Page 32 - A History Of Food And Drink In Wokingham

Appendix B – Provided by The Wokingham Society

The following items relating to food and drink come from “Frank Day's Personal Memories of
his childhood as an Apprentice Butcher in Wokingham during the 1930s”. This was kindly
presented to the Wokingham Society by Mrs Carol Day, his daughter-in-law, who had
produced a typed version of Frank Day's hand-written notes. The full document can be found
here: -
Frank Day's memories and Day Family (wokinghamsociety.org.uk)

Frank firstly recalls the shops in Peach Street in 1927.

“There was a pork butcher, owned by Mr Bert Harrison, who sold pigs' trotters and pork pies
and made a lovely lard for 2 pence a pound. He was a big man and always chain-smoked,
but he kept all his cigarette ends and gave them to us, sometimes 50 ends for a week”.

There was “a greengrocer come pie and cooked meat shop owned by a
Mr & Mrs Johnson. She was really a wonderful lady but at today's hygiene standards, she
would never have been allowed to open. The fruit and veg was left in boxes and just
stacked in the window, the cooked meat laid on the counter covered by a sheet, and the pies
were hung up near the ceiling on orange box lids with iron tied round the wood and hooked
on to nails in the beams, and if one went for a pie she would grab one from the rack and
wrap it in newspaper. She was a good old sort and we all liked her”.

There was “the British and Argentina Meat Company. The manager of B&A Meat Company
was Mr George Flint, a very popular man in Wokingham and his mate there was Mr Philip
Hartnell. Next along there was the Corn and Seed Merchant, Mr G. Ford & Son, and the last
shop on that side before the Market Place was the Home and Colonial Store”.

Walking back up Peach Street “On the other side was Mrs Hoskin's Sweet Shop, and then
came the overhang houses”.

Frank remembers The London Central Meat Company. The L.C.M, as it was known, was
where I first started work as a butcher in 1935. Mr Harry Cottrell was manager. Next to
those three shops was Dickie Arnold's paper shop and then Somerscale Fish Shop, owned
by Mr & Mrs Curtis. Mr Curtis was killed around about 1937 on his motor cycle at the bridge
at Finchampstead Road. Then there was the Redan pub. Mr Rance's son, Cliff also worked
at the L.C.M. as a lad. Next came Mrs Scraggs the greengrocer and W.T. Martin the
butcher. He (Mr Martin) was Mayor of Wokingham, and he also was one of the Martins of
the Terrace, who also built the swimming pool. Then came Mr Irving the grocer and this was
a quite a large store and we used to watch him making up the butter in half-pound and
pound packs. He used bats to cut lumps off a foot square of solid butter and made them
into oblong packets.

Frank “was due to leave school Easter 1936, but as we had lost our father in 1933, and a job
th
was offered to me, they let me leave at Christmas and I started work on December 15
1935, as an apprentice at the London Central Meat Company. It was hard work. There
were six others there and we were all delivering meat on bikes and I used to have to cycle
miles during the week, all for eight shillings and eleven pence per week, but I got used to it.

“The London Meat Company used to buy four-hundred/five-hundred rabbits every Monday;
we had to skin the lot and then they were sold for six-pence each and the skins were sold to
skin merchants for two-pence each, so there was a fair bit of profit in it”.

“Mr Ham had a bakers shop in Finchampstead Road close to the Two Poplars pub and in
the butchers where I worked he delivered all his stale bread for making sausages. That was

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