From Christine Bate’s document titled Shopping.doc

SHOPPING BEFORE1939

I think I may have written already about shopping in Rotherham, on White Hill, in Brinsworth and at home. 

Need to write about shopping in Rotherham if it’s not already somewhere else.

The nearest town to Brinsworth is Rotherham, about 2 1/2 miles from Whitehill,. Rotherham is a very old town, in fact it has more of a history than Sheffield, the big city of South Yorkshire. The name has Norse origins and means “the town on the river Rother”. As so often happened, the town came into being because it was at the confluence of two rivers, the Rother and the Don. Doncaster, meaning the castle on the Don, is a nearby town. 

When Father was able to rent a council house on Whitehill and so he and Mother married, the only public transportation to Rotherham was by tramcar from Canklow. This meant walking to Canklow, a distance of a little over a mile and waiting at the terminus. Mother talked about them having to make a decision whether to buy a pair of kippers and walk all the way home or spend the money on the tram fare. I can’t remember whether the fare was one penny or tuppence. Oddly, during WWII we generally had to walk to Canklow to board the bus into Rotherham on Saturday mornings when we went shopping for the weekend because all the buses that came over Whitehill from Catcliffe and Treeton were already full, with no standing room. 

Rotherham was centred on the Parish Church with streets radiating from All Saints Square, in front of the church. These old streets were still named for the town gates although the gates themselves were long gone. Doncaster Gate led towards Doncaster, then there was Wellgate, Westgate, Moorgate and Bridge Gate.  

Contents: Itinerant vendors, vegetables baker fishmonger, butcher etc.

There were four shops on the top of Whitehill where the Main Road came up from Catcliffe and then descended down into Brinsworth. There was the Top Shop, Booth’s, Smileys and the front room “shop” at the bottom house in the row. 

As regards shopping at home, several vendors of various kinds used to come up to Whitehill and go past our house as part of their route. There was the green grocer, or more accurately several green grocers. We patronized Arthur Cocking (the ‘g’ on the end was never pronounced). He had a green grocer’s shop down in Brinsworth at the bottom of Ellis Street. He also had a horse and cart that he drove around the neighbourhoods while his wife minded the shop. It was just a flat cart with open boxes arranged to display the various fruits and vegetable.Many times I went down the path from the house to the street with Mother to make our purchases from the boxes of fruit and vegetables. There were no exotic fruits or vegetables in those days, just root vegetables and other seasonal items such as peas, lettuce and apples.  Of course we grew most of our vegetables in the garden, but they had to be supplemented. There were other green grocers, but the main rival was Albert Butcher, one of the Catcliffe Butchers. Since Whitehill was between Brinsworth and Catcliffe we were well served.  Albert Butcher began to use a motor lorry while Cocking was still driving his horse. Sometimes we bought a few things from him when he came late on Friday evening, but other families used him as their main supplier. He generally had a wider variety of offerings and occasionally had pomegranates. Mother never bought pomegranates and I watched with envy as the Charlesworth’s children used a pin to pick the seeds out of the halved fruit. Mother never bought mushrooms either, because they were too expensive and she had been used to going out mushrooming in the fields at home up North.  

Then there was the baker who came on Friday dinnertime, the fish man who came on Tuesdays and the butcher who came twice, once in the middle of the week to sell mainly offal and stew meat, and at the weekend when most people had a joint of meat to roast for Sunday dinner. Then there was the pikelet man selling what are called crumpets in the South, the onion man from the Continent, France or Belgium usually, with strings of onions on his bicycle handlebars, and in later years, the ice cream man. The rag and bone man came unpredictably, usually driving a pony and flat cart and shouting “Rags and bones” as he drove along the street. Mostly, he had a jar of goldfish and  gave one in exchange for old clothes, but sometimes gave coppers, that is either halfpennies or pennies. Sheila once gave my father’s waistcoat to the rag and bone man, with his watch in it, but Mother retrieved it. It was customary for children to be given old ragged things to take to the cart, rather than the adult going to him. Those were days in the depression or “slump” when most people had very little and wore clothes or remade them until they really were rags by the time they were “got rid of”. 

Coal delivery was an important part of life on Whitehill.  In the1930’s coal was delivered by a dump truck that drew up to the curb outside your house and dumped the load. It was up to the householder to move the coal up the path into the coal house. Since we did not have a wheel barrow, it was carried up to the house by the bucket full. Quite a task for half a ton of coal. The paths up to all the houses were narrow because there was no call for driveways and garages in those days. Later on, the coal was delivered in hundred weight sacks, twenty hundred weights to the ton. This enabled the coal man to walk up the path to the house and dump each bag into the coal house. This was a space of about nine or ten feet square included in the footprint of the house, but with access from the outside. Ours was always whitewashed in the summer when it was empty and then when it was time to get a good stock of coal in for the winter, we had a barrier of large planks of wood that held the coal back but did not come down to the ground so that you could shovel the coal out at thebottom.  We kept the fire-lighting sticks in there too, and there was a high shelf at the back that was used for storing things that would go in the garage now. 

Our coalman was Mr. Mussum and Mother was very particular that he brought coal only from Treeton pit because it burned better. Canklow coal from John Brown’s pit was not for us.

I must not forget the milkman who came twice per day until 1939. He had a horse and two-wheeled cart with two large churns of milk with taps at the bottom. He drew milk from a big churn into a smaller one that he could carry. He also had long-handled measures. When he came to the door, we took a jug to the door and he measured out the milk we asked for. In Yorkshire a gill (soft g) was half a pint even though the table “Four gills one pint, two pints one quart, four quarts one gallon” was recited at school and was even printed among the tables in our arithmetic work books. 

An added benefit to having these traveling salesmen was that when the horses left a pile on the road outside the house, we ran with the fire shovel, generally used for shoveling coal, and picked the manure up into a bucket.  This was good manure for the garden and supplemented the load of manure that was delivered every year from the farm. I was told that I always referred to manure as “farm”. As for the fire shovel, we never had a coal skuttle to stand by the fireplace. We went out to the coal house and shoveled coal into a bucket that was kept in the scullery. Much better than going out into the cold each time the fire needed mending.