and Chip Shop was to give the clients the illusion of our having an automatic door.
As they approached it, I had to pull a length of cord.
The boss called me to his office on one July morning and said “ “John we have come to the conclusion You don’t fit this job”
( How ungrateful after me pulling that cord all day every day”
I replied that I felt much the same way. So we parted on friendly terms with me on a fortnights holiday.
Around the corner I went and saw a notice at Walkers Stores”
“Wanted! Provisions Assistant. No experience necessary.
On job training given, £5 a week”.
Something inside me said “Take it”. After all it offered a 40% wage increase.
15 years later doing Family history research
I found that retailing was in the blood too. Mum before marriage had worked in the Boot and Shoe department of Quaker businessman Walter Robson in King Street where the Health Food Shop is today and Dad’s brother had delivered all sorts of things about town and villages for him on a trade bike including large sitting room sofa chairs.
Also my great great grandfather William had opened a Grocery Store in Biggleswade in 1840 which survived until 1936.
Just before he died he made a will leaving £8000. At the time I found this out I’d got about the same amount and felt a sense of kinship with him until I found out that in today’s money that would be about £300.000 plus the business, the farm, and a large town house with paddock garden and two large summer houses.
At that point something a bit like “how are the mighty fallen” swept over me.
So I joined Walkers Stores, which arrived at Walden in 1907 taking over the premises of Beard and Son Drapers, and since the 1930’s managed by the indefatigable Major James Cook generally called Jim who with his wife lived in a bungalow in East Street, and through the War he commanded the local Home Guard, and was Secretary of a Dancing Club and Treasurer before 1948 of the GeneralHospital Insurance Scheme. and shared an important role in organising the regular carnivals.
A bit of an austere man I recall him accusing me of shop lifting.
True at the age of 12 I had been a shoplifter but knowing what to look out for I was more likely to catch shoplifters. The till was short and he had noticed that when ever I went to the till I’d look furtively to the left to see, so he thought, if anyone was watching me. However this was the twitch learnt at Chater’s to be ready to open the door, and had become a habit.
Later in the great flu epidemic of 1961 when all our staff went down with it, he and I ran the store on our own for a couple of weeks and we both got to respect each other and became firm friends.
Also that year Rumsey’s who had the store next door and over the top caught fire one Sunday morning and the water from the fire hoses drenched our store and flooded our floor and we were there into the early hours of Monday cleaning up and tidying up, and George Brown , elder of Gold Street Chapel, and then Secretary of the SW Co-op offered us the use of what used to be Cro’s Stores the other side of what was then Sketchleys the clothing cleaners to take our stock, sort it out and dry the tins.
The District Manager came over and declared all the stock as a write off unfit for human consumption and listed it for the Insurance assessors, then shipped it across the road for us to dry it out, patch it up so it could go on sale again. After all most of it was OK.
In those days and since the War years the grocery shops in town had a barter system between them If any of them ran out of a line they borrowed it from someone else to keep their customers happy. So Cros’, Pennings, Home and Colonial, International, Walkers, Co-op, and later Budgens would co-operate with each other and at the end of each month we’d tot up what we owed each other and go from store to store selecting what stock we’d like to balance our accounts with.
That was when I first got to know the Co-op Staff
Fred Stalley (Trade Union Treasurer)
Wilf Clayden (Trade Union Secretary) Cecil Cornell, George Cornell in Bakery.. Stan Mallyon, Alex Randell etc
Walkers which in fact officially was World Stores merged with Greens Stores and became Key Markets, I rose in this to be Assistant Manager and when in 1964 they closed down 400 branches one weekend at a week’s notice Cecil Woodley from Littlebury as Manager and me, were both offered lucrative self service store management posts on the South coast but we did not want to leave this district.
So I went over the road and into the cellar to begin a new stage in my career as the bacon hand..
Alongside Peter Preece’s Mum Phylis Leggerton
I boned sides of bacon, cut up joints, boiled gammons, sliced up bacon rashers and cooked meats on different machines, cut cheeses, and handed them over to Phylis who laid them out on plastic wrap, sealed them, and put on the labels.
Down there one day on my own I dropped a boning knife on my left leg and foot and squelched up the stairs with a shoe full of blood to find Alex Randle in his office and the services of a first aider.
On another occasion I got a severe abscess in the back of a rotten tooth and Warehouseman Stan Mallion persuaded me to let him take me to his dentist, Mr Willan, he took one look, threw up his hands in the air and sent me to a private dental surgeon Mr Turvey, in Audley road, who described my mouth as a disaster area, and told me he’d have to remove all that was left in hospital
On the day the op was due at SW General Hospital I said “Farewell” to Alex Randle and said “see you in a couple of days”
Two weeks later a bit crestfallen I reappeared at his office to apologise for my absence
Alex said “I knew it would be more than a couple of days but I dare not tell you that, unless you refused to go ahead with it.”
It was as 3 hour operation and used up a lot of blood.
