Christmas meat on display in the window of the Co-op butchers on Yarm Lane, Stockton c1928.
Picture Stockton Archive
A Pictorial History of Stockton-on-Tees
Christmas meat on display in the window of the Co-op butchers on Yarm Lane, Stockton c1928.
It’s amazing, how by now, a couple of generations seem to have grown up believing that ‘meat’, only comes in plastic, shrink-wrapped cartons, neatly displayed in an air-conditioned supermarket. Not a grain of sawdust, or a ‘blood stained’ butchers-apron in sight. Nor is there the aroma of fresh meat, or the sound of the hack-saw, as the butcher cut thru’ another side of beef, pork or lamb. This, as other huge sections of animals hung from hooks in the ceiling, or had their severed heads, openly displayed in the shop-window. These men had a proper, much valued ‘trade’, catering across whole sections of society, as they sold both the prized and ‘cheap’ cuts to customers with varying, often pitiful, levels of income. Who today eats ox-liver, brains, tripe or tongue with any regularity? Even ‘ducks n’ peas’? Our children have somehow now been shielded from all this activity, which as a kid, once held me in awe, not ‘horror’ whenever I entered such a shop. Strange how todays kids, will eagerly opt for burger n’ chips, a sausage-bun, or even a bacon sandwich… without the slightest idea as to how the meat content was produced, or even what animal it came from! The ‘proper’, helpful local butcher has by now, with only a few exceptions, become a factory based backroom-boy it seems?
Note the fat on the meat. That was then when meat was meat.