Interview with Barry Brace (b.1944) about education, being a teenager and employment as a butcher.

Barry Brace remembers the early days of his life in Bletchley; few completed houses, and cows wandering about. He was excited about moving from London: ‘to me I was moving out to the country … that appealed to me’. He recalls the new Wilton Road School: standards, the teachers, strictness and punishment with the cane, and remembers some rivalry between Londoners and ‘carrot crunchers’ (Bletchley locals).

Activities included swimming in gravel pits, football, and riding bikes (often on building sites). The cycling club was his main activity from his teens. There were plenty of part-time jobs: ‘I used to work part time in the butchers shop and do a paper round’. He left school aged fifteen for an apprenticeship at Wolverton Works, but found training at the Works and night school too much like school, so he left and worked in Roadnights, a tailors. He then moved into butchery, and drove the mobile butchers shops for nine years; he remembers the need to bite your tongue sometimes to humour the awkward customer.

He thinks Bletchley was fairly typical for teenagers in the 1950s and 1960s. He was always busy, with cycling, and his friends; but otherwise there were few activities – Wilton Hall dances and concerts, cinemas, pubs, coffee bars like Greenways, the Freeman Memorial Youth Club; young people drank less then. He married at 18 and rented a private house in Water Eaton, having met his wife at a Wilton Hall dance. It was difficult for local residents to get housing. It was a struggle getting established, but ‘good preparation for the future’. In 1969 they moved to Essex to take over his Uncle’s Butcher’s shop.

He discusses other butchers in the Bletchley area, and market stalls; food habits in the 1950s and 1960s with meat every day; the growing popularity of chicken; and how rare it was to eat out. He remembers swapping meat for a bag of cement with the foreman of Drabbles, the builders.