Shopping for Christmas ..... with T.C. Whitaker on Beech Road

It is the shop of Thomas Charles Whittaker at the bottom of Beech Road where it curves round into the Green.

And for me the attractions are many.  First we have a date, secondly it is possible to identify three of the four people in the picture and lastly there is that wonderful detail of all that the shop had to offer.

The date is 1906 and judging by the adverts for “CHOICE NEW CURRANTS AND SULTANAS [for] XMAS”and the boxes of Mincemeat we must be in late November or December.*

Standing in front of the shop by the open door in Thomas who was 40 years old when the picture was taken and to his right is his son “Charlie” and away in the corner is Mr Fox who the caption tells us was about to become the manager of the Stanley Grove shop.

Now it says something about the concentration of people around the green that old Thomas Whittaker could feel it made business sense to open another shop just round the corner and off the green, and later had another store I am told on Ivy Green Road.

But the captions and the photograph do not quite fit.  If the date is indeed 1906 then the figure to the left of Thomas Whitaker cannot be his son Charlie who would have been just ten years old, and while the Fox family lived at 19 Stanley Grove there is no evidence that they were running a shop at any time between 1903 and 1911.

There was a grocery shop at number 2 but this was run by the Whitely family.  Interestingly enough it was still a shop as late as 1972 and today while it is a residential property it is possible to see its origins as a shop.

So all of this points to a later date perhaps closer to the Great War or perhaps after 1918which  would be more creditable given the appearance of Thomas and his son Charlie. So all that is needed is a trawl of the later street directories for Stanley Grove and the occupants of nu 2.

And I suspect that the Whittaker’s bought up the little grocery story sometime after 1911, by which time widow Whitely was 55.

Now I am in real danger of becoming boring and reducing the story to something like the medieval debate on how many angels could dance on a pin head.**

So instead I will return to those wonderful shop displays which have all the brash marketing of that famous slogan “pile them high and sell them cheap.”  The windows are covered with products and adverts for products, ranging from fruit to biscuits and those great sides of meat hanging in the open while beside them over the door is an assortment of brushes.

All of which might allow Thomas to claim that from his shop there was all that the discerning shopper might want.

And of course there are all the household names that are still familiar from OXO and Crawfords, to Bovril and Skipper Sardines.  I like even the carefully crafted descriptions either side of the family name announcing the shop as a place of “High class Provisions, Family Grocer and Italian Warehouseman”

It is not the only photograph in the collection and I must at a later date introduce another which will have been taken at the same time and shows Mr Rogers with the horse and cart.  But that as they say is for another time.

Picture; from the Lloyd collection.

* There will be those Christmas experts who will point out that the date must be earlier in the year for no one serious about Christmas cakes and puddings would leave it till November to make them.

**Which apparently is really a piece of propaganda put about during the Reformation to discredit Catholic theology.