Memories of a Handsworth Baker - the transcript of a talk given by Mr. G. Innesabout the history of his business, the 'Furus1 Bakeries (1899-1954), toHandsworth Historical Society, 3 December, 1979.

In 1899 my father was 23 and he was a leather-worker, at J. B, Brooks'factory, down in Livery St; a little later on they made bicycle saddles. Hehad an older brother who had had a little experience in the baking trade. Atthe top of Hockley Hill, on the right-hand side, where the post-office is now,| there was a little bakery up to be let. My father knew nothing about baking atJ all, and his brother suggested they should go into some sort of partnership| and start a bakery business. My father decided to leave J. B. Brooks and become

a baker, I have here the first leaflet that was printed: 'Purus Bakery' - forI a long time my brother and I argued, when did the naiae 'Purus' first come in,

and we could not remember. But here it.is on the first leaflet, 1899:- 'PurusI Bakery, Hockley Hill, near Eey Hill1, and that was how my father got interestedI in the baking trade.

In 1900 my father married, and he and my mother came to live in Handsworth,in College Road, no 24; it is now a betting shopJ When my father moved to

I College Road, bread was still baked at Hockley Hill: how on earth they transportedit in those days without any cars, I'm not quite sure ~ horse-and-trap, somethinglike that. And the treason for him coming to Handsworth was that Eookery Road,Newcombe Road, Uplands Road were just being developed, just being built on, andhe had arranged for a bakery to be built just behind no., 261 Rookery Road,

\ which is on the corner of Newcombe Road, and Rookery Road, - not the Jeffersons'Corner, the other corner,, In 1902 he moved there from College .Road, and the

| bakery was on the premises: that was the way it all began.

I have here the first ledger of the first year or two's trading. It's\ quite interesting; the business v/as started with a capital of £20, and of that' £20 this leather-bound ledger cost 2/6d, (how many pence is that, today, in| 1980?). Out of that £20, £15 was spent on flour, the ledger was 2/6d, there| was a basket-carriage for 13/6d - do you remember the basket-carriages, onI three wheels, in which people used to deliver small quantities of bread'? TheIfirst week's takings were £2-12-3̂ .; at the end of six months there was aitrading-loss of 14/lOd; at the end of twelve months this had been turned into[& profit of £3~0-7-|-d. The shop, of course, in Collfge Road was almost oppositefthe old Town Hall. My older brother, Harry, was born at College Road in 1901;[I was born over the shop, on the corner of Rookery Road and Newcombe Road, in'1904, (don't start to do the arithmetic! ); my younger brother, Eric, who didn't[really come into the business at all, but finished up, first of all as a masteri!at Handsworth Grammar Schooi, (he was a boy at Hands'.rorth Grammar School, then;he was the P.E. master at Handsworth Grammar School, until he went down south) -|he was born at Stockwell Farm in 1908« Stockwell Farm was in the angle between;what is now Stockwell Road and Friary Road, facing Friary Road .... I was nearly/drowned there, but that isn't what I've come to tell you about.

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As the business grew, we took in next door, then next door again, andnext door again, along Rookery Road, away from Newcombe Road, until Isuppose six or seven houses were incorporated in the business, as the businessgrew; and thenf also? we had a separate bread bakery down Laurel Road, by theside of the school, which we bought when Tom Sherwood gave up. That wasbought in 1919. In 1902 there was just one round, and the shop. In 1914,that's just before the First World War, there were four rounds; we called themHockley, Handsworth, Haiastead and Smethwick, Soon after the war ended, weincreased the number, in 1919, to eight rounds; and when we finally gave upin 1954 there were eighteen rounds.

In the early days some people made their own dough and they brought it tothe baker's for the baker to bake it* They also brought their Sunday joint andtheir Christmas joint, their Christmas poultry - it wouldn't be turkey inthose days, only the rich people could afford turkeys: it's only the poor peoplewho can afford them today but their Christmas poultry might be chicken orduck in those days® My father soon gave this up, because six days a week from4.30 a.m. in the morning to seven or eight in the evening was quite enough forhim.

