Browse Sections

• Rochdale 150
• Useful information
• Nostalgia 
• Looking back
• Rochdale canal
• Web links
• Family notices
• Property price guide
• Traffic cameras
• Travel news
• Speed cameras
• Rochdale expats
• Obituaries

Jack's guest at fine spread

12/ 1/2008

‘JAMMY’ Jack Bottomley they called him – and it could not have been more apt.

Well at least for one day when the 85-year-old toured a well known Manchester jam factory at the directors’ invitation – after he had sent them a photograph of himself, taken some 67 years before, outside a co-op store in Princess Street, just off Whitworth Road.

Mr Bottomley had begun his career in the grocery trade as a 14-year-old, working for the Rochdale Provident Co-operative Society in 1916, spending time behind the counter in 37 of the 38 branches, eventually becoming the manager of the Cheetham Street shop.

The Provident chain was forced to sell to the larger and far more well known Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society in 1933 because of the depression.

But 1920 saw Mr Bottomley working at the Princess Street shop which in those days – at least when it came to jam – sold only Duerr’s.

As he told the Observer in retirement in 1987: “Customers used to collect their jam jar tops and send them to Duerr’s in exchange for a still life picture of a bowl of fruit.”

In 1920 Mr Bottomley said he had used one of the pictures in a display of Duerr’s jam products in the front window of the shop.

Many years later the picture came to light again and Mr Bottomley sent it to Duerr’s, thinking they might be interested to see it.

They did and duly invited him to visit their Old Trafford factory, sending a car round to his home in Shawfield Lane, Norden, to pick him up.