12:23 am by admin.

One of my first memories of working in Alexanders was something that happened to my cousin Alan and I while working for my dads then boss Alfie Johnson. Now Alfie was a portly red faced gentleman, and I use that word in it’s purest meaning, with a tendency to be a bit gruff.
Alan and I were both around 14/15 years old and my dad got us a Christmas job cleaning and scrubbing and generally running around doing just what we were told to do. We were both a bit in awe the whole thing. It was, to us, a mad house, people were boning big lumps of beef, others were rolling big joints of meat. Pigs were being cut up, sausages were being made and of course the most important thing of all, turkeys were being cleaned.
Now one of our jobs was pulling the sinews out of the turkeys and considering there were well over 200 of the beasts we were glad we had two sinew pullers.
They were a weird contraption and not easy to use because ours were wall mounted so we had to hold the dead, floppy, 20lb bird under one arm and try to load the feet into the guides one at a time then pull like fu crazy

Anyway I think you get the picture. By the time we were finished it was about 1 O’clock in the morning and we were knackered looking forward to our beds. After all we were just a couple of young innocent spoilt kids. I think that’s exactly what Mr Johnson thought because he hit us with a dynamite job, possibly to teach us that hard work is just that, hard.

“Just one more wee job lads” he growled, “I want you to count the feet into those sacks then count the turkeys and make sure the numbers match” . “What !!! ” we said in unison, ” But why?”.
“Well” he said if the feet match up with the birds we know that no-one is nickin’ them, ’cause they cost a lot of money”. Seemed a reasonable thing to do ( I know , I know but we were only kids for crying out loud).

So we knew there were, say, two hundred birds so four hundred feet was our target. “A wee tip” he said, “count them in pairs it will be quicker”. Armed with the tip of an expert we got stuck in. I think we got to about 50/60 pairs and getting more and more cross eyed by the minute. He hit us with the killer blow. ” Hey, I hope you’re putting them in actual pairs lads, I want two feet from the same bird you know, if a jobs worth doing it’s worth doing right.”
Well, we couldn’t take it any more and  we grabbed a sack each and tossed the contents on the floor at his feet. It was all we could do to stop the tears from flowing.

Just then we looked up from the alcove we were working in to see the whole staff, including my da, looking at us. Silence descended and then Alfie, the bugger, burst out laughing which was the signal for everyone else to do the same. “God you’se are good value for a wind-up”, my da said and they all started to give ua a hand putting the feet into the sacks,without counting.

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09:40 pm by admin.

When I first got the idea for this page I tried to research on the internet and I could not find anything significant about The Stranmillis Road. There were lots of bits and bobs but no real info.Oh there was plenty of rental accommodation, food places, beauticians, estate agents but about The Stranmillis Road as a place, nada, naught, zilch.

I got very frustrated and a bit arrgghh!!! because the Stranmillis I knew was a different place altogether. It was a place where people knew each other and looked out for each other, in short it was a little village and one with more than a bit of a bohemian feel to it.
” Why the interest in Stranmillis? “I hear you say, well I don’t mean I can actually hear you, but you know what I mean. Lets face it I would need really big ears to hear you from Castlereagh, although my nose is a fair size but my ears are quite normal if somewhat hairy.

Anyway back to the plot. I worked in my fathers shop for 25 yrs as a butcher. He was called Eric and the shop was Alexanders, hence The Alexander Years in the page title, maybe I even sold you your weekend roast. If it was tough you must have bought it from Dankys .

Thinking about those times and the people who passed through the portals of Alexanders, some famous and some infamous made me realise I was looking in the wrong place. It is those people I need to hear from, not the internet. Being a bit slow to catch on I suddenly twigged, I have my fair share of memories to share as well, DOH!!

Intro done so I’m away for a wee cuppa but there is lots more to follow. One thing I really would appreciate, to be honest I would be overjoyed if you too would off load your memories and stories, oh yeah especially stories, so I can put them in print.

You can put them on here as a comment or send them to me via e-mail which I will be setting up just for this blog, to be published in a day or two.

Posted in Stranmillis Road (The Alexander Years), Belfast, People | No Comments »