The butter patters’ work was a fine art
ONE solution to the current horrid plethora of pre-packaging in shops and supermarkets might be to go back to the pre-Second World War days when everything arrived in towns and villages in bulk.
It was then divided, weighed and packed in paper on the shop premises. Even soap was treated that way. And of course the cardboard-like hardened paper could always be used to light the household fire.
The orders were made up in the shops.
One writer in the Lewes U3A booklet Shops and Shopping reminisced: ‘Everything was tied up with string.
When I came off my round I used to go down in the cellar and have to cut paper, these long sheets of brown paper.
‘We used to cut the sheets to the required size, so much for a pound of butter and so on as the items got bigger. After that I got promoted.
‘The sugar we had to weigh out; and the butter had to be patted up. it used to come in great big boxes weighing about 28lbs. We had pieces of wire to cut the butter. Then I started to learn how to pat butter. They were wooden pats with markings on them.
‘You just had to wet them so that they didn’t stick to the butter; and we’d pat the butter into shape and then impress, say, an acorn on it. The customers used to love that. It really was a fine art.’
And jolly good butter it was, too.
Incidentally, the first supermarket in Lewes opened in the 1950s on the corner over Cliffe Bridge. it was called Victor Value and it gave Pink Shield stamps which went into a customer’s book.
When the book was full, it could be exchanged for cash.
Then came a small Tesco and later a Lipton’s.
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