Your Memories: Shocked at the price of sliced bread

Published on Saturday 5 June 2010 11:28

IT WAS an invention that shocked housewives across the Capital – the arrival of sliced bread in bakeries.

"I remember my mum thinking it was terrible that people would pay more to have their bread sliced," laughs 87-year-old Janet Dowell, from Leith.

"She would say to me, 'What's wrong with using a knife?' She thought it was far too dear to buy bread already sliced."

Mrs Dowell worked in the bakehouse of the Co-op, on Bangor Road, after leaving school at around 16. It was there she met her future husband John, an apprentice baker, and witnessed the arrival of one of the first bread-slicing machines to the store, rushing home to tell her mum the news.

Mrs Dowell would work one end of the machine, while a colleague would operate the other, yet she remembers it being riddled with problems.

"The machine would break down a lot. We were always having to get engineers out."

But bread slicing isn't Mrs Dowell's only recollection from her working life.

During her time working at a joiners, on Leith Walk she recalls operating a machine that produced wooden toilet seats.

"They would stack up and sometimes I felt like taking one for my mum – she didn't have a wooden toilet seat."

The Leither went on to marry baker John Dowell, who served in the Second World War along with three of her brothers – all of whom made a safe return from the battlefields to Edinburgh.

During that time, Mrs Dowell moved back home with her mum and spent many hours helping her and her father – who served in the First World War – to write letters to their sons.

When Mr Dowell returned from war, the couple went on to have four children together – Jaqueline, Alan, Janice and William – and Mrs Dowell was able to put her workmanship to good use once more.

"I always enjoyed knitting and I would always make pullovers and cardigans for my children when they went to school.

"I used to buy the wool from a shop in the Kirkgate. The woman there used to keep what I needed for me as I could never buy it all in one go – it was too expensive."