Trewoon Post Office and Shop. Taken from the book by Richard S.Best ‘A Clay Country Village’ with permission from the publishers.

R.S.Best was the seventh child of Frederick William Best and his wife Emma, herself the seventh child of Edmund Clemo. Fred Best was born in 1858, went to the Dame’s school in Trewoon and started work in the clayworks aged eleven. In all, nine children were born to the Bests, two of them dying in infancy and all delivered at home by the local midwife, Dame Truscott. To help out with the family finances, Fred and Emma opened a small shop and sub-post office at Trewoon Butts. The Sub-postmaster’s salary was £5.00 per year! With a growing family and the desire to expand, the Bests took out a loan and bought a plot of land from the Johnstone family of Trewithen. They had a new house and shop built in 1906, the cost being £400 for the substantial five-bedroomed house and store rooms.

So, Fred, aged 48, working later at Hill’s Quarry, would leave work at 5.00 pm and walk a mile back to the shop where his wife Emma had worked all day and start by weighing out bags of pig and poultry feed, bought in bulk from Hosking Trewithick and Polkinghorne, or ‘H.T.P’ as they were known. Fred would deliver these bags and bulk boxes of groceries in a small trap drawn by Joey the pony. Young Richard used to accompany him.

Richard Best writes of his mother’s side of the business. ‘Our shop had the advantage of being a post-office as well. Customers coming in to post a letter would often require something from the other counter. The shop stocked everything. Confectionary, calico, codfish (dried), candles, kippers, coconuts and corn-plasters. Among the ‘sweet’ shelves one would find mint cushions, coconut ice, pink and white sugar mice, sherbert fountains, liquorice boot laces and gob stoppers. There were chocolate bars, including Fry’s ‘Five Boys’ brand. Ginger beer, lemonade and coloured mineral waters in the old-fashioned Codd’s bottles with the marble in the neck.’

‘On the shelves were bread, bootlaces, Brasso and when the family pig had been killed, home-made brawn. Monkey Brand cleaner, Nugget Polish, Domeleine for stoves. Biscuit tins with glass lids from McVities, Peak Frean’s, Huntley and Palmer’s and Furniss’s Cornish Gingerbread Fairings. Reckitt’s blue and Robin starch were stocked as well as tea from Liptons, Lyons, Hornimans and Brooke Bond’s. One that fascinated me most was the magic word ‘Mazawattee.’

‘Few goods were packaged as we know them today. Lard was cut from a 14-pound block. Sugar, rice and currants were weighed out and packed in strong blue paper bags. The shop was lit by an oil lamp and was north-facing and thus cold in the winter with the door being constantly opened and closed. The shop would be open until ten at night, six days a week, but not on Sundays – Chapel day and day of rest. Being strict Methodists they sold no alcoholic drink or tobacco either for Mother strongly disapproved of smoking. She hated old Alfie Rundle’s pipe which he would smoke in the shop on his late Saturday night visits to buy a quarter of yeast.’

‘The children would often serve customers if Mother was busy or had just sat down for a meal. Bread was bought from Mr Benney, a St Austell baker. Large loaves sold for fourpence (4d. in old money. About 1.66 new pence). A dozen new-laid eggs were a shilling (5p.) This also bought 30 oranges! One must remember that the weekly wage of a clay or farm worker was only one pound fifteen shillings. (£1.75p)’.

‘The shop was also a social centre and news dispensary. People would often come in for a ‘ha’porth of yeast and a bit o’ gossip’. ‘A bar o’ Lifebuoy, a quarter o’ tea an’ ‘alf a pound o’ Gingerbreads’. Sometimes the gossip was of an adult or personal nature and we younger ones would be told ‘little pigs have long ears’ and be sent out to ‘weigh a quarter peck o’ flour’ or to see ‘if last week’s Christian Herald is under the cushion of Father’s chair’. We did as requested but never knew which of the villagers were the subject of these half whispers. ‘Divorce, bankruptcy, pregnancy outside marriage were hush-hush’.

A customer might say ‘so-and-so’s maid idn’ no better than she ought to be’. This remark always puzzled me as it was followed by a wink and a nod and no details given.’

The Trewoon Post Office and shop is now over a hundred years old. Richard Best lived there from 1906 until 1972 when he retired. A member of a large family who bettered themselves through hard work.