Sound Recording, Greater Manchester

Description

[Collector announcement]; Wilf Morgan, butcher, recorded in Mossley [interview starts mid conversation]; talks about his experiences as a butcher; boning a piece of beef and cuts of beef; meat prices in the mid-1920s; working/opening hours; the Journeyman Butchers' Association; describes the use of a pole axe to kill a bullock; removing the caul and the uses of by-products; footwear and clothing; the frontsman, selling meat from the front of the shop outside; meat display; shop cleaning methods (steel filings), fixtures and fittings; use of sawdust (floor); distinction between a family butcher and a high class butcher; advertising/butchers' slogans; mock auctions (Saturday evenings) to clear remains of day's stock; brother's apprenticeship; family background - father a lead miner, sisters working in mills; informant's butchering career, from the age of fifteen; meat buying habits and customer relations; describes methods for curing pork; relates belief that if a farmer's wife attempts to cure bacon whilst menstruating the meat will not take the salt - informant learned of this belief whilst working in Somerset; reference to the ?Argenta Meat Company; informant's knowledge of back slang (a form of communication between butchers and their staff, in which each word is pronounced exactly or approximately as if spelled backwards, so that customers cannot understand what is being said); women in butchering. Wilf Morgan continues with his thoughts on schooling and education; describes the previous shops he worked in/owned in Manchester (1920s-1939); rationing during World War Two; Christmas business; pig and bullock killing; German butchers; offal, blood products and other by-products; public health - tuberculosis, local sanatorium; Penny Dinners; meat prices. Continues on tape LAVC/SRE/A708r. 12 of 24.

Metadata

Identifier xhbx1bj9
IRN 414758
Class Mark LAVC/SRE/A707r
Level Item
Type of Record Archives - ISAD(G)
Peristent Link http://prototype1.library.leeds.ac.uk/xhbx1bj9
Collection(s) Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture
Category Archive
Parent Record Audiotape Sound Recordings
Creator(s) Upton, Clive S
Date [Mid-1970s]
Size and Medium 1 x 12.7cm open reel spool, Duration: 102' 29".

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