Richard Dye
master brummie
The points came in a small book that my mother would give me periodically. I think a point was worth 2 ounces of sweets. I’m not sure of the allowance monthly but it wasn’t very much at least seemed to me
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The corner sweet shop
- Thread starter Blacksmith
- Start date
.Cheers Paul, - The building is still there (see link), although it's no longer a newsagents. Old Mr. Webb kept it going for years, it was a Post Office as well. He became quite famous for the number of times he had faced-off armed raiders.
paul stacey
master brummie
Well Dinger?? how can a place change so much,?? there is nothing left, of the old Victorian village, of my childhood, normal I suppose, but somehow very sad, to an old man, thanks for posting .
It is shocking to walk down the streets and visit the areas that we knew so well now and to see them so changed, rarely for the better in my opinion, Paul. I remember my father saying much the same to me forty something years ago and listening intently as a boy, to my Nan telling me in remarkable detail about what Erdington had been like when she had been a young girl in the Edwardian era.
One of the things that is so good about this site, is that we are all able to share our memories with each other. Those memories and the photographs that are posted here, bring the past back into focus for us all and combine to provide a tremendous collection of posts that highlight so many varied aspects of Birmingham's rich history.
Hi Paul - I was wrong on my original posting. - The shop I showed as still being there on Google Streetview wasn't the Sweet Shop. I met up with my brothers yesterday and they remembered that Hudson's Shop was just a few yards away directly on the corner of Jiggins Lane and Genners Lane / Adams Hill on the site now occupied by Loppy's Fish Bar and the one-stop shop. My one brother distinctly remembers because when the sweet shop closed down the old couple who ran it (Mr & Mrs Hudson I presume) took all their old stock to the nearby Adam's Hill school and distributed it for free to the kids (I'm guessing this would have been in the 1970s). Here is a picture I found online of the old shop - seeing it I remember the very narrow pavement area outside the shop - If a big lorry went past you knew about it!
The shop I highlighted in my original posting was the Post Office, which took over as the only place you could buy sweets until the one-stop shop was built after the sweet shop was knocked down.
paul stacey
master brummie
Cheers!! Dinger, bought a tear, to my old eye, I can tell you !!
paul stacey
master brummie
I just realised Dinger, that my dear old dad, would have passed through those door ways, every day, for some 12 years, for his daily mail, and packet of "Parkdrive"!!
paul stacey
master brummie
Thanks Janice, very interesting!!
pjmburns
master brummie
It may be the shop had closed by then and they just lived there.
That makes sense. Perhaps the planning application was to turn the shop into a normal house. I think it was knocked down as part of "improving" the junction. It was always a very tight turn for buses and lorries coming up that incline at the top of Jiggins Lane. There wasn't much space, as evidenced by the tiny pavement outside the shop. The new layout had (has) much more of a sweeping curve.
The corner sweet shop I remember most was next to Paganel Junior School, on the roundabout on Swinford Road. The building is still there, now a chippy. The building itself looks like it was built in the 1930s but in the 1960s the inside was done out in wooden panelling, perhaps reclaimed from a much older building, giving it a very "Dickensian" feel. The sweet counter was on your left, with rows of boiled sweets in jars on shelves on the wall behind the counter. On the counter itself were sweets like Spangles, Fruit gums, Swizzles, Refreshers, Love hearts, Barratts Sherbet Fountains, Parma Violets and bags of iced gem biscuits. There must have been chocolate bars but I don't remember them, probably because they would have been too expensive for my pocket money. What I do remember as being cheap enough to buy were those "chocolate tools", flat hammers, saws and spanners made of that very cheap chocolate I believe was made with pork gelatine instead of milk (the very cheap easter eggs were made of the same stuff). Quite a distinctive taste, different to modern chocolate. I think the counter on the right-hand side of the shop sold pipe tobacco and snuff. There used to be a grocers on the other side of the roundabout (now converted into a house) with a vending machine that gave you 2 black jacks for ½d or a pack of chewing gum for 1d.