On the corner of Red Lion Street facing New Road was and still is Sheddy Turner’s fish and chip shop. Turner’s are descended from a long-standing seafaring family in the town and their fish and chip shop was established at this site in 1913 having previously been a poultry and game dealer’s business.
It is currently run in 2024 by Philip Hall who went to school with me. Philip’s grandfather, Fred Turner was a leading businessman in the town with various ventures, including Hills department store, Hills Furniture Shop and even a milk round in the 1960’s. With his fish and chips being a local favourite it was Fred’s proud boast to say, “I’ve fed half the boys and girls in Spalding”, and this was most likely true. Many people benefitted from Fred and his family’s direct or indirect employment and the generosity of what the family put back into the town, much of it quiet and unseen.
Next along from Sheddy’s was the Punch Bowl pub – a favourite spot for under-age drinkers. Just along from this was Mrs Peel’s newsagents where my grandfather would send me to purchase his daily Sun. Next to her was Charlie Watson’s fruit and veg shop that was not just in the shop but also set up on the street outside for as long as people could remember. In the 1980’s there was a furore when attempts were made to stop the fruit and veg being sold in the street with ancient market rights adjacent to the River Westlode (that is culverted below the street) being claimed. My research has only found old mentions of public market rights being held on the crossings of the River Westlode.
On the street corner nearby was the appropriately named Corner Café. The Corner Café in the early 80’s was an early morning Mecca few newly liveried British Telecom vans as the engineers had extended breakfasts past 10am in the morning before going to jobs. This irked many local people especially as it was a time when there was a waiting list for phone line connection. I did not have a telephone in my parent’s house until 1981.
Crossing the road from Broad Street at the junction with Pinchbeck Road was Butter’s shop. This was a firm favourite with local farmers and workers on market days to get clothing and the range of useful items that rural folk need for work and pleasure. In my time it was owned and run by Pete Buffham, who lived with his family on the same street as me. His brother, John Buffham was a motor mechanic at Commercial Road Garage. Being a shopkeeper Pete Buffham would find himself recruited alongside my father for Coroner’s inquests on a Thursday afternoon, being half-day closing.
The origins of this business lie with a pawn-broking business J Butters Ltd which had roots in nineteenth century money-lenders based in the Midlands that diversified into selling cheap suites. They were originally accountants and money lenders that migrated eastwards with Jewish poultry dealers from the Midlands. It was the railway that enabled such a business to develop in Spalding with the importation of cheap suits, coats and clothing from the Midlands into a shop that was also a pawnbrokers in the early twentieth century. In my time this was a shop, pawn broking in Spalding was not a widely visible business, although some licenced and unlicenced activity was known to me well into the 90’s by local trusted people, the nearest visible pawn-broking shops were found in the larger towns of Boston, Kings Lynn and Peterborough.
Butters was a veritable Aladin’s cave of useful stock – I have bought knives, wellies, waders, coats, shoes and trousers from here to name but a few items. It was always good quality and well priced. Such a shop thrived in a “market town”, but habits and customers change and it is a sad addition to the list of lost family businesses that existed in twentieth century Spalding.
On the corner of Pinchbeck Road is an Indian restaurant. In 2024 it is called the Tulip Tandoori, but I remember it as the Shaheen Tandoori. In my early twenties it was the first place I ever tried Indian food, not counting the Vesta curry my father would occasionally treat me to in the 1970’s. For me the height of exotic food was a cardboard box containing dehydrated curry, or occasionally paella in a dust form that magically rehydrated in boiling water to produce spicy “exotic” food. The food writers Bee Wilson and Clarrisa Dickson Wright have both argued separately that the naming of British curry-houses reflects their vintage with Taj Mahal, Passage to India or Koh-I-Noor usually dating back to the 1960’s, the 1970’s seeing names shrugging off the colonial past and more exotic such as Aladdin, Sheba or in this case Shaheen Tandoori. Shaheen is a Bangladeshi/Pakistani name of Persian origin with its derivation meaning “King of Birds”. It later changed its name from Chameli Tandoori (Chameli can be translated as Jasmine flower from Urdu). It is normal for Indian restaurants opened in the late 90’s onwards to have plainer anglicised names – as such we see the name “Tulip Tandoori” which is apt for the area known for growing tulips. Lest we forget tulips have a Turkish or Persian origin! Up to the early 90’s you could find diners in this restaurant that had travelled from north London just for a meal such was its reputation. The comedian Mark Steel ate here when he performed the stage version of his radio show “Our Town” in Spalding. Before this was an Indian restaurant it was Nicholsons Bakers. My late neighbour and friend Martin Nicholson was brought up in this shop and had some stories about it, along with my father. My father recalls coming out of school in nearby Westlode Street and calling in at Nicholsons for “noggins” of bread, off-cuts of dough that had been baked into bread and given out to children by Mr. Nicholson.
His son, Martin, told me that when he was young people could not always afford a whole loaf of bread. Mr. Nicholson would happily sell them half a loaf of bread, cutting a loaf in half, but always insisting on the shopper choosing which half. Apparently this would confound some shoppers as they would stare at the two halves trying to work out which side was the largest. The road junction outside this shop has always been difficult to cross and Martin recounted to me that as a teenager a lady got crushed by the wheels of a lorry that run across her mid-ships. He went out to help her as they waited for the ambulance. Despite her horrific injuries she claimed she felt no pain and chatted away. When the ambulance crew arrived one of the crew took Martin to one side and explained that they would like him to keep her talking as the minute she was lifted her injuries were such that she would die immediately. This he did keeping her happily talking until she passed away.
It is the smallness of my “parochial” Spalding that has meant at different times tales and people connect in some small way. Martin Nicholson used to work for the Gas board and told me many tales, some quite grim, of various adventures in his job. Apparently as a young engineer one of his early tasks was to be suspended from the gas monitors in town painting the sides. In the days of coal gas it was poisonous and sadly a means of suicide, but one of the unfortunate side effects of sticking your head in the gas oven as you died would be the swelling of the head and he had the grim task of prizing the poor soul from their oven. Other times he would have to cut off non-payers relying upon the services of Ken “Putty” Chenery to gain access to homes, the former neighbour of my parents we have seen earlier providing names of bad payers. On one occasion he arrived at a burst gas main near the sugar beet factory that had ignited through several holes in the tarmac of the road that the Spalding Fire Brigade were efficiently extinguishing, only for them to watch him wander down the road throwing lit matches to reignite the gas to prevent a potential explosion! Sadly Martin died of cancer, and one evening towards the end of his life we sat on his doorstep drinking beer and whisky whilst consoling another distraught young neighbour who was upset that his mortgage would not be repaid until he was nearly 80! The irony of this from my terminally ill neighbour was not lost and caused us some amusement afterwards.
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