Eating Out in the Fleetwood of Yesterday

Whenever we have visitors one of the things I always insist on them doing is to have some of our (Fleetwood’s that is) fish and chips. And preferably to eat them drenched in salt and vinegar in the open air from a newspaper, they are packed in a plastic carton which does not enhance the flavour in quite the same way that newspaper used to. Nevertheless, they still taste better outdoors eaten with fingers than indoors on a plate. Although you can still enjoy very good fish and chips suppers in almost any Fleetwood chippy.

One popular place in the sixties was the Ferry restaurant owned by Billy Greenwood and run with the aid of his brother Harry – a happy, amiable man who was imposed on by all and sundry and never seemed to grumble, and Billy’s mother who indefatigably stood in the minute kitchen all day cutting and buttering bread and carving the various meats. To keep down the mice Mrs Greenwood had three cats in the place and while they certainly did see to it that there were no mice they were the canniest cats I ever met. When Mrs Greenwood was carving the meat or portioning fish one cat would hold her attention in some way or other while the other two would manoeuvre enough fish or meat on to the floor to keep the three of them busy for the rest of the day. Mrs Greenwood used to blame the staff for shortages and no one knew who the real culprits were.

I have been in there in recent years and can heartily recommend them for their excellent fish and chips, with portions of crisply battered fish of a size suitable for a navvy – one portion is enough for either one kid or two adults and an equally large helping of perfect chips, cooked by the friendly Gino, a large Italian chef who knew his onions when it came to fish and chips, if you’ll pardon my mixed metaphors.

The Greenwoods left Fleetwood when the railway took over the restaurant and therein lies a tragic story. Not with the Greenwoods, I hasten to add, for Billy later took the old Central Station site in Blackpool and opened a place called Tudor Bingo and made his fortune there, so the Railway take-over was not an ill-wind for him in the long run. But it was for Albert Baker who owned the block of shops alongside the Ferry Restaurant. In 1938, with no thought of a war to come. Albert looked at the empty space between the Ferry office and the Belfast stores and thought what an excellent site for a row of shops. The land was owned by the then L.M.S. Railway Company and they agreed to Mr Baker leasing it for twenty-one-years with an option to renew the lease when time was up. In those days it was a gentleman’s agreement between gentleman and, as such, always honoured to the letter. So Albert at great expense built the block of six shops, one for himself as a kipper shop and five to let. The shops had only been opened two years when the war broke out and they were commandeered by the American forces, and it was not until 1946 that Mr Baker was able to re-open his shops again after extensive re-decoration which he had to do at his own expense.

The Railway Company assured Mr Baker they would extend his lease for the lost war years and with that he had to be content, but when in 1965 he applied for a renewal of the lease it was refused and he was told that not only would the Railway Company, now British Rail and no longer gentlemen, not renew the lease but that they were taking over the shops and he would no longer own them and that he must put them in perfect order and decoration before they did take possession. To add insult to injury they then offered the shops and the Ferry restaurant for sale to the highest bidder and thus our landlord changed without us or any of the other tenants being given the opportunity to buy., and poor Mr Baker became a tenant paying rent for the very shops he had paid to build and never did get his money back – certainly not in rents for he was a very generous landlord and he could of charged much more rent than he did. But that’s life, I guess, and not always very nice. So my recommendation is not to depend on a gentleman’s agreement unless you can be sure the gentleman with whom you can make it stays around as long as you do.

We rarely ate at the Ferry restaurant in the Greenwood’s days, our usual haunt in the winter was the Railway dining room, known as the station refresh, where for one shilling you could have a really home-cooked meal, nothing fancy, just good food such as Lancashire hotpot with roast potatoes followed by apple-pie and real egg custard, my mouth waters thinking about it. And if you were still hungry after gargantuan portions you could have crusty home-cooked roll with Lancashire cheese. Those were the days! When the station closed down I went into the rooms above the refreshment room and saw the kitchen, a huge room with a massive fireplace and ovens and a spit large enough to have roast a large ox. The spit was there and it was probable that in the early days of the station whole carcases were actually cooked on that huge range. There were in the station first and third class dining rooms when it first opened and in the days when the Belfast boats sailed from Fleetwood probably both dining rooms would be packed with diners waiting for the boats or trains, eating mountains of food for their journeys.

