Wm. Dove family butcher 1925

Mons Bell recalled his early memories of the family butchers business William Dove,…
“...I left school in the Christmas of 1932, a few weeks before term had finished because the cashier in the shop was taken ill. Some weeks later when she returned, I started work as the butchers delivery boy with a bicycle. I did this for about six years until I was 20 and I went into the army in 1939. I was demobbed in 1946 and I went straight back into the business. I never did a formal apprenticeship, it was just expected that you learned quickly, but father showed me how to cut meat properly, how to make good sausages and how to do the trussing. Before the war my father would pay eighteen pounds for a whole bullock that would cost over a thousand pounds now. Just after the war you could buy pigs that were dirt-cheap. We only had a small van then, but we would load it up with pigs and take them down to Dennis Skinner’s slaughterhouse in Chiddingstone as there wasn’t a slaughterhouse working in Westerham at that time.
We used to take our rubbish from the shop to the stoker at the brewery and he’d throw it in the furnace and ‘woof’ that would go up pretty quick - it was a good way of getting rid of the stuff… ...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…"

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…”

Comments about this page

  • A great story and memories of your life much appreciated.
    Remind me of my time butchering from 1964 in my fathers butchers shops.

    By Andrew Moore (06/10/2022)
  • 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

    By Bill Curtis (18/02/2023)

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