At Rookery Road, I can remember, the bakery was across the yard, asmallish bakery, but the engine room contained a T".ngye gas engine - there'sa smaller model of it in tlit Science Museum, It was a gf.s engine; it hadgreat, big fly-wheels there, and it had got a crank, and you wound it up; youlit whatever started it going, (I'm not a practical man at allj)» but there wassomething a. bit like the top of a beehive with a flame coming out of it. But,anyhow, there was a crank, and you cranked it, and cranked it, and the bigfly-wheel got faster and faster - and suddenly it would start. There was onepulley-wheel on it, going to a shafting above, that ran the whole length of thebakery. And all the machines in the bakery had to be connected to that shaft;we didn't have electric motors on every set of machines. If a machine had togo at different speeds, as many of them did, you put larger pulleys or smallerpulleys at the top end or the bottom end, and that adjusted the speed. I canremember turning away at that ..«. „ it's a wonder I have'nt got muscles likesomebody ,,,

I think you'll forgive me for telling you about Albert.1 Albert was ourconfectionery foreman, and he was with us for forty-five years. He came fromthe Black Country and he was a great sort of chap in his ways, but he'd gothis failings, which we soon found out; and we'd got our failings, which he foundout as well. But Albert, wells I always remember, he was the confectioneryforeman and in the early days .... .. you see, I'm not really a baker, it wasmy brother who was the practical i»an, he was sent down to London to the bakeryschool to be taught the trade. There wasn't enough money for me to be sentdown as well, so I had to pick up what little bit I could here, and go to eveningclasses which were often held in George Baines' bakery in Finch Road, But hewaa the practical m&n and as things developed I was jn the 'admin' side - I satin the office, and he did the work'.... That isn't quite right, but I remembermy father thinking that Albert would teach me the trade; he got me to get up atsix in the morning out of a nice warm bed and creep across the yard into thebakery where Albert was going to teach me the secrets of the trade. Well, aftertwelve months I could make rock cakes, and that was all b3 ever let me tryi Washe going to teach the boss* son all the secrets of the trade? Not on yournellie' .... And there we are, I had to manage with local evening classes.

Albert had another strange attitude to progress. He had an inbuilt.resistance to it. We got used to it; I mean, my brother and I would find outabout a new machine, and we would think that it would be useful, and we wouldgo and see it demonstrated and we would know that it would be useful, and wewould go to Albert and say, 'Now, there's a new machine, and it will do this,that and the other'..... It's no good at alii Absolutely no good at all!1

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So we bought it.1 And we put it in, and after twelre months we'd go toAlbert and say, 'Albert, how's the new machine going?...' '...Marvellous!I told you right from the start we couldn't do without it.'

In those days the 'make-weight' .... if the loaf wasn't the right weightyou put a bit of cake on it, or another bit of bread or a slice of somethingor other, to make it balance. You see, weights-and-measures inspectors wereprowling about to make sure you didn't diddle your customers - and, did youknow, you could be fined if the loaf was too heavy as well as if it was toolight? You never were, but you could be, according to the law! The law saidthat a two-pound loaf should weigh two pounds, and if it was an ounce over youwere breaking the law. Bread contains moisture and evaporates according toclimatic conditions, and it's sometimes extremely difficult to make sure thata loaf that is two pounds when it comes out of the oven is two pounds a daylater, or six hours later. Particularly that applied to cottage loaves, whichhad a bigger area for evaporation.

In the early days, they were mostly horse-drawn vehicles, of course: carts,first of all, two-wheeled carts, and then vans •• four-wheeled carts - and theinteresting thing there is that the horses, if thty wer3 on the same round allthe time, got to know all the customers. And they ..ould stop, and they'd goon to the next customer. There was an interesting incident where one of the menwas continually coming in late, and we couldn't understand it until he was awayill. One of the checkers went out on his round and the horse stopped not onlyat every customer but at every pub!

