The Crown

I remember the supermarket was called Caters, my mum and dad shopped there every Thursday after work.

I remember the Crown, used to drink there when ending a shift on the underground in the early 70s, all these memories and so sad to see places close down.

I was brought up in Morden and "The Crown" an historic coaching Inn took pride of place. It had the most beautiful gardens, the jazz club in the early 60's was something to behold. It was packed to the rafters, hardly room to jive, but we did. It was a disaster when it was pulled down (should never been allowed) and that monstrosity of a 'Caters' supermarket built in its place, along with a plastic pub of absolutely no character. It was the beginning of the end for Morden.

Regards the old Crown Public House, when I was little, my Mum would take us for lunch.  Being about 6yrs old, we would have to slip pass the bar and straight upstairs to the dining room, a three course lunch was about 5s  in the 50's then increased to 7s 6d a meal I think towards the 60's as general charge in restaurants.  Just outside was this roundhouse, always smelling of drink and stale tobacco we'd pass men sitting around inside.  There was a police box on the corner at the edge of the pub car park I think, fenced by posts and hanging between chains.  To the right facing the pub, around the corner was an off-Licence.  We would go there to buy a large bottle of orange or lime squash with a brightly coloured crinkly rap over cap to take home.     

I didn't know it at the time but my sister June tells me my dad Jack Mckinlay used to sing Scottish songs in the Crown would be late 50's early 60's anyone remember him?

For anyone interested in the original Crown pub, where as a teenager in the late fifties, I and my friends used to frequent the jazz club most weeks. It  was really nice inside.

As Caters has been mentioned, I and a friend whilst still at school, had a Saturday and school holiday job in the mid to late fifties, at Caters old store. I worked there from the age of fourteen.

This was a conventional serve-over grocery store of the time, much like an  old-fashioned Sainsburys, with separate  counters for; cheese, eggs, cooked meats and bacon on one side and a long packaged grocery counter and a bank of loose biscuits in  tins near the entrance of the shop, on the other.

My job was mostly bringing down more cases of canned goods frrom the warehouse on the first floor, to fill up the grocery shelves, or  to serve on the biscuits, (with a very attractive Saturday girl). Few  packets of biscuits were sold at that time, mostly loose  which needed weighing from the bank of probably 36 tins. Then ringing up in the till.

The girls on the packaged grocery counter, I think there were  three, all had little pads and went back and forth to the shelves immediately behind them to pick the items required, wrote down the price of each in a column on the pad and then added them up to find out what to charge each customer. No receipts!

I remember the shop as always being busy.

The office was on a raised platform at the back of the sales floor where the two women who worked in there could see what was going on. I remember the names of some of the staff, including Bob who looked after the warehouse. He was quite knowledgeable and did the ordering of the packaged grocery.

The man on the bacon slicer was the father of Cyril Peacock a World Champion amateur racing cyclist in 1954.

This was before the old Crown pub had been demolished.  I left after leaving school at seventeen and moved away from home around 1960.

I came back to visit my parents in Tudor Drive not long after the new store had opened. I saw  that Bob had been reduced to just handing out baskets at the front of the store, which seeemed a bit sad. I said, "Hallo," but he didn't recognise me.

I remember Morden as if I still lived there, I was born in Martin Way and as an infant I went to Poplar rd school, when I used to the town with my mother bless her we used to go to Woolworth quite a small branch but always seemed to get what you wanted then pop into the RACS store where my mum and day bought my clothes and for my brother John he was 4 years older than me before getting the 157 bus home to Martin Way flat above Millers butchers, such lovely memories that’s now 82 years.

Roger hope someone remembers me.