Another restaurant we occasionally patronised was the Imperial on Queen’s Terrace, opposite the railway station. Like the station they made very good home-made meals, nothing fancy, just good food with recognisable names and equally recognisable shapes on the plates and, of course, with the queues for the I.O.M. boats they were packed every lunch time, but they always found time to feed us regulars.

When we went to North Albert Street we started going to restaurants closer to hand, and tried most of the nearby ones, all of which were very good in the winter but in the summer we had trouble getting tables and getting served in reasonable time. They were all dearer than the station refresh – two shillings, would you believe? Scandalous! And their portions were not as good, but what could you expect – it was waitress service, after all. Heald’s café had once been called the Grand restaurant and used to advertise shilling dinners and sixpenny teas in 1901, so prices hadn’t really risen a lot by 1960. Funny how names change over the years, in the 1900’s cakes and public places all had majestic names like the Grand, or the Imperial, but with the advent of travel abroad names had changed by the eighties to have a Spanish flavour such as EI Caprice or EI Camel Dungo. Now, thank goodness, they are going back to good English names we can understand such as Tandoori Curry!

The Lantern Café was very good, run by Mrs Morse the widow of Mr Morse the dentist, but in the summer the service was far to slow, so we tried Burtons café in Albert square. Upstairs was reserved for local people and was mainly patronised by the local Bank staff and nearby traders who did not go home for lunch. Their lunches were half a crown, (twenty five new pence) and accordingly were only for the elite of the town. (The Euston at three-and sixpence was far too expensive for most business people!) There was no such thing as “foreign” food in those days, spaghetti and lasagne were unheard of and curry was highly suspect. If a dish was highly spiced and flavoured it was generally thought to be because it was off, and many a dish was returned to the kitchen with that complaint. Although we did see many awkward customers who ate half their meal and then complained and left without paying, probably to go and do the same thing somewhere else. But one local bank manager – who shall be nameless – did complain one day about the marrow fat peas (no frozen in those days, it was either fresh or dried) being hard uncooked. The waitress brought the manageress who haughtily viewed the heap of offending peas on the plate and taking a spoon tasted a few. She swallowed, shrugged her shoulders and said “They taste alright to me.” They should do, retorted the customer, “I’ve been chewing them for the last 10 minutes”.

One of our customers in the Albert Square shop was the delightful Arthur Walker who, with his brother Douglas ran the tailors shop across the road while their uncle ran the tobacconists next door. When Sharman’s, the tobacconist, closed down the shop was incorporated into the tailoring shop making a very large establishment in which the Walker brothers could spread their wings. Arthur was a keen photographer and had been since he was a boy when his father had bought him a camera for his birthday. In those days – during the first world war – cameras were very large affairs using glass plates and had to be used on a tripod, and Arthur tireless carried his cumbersome equipment all over the town taking photographs and doing his own developing and printing, for there were no processing services in those days. He proudly showed me the enlargements of those early photographs and I dearly wanted to borrow them to copy them, for they were a unique record of the town during the first decade of this century. I was also extremely curious about their odd colour, for they were not the usual sepia but had a silvery sheen about them that I had never seen before. I later discovered that they were platinotypes, so named because during the first war silver salts were very scarce but platinum salts were plentiful and cheap and used in photographic plate and paper coatings instead of the usual silver, but few people liked the peculiar sheen which the papers had when sepia toned and so the use of these salts did not catch on, which is as well considering the cost of platinum today. When I saw Arthur’s prints I had no idea – neither did he – that they were valuable; a few years ago some were sold at Sotheby’s for £5,000 each making Arthurs collection worth about £100,000! But this was all in the future, at the time he was showing them to me neither of us knew their worth and I only wanted them as a record of the town, so he promised he would give them to me as a gift to keep when he had shown them to various people who wanted to see them. He never did and after I heard of his death I did not like to ask his wife for them, but a little later I did enquire from the executor of his estate if I could borrow them to copy and did he know there true value? (By then I did know what they were worth and could not have accepted them anywhere, but I still wanted to copy them) No, I was told, they had not known they had any value, and it was to late anyway because they had been burned in the back garden along with a lot of other stuff! I was quite speechless, what can you say when you hear of £100,000 going up in smoke, not to mention a valuable record of the town fifty years ago.

