“Half a fucking ham stuffed up his left nostril and he still couldn’t smell it!” snorted Wally Stewart as he slapped his boning knife down on the counter at the rear of the Co-op warehouse in Carlisle.
The object of his scorn was one of two recently appointed assistant senior managers of the Carlisle Co-op (full name Carlisle South End Co-operative Society, founded in 1904 by a group of railway workers, Carlisle of course being a major railway town with, at one time, seven different railway companies operating there).
Although we didn’t know it at the time, their appointment was the first sign of the beginning of the end for a Carlisle institution which listed branches numbering up to 40 (the number of my local branch in St Ann’s Hill, created to cater for the large number of new houses built to accommodate workers at No 14 Maintenance Unit of the Royal Air Force).
A figure which I remember hearing was that the Carlisle Co-op had a membership of 20,000, this when the total population of the city itself was about 70,000. There was however a very wide hinterland in Cumberland with village branches and one as far away as Appleby in Westmorland, some 30 miles distant. In my time at the Co-op warehouse there were six travelling shops based there which served the local villages, hamlets and farms.
The change the managers were brought in to introduce was the introduction of a huge Cooperative Wholesale Society central supply base in the North East of England from which the Carlisle shops would order all of their requirements directly rather than submitting weekly orders in their own book to the warehouse in Junction St.
This process led, inter alia, ultimately to the demise of the Carlisle C-op and other local independent Co-operative societies and the subsequent emergence of the modern pattern of purely local convenience Co-p stores. A bit of me remains well pleased that the Co-op ethos is still thriving, albeit in a different form to the one I knew, with 6 million active members as of 2023 and with a target to reach 8 million by 2030.
The Carlisle Co-op central store covered almost half of one side of Botchchergate, the southern entrance road into Carlisle. Here you could cash in your ‘Divi’ (a return based on how much you had spent in the Co-op in the previous year), furnish your house, clothe yourself and your family, buy all of your groceries for the week, order your coal for the fire, get your hair done, get your teeth seen to, organise a funeral and then have a cheese sandwich and a cup of tea at a funeral breakfast after burying or cremating a relative.
THE DIVI
In the second ‘Carry On’ film, ‘Carry On Nurse’, the character Henry Bray (played by Liverpool-born Brian Oulton) is a snobbish, would-be upwardly mobile, patient.
In a scene set at visiting time scene his wife arrives and proudly shows a new jumper she has just bought with her Co-op Divi. He is very embarrassed at this announcement being made in a public ward!
Is this a reflection of the idea that only the ‘Working poor’ used the Co-op and he didn’t want their social status broadcast?)
Liz Hodgkinson writing in ‘The Oldie’ (May 9th 2022), describes how, for the first time in her life, at the age of 74, she visited a Co-op supermarket.
When I was growing up in the then tiny town of St Neots, in Cambridgeshire, only common people shopped at the Co-op. Anybody with a bit of money, such as my mother, would get their shopping from the more expensive food and clothes shops, even when the goods were identical.
The process with the Divi was fairly simple – when you bought something you gave your membership number and got a receipt for the payment.
Your purchase amount was then recorded and at the end of the year, depending on how much you had spent you got a percentage back in cash or goods
Part of the site (No 48 Botchergate) is now a Wetherspoon’s called ‘The Woodrow Wilson’, named after the American President whose mother was born in Carlisle.
The text reads: The ideals of the Co-operative Moment, inspired by the reformer Robert Owen, were put into practice by the Rochdale Pioneers, who opened their little store in 1844. All Co-ops were based on the principle of profit-sharing known as the ‘divi’ (or dividend). With each purchase, customers received tokens or tickets, which they could later exchange for cash or goods, the remaining profits being reinvested.
This building was once part of the Carlisle South End Co-op Society store, built in 1904. The Carlisle Co-op was set up by a group of London & North Western Railway workers, who held meetings to publicise their idea in the Deans Hall on Charles Street. Their first shop opened in June 1861.
The original store, on the opposite side of Botchergate, sold groceries and provisions. It opened twice a week, with committee members taking turns behind the counter. Overcoming initial financial problems, a drapery department opened three months later in the neighbouring building. After some years, success was such that the Co-op moved across Botchergate to larger premises. This is the building that you are now in, which opened in April 1869, when the celebrations included a tea-party and a ball.
Top: The Rochdale Pioneers Left: Robert Owen.
I worked as student in the warehouse in summer holidays between 1963 and 1969. (I started my first teaching job in 1968 but needed the extra cash to get married in early 1970!)