On another occasion I slashed a finger with a boning knife and had to got up the Hospital with my arm held up in the air like the Nazi salute and have an anti tetanus jab as well
In those days the cellar, lovely and warm in winter, and lovely and cool in summer, was supplied from the warehouse above by a service lift on ropes which we had to pull to move it about.
Down there we stored all the wine, spirits and tobacco
There were large central heating pipes from the boiler room through the cellar surrounded by a cladding all painted bright blue, which 20 years later was declared to be blue asbestos so 18 months ago I had to be X-rayed and scanned for a shadow on my lung thought to be asbestosis. Fortunately it was only pleurisy.
A couple of months after joining the Co-op there was a General Election and the Co-op offices became Labour Party Election HQ as the Co-op Movement fielded it’s own candidates as the Co-operative Party which was part of the Right wing of the Labour Party and later many of it’s members formed the Social Democrat Party which joined with the Liberals to form the Liberal Democrats.
For the election the Co-op car park was closed only to staff cars ferrying electors from their homes to the polling booths to vote.
The President of the Society Mr Sugden came round a few days before recruiting volunteers to be tellers at polling booth for the Labour Party to sit outside and ask people who they voted for ( supposed to be get their registration numbers to help find out who has not voted)
I felt duty bound as a good citizen to say “Yes”, everyone else said “No”
I later found out that that all or most of the staff all voted for the Liberal candidate and really could not stand Sugden who was regarded as a bit of a Communist.
I was assigned to South Road school for some hours. One of my friends a retired Baptist Minister walked up the driveway and then saw me sitting there with a large red rosette, took fright, paused, turned round and went home.
Highlight of each morning was the 5 minute Tea break in the old cafe by now the staff canteen, We went in, in groups of 3 and 4, at 5 minute intervals.
But when one lot came in the other lot did not go out.
So eventually most of the staff were in the otherwise deserted cafe canteen munching through crusty bread rolls richly layered with butter and grated cheese, and there we sat for a good half hour nattering as the queues outside got longer and longer until a very aggrieved Alex flew through the door to demand where the staff were.
Eventually this perk was taken away and the cafe closed. Edie and Hilda who ran it were found other work, and the cafe became part of the warehouse. Spoil sports - we were only helping each other, co-operating or doing union business or putting the world to rights. f
Later on to save going bankrupt Walden Co-op amalgamated with Cambridge and District
The new broom decided that it was not hygienic to prepare fresh foods in the cellar, so I got moved to the ground floor warehouse which had no heating and in the winter the temp dropped below freezing and in the summer it was like a sweat shop,
There were two skylights surrounded inside a wire mesh cage with glass with just a little free space between the under cage and the ceiling for wasps to fly in, where they’d get caught on sticky paper rolls, or swarmed round trying to find the way out until they dropped from exhaustion and died on the bodies of several year’s collection.
I left there in 1968 and was relocated at King Street in the Butchers shop where Ken Spall was in charge of the Butchery Staff and I was in charge of the new Grocery counter with Nancy Howell to keep me on the straight and narrow. I think Nancy was the widow of the only Staff member out of 35 who served in the Forces, that did not return home after WW2 - L/Cpl A A Howell, Royal Corps of Signals who died aged 30 on active service in India August 3rd 1944
We enjoyed much fun there This had previously been the Butchery shop of Wedd and Downham and the Co-op butchery when I was a boy was in Hill Street [about where the Salvation Army shop is now.- updated 2015]
From there I was sent to Pleasant Valley Store a few yards from where I then lived
Pleasant Valley branch was before the war Parrish’s Stores, and then he had to go and be a soldier and it lay empty, until after the war when someone started it again when I was a boy of about 10 they rebuilt it. so it seemed. on crates and crates of Tizer.
Then Harry Matthews bought it. He sold it to the Coop but stayed on as Manager and after him another man did it, and then Len Reed from the former Victoria Avenue branch was transferred there but he got in a terrible mess with the door’s electric alarm, and in the end just gave up.
Then I was asked to take it on and did so for 5 years. It was a very friendly shop with Eileen Halls from Summerhill Road, and Joan Blakeway from Rowntree Way, and Doris Hudgell from Shortgrove, Newport.
Sam Gilchrist or was it Littlejohn being area manager came over one Christmas and commented on how nice and tidy the warehouse part was until some of it fell on him from a top shelf. l
We kept several neighbours sustained weekly on bottles of sherry.
There were shortages and we could not always get the range of products people wanted.
There were people living in council houses, private homes and private rented homes There were poor people and richer people.
They liked a wide range of cheese, English mild Cheddar, English Cheshire, English mature cheddar, Canadian Matured, Australian and New Zealand.
We satisfied all their needs using English Mild. There was only ever the one kind of cheese but they all told each other how great the Canadian, Australian or New Zealand were that week,
and they were all satisfied.
We were always taught
“At all costs keep the customer happy. They are always right even when they are often wrong but unaware of it. “
Jim Cook at Walkers Stores told the story of when he was an apprentice at the family business’s Head Store in Warwick .
A customer came in to buy a breadboard and bread knife for a wedding present and was charged £5. He protested that he did not want a cheap present but something with a bit of class to it.