We were experiencing a new problem in the shop in the form of mail order competitions. For the first time cameras were being offered in the newspaper and magazines for people to buy through the post and because the mail order firms were able to buy in very large quantities they could offer cameras at much lower prices than we could. One of our answers to this form of attack was to put a half page advertisement in the Fleetwood Chronicle saying “The postman can bring your camera but cannot show you how to use it. Come to the camera centre where you will get expert advice. But this expensive advertisement back fired on us, for the next two weeks saw a procession of customers bring in mail order cameras, all with the same story; “You are right, the postman couldn’t tell us how to use it, but you say you will, so here it is!” And we ended up giving them an hours lesson on how to use a camera they had bought somewhere else! In the long run however, it did pay off for all those people invariably became regular customers for films and all other things they needed. I am glad to say this helpful policy is still maintained by the knowledgeable and amiable Peter Timmins who know has the capable management of the Camera Centre and keeps up the good name we were so proud off.

But mail order is still a problem and not only for the camera shops, most businesses have such competition to contend with and it does make life very difficult for local businesses. Personally I would rather pay a bit more and deal locally with a friendly shop-keeper who will always be there to help him if you need him. But many of our regular customers could not resist the lure of the mail order ads, and time and again they were legged up by this remote service, such as Bob Porter who was a friend of ours and felt he was being disloyal by buying a camera through the post. So when he came in the shop for a kodachrome film and did not bring the camera – and we knew he had previously used 120 size film – we suspected he now had a new one which he had bought elsewhere. He was off for the week-end camping with Chris Baxter, and they planned to climb to the top of the Great Cable and photograph the sunrise and again in the evening to make the same climb to photograph the sunset. Which they did, and in the meantime they walked over the hills and fells taking the most magnificent photographs they had ever seen. Bob finished the film, took it out of the camera, and sent it off to Kodak for processing, but it came back with nothing on it, and with it a little note telling him to check the camera. Sheepishly, he came to us and told us the whole story and we found that he had not loaded the camera properly and gave him a lesson on loading. It did not, of course, bring back the masterpieces and fortunately it did not affect our friendship, but he always bought from us in the future!

Every keen photographer in those days were using kodachrome and had a projector and screen to show their masterpieces to reluctant audiences, and with a friend, Austin Marsh, I was no exception. Austin and I pooled our better slides and made a show up and we found we had many invitations from local societies to give them a show at their A.G.M.’S and such like and one invitation we accepted was to the A.G.M. of the Rechabites which was held in the upstairs rooms of Heald’s Café. Before the show while Austin and I were waiting for our turn we listened to the visiting speakers, one of whom came out with a story. The audience was all local people, and not all of them were Rechabites, I think they were there for the fun of it mainly. The speakers story went like this; I want to tell you a story with a moral, said the speaker sententiously, I am addressing any of you who drink, he fixed a beady and accusatory eye on one or two locals who shuffled their feet in embarrassment and avoided his eye, I have here two glasses, one contains water and one contains gin. I will drop a worm into the water and it swims quite happily, I will drop another worm into the gin and it immediately dies. Now Ladies and Gentlemen, what does that tell you? He looked round the bemused and silent audience and opened his mouth to speak again, but before he could do so one Fleetwood wit at the back of the room said in a loud voice, it means that if you’ve got worms you should drink gin.