Grandpa was a Grocer

My Grandpa, George Bladen was born in 1896 in Rutland Street, Swansea and attended the Grammar School on Mount Pleasant Hill, from where he emerged in his early teens with meticulous handwriting and a keen eye for adding up. He started work in Taylor and Co. Ltd. Provisions Merchants in Wind Street and was eighteen years old when the Great War broke out. When he returned from army service, he worked for nearly twenty years at their store at 23, The Dunns in Mumbles, rising to the position of Manager. This is his story as told to me, of his days in the Grocery trade, long before the advent of supermarkets, automatic tills, credit cards and internet shopping.

In those days, many foods such as tea, sugar, flour, pearl barley and split peas were delivered to the shop in sacks, which then required weighing up and packing in small bags in pounds or ounces e.g. ¼ lb (4 ozs) of tea costing from about 4½d depending on the quality; 1lb of sugar, costing about 3d, biscuits about 4d a pound weighed from a large tin; 1lb of split peas, salt and flour and freshly-ground coffee beans (prices circa 1920). Grandpa said he was trained up to be able to pack these so neatly, that today you would think they had been machine-packed. Margarine, butter and cheeses had to be cut from large blocks and weighed out to the customer's requirement and bacon was sliced from a joint to the thickness that the purchaser wished. Jams, treacle and honey came in jars. At Christmas, sultanas, raisins, nuts, dates and figs were added to list of the products to be weighed out.

Shop hours were long from 8.00am until 7.00pm with a half-day on Thursdays, when he would finish at 1.00pm, but on Saturdays the shop would be open until perhaps 10.30pm!

Mrs. Savours (pictured with son, Richard and baby, Norman in the foreground of the photo) might have shopped there. Her purchases would have been listed in a counterfoil book and the prices totted up by brain power! The bill would then have been paid on an account or to a cashier at the shop's enclosed cash desk, in coins such as sovereigns (£1), crowns (5/-), half-crowns (2/6d), florins (2/-), shillings (bobs), sixpences (tanners), thru-penny bits, pennies, ha'pennies and farthings. In those pre-decimal days there were 4 farthings in a penny, 12 pennies to a shilling and twenty shillings to the pound. Paper money was very rarely seen. If she requested a home delivery, an errand boy, employed by Taylor's would deliver on a heavy-duty bike with a front basket loaded with her groceries.

It was while Grandpa was working there that he met one particular customer, a young widow, whose husband had died in the recent flu epidemic and in 1921, they were married. He left Taylor's in the mid 1930s to become a 'commercial traveller' for Kardov flour, thus remaining in the Grocery Trade all his working life.