Development from 'basket1 carriage to two-wheeled vans, four-wheeled vans,motor-cars to T-model Fords, electric vans - of course, the disadvantage was theshort mileage, it still is! We could solve our oil problem if we could onlyinvent, or allow to be invented, a battery that would take electric vans muchfurther than they can go at the moment. We do hear rumours that in about threeyears' time it'll come. We probably had the first electric vehicle in a bakeryvan in Birmingham.

Bad debts and bad payers « I hope none of you live in Handsworth Wood;if so, you rausn't listen to this, because the worst payers, we found, were thewealthy people in Handsworth Wood, who had two one-pound laaves a week, and youhad half-a-aile drive to go up to see if they wanted them, and then they'd takethree months' credit. There were times of depression the Hamstead Pitdisaster, miners' strikes, when there was no strike pay; my father, as aChristian, could not pressurize families unable to pay because of things likethat. This caused, sometimes, financial problems. We had our peak periods:Christmas, Easter: it was my job to try to balance the stocks and the ordersand this, that arid the other, of the many'Christmas lines that we had. We hadChristmas cakes, the decorated sort, the p^lain sort, all sizes, shapes, mincepies, gateaux, pork pies -J 'the best in Birmingham'!...... absolutely, there'sno doubt about that! One of our slogans was that our pork pies contained 100$pork! In addition to that, sidelines - tins of biscuits, tea caddies, chocolates,plum puddings, and then the school party orders . .«.* Before Christmas, I wasoften there at seven o'clock in the morning, and there at ten o'clock at night,trying to balance my orders. And then, of course, you get the people who won'torder anyhow, and come on the last day and expect you to produce a dozen ofthis, and so on, and get very annoyed if you don't. On Christmas Eve there werevans out to all hours, up to midnight. I think the record on one occasion waswhen one of the vans returned at 4 a.m., on SThristmas morning.

I had a comptometer on my desk. It was there for years and years and years.Now that these new electronic gadgets (are available), I've got one of those now.My comptometer did the same thing, but it was about forty times as big; we gaveit to the Science Museum.

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Easter - hot cross buns. We broke all records on one occasion; when wasit, somewhere between the wars? We made 150,000 buns in two days; they weresold at a ha'penny each - that's half the olj. pennies, not the new ones: that'sa quarter of a penny. We were proud of this fact, that we'd broken all recordsuntil we came to our senses; and the next year we increased the size of the bunsby 50$, we charged -fd, and instead of 150,000 buns, we made only 100,000.Those of you who've got your mental calculator with you can tell that the cashreceived was exactly the same, the amount of material used was exactly the same,but if you consider that there are ten operations in the manufacture of everybun, and there probably are at least that, it meant that we reduced the numberof operations from 1,500,000 to 1,000,000 and we got a better bun.

Special occasions «..<,. Coronations ..... all sorts of special lines incakes ..... street parties »„.„«, it's strange, many organisers thought we shouldbe only too pleased to give away our profit for the sake of the children: wedid! Can I tell you why I never give to the R.S.P.C.A.? I hope there aren'tany R.S.P.G.A. fans here. There is a reason; for fifty years I've never given apenny to the R.S.P.C.A., because one of our horses on its way back to the bakerywent lame, and one of the clear 9 fussy, ladies living ir. u big house with a longdrive in Eandsworth Wood, reported it to the R.S.P.C.A. Then we had an R.S.P.C.A.inspector round; I don't know if he had been a sergeant-major or what, but hecame there as if he owned the world. We were proud of our horses, really proudof our horses, and the way they were kept; but he went round all the stables,examining every horse^ chucking his weight abouts and so forth, and I was so fedup, I made up my mind I'd never give a penny to the R.S.P.C.A., I'd give it allto the children.

