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History of
78 Wyle Cop
The first business (we can find on record!)was originally founded in 1878 as a pork butchers in Coalbrookdale (Ironbridge) and moved to 78 Wyle Cop in 1918 after WW1 where it was run by Charles 'Chuckie' Edwards, who had married into the business, CW Edwards -Pork Butcher. He also played for Shrewsbury Town Football Club and earned £2 a week!
The whole premises was given over to the business with fridges to cure bacon and hams in the cellars below, the shop itself and where Wyle Cop Antiques (at the rear of the coffee shop) is, the meat area and porkpie room with ovens.
Everything sold was made on the premises.
Every Christmas as a boy, Chuckies grandson, David, used to paint a huge smiling pig on a large mirror that faces the current counter and covered the whole wall!
Above the shop was the best lounge and the kitchen overlooking the back yard (then a school playground) and above that, two further floors with bedrooms (the uppermost floor was given over to hanging the bacon to dry and there used to be pullys at shop level that hoisted them up the stairwell to the attics)
At one point there were six staff living and working there handling 30 pigs a week, plus counter staff who didn't lodge in.
During WW11 the American convoys used to stop at the "Top of the Cop" in the middle of the night on the way to the transatlantic shipping routes at Holyhead in Anglesey and would be served pork pies and tea by Chuckies wife, Ida, and their son, Phillip.
War rationing meant long queues which would stretch up the passage alongside the shop and back down to the front and there had to be two policeman keeping order. All types of meat was sold in the war and were allowed to shoot deer in Attingham Park (on the way to Telford on the old A5) to cut up and sell and put in sausages etc.
The business was sadly shut down by Charles' son in 1986 as the demand for traditional pork products died with the generation brought up with them: tripe, chitlings, chawl, brawn, stratchings, black pudding, pigs trotters - all the inexpensive cuts that people no longer will eat. Added to this, the onslaught of the new 'supermarket' .Charles' grandson always had pigs brains on toast for Tuesday breakfast - this was the day after they had been cut up in the shop, which remained closed on a Monday to do this.
There were many celebrities in the old butchers, when they used to stay at The Lion Hotel, the most famous was Morcambe and Wise, who a bought a ham off Charles and sung Bring me Sunshine to the customers in the shop!
After the butchers was shut, our records of what followed here are a little sketchy to say the least! If you have any information on the history of the shop, then please email us or pop in for a coffee and a chat!
With great thanks to David and Richard Edwards, grandsons to Ida and Charlie Edwards, for providing us with so much valuable historical information.
In memory of Philip Edwards.
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