100 years ago

If they learnt the art of chewing, even people whose food expenditure was only 3d a day could make their meals last a long time.

A chewer, according to dietetic experts, was one who chewed all things so long as they had any taste left in them. Gladstone, we were told, used to take 32 bites to every mouthful of food. The modern school of chewers regarded this as dangerously rapid eating.

“I have tried chewing conscientiously,” wrote Mr Eustace Miles. “A banana has got 800 bites, a small mouthful of bread and cheese 240 bites, a greedy mouthful of biscuit (while I was walking on a Yorkshire moor) over 1,000 bites. It still seemed to taste about as much as at first; but I knew that taste by then, so I swallowed.”

 

50 years ago

Independent grocers, it was thought, might be on the brink of a breakthrough against the gain in trade by supermarkets and multiples, delegates to the conference of the National Grocers' Federation were told.

Their newly-elected president Mr Len Carrick, told them that the supermarkets and multiples had no longer virtually all the advantages of buying and showmanship. But, he warned, “big business can be violent in their reactions and in their fight to succeed. As long as we continue to appreciate that we must move with the times and give the housewife the goods she wants at a competitive price, and displayed in a manner she is taught to expect, our personal service gives us something that others just haven't got and with this we can maintain as private grocers our substantial stake in the trade.

There is some evidence that the British housewife, unlike her Trans-Atlantic counterpart, does not quite as readily fall for the supermarket circus atmosphere in her shopping.”

 

25 years ago

Rocketing house prices had forced desperate York father Geoffrey Carr to go public in an attempt to help his son buy his first home.

The self-employed builder was appealing to people selling up in the city to give his 21-year-old son, David, a chance to buy.

And he hit out at the booming property market which was making York residents poor relations in their own city to eager buyers from the South.

“I fear if my son does not buy a house in the next three or four months he never will, and that is going to be the position for thousands of other young people,” said Mr Carr.

Mr Carr said his son saved all the money he could towards buying his own home, but claimed that the recent spiral in house prices threatened that dream.