The assistant went out the back and he and the boss paused for a bit and then the boss came out with the same set and sold it for £10 and the customer was satisfied that he had bought something decent and went away happy. They only stocked one kind.
Towards the end of my time at Pleasant Valley, it became a bit of a ghost town, lots of houses became empty and their land lords sold them and this affected trade and there was competition from the new grocery shop in Rowntree Way, and the off licence suffered from the opening of the Crocus pub but I put in my reports that in time things would improve as a new housing estate was being built called Cromwell Road.
I got rather depressed there but it was convenient for country walks after hours.
When we as a family moved to Four Acres in August 1972, so I was transferred to Newport as branch manager on a higher salary.
In those days the flat above the shop there was occupied by a former manager of the Walden branch who had a bit of an affair with an female employee and had to be moved. When I was first there his wife was too, but after her death he lived alone. I helped him with his gardening, He was always there first thing in the morning to welcome us, and last thing at night he’d come down and check that the young manager had locked up. He bought about 200 f*gs a week but after his death we found .most of them stacked in his sideboard unused and loads of unconsumed food.
One Sunday morning I suddenly realised my shop keys were not in my pocket, so I cycled over to check and sure enough I’d left them in the front door, he’d found them and had them in a safe place.
On one occasion we had a lot of promotion papers to deliver around the village and the errand boy was sent off to do so and paid extra to do so but a lot of the villagers when questioned had not seen them.
He’d given up and lobbed a lot behind a hedge. When he reported in that afternoon for work I confronted him and he collapsed in shame and shock. I forgave him, I liked him a lot really and his behaviour was completely out of character.
I was at Newport during the 3 day working week that brought Ted Heath’s Government down We had electricity rationed to 3 hour bands, and in the daytime we had to operate at times without light, heat, or electric cash registers.
Also there was a sugar shortage and I introduced rationing and had 500 families registered with us for sugar for weeks and for miles around..
Then finally the Co-op could get no sugar at all, so some that week had their quota and some got none, and that caused a right royal row and they then forgot how we had helped them for weeks, some never normally came near the place.
There was a trap door in the floor there and a cellar beneath where we stored the soap powder and you could sit on the step as people walked over the top on the floor and listen to their conversations...Most interesting at times.
In high summer I used to use the trade bike and cycle out with my sandwiches to THE PIT a worked gravel pit filled with water and later enclosed and used for selling fishing licences.
Later I used to cycle down Wicken Road towards the motorway bridge but just before it turn off onto Green Lane, the old highwaymen infested London Road that went through to Rickling and sunbathe in a meadow there.
or shelter in the Parish Church which was like being in a fridge on a hot Summer's day.
While at Newport I put on several slide shows for the Ladies Club, and the church hall to raise money for charity, and on one occasion was invited to Shortgrove to photo the grounds in bluebell time.
I was at Newport the day my Dad died and the Walls Meats and Pies Rep brought me to Walden Hospital where he lay some hours in a coma.
While I was there I learned to swim, aged 37. Mrs Bush at the TV shop next door had just given up evening work at the Telephone exchange and had time on her hands so she would drive herself, 3 of our staff and me to the old Hill Street baths to have swimming lessons. We all enjoyed the first 3 months with our waterwings attached. Then the instructor said we would make no progress until we took them off.
Liar - that was when we made no progress at all, we just sank. like lead balloons. We said that was the end, we would not go anymore, but the following week we were there in force determined to meet the challenge and we all learnt to swim.
On my 38th birthday I was in the pool on my own, the others had gone back to change and I stayed on a bit. The attendant reckoned I was safe so climbed back to his office and I capsized at the deep end and sank like a stone.
Surprised, I thought “Fool, are you going to drown?” So I stood up with the top of m head just below the water and walked until I found the ladder and climbed out.
At Christmas Eve we used to take a long lunch break and watch the queue form outside the shop and the staff had Christmas Lunch at the Star and Garter
On one occasion we had a report from Head Office that the Grammar School had reported that they had got a group of boys who had confessed to shoplifting. Little tykes had been systematically thieving and got several pounds worth. We got told off for lack of vigilance
The Deputy Head caned the lot of them over their buttocks and then marched them down the shop to pay for what they owed. One boy who had owned up had only stolen one Mars bar, but got caned just the same. I felt very sorry for him, but still they probably didn’t do it again, and after all the cane was no big deal really, once you’d had it once. It’s greatest value was as a deterrent. Fear of it deterred people misbehaving, or at least getting caught.
One afternoon I decided to spring clean the fridge. I had everything out in the back room on a counter while washing the fridges down just as a Public Health Inspector walked in
He seemed OK, but his report caused concern at Head Office and the district manager called to see me. He said that he was not impressed with my having had an earwig in the fridge.
I thought I have seen a lot worse, such as at Walkers we used to have fly eggs and maggots in bacon that we had to cut away and clean with vinegar.
I could not make that out what the fuss was about until one of the staff said that he said not “ear-wig but air-wick”
I left there in 1977 and the first lady assistant Jean Peters was promoted manageress.