Interview with Jeff Turpin, Stapleton, March 11, 2014
Jeff Turpin (born 1929) bought the small shop at the corner of Greenbank Road and Hinton Road in 1965. In this short interview extract, he recalls how the shop has changed in the last fifty years.
Marcel Thomas: Yeah I guess the shop itself has probably changed so much in those years? Jeff Turpin: Yeah it has. Well it was... you walked in the door, which, as I said, was in the corner position, and it was a room only half the size of this one, and you had the window there, everything you saw was in the window then, tins of fruit and tins of ham and spam and so on, the window there and a little area with about three or four shelves up here and all shelves behind you. As I say, this old Oxford tin on the counter that we used for till. And... then... of course we managed to... you could go in there, I remember when I... Mrs Hagarty, that’s who we bought it from. I remember when we went over to buy the premises, it was a Sunday, we were looking out, and then she... or no, it was early, but she invited us over for Sunday lunch. And we went over there, we sat down for lunch, there was just my wife, myself, Mrs Hagarty, and every so often, the bell would go “ding” and she would get up from lunch, walk out, serve someone, come back again. But this happened only about three times while we were sat down there [laughs], it didn’t interfere with the lunch hour. That’s the way things were then. And... I don’t know, it’s... you get ideas and... I suppose it’s because these shops diminished so much, you could really make a living out of it before then, you know. Afterwards you were just making a little bit of money and that was it. But yeah, since... would be nice to make it so much bigger and so on, but you gotta start... you can’t just blow it up, can you?