A BUTCHERS TALE.
Barnstaple in a small market town in North Devon, that used to have the abattoir and the cattle market in the town centre.Next to the Pannier Market there is a street known as Butchers Row, as there used to be 50 butchers shops in the street all side by side. This was similar in idea to the Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne, except burchers row is a street with traffic.
My Father cam from Exbourne 22 miles from Barnstaple and when Dad was starting work in the slaughterhouse in 1954,Peter Dibble started his job as a butcher’s boy in Barnstaple, post-war rationing was just ending and he would cycle miles in the cold and rain to deliver meat.
It was the era before supermarket dominance, and the local butcher’s shop was a focal point of the community.
Peter, now 67, was 13 when he started as an errand boy at Gratton’s in Butchers Row; he carefully pedalled his bike with its sausage-brimming basket around the town before and after school, often turning up late for lessons.
Then, when he was 15, Douglas Gratton offered to take him on full-time. Peter left school and started work in a traditional trade which would dominate his life for almost 55 years.
Over the decades, he has seen the town centre, butchery, local shops — and customer demands — in North Devon change almost beyond recognition. And he looks back now on the period between the late 1950s and late 1970s as a "golden era" for small local shops.
He retires in March with a bleak parting shot: supermarkets have all but killed us.
He said: "Back in 1954, I was down in Woolworths with my mother and I was picking up broken biscuits, and sampling them, and a lady came along and said Douglas wants to see you; he had started up a business and he wanted me to be his errand boy. I was pleased as punch.
"When I started we didn’t even have hot water in the butcher’s shop, so I had to go home to Belle Meadow and heat up water and bring it back to scrub the shop.
"Mr Gratton was so popular, the queue was right down the road to see him."
Peter’s first pay packet was £1.50 a week which went up to £4 when he went full-time.
In those lean days, thrift was key. Nothing was wasted.
Peter said: "Everything had to be usable. When we tied up meat, Mr Gratton would come and look how much string was on the floor, and if there was too much, he would make you do it again. Everything had to be accounted for."
He has enjoyed many humorous moments over the years in the shop and tells two favourite stories.
On one occasion a woman asked for a chicken. There was only one chicken in the fridge and she said it was too small, so Peter took it in the back room, untied the strings, "fluffed it up a bit" and took it back to her. The customer was impressed and, to his horror, said: "Okay, I’ll take both chickens."
He escaped by saying the first chicken was for his table, and wasn’t for sale.
"But the most funny story," he said. "Was when there was a fellow being annoyed by a short fat guy, a fellow worker, who went out of the shop for a while. A woman with a light-coloured coat (similar to a butcher’s apron) came in and stood with her back to the fellow who had been annoyed."
He thought it was the person who was annoying him and he rushed from behind and put his arms around her and started bouncing her up and down, said Peter.
Once, a woman threw a dozen chicken bones on his counter and told him she had eaten the animal and it had been "disgusting". Not too disgusting to eat, he thought at the time.
But Peter claimed the shop was now only a "shadow" of what it was. He became the manager in 1968 and in its heyday he would sell 26 sides of beef, at 300lbs each, a week, as well as 50 lambs and 35 pigs.
Now, he is lucky to shift six sides of beef. People who work during the day are less able to visit town centre shops, and many people choose to do one large weekly shop at one of the out-of-town retailers. Customers are also increasingly demanding organic meat and other specialist products.
"It’s the supermarkets," Peter said. "They have got everything on offer. When the weather is cold, they are warm. They have free parking and advertising campaigns. I think the writing was on the wall from 1989."
When he has hung up his cleaver for good, he will take holidays and use his bus pass to explore the West Country. You might say he deserves it: between 1968 and 1992 — 24 years — he never had a day’s holiday or sickness. And he still thinks no meal is complete without some meat, preferably local, and cooked in a traditional English way.
"The past 10 years we have been going to the Caribbean," he said. "But there’s nothing like good old-fashioned food when you get home."
Muriel Elizabeth Hayes.
Buenos Aires Argentina.
emmail: murielelizabethayes@yahoo.co.uk