The warehouse was situated in Junction St in the industrial area to the west of Carlisle railway station, on the opposite side of the road from Shadddon Mill (at one time the largest cotton mill in England with its landmark Dixon’s Chimney – the eighth largest in the world at 305ft tall and a landmark visible from anywhere in Carlisle.)
I think the warehouse had originally been part of a complex of woollen mills in the area because there was still a mill stream with dam and sluice gates just opposite the entrance for the warehouse staff. Apparently, when the adjacent mill shut down for the summer break the warehouse staff had earned a bit of extra money cleaning the accumulated debris from the stream and dam. The Co-op dairy was on the same site but we never saw the milkmen who started at 5 in the morning and were long gone by the time we arrived for work at 8.They were a race unto themselves, all of them appearing short and very wiry, used to running from their floats to deliver milk in time for people’s breakfasts. Also there was the shoe repair workshop where a really helpful young man who was deaf and dumb once repaired my own shoes.
The warehouse staff contained a number of people who had spent their working lives with the Co-op, starting as apprentice grocers and working their way through the grades as “Second Hand”, “First Hand”, “Bacon Hand” as they learned to manage and serve the wide range of groceries which the average local Co-op shop stored.
One such was the person with whom I first worked on the top floor of the warehouse, Henry Davis. Henry was in his sixties, a small meticulously neat man, a devout Methodist, quietly spoken and very exact in his handling of the orders that came in. In fact he was so meticulous and precise that when he had actually worked in the stores he would, apparently, remove a single raisin or currant from the scale when he was weighing out the loose produce for a customer to make sure she didn’t get a single currant or raisin more than she was paying for!. This was in the days before everything was pre-packed as it is in modern supermarkets. Biscuits would come loose in tin boxes to be weighed out, raisins and currants and other dried fruit would be in large bags.
(A favourite cheap purchase in those days was a bag of broken biscuits!)
Customer complaints led to him being banished to the warehouse (hence my title).
The top floor stored all of the canned produce sold in the shops, peas, baked beans, soups, canned vegetables.
It even stored canned macedoines (mixed vegetables).When I did a web search for macedoines the results showed a predominance of French recipes and products. Tesco, Sainsbury’s and even Waitrose don’t list them as a product. I was steered to specialist online retailers. Fascinating to think that the shoppers of Carlisle were so sophisticated in the 1960s!
I enjoyed working with him as he would sit and talk of olden days and his Methodist faith. He introduced me to the mysteries of A1, A1 Tall and A2, these being the different can sizes, 12oz , 16oz and 20 oz equivalent as I remember.
The heavy boxes had to be moved using a Slingsby barrow to the hoist and then down to the ground floor to be put with orders from the three other floors in a pen to await delivery.
The trick with the Slingsby barrow was to have one with a front blade well worn down and sharp so when a set of, say, five heavy boxes of cans of Co-p soup was to be moved, you tilted the boxes forward from the top, slid the blade underneath and then tilted the load back onto the barrow and so away.
You can now buy a vintage Slingsby barrow like the one above for upwards of £90 on the internet!
Another character of similar age and background to Henry was someone whom I shall call William. In contrast to Henry he was a very embittered person, deeply resentful of his transfer to the warehouse. At morning and afternoon tea breaks he would remind us in strident tones of his history in the Co-op and his achievements as Second and Bacon Hand. Unsurprisingly, even though he was obviously an unhappy person, this did not endear him to his workmates.
By total contrast the most cheerful person I came across didn’t actually work in the warehouse itself.
As part of the set of buildings there was a joiner’s workshop where the coffins for the Co-operative funeral service were made as well a garage for the unmarked private ambulance used for the transfer of bodies from hospital or home.
‘Ocky’ as he was known – I never discovered his real name- was a rotund, red faced man with a permanent genuine beaming smile on his face.
On one occasion a couple of young Scottish delivery men had just finished unloading at one of the warehouses bays when Ocky came in and said, “Can you give me a lift with a box boys?”
They agreed and went out with him.
When they had finished one of them said, “That was very heavy!”
“It should be,” said Ocky. “There was a body in it!”
The men just fled!
The ground floor of the warehouse was where all of the goods were initially delivered to be then distributed across four floors. In my first years there the main worker was Danny Harris, probably in his 60s, originally a miner from West Cumberland with the distinctive accent from those parts which sounded (still sounds?) very different from the Carlisle accent. One explanation for the differences is, apparently, that when the Lowther family started to develop coal seams stretching from Whitehaven to Maryport , they brought in miners from the North East of England. The subsequent blending of the Cumbrian accent and the North Eastern one produced unique patterns of pronunciation limited to a fairly narrow coastal area.
