{"id":12408,"date":"2010-01-27T18:53:54","date_gmt":"2010-01-27T17:53:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bohemiavillage.com\/?p=12408"},"modified":"2013-03-26T16:45:20","modified_gmt":"2013-03-26T16:45:20","slug":"happy-memories-of-the-old-bakery-on-1-50pw-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bohemiavillage.com\/?p=12408","title":{"rendered":"The Old Bakery – happy memories on \u00a31.50 per week"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mrs Sheila Harffey<\/strong>, (n\u00e9e Dawson), of Hollington writes (Mar 2009).<\/p>\n

Reading the article on the Old Bakery in Tower Road West (The Old Bakery now selling bric-a-brac<\/a>) brought back many memories of starting work there on January 6th 1953, aged 15, when it was\u00a0 Borgeauds Bakery, owned by Messrs L & W Fookes.\u00a0The bakery was originally in Queen\u2019s Road beneath one of their shops. It moved to Tower Road West in about 1850.<\/p>\n

The shop (at 130 London Rd) was then the ladies\u2019 changing room and there were steps at the back leading up to a large building\u00a0 which was the bakehouse. The main entrance\u00a0 was in Tower Road West through the garage holding the delivery vans into the bread department. Above was a large room holding sacks of flour, mixers, pastry stampers and 20 coke-driven ovens, plus benches for preparing cakes, sponges, buns, pies and sausage rolls. Also smaller rooms for cake decorating, chocolate work, stores, washing up utensils, a packing department and a room for large cakes, e.g. wedding, birthday and anniversary.<\/p>\n

The firm, I believe, had several shops in Hastings, St Leonards and Bexhill plus supplying hotels and maybe the White Rock Pavillion and the Sun Lounge (now Azur). The main shop and head office were in London Road, opposite Christ Church. At the bottom of London Road (now a restaurant) was another shop which every Christmas had a wonderful mountain scene made of marzipan and icing which filled the whole window.<\/p>\n

There were twelve men and boys, and twelve ladies and girls in the charge of foreman Mr Arthur Vidler in the bakehouse during the day, plus the night bread bakers. Also employed were van drivers supervised by Mr David Arkley.<\/p>\n

The female staff started at 6.00am. I remember my first job was jamming and cutting doughnuts. We had to work fast to get an early delivery out to the shops ready for opening. Christmas and Easter were especially busy with cakes, mince pies, hot cross buns on top of our normal work-load.On Saturday mornings after baking was finished and orders sent out, everyone set to to clean the machinery and scrub the floors, the 44-hour week finishing at 12 noon, my wage being less than thirty shillings (\u00a31.50) a week.
\nThe work may have been hard but it was a happy work-place.<\/p>\n

I made many friends there and, since the publication of your article, have made contact with Gill Beaumont (n\u00e9e West), Charlie Beaumont and Bob and Joyce Young, but have lost touch with a lot of them and sadly, a great number have passed away.<\/p>\n

In the late 50s the ownership of the company changed to Rank Hovis McDougall and production moved to Eastbourne.<\/p>\n

COMMENT<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Mrs Sheila Harffey<\/strong>, (n\u00e9e Dawson), of Hollington writes (Mar 2009).<\/p>\n

I would like to clarify a couple of things in the article on the Old Bakery. The number of ovens used was just four, not 20 as stated, two being in the downstairs bread dept and two in the upstairs cake department. These were Collins 5-deck, each taking 30 large baking trays. There was also a bread-slicing machine. Also the date of the move to Tower Road West was 1950, not 1850. Since the article\u2019s publication, a staff photograph [above] has come to light, showing, L-R, back row: [?]; Frank\/Bert Smith; Charlie Beaumont and Arthur Vidler; front row: Edna Cook; [?].<\/p>\n

Mrs Sheila Harffey (n\u00e9e Dawson)<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

The Old Bakery<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mrs Sheila Harffey, (n\u00e9e Dawson), of Hollington writes (Mar 2009). Reading the article on the Old Bakery in Tower Road West (The Old Bakery now selling bric-a-brac) brought back many memories of starting work there on January 6th 1953, aged 15,… Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[111,7,13,17],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bohemiavillage.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12408"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bohemiavillage.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bohemiavillage.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bohemiavillage.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bohemiavillage.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12408"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.bohemiavillage.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12408\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26163,"href":"http:\/\/www.bohemiavillage.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12408\/revisions\/26163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bohemiavillage.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bohemiavillage.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bohemiavillage.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}