Reporter Freya Gilbert discovers her grandad’s role in introducing avocados, chicories and endives to the north east

It’s January 2022 and we’re all sweltering in my grandparent’s Northumberland bungalow. They keep the house hot, but their extended family are not accustomed to tropical temperatures at this time of year. We’re there to celebrate Christmas as the Omicron wave prevented my grandparents from travelling to Kent, where the rest of my family live.

It was my mum’s idea to get out some of the old photo albums, which led to gleeful recollections of remember-whens, peals of laughter at old teenage grievances and fond memories of family friends. The hum of excited chatter waxed and waned as each page of the album was turned, until we came across a black and white photo of a very familiar location.

My Bumpa, (Grandpa proved too hard a word for my older sister to manage in childhood, so he’s always been known as Bumpa) Norman Barnett, along with his dad, Nick, and younger brother Tom used to run a fruit and vegetable shop called N.S. Barnett & Sons on St. George’s Terrace. Today, you will find a Starbucks in its place.

My grandad explained how his father took over the shop just before the start of the Second World War, and his mother ran it when his father served in the Navy. My grandad joined them in the shop full-time in 1955 or 1956, he recalled.

My granny, Pauline, directed me to Bygone Jesmond, a history book by Jimmy Donald, and to page 19 where there’s an even older photo of the shop. “It wasn’t a fruit shop then. It was obviously a haberdasher or something, with clothes in the windows. But it’s interesting to see that that was the same shop as Norman’s father used to have,” she said.

My great-grandfather, Nick, decided to open the shop on St. George’s Terrace to be independent from his father, who ran a fruit and veg shop on Starbeck Avenue. This family tradition of working in the food trade was instilled into my grandad from a young age, he said.

“I didn’t have much of a choice at the time,” explained my grandad who remembers early mornings, intensive labour… and bacon sandwiches. From the age of 14, he’d be woken at 5am on a Saturday morning to go with his father to the market on St. Andrew’s Street in Newcastle city centre. “He’d do the buying and I would do the loading of the waggon. Then we’d come back to the shop and I’d do the unloading.”

“Your dad was a hard taskmaster!” quipped my granny. “Yes, and then back to Mum’s for bacon sandwiches,” my grandad continued.

He worked at the shop for 14 years and still clearly remembers the community shop owners along St. George’s Terrace and Acorn Road. “On the other corner from [the shop] there was a shop called Leithard’s which was the grocery shop where the butter was stored in wooden barrels and things like that… it then became a wine shop, Victoria Wine… there was [also] Miss McCauley’s which was a haberdasher in the middle. Two spinster ladies ran it and they used to sell nylons, gloves and needles.”

This prompted more fond memories from my granny. “On a Saturday night, Norman used to bring me a couple of pairs of tights from Miss McCauley’s and a nice bunch of flowers… there were no big supermarkets then, it was all just little individual shops owned by families.”

She recalled how N.S. Barnett & Sons “always had a beautiful window display and they used to have fruit and veg sat outside on the pavement as well. It was just a very good shop.”

It may seem that the days of shoppers visiting family businesses for their essentials are long over, but data from the Institute of Family Businesses (IFB) suggests that family businesses remain important to the economy. According to the IFB, in 2017 there were nearly five million family run businesses in the UK, with these businesses contributing to almost a third of our annual GDP. However, the IFB counts a business as ‘family run’ if it is run and operated by a single family member, making it harder to discern how many family companies like N.S. Barnett & Sons are still going today.

Shoppers would regularly come from Heaton, Gosforth and, of course, Jesmond to buy at N.S. Barnett & Sons. My grandad claimed it was the first shop to sell avocado pears, chicories and endives in the north east in the early sixties.

“It was frowned upon by most people who really didn’t have a clue what [an avocado] was.. We had a very nice doctor customer who bought an avocado and thought it was a fruit. He’d eaten it, hadn’t liked it and the next time he came in, he told my father what he thought.” After being shown how to correctly prepare and eat an avocado, the doctor bought another and enjoyed it.

Local historian and Bygone Jesmond author Jimmy Donald, and his wife, Kay, were regulars too. They lived in one of the streets off St George’s Terrace. Their sons, Chris and Simon Donald, started the magazine Viz from their Jesmond bedrooms while attending Heaton Comprehensive School (now Jesmond Park Academy). An extraordinarily popular comic magazine in the eighties and nineties, it sold more than a million copies at its height, but my granny wasn’t a fan. “It caught on with young people because of the rude words. You know what young people are like,” she said.

My grandad’s younger brother, Tom, was the first to leave the shop, after contracting pneumonia. He was advised by his doctor to find a new trade for the sake of his health. “Dad said to me, ‘What do you want to do?’” explained my grandad. “It left two of us to do the work of three, so I decided to get out as well and quit the the food trade in 1970 to set up my own business, Glenbar Hire. We had a neighbour in Jesmond who was in the wine trade, but wanted to get out of that business too, so we decided together we would start a [tool] hire business.” My grandad’s new business was located on Jesmond Road, where Peace & Loaf restaurant is today.

Jesmond may look very different now from my grandad’s day. There are many of the big-name coffee shops and supermarkets that we see in every town and city high street. And yet, in between, you’ll still find lots of independent, sometimes family-run businesses, like my Bumpa’s, that ensure Jesmond’s community spirit stays strong.