Bideford celebrated its Frost Fair last Saturday. No frost was to be seen, except the spray-on variety, but the event certainly brought plenty of people into town. It was great to see the Pannier Market full of stalls, the town band playing, and a stilt walker mingling with the crowd. Down in Mill Street there was more music, SS Freshspring gave more than 200 carriage rides with their steam engine, and organisers were agonising about whether the horse and carriage rides advertised would be able to get up Bridge Street. Victorian dress was not exactly de rigueur, but those who went for it added to the heritage atmosphere and festival spirit.

So many of our Christmas traditions date back to Victorian times, inspired by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s family Christmases. It was during her reign when mince pies stopped containing meat, we started eating turkey and decorating Christmas trees, and the Christmas card industry got going. Christmas crackers, invented by an English confectioner, date back to the mid-1800s.

Bideford Community Archive’s website displays adverts from the local papers from December 1922, giving us an idea of what Christmas shopping was like here a century ago. A W Bennet on Market Place was advertising a range of Christmas gifts including bird cages, fire brasses, and electroplated spoons and forks. At 10-11 Meddon Street, there was W. Woods, ‘the noted shop for dolls’, while Braddicks advertised a Meccano set to build the Eiffel Tower and a fairy cycle at ‘20% below London prices’. 

On the High Street you could buy your ‘football and hockey requirements’ at Meredith’s, opposite the Post Office, or grab a bargain at watchmaker and jeweller B A Wilcox’s Xmas Sale: ‘remember last year’s sale and come early’. On Mill Street, two shoe shops were vying for custom. Watts, at number 54, called itself ‘the small shop with the big stock’, while A Lewis at number 43 advertised ‘high class footwear and slippers’, with ‘repairs promptly executed at reduced prices’. 

Mill Street also boasted the ‘London Central Meat Company Ltd., at number 59, with Californian tinned peaches and apricots alongside ox tongues and beef suet at a shilling a pound. 

In 1944, during the war, the public were asked to help the Post Office by making sure their parcels were securely packaged. Who remembers sealing wax on the brown paper and string? This year Torridge District Council’s message to the public was a bit different, explaining how to recycle our Christmas wrapping properly.