Dunstable Yesteryear: Ready for Christmas dinner
Buying the crucial ingredient for Christmas dinner, before the days of supermarkets and refrigerators, once meant a trip to the local butcher and making a selection from whatever was hanging outside his shop.
And Dunstable people were spoiled for choice. Don Kemp, author of a detailed booklet about Dunstable’s cattle markets, worked out that there were 22 butcher’s shops in the town in 1938, serving a population of just 14,000.
They included Robert Bunker in Union Street, Philip Mead in Edward Street, Harold Hobbs in Poynters Road, Harry Blake in St Peter’s Road and George Bryant, Harry Tilley, Fred Brookes, George Waller, Ernest White and Kate Bird in the high street.
The photo here was taken in around 1924, when Ernest Faulkner Sayer had a butcher’s shop in West Street. Pheasants, chickens and rabbits were displayed outside, ready for plucking or skinning by the customers.
Mr Sayer had a long-established business. It was on the corner of Princes Street from 1906, in premises which later, until recently, became a chemist’s. He moved nearer the crossroads in around 1917 to the building seen in our picture, on the corner of Matthew Street. Today the premises, readily recognisable, are occupied by the PCL Corporate Wear business.
Yesteryear is compiled by John Buckledee, chairman of Dunstable and District Local History Society.