STEPPING BACK IN TIME


AN INDEPENDENT REMEMBERS PART 52


Our independent retailer continues he meander down memory lane as he looks back with fondness at some of the more light-hearted moments of his long and illustrious hardware retailing career.


M


arch 1985 and the


boss was


happy for us to carry on as he’d been doing since just after WW2,


selling timber and screws and nails, with the odd packet of Polyfilla and lots and lots of mastic. Despite the uPVC craze exploding around this time, there were still thousands of timber doors and windows that, every few years, required re-sealing with linseed oil-based mastic. And we were the people to get it from. I can smell it now. Delivered by the pallet, there was often little room for customers until after all the tins had been put away. We took the pallets to a pallet yard that had a big sign offering to buy them. But the first time we went there they said ours were British pallets and they only wanted European, but we could leave them there for no charge, so we did, it was easier. The next consignment came on different pallets and I took a boot load of them to sell, to be told they only ever dealt in British pallets, but we could leave them for free. No chance, and instead I used them in the cellar as duckboards. That place had stacks of pallets as tall as skyscrapers, and I wondered just how many of them had been paid for.


Old girl in the back In my attempts to open new markets and expand our services, by this time I was on the lawn mower trail, sales and service, and had successfully obtained the parts manuals for the Qualcast and Flymo ranges. These came in big thick loose-leaf binders and showed every single model blown apart, with each item numbered. No one


else in our town had these goodies. We still didn’t have room for our own cylinder grinding machine and by then I was taking them to a specialist garden machinery supplier in the next town. It was a family-run business going back many decades. Being able to ask them technical stuff was a bonus because originally I


was only


interested in the old girl they kept out of sight in the back: a Garfitts cylinder grinder. Oh, I can hear her now, with her comfortably worn – yet infinitely serviceable – bearings, each fed through strategically positioned nipples, and her sturdy transverse flanges, all well-lubricated. The gentle throb accompanying the action would have you believe she was powered by a modern induction motor, but in my ignorance I didn’t see that she was being urged on by a belt from a


“In my attempts to open new markets and expand our services, by this time I was on the lawn mower trail, sales and service.”


26 DIY WEEK MARCH 2021


separate motor. She must have been well in her 60s when she caught my eye – and this was 36 years ago and long before 60 had become the new 39.


Treasured tome


The firm also supplied me with some spare parts and offered 10 percent trade discount. I wasn’t a great fan of this figure and thought that with all the work I was bringing them it should have been at least 15 or even 20 percent, so I needed to find from where these pattern spares were being supplied. The quality was excellent and, like with the car spares market, in some cases were indistinguishable from OEM parts. As nice as they were at this firm, whenever any one of them got out the catalogue for me to choose what I wanted, they went to great lengths to ensure that I couldn’t see the supplier’s name on the cover – even to the extent of searching around for some bit of card just to place against it. They even trained the apprentice to do this.


This amused me because it was so bleeding obvious, with no attempt at subtlety; it also frustrated me


to hell because I was all the more determined to find out from where I could get this great stuff myself at wholesale prices. Remember, there was no World Wide Web back then, and in many cases it could be like living in the dark ages. Stuff had to be done the hard way.


Traders of the Lost Ark I spent hours in the Post Office examining


Yellow Pages for


the whole country, searching for mower parts suppliers. Then I was back at the shop phoning them. Someone mentioned that the place I was looking for was in the south, so I concentrated my efforts there, and found one young woman told me that she knew the firm I was looking for… but she risked losing her job if she told me.


I got her to give me the name of the town, which was in Dorset. I phoned directory enquiries (it was free back then) and within minutes I was in touch with Central Spares, Wimborne, and ordering the much coveted catalogue from them. At


www.diyweek.net


last! What a hike that had been. I felt a bit like Indiana Jones. Don’t laugh.


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