The Wonder Of Woolies

When I was young there were only a few shops that I would willingly go to; at best I was indifferent about the majority of stores I was dragged to by either or both of my parents. The exceptions were WH Smith,  the Apex Libraries, and Woolworths. WH Smith needs little introduction, and it was there I would peruse the paperbacks and the stationery, making the odd purchase here and there when my meagre resources allowed. Apex Libraries was an independent bookseller in Romford's Quadrant Arcade and is likely the shop referenced in Ian Dury's song, Razzle In My Pocket. Apex Libraries had a different range of books compared with Smith's, I can remember there were paperback compilations of Batman comic strips that were not to be seen anywhere else, and apparently, they also stocked magazines that catered for niche interests which the more mainstream booksellers, like WH Smith, did not. 

I distinctly remember owning a copy of this.

For almost everything but books, however it was Woolworths that drew me in time and again. 

The last Woolworths store in the UK closed its doors for the final time in 2009, and there are still times when I feel its absence. Woolworths - or Woolies as we all knew it  -was one of those shops that was nice to just wander around, even if you didn't buy anything. Too many people doing that might well have been part of its downfall. Woolies didn't specialise in anything - again that might have been part of their problem - but you could buy almost anything there, from sweets (the almost legendary Pick 'n' Mix section was, for many people, good enough reason alone to visit Woolies) to televisions, from clothes to garden furniture.

It was at Christmas that Woolworths really came into its own, especially if you were buying for children, as its range of toys and games was almost unmatchable other than in speciality toyshops. One year, it must be about fifteen years ago now, Val and I went Christmas shopping at Lakeside and spent most of our time, and a large proportion of our festive budget, in Woolworths, buying presents for our children. Our children are now grown up, but I guarantee that if Woolworths were still going, a good number of their presents would still come from there, come Christmas.

Woolworths, Collier Row, shortly before it closed.

The Woolworths store in Collier Row, just ten minutes walk from my childhood home, was somewhere I visited regularly. School supplies - boring, but essential - were frequent purchases, with notebooks ('rough books' as they were known at my school), pens, pencils, rulers, protractors and compasses all being sourced there. 

Many of these were bought for school.

Then there were things to play with or more specifically, one thing that I played with a great deal, the famous Wembley Trophy Football. I used to spend hours kicking a ball around our back garden. We lived in a block of flats when I was young, it had a large communal garden with the back wall of a block of garages at one end, against which I would habitually kick the ball. While this was great fun, it did have a detrimental effect on the structural integrity of the plastic footballs, which inevitably would puncture, truncating my game and meaning that I had to abandon playing football until such time as I had saved up enough pocket money to buy a new one.

Apart from footballs, I would regularly purchase scrapbooks from Woolies. I was actually quite surprised when re-reading Fred Eyre's wonderful book, Kicked Into Touch, recently when the author said that when he embarked on his football career and wanted a scrapbook to keep his press cuttings, he had to search high and low in Manchester's stationers before finding one. Why, I wondered, did he not go straight to Woolies? I'm sure they must have had a branch in Manchester. 

My first scrapbook was purchased, from Woolies, in 1968 for a school project. The Olympic Games in Mexico was the subject, and my class was tasked with producing a scrapbook about the event, which I did assiduously. I think that I must have enlisted the help of my parents' work colleagues to supply me with daily newspapers to collect cuttings, as I won a prize, not so much for the quality of my work, but for what my teacher described as "the sheer volume" of it!

The year of the Mexico games was also the year I started going to watch my local football team (see Romford 1, Manchester United 0) and I started keeping scrapbooks. Over the years I collected almost every press cutting about Romford FC from our local newspapers, namely the Romford Recorder, the Romford Times (later, Express), and the Romford Observer, which was a bit of a latecomer on the scene, but had the novelty of including colour pictures. Occasionally there were small features to be found in the national press. I had an extensive collection of scrapbooks covering the ten years that I supported the football club until they folded in 1978, but at some point thereafter, with there seeming to be little or no point in keeping them anymore, I threw them all out. Now, with the football club having been resurrected in 1992, I dearly wish I had kept them.

Were I just starting to support a football team now, I doubt very much whether I would bother starting a scrapbook, especially for Romford, since local newspapers coverage of local sport has changed immeasurably over the last fifty years, and largely not for the better. Back in the 1960s, the Romford Recorder had match reports, features, previews and photographs galore of local football, but today the coverage is meagre. This week's edition has just four pages covering all the local teams, and a good deal of that is about the nearest Premier League side, West Ham United, which is syndicated in the Recorder group's newspapers that cover East London. The paper pretty much gave up including formal match reports years ago; a scrapbook of cuttings about Romford FC from its pages would be quite thin these days. That is an inevitable consequence of the changes to the way we consume news these days, not just sports news, but all news. 

Still going, but the Romford Recorder is but a shadow of the paper I remember from my youth.

In 1968, the local paper was an invaluable source of news; many is the time I would have to wait till the Recorder came out on a Friday to learn of Romford's result from a game they had played on a Tuesday; not so now. And the Recorder was legendary for its classified section, with pages and pages devoted to car adverts, job adverts, and estate agents' listings, yet more areas of our life where the internet has taken over from the print media as our primary source.

No doubt there are stationers up and down the country that sell scrapbooks, but even if I saw the point in buying one now, getting it from anywhere other than Woolworths just wouldn't seem right.  That was the wonder of Woolies.