EXACTLY 20 YEARS SINCE ONE OF OUR BEST-KNOWN BRIGG SHOPS CLOSED

Today is the 20th anniversary of one of the best-known shops in Brigg closing its doors for the final time.
C. Turner & Sons - the pork butchers - sold their final sausages, haslet, plum bread and pies from the Queen Street shop on April 1, 2000.
Closure came with the retirement of proprietor Keith Turner. Among those working alongside Keith 20 years ago were Margaret Turner, Jean Barker, Joanne Strawbridge and Thomas Barker.
The family business had been founded 100 years earlier by Keith's great-grandmother, who used to bake at home and sell what she made at Brigg's Thursday and Saturday markets. A Brigg shop was established 11 years later.
Keith's grandfather ran the business until his retirement in 1951, being succeeded by sons Fred and Reg. Keith joined them at the Queen Street premises as a trainee butcher, taking charge in 1971.
The family recipe for Turner's sausages was handed down from his great-grandmother and guarded by successive generations. 
The Beauty Clinique subsequently converted the Queen Street premises into a salon which opened in 2004. We've included a picture below...

Cliff Turner, another member of the family, now living in retirement in New Zealand, shared some memories of the business with Brigg Blog a few years ago, as follows:

One Christmas time, either 1938 or 1939, business was so good that more pork was urgently needed. Dad and Uncle Fred were so busy making pork pies and sausage that my Uncle Arthur Cross, who had been a butcher in his earlier days, got the job and I was roped in to help him. My main job was carrying the hot water.
Some of the pork was sold as joints and chops but a lot of it went into pork pies and sausage which were made in a little workshop off Cross Street. A single-cylinder petrol engine drove a big mincer from which the minced meat fell into big earthenware receptacles we called pancheons. Minced meat for sausages was flavoured with pepper and sage but if I remember correctly nothing was added for pork pie filling. Dad was the sausage man while Uncle Fred and Grandad did the pork pies. The uncooked pies were taken on a hand cart to a baker called Davis in Wrawby Street to be cooked. I would go occasionally to help in the workshop, cutting up meat ready for the mincer and linking sausage. I am sure I could still link sausages now!
Our shop, unlike beef and mutton butchers, never had to cope with ration books in the war years. When rationing started, probably in early 1940, butchers were no longer allowed to procure meat from wherever they chose; meat was delivered to them but I do not recall how the system worked. In our case we were no longer allowed to sell pork as chops or joints; a certain amount of pork was allotted for making sausage and pork pies. The proportion of meat to rusks allowed in the sausages was drastically reduced.
Sides of pork were delivered by lorry; I do not know where it came from but it was often of poor quality and was often dumped on the pavement outside the shop. Because ration coupons were not required for buying our products, long queues would form outside the shop until stocks were gone. The country rounds made by Dad and Uncle Fred were abandoned. I had thought that the country rounds were never resumed after the war but recently my cousin Keith’s daughter Melanie told me that a weekly round to Scawby was made when her Dad was running the business. The slaughter house in Redcombe Lane was never used again.

Cliff recently emailed us some Turner family pictures, seen here, to accompany this post. He celebrated his 95th birthday a few days ago and is a former pupil of Brigg Grammar School.

Cliff with brother Ken on the coal box at 5 Princes Street, Brigg. 

Cliff's Uncle Fred's wedding day  - Uncle Albert, Nana and Grandad Turner, Fred, Auntie Flo, Reg and Auntie Annie.

Cliff's Turner grand parents at Cleethorpes