Backwords: Co-op Shopping
Mike Shaw recalls the days when all northern working class families did their grocery shopping at the local Co-op.
We used to shop at the Co-op with the same sort of familiar regularity that we wound up our mantelpiece clock.
Families like ours were just as unlikely to buy their weekly provisions from anywhere else than they were to vote for the Tories in a General Election.
It was on this brand of loyal devotion that the great Co-op citadels of my youth were created up and down the Pennine valleys and in the hub of textile centres like Huddersfield.
Each town and village had its own Co-op empire, with missionaries despatched to outskirts like ours to staff branch shops that were virtual lifelines for the natives.
Even though it was not in the mainstream, our Co-op branch stocked just about everything we needed to feed ourselves all the year round.
Anything else - including new clothes at Whitsuntide and extras for Christmas - meant a mile-long ride on the bus to the huge Co-op emporiums in either Marsden or Slaithwaite.
At Marsden, I remember, my mother bought me a hairy brown sports jacket which I hated for as long as it lasted, and a pair of equally offensive brown shoes from the footwear department on the other side of Peel Street.
Our trips to Marsden usually included a visit to the confectionary department on the corner of Peel Street and Manchester Road for fresh cream cakes and Swiss rolls.
Even more memorable than the mouth-watering fancies in the glass display cabinets was the incredible organisation of the place, masterminded by a ball of energy called Miss Furniss.
Miss Furniss - Maggie to her friends - was efficiency personified, with her rosy cheeks and a bun style that befitted the manageress of a cake shop.
Her speed behind the counter left me goggle-eyed, and she kept her young assistants on their toes with an acid-tongued rebuke for casual conversation or lethargy.
Slaithwaite’s Co-op had an even bigger and better emporium housed in a grand multi-storey building topped off with a spire.
The moonrakers’ Co-op also included a café where I remember eating egg and chips, and a hall which was a venue for most public meetings.
Scapegoat Hill, if I remember rightly, was the Co-op on top not only because it was so high up but because its “divi’’ - the discount on purchases which was paid out twice a year - was the best for miles around.
Huddersfield had a Co-op café too, and when father took me on occasional Saturday shopping trips we often finished up nibbling at a buttered currant teacake and sipping tea there.
Either that or, if I really badgered him and he was in a responsive mood, tucking into fish and chips at Gibson’s in the Beast Market.
On those rare expeditions we had regular calling places. Such as Y-Pay-More for broken biscuits and Woolworth’s for strong mints and liquorice allsorts.
At Dodd’s herbal chemists in King Street I always had to wait outside on the pavement until dad came out again.
At the time I never knew why. It was a constant puzzle to me in my formative years.
Now I think I know the answer. After all in those days the Pill had still to be invented. And there were no such things as vasectomies.
