'You'll Take What You Get!'

Ian Ewart (Photograph courtesy Shelley Wall)

On a blog a few days ago on Ewarts Newsagents I mentioned the sweet jars which were set up along one counter of the shop behind glass. For small children this of course was at a perfect marketing height-eye level. For many of us we were in there very regularly for our treats. 

In the mid 1960s as I got toward the age of nine or ten, if my father was working and we had been given school dinner money we sometimes just held on to the money and bought our lunches at Oxgangs Broadway. For me, lunch would consist of three Paris buns for nine old pennies with a bottle of Koolapop-a cola drink, which also cost nine pence-a grand total of one and six i.e. one shilling and six pennies. However, on returning the Koolapop bottle I would get threepence back which would go on a little mixture of sweets. 

I’d usually go for sports mixtures-little fruit gums which were very hard and which took a lot of sucking and chewing. They took the form of sports kit-little boots or racquets. Green or red were the best flavour-orange was fine, but black was unpalatable to all but a few; on placing the order I would ask the shop assistant for no black ones. Sometimes they would oblige, on other occasions they would say Ye'll take what you get son! After all they could hardly do this for all customers and be left with a jar of black sports mixtures!

Because the sweets were bought towards the end of the lunch period and also to improve the quality of the school afternoon we would run the risk of eating surreptitiously in class. This was high risk-if you were caught, which was often the case, you had to spit the offending morsel out in to a basket, but more worryingly you might have to hand over the offending sweet bag to the teacher. 

Other sweets which were popular with us all from the Ewarts sweet jars particularly for chewing in class were Fruit Salad and Blackjacks. Because lunchtimes were busy and some kids could be very slow in making up their mind and the shop assistants patience low, the lunchtime theme tune for Ewarts could have been Come on, make up your mind! I was never like that. I knew exactly what I wanted. However, there was such a bewildering range of sweets to choose from, perhaps it was understandable. In Sunday's blog in a quick Cooke's Tour I'll tackle the impossibly large topic of the bewildering range of sweets that were available.

The Blog Works Its Magic Rescuing Some Things From The Mists Of Time, But Not Everything Including Koolapop!

I began typing this as a comment response to David Lines' comments which were a very pleasant surprise indeed, but quickly realised it was going to be too large a response for the comments column; not to mention the need to get my elder son Will to install a widget to prevent the distortions which appear whenever a respondent includes an apostrophe (hint, hint Will!). Anyway, great to hear from you David after all these decades.

There was an element of serendipity in us being photographed with Rhona Clelland and Marion Scott at the Boroughmuir School dance as it was the photographer who set the group up-although I certainly held a candle for Marion and I suspect David was fond of Rhona-two very bonny girls so we clearly had excellent taste! I met Marion well over twenty years ago and I think she had three children at quite a young age.

David Lines; Rhona Clelland; Marion Scott; and Peter Hoffmann
Boroughmuir Dance circa 1969/1970

Similar to Rhona many local girls from Oxgangs attended the very well run Patricia Browne Dance and Ballet School at Churchill, my sister Anne included. Several of the girls went on to enjoy professional careers including Carol Ramage (4/3) in Portugal and also Audrey Smith (6/6 Oxgangs Street) who was my girlfriend at Hunters Tryst School and who I rather liked but lost contact with when she went to Firhill School and I went to Boroughmuir School. We met up years afterwards for a drink and went dancing, but by then she was engaged to an older chap. I always looked out for her on the New Year Specials where she was a member of the dance troupe. She had a younger brother Alan-the Smiths were a rather lovely family.

Audrey Smith, Hunters Tryst Primary School circa 1965/1966

I intend doing some future blogs on the very shops which David mentions-like him they are the most significant in my memory. Similar to David, but different because of staying at the end of Oxgangs Avenue, we mostly attended the other three main shopping locations-it was only during school lunches I went to the Crescent-as David say Cruickshanks' was excellent, particularly given its size-they sold Koolapop cola which seems to have vanished into the mists of time for ever; we also used to buy collectors' cards with a piece of chewing gum, including the American Civil War series.

I agree about the smell of paraffin-it was very addictive-it was from the dry-salter's/ironmongers that depending on the season of the year we used to get either Airfix balsa wood planes; fishing nets; or cinnamon sticks (for smoking!); Campbells' Newsagents was a regular, particularly on a Sunday-I can still picture old Mr Campbell who was a gruff, but pleasant character.

I think David arrived at Hunters Tryst around P3 or P4. I always had a tremendous respect for his athletics ability-he was the one individual who I always feared at the school sports in the sprint race, knowing I would always have to be at my very best if I hoped to win-most of the races between us were probably photo-finishes! Another lad in the class who I think was quite under-rated was Stephen Drysdale-I don't think he quite realised how good he really was, which was perhaps fortuitous! I met him thirty years ago playing tennis-he was a very nice guy.

Stephen Drysdale, Hunters Tryst School, 1967

As David says, changed days-I exchanged some communications this week with a lady in America just now who is a singer-she told me she used to stay at Capelaw Court (village in the sky)-small world, but I wouldn't want to paint it!