William Dove was the manager at Charles Levett’s ‘Westerham Home and Colonial Meat Stores’ at Aberdeen House in Market Square in 1907. Dove also ran a pork butchers shop in Quebec Square on the outskirts of the town. In 1908 Charles Levett retired and sold the Aberdeen House business to Wallace Pritchard who employed Walter George Rogers as his resident butcher until 1921. In that year William Dove consolidated his business interests, closing the Quebec Square shop and buying Aberdeen House as a going concern which he quickly branded as ‘William Dove, Family Butcher’. From the early 1920s he employed a young butcher from Gravesend, Cecil Robert ‘Curly’ Bell…
Standing outside the shop, from the left are Curly Bell, Bert Thorneycroft, Herbie Verrall and Walter Robotham
Mons Bell “… In 1954 Mr Dove died and the business came up for sale. My father, my brother and myself had to get the money together to buy it. I couldn’t find my thousand pounds, so Tom Harmer who worked in the shop lent me the money and I paid him back over a period of time. After he was 65 my father carried on with the business until the day he died – I was running the shop by then but he would be upstairs doing the ordering. He’d ask me what we needed and if I said get two sides of beef he would always get four – his way of staying in charge I suppose…
…before electricity came in the early twenties, they used to have big ice-blocks delivered from Chatham to keep the meat chilled. People would buy ice as well as their meat so you would be constantly chopping up ice for them as well…”
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A great story and memories of your life much appreciated.
Remind me of my time butchering from 1964 in my fathers butchers shops.
Hi Andrew, glad you liked the story! Around the 1900s there were no less than eight butchers in Westerham, all making a good living. Strangely only one of them had a slaughterhouse though. Kind Regards, Bill Curtis
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