Outstanding lines have already been mentioned - pork pies, of course, theywere the best in Birmingham! Custards, as well, they were the best in Birmingham.One of the reasons was that they were only made from shell eggs and fresh milk.'Pure-o-malt' - do you remember "pure-o-malt', 'the malt loaf with a flavourthat is different1? It had a secret ingredient; it wouldn't be allowed today,you have to put the recipe on the packet or something like that] It was good;I thought I had a 'pure-o-malt' wrapper, but I haven't.

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'Purus' Bakeries - where did my father get the name from? It's Latin forpure - I think; I never did Latin at school, I didn't go to Handsworth GrammarSchool. I went to the Central School, where we did Chemistry and Engineering,nothing like Latin and silly things like that. But my father, who probably leftschool when he was eleven or twelve, picked up this Latin word 'purus'; andbecause it was 'purua', for a long time, at a certain period when the millerswere being accused of doctoring the flour, we had the slogan that, 'all flour usedin the manufacture of "Purus" bread is guaranteed free from added chemicals'.

Snow * *. *. we had a bit of snow last year, didn't we? We had a bit of snowin 1940 and 1941 as well. We had so much snow it was almost impossible for us toget through. Bo you know that the horses at that time - we ran about halfhorses and half motors thep_ I suppose - the horses were the only ones thatcould get through, becaxise the wheels of the carts were high enough and theirlegs were long enough to get through. But because of the snow they could onlymanage, physically, half a round, and some of you may remember that we had toarrange with somebody at the end of some of the side roads to take all the breadfor the customers in that road so that they could come and collect if from thehouse at the end of the road. We had Mayday 'parades in those days and we usedto give a prize for the best-decorated van.

Night baking a»... of course, unsocial hours, it ought not to be allowed,•but yjju people, at that time, insisted on having bread as new as possible, straightfrom the oven, hot9 if you could. And if it was made the day before it couldn'tbe, so it was made at night. There was a lot of argument, by people who didn'tknow what they were talking about, that night baking ought not to be allowed, and

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so there was a lot of agitation about it, and so - it was a friendly firm - wewent to our night bakers, and we said, what do you think about it? Shall we trytheir suggestion that night baking should be disallowed altogether? And therewas one man, Bill, (even though his name wasn't Bill, I'm not going to give hisname away), he was aged about sixty, and he came from one of the less salubriousparts of Birmingham, and he let it be known with plenty of Alf Garnett badlanguage that he preferred night work. It was bad enough having to sleep withhis missus one night a week, he couldn't stand it for six' He's still aliveJ

Rudyard Kipling is rather frowned upon these days, isn't he, by long-hairedintellectuals and the intelligentsia: he's 'old hat'. He wrote a poem called'If, and I think I must have learnt it at school; I don't know^ is it as oldas that? Perhaps so. But it's a fine poem and I sometimes think that if all ourchildren today were forced to learn it, it might help them a little bit. There'sa lot of it, but in it comes this phrase:

'If you can cope with triumph and disaster,And meet those two imposters just the same....'

Triumph and disaster ..... We had our moments of triumph, we had our moments ofdisaster. The first fire was in 1910. I was six then, and I can just rememberbeing awakened in the middle of the night and taken over the road, toHollingsworth's shop on the corner of Elmhurst Road, the ironmonger's there; Ican just remember being taken there in the middle of the night, I didn't knowwhat all the fuss was about. But for years afterwards people used to talk aboutwhat happened that night, in addition to the Purus fire. The fire station wasstill at Stafford Hill, where it is now, but, of course, no motors, only horses,and the horses galloped there with the fire engine, and as soon as they got tothe bakery, one of the horses fell down dead. I think he'd just been fed, andhadn't had time to recover.

