1930s: Prams pans fish beds or gossip were all available in one street

Jump to: navigation, search

Visitors to Derby’s Westfield Centre may think it has it all. But the chances are that Brook Street, in Derby’s old West End, once had everything the new centre is set to sell – and more besides. Derbeian Harold Richardson recalls the town’s first shopping ‘mall’.

Those who can remember the communities that once existed in the West End and other run-down areas of Derby will also remember, with some nostalgia, their corner shops. And I suppose Brook Street, so varied were its offerings, would have been the shopping mall of its day.

You would be hard put to find anything similar now but in less sophisticated times such shops were a vital part of that way of life – and that included the pawnshops.

The corner shop would supply all your needs – and the pawnshops the necessary coppers for your purse or pocket. Failing that, and provided you had not been blacklisted, nearly all of them had their ‘strapping’ systems that allowed credit until Friday night.

It wasn’t just the essentials like groceries, vegetables, meat and fish that they stocked; you could get leather for your boots and a hobbling iron to mend them on; or fix your wireless by getting its accumulator recharged.

Furniture, prams, gramophone records, rugs and beds, pots, pans – in fact, anything you could think of, there were shops for them all.

Nothing was ever new, of course, and if it was a suit, shirt or coat you were after, you couldn’t do better than try Sullivan’s second-hand clothes shop next to the chapel in Brook Street.

Bins of shoes of mixed styles and sizes were left out on the pavement, from which customers could make a choice and search for a matching pair.

Women’s dresses dangled in its window and, to my young mind, especially at night in the gas-lit street, I remember how their ghost-like appearance would have me break into a run.

Winnie’s is the shop that most clearly comes back to me. It was on the corner of Leaper Street and Brook Street and was the nearest to our house.

Its stock covered just about everything compatible with the pockets of its customers. Besides groceries, there were sweets, potatoes, paraffin, firewood, pastries and biscuits and all manner of pills and remedies.

You could get a pair of men’s socks for sixpence or women’s pinafores for a shilling (5p). Most things then had to be cut, ladled out, weighed or counted, so patience was needed and you wouldn’t dare complain of having to wait. It was also something of a gossip shop, so rarely was it completely empty of customers.

Tall and thin, Winnie maintained a jaundiced view of life, her bitterest comments directed at those who dared complain or bring anything back for exchange.

She had hands and forearms perpetually red from the constant scrubbing and washing with carbolic of floor and counter. It was as if she was always worried about what her customers might bring in with them.

Most nights she kept her shop open until 8pm and, on Friday nights, it was well past 10pm before the shutters went up – it being the night for “settling up” by those privileged to “strap” through the week.

To give defaulters one more chance before the black mark was entered against their names, the shop light might be kept on until after they had turned out at the Albert Vaults and the Seven Stars.

Facing Winnie’s, on the corner opposite side, was the fish and chip shop run by Mr and Mrs Keating. The only time you saw Mr Keating was when he struggled through with another bucketful of chipped potatoes ready for frying.

A sheet of newspaper with just a white square in the middle would keep in the flavour of its two-penny fish and its penny scoop of chips.

Those in the know would be there just before it closed at 10pm. At that time you could get a bag of scratchings – bits of batter – for a penny and any cooling chips left in the pan as well.

Mrs Fletcher, the fishmonger, was noted for her bloaters and cod . What I remember most about her now was how, over the years, she had taken on the open-mouthed, bulging stare of her stock in trade.

At the fishing tackle shop three doors further on, Mr Hill would fill you a cocoa tin with maggot bait for 1½d. And in those hard-up days, he would oblige you with a single Woodbine cigarette and two matches for a halfpenny.

Crossing the street would bring you to Hudson’s pot shop and the entrance to Perfect’s Yard, at the top of which was a low building where the Blue Riband Mission would entice street urchins to their weekly meetings with the offer of a free bun and mug of cocoa.

Outside her shop door, Mrs -Hudson kept a wicker clothes basket filled with slightly chipped cups, all at one penny each. Mr Hudson was famous for being the owner of the King of Rome, a racing pigeon of some renown and about which a song has famously been recorded.

What, without doubt, was the most popular of shops to us youngsters was not on a corner at all but part of a row of houses. It was instantly recognisable as the paper shop, though, because of the tatty posters stuck to its bricks.

It is strange how clearly the window of the paper shop has stayed in my mind.

It was no larger than any others in the row, yet it found room for a few toffee jars, some dummy packets of cigarettes, a dead fly or two and fading promises of free gifts to be had for collecting soap coupons.

Above the door, rust-spotted squares of enamelled tin advertised Hudson’s Soap and Robin cigarettes, without any guarantee of finding either in the shop below.

Inside, even on summer days, it was a gloomy place with corners filled with piles of dusty papers that never seemed to grow smaller, and, coming out of the sun, it was like walking into permanent twilight.

On the counter itself, the only place with some order, were laid out the treasures that made Mrs Littlewood’s shop the cave of wonders that it was for me. It housed the things I adored, the comics of the day.

Some I can still remember, Film Fun, Comic Cuts, Wonder and Joker, the latter being printed on green paper.

Having a more profound effect were the boys’ weekly papers with titles such as The Wizard, Rover, Hotspur, Skipper and Adventure – all at 2d each and all with covers of two-tone colours of orange and green or orange and blue.

Sparse pocket money meant a choice of only one. It was usually the Wizard but I was able to get hold of the others through a street swapping system.

The comics were similar in having half a dozen or so stories of adventure and daring in serial form, with powerful characters, charismatic heroes and black-hatted villains all ready to use fisticuffs as a method of solving any dispute. The bad men might, at times, have had the best of it but they never escaped their just deserts.

Favourite subjects for the stories, as I recall, were the Wild West, the Frozen North, the Great War, masculine spoils, jungles with ferocious animals and wild natives.

There were fantastic weapons and death-rays and out of their pages came Martians and interplanetary rockets, giant robots intent on destroying the world and extra-terrestrial viruses that could eat through metal to collapse bridges and bring down skyscrapers.

They gave us lands of romance, adventure and fair play that invoked a spirit to outlast childhood and, not so many years later, help see us through another world war.

Pages linking here