Well, the shop down at the end of Bench, perhaps the older people still refer to it as Dunkley’s.  Mrs Dunkley, her first little shop was by… where the New Inn, not the New Inn, the Brewery Tap, if you come from the Brewery Tap towards the river, the very first house next to the Brewery Tap, that was her shop, she had a little tiny shop there.   Then she moved to the corner of The Bench and then she had like a sweet shop and that and at the other end of The Bench, in Back Lane, she opened a grocery store. It’s always been referred to as Dunkleys.  I don’t suppose popular as such, I mean, notorious, I suppose.  Her husband Harry, Harry Dunkley… part of Ham, really, Dunkleys, you know, you grew up with it!

So is that where the family did most of their grocery shopping?  No, no, that would have been in the Co-op.  The Co-op was adjacent to The Crooked Billet, the other side; they had a little greengrocers shop opposite, Elsons, but my Mum did all her shopping in the Co-op.  I can still remember, we had a dividend, I can still remember the number to this day; the two numbers I remember are my Mum’s Co-op number and my Service number.

There was different orchards everywhere and… although I don’t remember a lot of it… because you had the market garden bit, Smerdons, don’t know if you… The market garden bit was basically along where Riverside Drive is, between where Riverside Drive and the allotments are, that was a big market garden. There is some swings there, all along there, that was a big market garden.  I’m not sure if it was associated, we had the greengrocer Smerdons, which was on the corner of The Bench, which Mrs Dunkley eventually went into.  Then you had Frank Birch, the butcher, he must be mentioned, mustn’t he?  He was a character, but he had an impediment whereby he didn’t have a roof to his mouth or something, so he used to talk funny.  That’s all I basically remember about him.  His son played briefly for Ham and then he played for Kingstonians, goalkeeper, John Birch.