In the war years we had our bombings: December 1940, the landmine, whichdropped between Antrobus Road, and Laurel Road. It was only fifty yards awayfrom our bread bakery. Do you knovf, I was a warden (Air-Raid Precautions Warden),and I was helping people - I live at the top of Philip Victor Road, some of youmay know - and I was helping people in Antrobus Road for an hour to get to safety,and trying to find out where the bomb had dropped, and everybody said it was intheir back kitchen or their front room, or so on and so forth, and after an hourI suddenly realized that we'd got a bakery somewhere near it! I went up toinvestigate. Perhaps I can read you just this little >it here, a circular thatwe sent out a long time afterwards when it was safe to send it out,'Unforgettable memories: the mass of twisted girders and fallen beams, the pilesof broken glass which littered everything, the cascades of water from the emergencystorage tanks'... we all had emergency storage tanks in case the water was cutoff, and these were blown down, •«.«. 'pouring their contents over flour andmachinery; the remains of the Belfast roof of the garage'«,... which was on theside nearest to the parachute mine - the blast lifted all the roof off like that.The beams came down, and they snapped off at the end, and finished off on the rowof vans, all the way down there. '... The motor vans without windscreens, andwith holes in the roofs, delivering bread the next day after they'd been extricatedfrom the wreckage: furniture vans offered,, and used, to deliver bread, (theowners' comment, "bread is more important than furniture")! the horses', -fortunately, the stables were a hundred or more yards further away on the otherside of the bakery from where the bomb fell, ...'the horses there were calmlystanding among the litter of blown-in boards; not one of them received a scratch.And our relief that because of the blitzes, and for the sake of our men, we hadvoluntarily gone over to day baking. Otherwise, there would have been a fullstaff at work; as it was, the place was empty. The sympathy and forbearance ofour customers, who put up with all the inconvenience with the greatest goodwill1.

They were great times, weren't they, those? I mean, we met disaster in those

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days, and there was a little bit of co-operation, wasn't there?

1942 - the last bombs that were dropped on Birmingham - one dropped inRookery Road, opposite the end of Uplands Road, where those new houses were.Twenty-two people were killed, including Frances Bond, the singer, you mayremember, I always remember one thing: we live in Philip Victor Road, andour lawn the next morning was covered with feathers from the pillows andbedding from it, and the feathers were even blown as far as the park. Ialso remember my office windows were blown in* Oh dear, — I'd been doing thebooks the night before; I5d never done this before, out I'd got books allover the place, and I'd got fed up with this getting them ready for theauditors, and I left them all open on my desk, that particular night. Whenwe came the next day there were brick-ends and plaster over my desk, thisdeep; and the window was there, and the wall here; sticking into the wall wereslivers of glass $ like arrows, that long - thank goouness I wasn't sittingat the desk when it happened.8 But that wasn't even the worst. I think thebread bakery - we got back into production in six weeks, and the authoritiesdid a marvellous job of work there: bread was important. In 1942, it took usmore than six weeks to get back into production at the confectionery bakery.And then in March, 1944, in the middle of the night, still in the war years,the phone went, it was my father; the police had just been on the phone, thebakery at Rookery Road was on fire, and it was pretty bad,

I have read of people*s knees giving way when they were frightened. Itwas the only time in my life that mine have. I got out of bed, and I couldn'tstand up. Can you imagine what it is like to look at and watch the bakery, thebusiness that you have built up over the years being burnt to the ground? Ittook two and & half years to rebuild. We had to manage with a smaller bakery inWattville Road for our confectionery.

War-time restrictions: in April, 1940 - the war began in 1939 - papershortage: wrapped, bread on alternate days only, later disallowed altogether.In Augustj 1940, no cottage bread - it didn't take so much water. In July,1940, no sugar an the tops of cakes after baking, and no excuse, even forwedding cakes. We made wedding cakes \vith a cardboard outside, and put themon: well, there was a war ou, wasn't there? The two-pound loaf was reduced inweight to one pound and three quarterss and what I remember as a two-pound loafstill weighs one pound and three quarters. The one-pound was reduced tofourteen ounces, and it probably did save something. The three-day week delivery,bread rationing - the biggest farce ever dreamed up by bureaucratic theoristsJYou had ration books, you had 'For bread', you had three or four different pageswith different values, and for the two-pound loaf - the pound and three-quarterloaf - you had to give up so many coupons; so many coupons for this, and that....did they really expect our roundsmen to go round with a pair of scissors and sayto the customers, 'OhJ A two-pound loaf. Thata one of these and one of those,and where's little Willie's book? and so on' and so forth.'1 It did work, in theend,, We bakers made it work' We were supposed to cut out these coupons and soon, but what we did} we askad our customers, our regular customers to deposittheir pages with us, and we cut out what we thought was appropriate* We mixedthem all up together; they were supposed to be sorted out, and all counted, andsent off afterwards, so that we could get our next ration of flour. Well, weworked out our next ration of flour and we got a pile.j a great big bag ofcoupons, and we said,, 'there are so many there, that's what you want'. We sentthem off, and we never got anything back, because they just hadn't got time tocheck theme I know very well that they just chucked them in the fire.

