Transcript: Miss Marjorie Tebb recalls coupons used after WWII in her family's butchering business

Description

Miss Marjorie Tebb was born in 1920 and [media]interviewed in 1986 for the 'Looking Back at Liverpool: An Oral History of the Liverpool Region 1900 to 1960.' Here she is talking about the complex arrangements for coupons after World War II that regulated the wholesale and retail trade in meat for CR Tebb and Sons, her family's butchering business.

Transcript

MARJORIE: We went to the abattoirs every morning for a while and then we started to only go three times a week: Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays. In the meat hall we had a rubber stamp and if you said 'Right, I want that, how much is that?' they'd tell you so much a pound, or a kilo, as it is now, and then you'd put that rubber stamp on. And then when they delivered it you knew that it was what you'd got at the abattoirs because it had your stamp. At the time there was coupons [for] meat, and you had to have coupons to buy it. Many a coupon I counted; each beast was so many coupons or each lamb or mutton so many coupons per animal, pigs were so many coupons. And when you sold it you had to cut the coupons out of their [customers] books; and those coupons had to be counted and put in an envelope and sealed. You had five hundred in each envelope, an ordinary manilla envelope. You'd put them in and you'd put your stamp on the back of it– we've got a 'CR Tebb and Sons' stamp, you'd seal it and put the CR Tebb stamp on it and write 'five hundred coupons' on it. And you had to send that in to the Metropolitan Meat and Industry Board. They'd receive the coupons form you. That would give you the authority to buy the meat at the abattoirs. [1]

References

Catherine Johnson (ed). Looking Back at Liverpool: An Oral History of the Liverpool Region 1900–1960 (Liverpool: Liverpool City Council, 1986). http://mylibrary.liverpool.nsw.gov.au/Electronicbooks/Lookingbackatliverpoolanoralhistory-1900-1960.pdf

Notes

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