(My wife, from Liverpool, tells of meeting an old miner from West Cumberland at a church gathering. His accent was so impenetrable that she maintains she couldn’t understand a word he said!)
A couple of examples of the accent (and dialect) run –
“Hoosta fizzin, marrer?”or “How are you feeling mate?
“Ahs gan yam” or “I’m going home.”
Danny was softly spoken and completely committed to his work. He always approached unloading delivery lorries with concentration and speed, making him hard to keep up with.
Unhappily, on one occasion when he was unloading sides and hams of pigs he maintained his usual speedy pace from the lorry to the big walk-in refrigerator where the bacon was stored. He sweated heavily with the effort and, as I understand, the shift from being heated to being very cold caused him to develop a very bad chill so that he went home sick.
He never returned to work because it was discovered that his heart was damaged.
A few weeks later the same delivery crew arrived and asked me how long the unloading would take,
“About thirty minutes,” I replied.
“Danny used to do it in fifteen!”
“Yes,” I said, “and Danny will never work again!”
I made sure that it did, in fact, take 30 minutes!
I have thought over the years how terribly sad it was that a life dedicated to hard work, providing honest and uncomplaining labour for his wages, should end so sadly.
Danny, like a good number of people within the Carlisle Co-op, was a devout Catholic.
(Conversely, my father-in-law in Liverpool, also a devout Catholic, would not shop at the Co-op because he maintained it was a Communist organisation!)
Danny was the treasurer of his parish conference of the Society of St Vincent de Paul, a grassroots charitable organisation dedicated to giving financial and practical help to those individuals and families in need. Each conference was funded by donations from parishioners and gifts.
At a meeting of conferences in the presence of the Bishop of Lancaster, Danny proudly announced that his accounts showed a £50 surplus. Another conference announced a deficit of 5 shillings (25p). The bishop just said, rather drily, “I’m glad to see one conference knows the meaning of the word ‘charity’!
(This story was told to me by the warehouse foreman, another Catholic and member of the SVP, who on his Sunday afternoons visited The Garlands a large long-stay mental hospital on the outskirts of Carlisle. He would take cigarettes, sweets and companionship to the patients.)
THE SUGAR WALL
Every so often a lorry laden with three and a half tons of sugar would arrive either from Tate and Lyle in Liverpool or the Sankey Sugar Works in Earlestown (now both closed down, Sankey in1979 and Tate and Lyle in 1981).
The sugar came in packs of fourteen 2lb bags in a heavy paper wrapping making a total of about 275 individual packs to be unloaded.
We had no pallets or fork lift trucks in the warehouse so each pack was lifted on to a set of rollers and passed into the warehouse where someone (often me in the summer) would build a wall of sugar inside one of the pens.
It was a bit like bricklaying.
To ensure stability you laid two packs lengthwise horizontal to the wall of the pen and then three vertically The Gemini AI-generated image shows what it looked like ( allowing for a 60 year time difference.)
FLAVOURS OF THE PAST
Regular visitors to the warehouse were commercial travellers seeking to maximise the sales of their particular products. One such was a rep for Kellogg’s cereals. When the General Manager of the Co-op was on holiday this particular rep persuade the whizz-kid new assistant general mager (not the same one who couldn’t smell gone-off bacon) to order enough Corn Flakes to feed the whole of Carlisle for three months! The consignment was so big it couldn’t actually fit in the warehouse and had to be stored in the old stables of the adjacent dairy.
I don’t think the assistant manager had a bright future in the Co-op!
A much more welcome visitor was Mr Hoggett, owner of Hoggett’s crisp and pickles factory.
He was always immaculately dressed and wore a smart trilby hat. He spoke with a soft Tyneside (Gateshead) accent and was always pleased to receive an order.
Sadly, the firm is, as far as I know, long gone. However, there is one claim to fame connected with it, namely that a certain John William Hoggett, born in 1869, is reputed to have invented the world’s first flavoured potato crisp – vinegar. Conversely, a correction in the Newcastle Chronicle reads, The original flavour was cheese, not vinegar, as we said, and it was invented by John William Hoggett, of Hoggetts Food Products, who is still alive and well. It wasn’t invented by his father or grandfather, so there.
(The oldest reference to potato crisps, or ‘chips’ in America and Australia apparently dates from England in 1817).
THE HORSE KNEW THE WAY AND THE HAIR OF THE DOG
My most memorable workmate was Harold McCormick. He had been a Co-op milkman and still retained the small wiry frame and hurrying pace typical of the milkmen of that time.