There's an interesting little story of our Mrs Mopp at that time. Manualworkers got extra bread, extra coupons ... our Mrs. Mopp came up with, 'Oooh...we're alright now! My husband's got the extra - he's an Emmanuel worker!1

December 1942 - there were 5,000 entries for the competition for the bestwartime loaf. There were only 100 diplomas signed by Lord Woolton given, and we

- 7 -won one. Good advertising; when you've been involved in producing advertisingschemes, all advertising is, I suppose, designed to persuade people to buy morethan they intended. When you've been involved on the advertising side, youdevelop a sort of inbuilt resistance to the wiles of other advertising, andI've never bought an Encyclopedeia at the door. We advertised; we had the'Purus1 crossword puzzle. If you remember the Purus crossword puzzle, therewere all sorts of alternatives for some of these blank spaces, and some peoplegot very annoyed because they didn't win the first prize, and they got itwrong. There was also a jigsaw puzzle, and you cut it out, and it could beput together in about a thousand different ways, I suppcse, and only one ofthem was right' There was a lot of trouble with some people, because they hadfinished it and they didn't win it. But there's one of the hazards, I suppose,of advertising. Film stars, in tea packets - I wonder if any of you remember,if you collected a full set of twenty-five film stars in packets of Purus tea,you got a free, one-pound pork pie? We thought it was perfectly legitimate towork out how much we could afford to spend on it, and then regulate the numberof complete sets by issuing a certain number of a particular film star. AhJPeople up at Kingstanding had got a swop shopi It wasn't long before they foundout that, number twenty-four or whatever, no-body had got one, or very fewpeople had got one. We had to issue a few more to get ourselves out of that one.Pencils - we used to give away all sorts of things - pencils? (rather cleverthis is), 'B.R.E.(A).D. in Birmingham1 - that's my idea, I expect .... InCoronation year we gave away tea caddies; I wonder if there are any of thosestill in use, with a picture of the Queen Mum and her husband, King George VI,wasn't itV

I've already shown some of you this picture of the trams in MartineauStreet, we're interested because on the front of that tram is an advert for'Purus1 bread and cakes. Do you remember the doughnut machine in the window inRookery Boad? Doughnuts were sold in boxes of six, for sixpence - six doughnutsfor sixpence? Calendars - do you remember the 'Purus1 calendars? They werevery much appreciated, dogs mostly, more dogs than anything else, occasionallyhorses, sometimes cats, and a couple of Eastern scenes that we had. Then, in1938, we were going to be forty years old in 1939, so at Christmas 1938, we gavethese cake trays away instead of calendars. Somebody's got one here or canremember it anyhow. That's the sort of thing we got up to. 'Peter Purus1 -do you remember 'Peter Purus1, our little figure of a man? Here he is on thebox - that's how he is frontwards .... then we had him developed and put on ourvans, the 'little men' as they were called, one of these little men, sideways onunder all of the letters. Tnere's one of our old ca!:e bends there; the missusstill uses them to line her cake tins, she used some this morning ....'Peter Purus', we used to have that on most of our vans, a batch loaf there,divided into four corners, and on each of the corners the letter 'P1 was stamped,and it was known as the 'P' bread. There's a 'Purus' clock in Rookery Road,Mr. Challenor - do you remember Mr. Challenor, the headmaster, he was a greatchap, yet wasn't he a martinet? The only time I was caned was when I was latefor school, for that was the penalty for being late. We got on very well withhim after we left school; you always can stand these teachers after you've leftschool. He always used to tell us about a boy who came in, and was going to getthe cane for being late. 'But, please, Sir.1' , he said, 'I can't be late' The"Purus" clock says it's earlyj ' 'And', he said, 'I had to let him off'1

