Photo: Steve Odell

The village shop ceased trading around 1990. 115 Ermine Street is now a private residence.

See also:
Site Index
Village Index
Huddlestone's Shop 1930s (below)

Smoothy's General Store, Arrington, c1905
© Cambridgeshire Collection

Image: c1905, posed scene, quality of the available image (digital) is rated 'good'.
Location: In the centre of Arrington village opposite the "Hardwicke Arms".

The photograph shows Mr J Smoothy, 73, grocer and draper, standing in the doorway of his general store in Arrington, surrounded by his employees. The store was also the local post and telegraph office.

Joseph came from Balsham and, with his wife Martha, ran the village shop in Arrington for over 40 years.

Kelly's Directory 1904: "Post, money order and telegraph office. Postal Regulations - Joseph Smoothy, sub-postmaster. Letters arrive from Royston at 6 a.m. and 11.10 pm., despatched at 8 p.m.; despatched on Sundays at 6.00 a.m."

[From an essay by Alexander Campbell Yorke written in 1914. The author was then a man of 62 and remembering his childhood at Wimpole Rectory in the 1850s]

"At Russell’s shop in Arrington, which served Wimpole too, hams and bacon, such as every cattier now expects, were almost unknown. Monstrous flitches hung inside, and either doorpost was garnished with a gigantic ham. But it was bear’s bacon and ham from the Rocky mountains."

"Tea I can remember at 4s a lb. It was a marvel when it dropped to 2s 6d. It was all China tea. India and Ceylon leaf came quite late in my boyhood, and then only to flavour the weaker growth of China. Green tea was a rare delicacy. A 2 oz twist of tea was an acceptable present to the old cronies. The sugar affected by the cottage folk was a dark stuff from Mauritius or Demerara, full of molasses and great lumps looking like black beetles. The approved manner of drinking tea was, first to put in the mouth a spoonful of this sugar, and then to gulp the tea through it."

And later, "Mr. Horsfield [Schoolmaster at Wimpole] was a great friend of Mr. Smoothy who had bought Mr. Russell’s business from his widow. Many is the sixpence I spent in barley-sugar and sugar-candy at that Arrington shop; and many the cup of tea that I have had in its dark little parlour; Horsfield and Smoothy were two good friends — ‘requiescant in Pace’."