A Master Grocers Life This is a picture of the shop approximately 100 years ago as a two storey building with no large windows on the front of the house. It belonged to William Barr, Grocer next door to the Commercial Hotel. William Barr set up the Barr Trust for many poor people of Kirkcudbright. At one time this was run by the Town Council and then the Community Council and it is now part of the Common Good Fund. My Father was a grocer, man and boy, with James McMeekan in Castle Douglas. The shop was where the Douglas Arms bar is now, across from the Town Clock in King Street. As he was in the R.A.F. reserve he was called up early in the 1939 for the war effort. He returned to the shop as manager in 1946 . In 1953 Mrs Clingan, in Kirkcudbright, was looking for a new manager. Word soon reached my Father through the many company reps there were on the road. He applied and was given the post. From 1953, till after the death of Mrs Clingan, in early 1959, Father travelled daily on his motor bike from Castle Douglas. Meanwhile, my twin brother Michael and myself having left school at 15, were both serving a four year apprenticeship in engineering. Following the death of Mrs Clingan, her family decided to sell the business and offered Dad the first chance to purchase! William Smart the baker in Castle Douglas offered to join Father as a sleeping partner, so the deal was done and Father and Mother took over on 28th June 1959. We all moved to Kirkcudbright with Michael and I continuing our apprenticeships and travelling to Castle Douglas every day by the 7am and 6pm Western buses. Travelling shop CSW 44. With the business, came the travelling shop for the country runs. Mr John McCreadie was the van man and was with the firm for many, many years. The old coffee mill (now in the Museum) and all the other equipment was very old fashioned and Father set about modernising, the shop with the old mahogany counter being replaced with new white formica tops and modern fronts. The rows of small dark brown drawers were removed from behind the counters and put elsewhere. The next two years were spent building up the business. In 1961 I had finished my apprenticeship with James Brown and the Rootes group. My wage at that time was £4-3-6. As the business was doing well Dad asked whether I would consider joining the firm as a junior partner. My wage, with a small bonus, would be approx. £10.00 per week. So I gave it some thought and decided to join him for the extra money, and if it did not work out, I could always go back to the engineering. What he did not mention, was that there may not be a pay rise for the next 10 years. So off I went on a six month training course to the “Beeches College”, Bournville, Birmingham run by the Cadbury Bros. But after three weeks I phoned back and said I had had enough and was coming home as I would learn more being hands on in the shop. The truth being I was in love and wanted home to be with my girlfriend Maureen who actually met me at the station. Not a bad idea or choice as we have now been happily married for over 50 years. In the mid 60s the Traders Association held three very successful 5 day exhibitions in the Town Hall. Most of the members and shopkeepers took stands to display their products and produce, and were visited by hundreds of people over the 5 days. Father as Chairman of the Association opened the first exhibition. Derek Baty from Border TV opened the second. At that time there were seven private grocers in the town. Five with vans on the road, plus all the bakers and butchers vans going out on daily runs. All of the grocers shops were counter service including the Co-op and Coopers. Back then we had Retail Price Maintenance which covered every branded grocery item. (Heinz, Crawfords, Cross & Blackwell, Jacobs etc.) which meant my packet of McVitie and Price, as it was in those days, Rich Tea biscuits had to be sold at the same price as everyone elses. That is one of the reasons own brands were introduced. Therefore, we all had to run our businesses on quality and service. Almost all the grocers had a full time message boy and of course his bicycle. The shop improvements continued by the lifting of the old wooden floor and Mr Clemie, the Builder, laying a concrete one . Views of counter service. Rogerson and Black. Lovel and Christmas were wholesale merchants from Glasgow. They owned what was locally known as the “Pork Store” (where Polarbites is now). From these premises they sold bacon, pork, Scottish Maid and Scottish Pride butter, cheese, canned hams, fruit etc. They also had a slaughterhouse down Dee Walk where the pigs were killed on a Monday, then brought to the Harbour Square for processing and curing. Their sausages were a great favourite and were purchased daily from the store 10 to 15 lbs at a time. All our Ayrshire middles and Gammons came from that local supplier. Robert Ferguson. Grocer at 48 Castle Street, had let out his business to a local man, but after 4 years he had gone bankrupt. In April 1966 Mr Ferguson came to see Dad and myself and asked if we would consider taking on his shop as he did not want to see it closing. After much thought and discussion, we decided if we could stock it out of St Mary Street shop we would, and we did. Mr Herbert Sewell (Staff member) went as Manager with his wife Helen and we kept the shop open for the next 10 years. Herbert Sewell and Lorimer Paterson enjoying a dram after the annual stock taking. The top of the head in the corner is Ronald Smith, Victoria Park, who was the van driver at that time. His Father Jimmy who worked for the council looked after the town’s water supply. The order girls. Maureen, Hazel Middleton and Nancy Middleton in the back shop. This shop in St Mary Street was owned by Jim and Mella Carson and previously by an American William Haig as a Spar outlet and before that by Jack Brown the Town Provost. As you can see Alex McClymont’s large drapers shop on one side and John Mitchell electrics on the other. At about that time Father saw for sale in the Grocer magazine a new type of fuel less ham cooker. He sent for more details and in due course we purchased one and it was installed with a twin gas ring in Mum’s kitchen. The home cooked ham became such a favourite I had to bone and roll 6 to 8, 14lb gammons per week, with the Selkirk Arms and the Commercial Hotel purchasing whole hams for catering. My Mum, among her many other jobs looked after the hams for over 30 years. Fishing Fleet. Ranger Two. Mr John King Snr. was a diamond of a man who so did much to help me with the business. That is Ranger Two the light blue boat in the harbour with Carswell’s Mill in the background. In 1970 John phoned to say his new boat, Ranger Two, was arriving in the harbour that weekend and would I be interested in supplying stores for the boat. Of course the answer was yes. At that time John was still skippering and said he would send up a crew member with the stores line. He arrived with a hand written list, and it was duly made up and sent to the harbour by three runs of the message bike. This was to be a weekly occurrence. After about one month I decided to have an order list printed, Bread, Butter, Sugar, Tea etc., approximately sixty items on each page, with only the boxes to be filled in with the quantities required. With the order being so good, I offered to put the stores aboard sometime over the weekend for sailing on a Sunday night. I was then given the keys for the wheelhouse. Once the word got around of this service, I had other Skippers wanting the same. Arrangements were made and keys handed over. This had now become a Saturday night and Sunday’s work. The trawler provision trade had taken off and we provided this service for John King, Jim Little, Gordon Burns, Norman Parker, and Tony Finlay’s skippers Alan Kerr, Stephen Kerr, Rab McKie, Dougie Maxwell and many others from 1968 to July 2004. Occasionally we would receive a late night call about 9pm from a skipper about to land, asking for stores as he was going straight back out at around midnight on the same tide. Maureen and I would then go to the shop, make up the order and take it to the harbour, back home for 10.30pm. John used to phone me and say he was sending up the crew from a visiting trawler for provisions and to charge them to West Coast as he would recoup the cost from their catch. This happened on many occasions with John putting a lot of business my way. Every now and again we would have strangers coming into the shop asking for provisions to be charged to their boat.