Angel cake - it was a huge success, and then they thought they'd repeat it,put colouring in it, make it chocolate, and they had a brainwave, they calledit, 'Devil's Food'. It was an absolute flop. People wouldn't buy it, you see,there was no punk rock appeal in those days! We had a bonus scheme to competewith the Co-ops. It had to be dropped during the war, thank goodness.

It was terrific. We had the cafe on Soho Road, at the corner of Murdock Road,some of you may remember Miss Fisher, Miss Cannon, and, at Rookery Road, MissWoodcock, Doris Crawford is still living in Philip Victor Road, and Miss Bamford.

Salt - on one occasion the dough-maker forgot to put the salt in the dough,and we didn't find out, of course, until about 1,000 people complained that the

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bread wasn't up to standard. I like the story of the. Boy's Brigade boy whowas asked, 'What is salt?' 'Well*, he says, 'it's the stuff what makes theHaters taste nasty if you don't put it in'1 Ovens - there are some still usedin old farmhouses where you put the fire into the oven, then take the fire out,then put the stuff you want to be baked inside it, Then you had your 'peel'ovens j when you pushed the leaves in on the end of a peel., almost like a spade onthe end of a long pole. Then we had draw-plate ovens; we had those actuallydown at Laurel Road; where the whole of the bottom of the oven wheeled out whenyou put the bread on, wheeled back in again, and there you are. Travelling ovensof all degrees of sophistication ~ coke, coal, oil, gas, electricity.....

Holidays with pay were made compulsory in the baking business in 1938; westarted them in 1921, seventeen years ahead of the others. Plays in the park -do you remember plays in the parks? July 1942 - I was surprised to find it wasthe war years. We took the whole of the employees and their wives to seeEden Philpotts1 'Devonshire Cream' in 1942} and John Drinkwater's 'Bird in Hand1

in 1943, They were held in the open air if it was fine, and a marquee if wet.1938, when prices were put up to, 'Small Loaf, one penny; Large Loaf, two pence1.What is it they've gone up to today, 34-g- pence is it? ..... I've got ourChristmas list for 1932 here: pork pies? 6d a Ib; mince pies, nine for 5d;Pure-o-malt, l̂ d; slab cake,, 2-kd per Ib' .

At the Golden Jubilee, in 1949, we had some celebrations' We took the wholeof our employees to a performance of 'Annie Get Your Gun*. We had a 'do' up atthe Church hall on Soho Road as well afterwards, and we had a photograph takenof fifteen employees who'd been with iis for over 25 years; Albert, as I havementioned, had been with us for 45. years. There's a picture of Albert; he handedover a rose-bowl to my father and mother on that occasion. There's a picture ofme making a bit of a speech there, too.

In 1954 we sold out to Bradford's, mainly because Town and Country PlanningPermission was refused for modernising our bread bakery at Laurel Road, on thegrounds that it was in a residential areaJ We fought it right to the end, therehad been a bakery there for over 50 years, but without modernising »"e couldn'tcompete. Another angle, particularly, was the fact that cur delivery was mostlyprivate house delivery, not whole-sale. You all know what has happened now tohouse-to-house delivery of bread; there is scarcely any at all, is there?

It nearly broke our hearts at the time; I don't think, looking back on it,that I can do anything else but go back to Hamlet again. I too am a religiousman, a Christian. I'm quite sure, with Hamlet, in saying that, 'there's adivinity which shapes our ends, rotigh hew them how we will'.

donated by Handsworth Historical Society,

29th January, 1980.