Date:27/05/14
Location: Newcastle-Under-Lyme
Interviewer: Hilary Hughes
Permission given to use interview for website, exhibition and Staffordshire archive: YES
Question asked “What do you remember about bread or bread baking”.
I was brought up in Smallthorne, I was born in 1941, and I remember the horse and cart from the Co-op used to deliver the bread and milk everyday.
And my husband came from Middleport where the bakery was, the Co-op bakery, and all the horses were based there. they used to go down there and play. Only the other day he was telling us, because he's invested in a bread-maker me husband not me, he was making his bread and doing very well. He was saying that the bakery was open at Middleport when he was little and they used to sneak into the yard of the bakery and if there were any cobs there, they used to just take one and go. I said, you'd be in borstal now, although it's not called that now is it. Fresh bread.
Me Mum used to send us up the corner shop at Smallthorne for bread, they never went town, they had the whole street you know, did all their shopping in the village, groceries, butchers, bread. She used to send us for a cob, a new cob and on our way home we'd pick little bits off it. She'd say, have you ben eating this cob again, those were the days. I'd be about three or four years old, but when they stopped delivering with a horse and cart I wouldn't know, probably in the 50's.