He was in charge of the floor that stored cereals and tea. The popular cereals included Cornflakes, Rice Krispies, Coco Pops, Puffed Wheat, Weetabix and Shredded Wheat
He had served as an infantryman in the Burma campaign but the only thing he ever said about it was that he had learned to smoke on the march up into the hill country and that eventually he and his fellows would even smoke tea leaves!
He still rolled his own at work but not from the tea around him.
Tea ranged from the popular 99 (so-called because originally it was simply the number on the blender’s chart) to the upmarket Indian Prince. Both are still available but in those days only in packet form.
I also learned what kibbled corn is – maize that has that has been crushed or cracked into smaller, more easily digestible pieces, very useful as feed for chickens and birds, especially in a time when more people would have kept hens, other fowl and pigeons. Carlisle was, and is, still the big town for a large rural hinterland.
A frequent topic around the morning tea break between Harold and Dick the delivery lorry driver was the search for the “Good pint”.
In the 1960s all the pubs in and around Carlisle were government-owned, a relic of 1916 wartime regulations (The Carlisle and District State Management Scheme) to prevent drunkenness among the munitions workers around Carlisle and Gretna. In the 1960s rumour was that the senior civil servant in charge of the scheme in the Home Office was a teetotal Methodist. Pub managers were civil servants, paid the same irrespective of how much or how little drink they sold.
A favourite and much-frequented pub by Harold and Dick was The Joiners Arms, known by them as “The Blue Lugs”, the name apparently coming from the fact that the joiners in the workshop to the rear of the pub had blue ears from the lead in the pencils which they kept behind their ears. Another version says the local workers used blue chalk to mark wood. When not using the chalk they stuck it behind their ears, hence “blue lugs”.
The pub dates back to at least 1785.
The building behind the pub is the McVities biscuit factory which in my day was known as Carr’s Biscuit Works. The girls and women who worked there had a fearsome reputation among those of us boys still at school beyond 15!
As I mentioned earlier, Harold had been a Co-op milkman in the days when horse-drawn milk floats were still used. He delivered in Stanwix, a northern suburb of Carlisle across the bridge over the river Eden, about two miles away from the dairy. He was very popular with his customers and on Christmas Eve a lot of them insisted upon him having a celebratory drink. Not surprisingly, at the end of his round Harold was a lot the worse for wear because of the drink taken. As he himself told me this didn’t matter because the horse, having done the journey five day a week for the preceding 52 weeks, knew its own way back to Junction St without any guidance from Harold.
To say that Harold was fond of a drink (or several) is an understatement. However, I never once saw him affected by alcohol over the six years I worked with him. He saved it for weekends and holidays. The highlight of his year was in the summer when “The Scotch folk” came to stay. Harold would get a week’s pay plus two weeks’ holiday pay on a Friday afternoon and have it all spent by Monday! He would say how, when sitting “With the company” in a pub, he would go to the toilet and on the way there give the nod to the barman. On his way back a fresh pint would be on the bar for him. He would down that, return to “the company” and ask, “Whose round is it?”
The only thing approaching advice he ever gave me was when he said, “No matter how much drink I had had the night before I always made sure there was a bottle under the bed for first thing in the morning.”
Happily, in the 60 or so years since, I have never had occasion to put that particular piece of advice into practice!
I still remember Harold with great affection. He taught me what it was to earn my wages by doing a thorough and careful job in fulfilling the orders for the shops we serviced. His voice always softened when he mentioned his wife, “My Evelyn.” He was universally liked by all in the warehouse and I was genuinely saddened when, a few years later I learned that he had succumbed to heart failure.
This, I hope, has been a fond description of, and tribute to, the people of the Co-op warehouse with whom I worked in my summer holidays over six years. I was always accepted, never patronised and always felt valued as one of their team.
After fifty years as a teacher of English I remain proud that I could once hold my own among men who may have left school at fourteen or fifteen with no formal qualifications yet who still taught me what it means to work and behave as a mature adult.
They have all gone into the dark and the site is now occupied by Jewson’s and Kwik Fit.
When I pass where the warehouse once stood they always come vividly to my mind across the 56 years since August 1969 when I got my final pay packet and went back to the rest of my life.
Note 1: Gerald Kelly’s previous contribution to OTHER PEOPLE’S FLOWERS is ‘Going Home’: https://davidselzer.com/2024/12/other-peoples-flowers-going-home-gerald-kelly/
Note 2: OTHER PEOPLE’S FLOWERS: https://davidselzer.com/2021/03/other-peoples-flowers/
By David Selzer