WHAT WAR-TIME RATIONING MEANT FOR BRIGG PEOPLE

Cliff Turner, now 91 and living in New Zealand, continues his memories of growing up in Brigg during the 1930s and early 1940s. Today he recalls the family business and going to school at Brigg Grammar.


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. The end of the war in 1945 did not bring an early end to food rationing. When Nancy and I married in 1951, meat, sugar, butter, cheese, bacon, sweets and chocolate were still rationed.
In early September 1936 I started at Brigg Grammar School, founded by Sir John Nelthorpe in 1669. The school had two streams, one for bright boys and one for the less bright; scholarship winners were of course put into the "A" stream along with chosen fee-paying boys and my first form was 3A. There were forms 1 and 2 but all the boys in those forms were younger fee-paying pupils, some of whom had started at the school at the age of eight. Boys in the "A" stream took the Cambridge School Certificate after four years while those in the "B" stream had to wait an extra year before being allowed to attempt it.
The big change from the elementary school was that we had different teachers for different subjects and one teacher was allocated to each form as form master. At the end of each 45 minute period a bell was rung, the teacher left for his next class and the teacher for the next lesson arrived.
To be continued on Brigg Blog. Many more memories to come from Cliff.