ONE of our regular contributors to this page, VINCENT FINN, was inspired by a recent T&A article to share his memories of shopping in the city:

Like so many ‘old’ folks around town, I really enjoy your articles showing Bradford in the past.

You ran two pictures recently of shops now long gone - Phillip Smith in Ivegate and the shops on the corner at Rawson Market.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s I spent just about every Saturday in town. Occasionally my mother would have me go to Smiths in Ivegate and buy a couple of pies. As you may know, they came in different sizes, the biggest being a stand pie.

The reason why the shop was so popular, if I am correct, was that they were pork butchers and as such you didn’t have to be registered with them for your weekly ration of meat. I think they were classified as being able to sell their product “on allocation”, meaning that if they had it they could sell it.

In the rationing era you had to register with a shop/supplier each year when you got your new ration books. We were registered at the Co-op at Fagley. I think just about every Co-op shop had a butchers counter.

Your photo of Rawson Market only showed the corner of the building, but about two shops up the street in early 1950 there was a shop that sold all kinds of Eastern European meats. They were cooked and hung in the window in long sleeves, much like a string of polony that you could buy in the pork butchers. This shop was a rare novelty for Bradford and catered to the newly arrived/arriving groups of people who were coming to Bradford from Eastern Europe. I think they were titled by the government as DP’s - Displaced Persons - who were being re-settled after the war.

The owner of the shop at Rawson Market also opened a shop in Otley Road, Bradford Moor, It was just at the end of Butler Street, and anyone still around who lived there then will remember it it was quite a novelty and the smell from the shop was very nice.

By the way, there were a couple of other shops in the area that were pork butchers and therefore could sell their goods without your need of a ration book. In Leeds Road there was a family, Youngs, who had a pork shop and they also had a shop in Barkerend Road.

Two shops down from Smiths in Ivegate was a ‘regular’ butchers, Dewhirsts, which was part of a chain of shops around the city. They had a shop in Otley Road opposite the Tennyson Cinema.

And finally, on one of my visits to Bradford in the middle 1960s I went into Smiths. The manager was a ‘boy’ named Lawrence Watson. He was my friend at St Mary’s School and he married the daughter of the owner of the shop.

Of course, if you were to buy a nice small pie and take it across the street to the Unicorn it made a nice lunch.

All these memories from an old photo. Half the pleasure of shopping in Ivegate in those days was the nice smell wafting from the butchers.