Peter Viney's Blog

Before streets were filled with charity shops, the jumble sale was a British institution. A jumble sale … not a yard sale or a garage sale, or a vintage market. A jumble sale. They’re not quite “gone” and I turned up a couple of 2020 / 2021 adverts for them, but mostly charity shops have rendered them a thing of the past.

Every Saturday, in every area of a town, at least one church would have one. They were advertised in the local papers.  People queued up for 30 minutes or more for the two o’clock opening in the church hall. Church halls and village halls required a storage area for the wooden trestle tables. People jostled and pushed to get in. Then they fell upon heaps of tat … clothes being the most popular. Yes, I have seen women fighting over secondhand string vests. The more astute churches and clubs would shift their jumble sales to 3 p.m. so they could get people who had already done one earlier.

Richmal Crompton’s Just William books feature jumble sales, or rather sales at the village fêté held on the vicarage lawn. Those still exist, though annually. Cranborne in Dorset has one. The concept extends to primary school ‘Summer Fairs’ which often have similar stalls.

William’s mongrel is named Jumble. They have the stalls … the White Elephant Stall is the most famous one and William The Outlaw (1927) has a story, William & The White Elephants. He is left in charge of the stall and manages to sell the vicar’s wife’s new coat, left on the chair behind the stall, for a shilling.

The White Elephant stall contained the usual medley of battered household goods, unwanted Christmas presents, old clothes and derelict sports apparatus.

William & The White Elephants: Richmal Crompton, 1927

White elephants are stuff that doesn’t fit any category. Odds and ends. Bits and bobs. Christmas packs of toiletries. Aftershave (unopened). An ugly wooden carving brought back from National Service in the Far East or Africa. A single table tennis bat. A print of Montmartre from a holiday in Paris. A badly-painted plastic model aircraft. A Dinky toy with three wheels. Some 78 rpm records. A large jumble sale would distinguish White Elephant from Bric-a-brac … ornaments, vases, a milk jug and sugar bowl whose matching tea pot had long ago been broken.. There would always be a book stall. Lots of clothes stalls. Remnants… fabric, knitting wool.

As the evenings draw in during November my mind goes back to Jumble sales. We were ecumenical teenagers, attending at least three church youth clubs a week. That was hard work as each required attendance at church once a month, which meant I was a useful source when a girlfriend was studying the sociology of religion. Later, membership of a club helped to get our teenage band a place to play, which meant at one point I was a member of five youth clubs, and therefore there was one Sunday a month where I had to attend two services.

Our main youth club was the Saturday one at Winton Methodist. My best pal’s mum used to go to the church, which is why we ended up there. The Winton area of Bournemouth was full of non-conformist churches … Methodist churches were everywhere dating back to when there were Methodist, Wesleyan Methodist and Primitive Methodist, which later united. We had two Baptist, two Congregational, three Anglican. Several more bizarre ones (which never had youth clubs). Winton had been a working-class district in the late 19th century, so the non-conformist churches and chapels dominated. Then I had a Catholic girlfriend which meant yet another church youth club and attendance. Yes, when it comes to churches, I’ve done them all.

The main youth club allowed our teenage band practice space on the church hall stage, all day on Saturday. Then we could fumble through a few numbers as a change from the record player in the evening. I remember that was practice on three Saturdays a month … the fourth was the jumble sale taking up the church hall. I reckon the youth club collected for three or four sales a year. Churches would assign various clubs and organizations the collecting responsibility. So one month, it was the Young Wives (yes, that was a group). Another month it would be the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides. Another month it would be the Men’s Bible Fellowship. And then there was us, the Youth Club. I reckon that the funds accumulated would be assigned to the group that did the collecting.

It took two evenings on successive weeks We were delighted to do it, a legitimate excuse to go out in the dark and avoid homework. One week was putting Gestetnered notices through doors. These announced that we would be collecting in a week’s time. Then the next week we’d be out. Always in pairs, because the youth club thought a boy and a girl less threatening than two lads with greasy quiffs in leather jackets (not me … I was Beatle cut). They thought two girls to be unsafe on their own. So you got to walk around in the dark with a girl, though they split up boyfriends and girlfriends, being a bit strict. Just talking to girls was enough.

I think we had a hand cart, then a couple of volunteer middle-aged church members cruising the street with cars. We specialized in the larger detached houses, in the neighbouring Talbot Woods area. We thought this a posher area with better jumble. I later lived in two of the houses we would have collected from.

Then on to our jumble sale, where we would help man the stalls. The stalls were mainly run by regular jumble sale ladies who priced the goods. I was always the assistant on books, being a grammar school boy. There was a strict rule that no one could buy anything before the doors opened, then only after ten minutes and the initial rush. No insider trading in those days and it would be a rush with people fighting and pushing over clothes. A lot of 50s vintage stuff would have been sold for pennies. We had no concept that any post war artefacts would become collectible.

I still have four Dickens novels from one sale. In that area, no one fought over the books.  We had collected a complete set of Dickens from a house … the red and gold ones you will still see in most 2021 charity shops. It was decided it was unrealistic to keep the set together. They were priced at 6d each, and I only had two shillings. Four books. My choice met approval from the minister’s wife, who was in charge of books. They’re the Hazel, Watson & Viney series, and I’d noticed that, though they’re not relations.

In that era, we gradually picked up a stack of large oil paintings … reproductions in heavy gilt frames. They never sold and built up in a pile in the trestle store. Their eventual fate was the Youth Club 5^th November bonfire- held at the other church the minister was responsible for. They went up in flames remarkably fast. Real oils. I often thought of them doing our stage shows later. What great stage props they would have been, and in their day they must surely have been expensive. One was a full-size copy of Monarch of The Glen.

They came to mind clearing my father-in-laws house. We found two gloomy chromo lithographs in the attic that neither Karen nor her sister ever remembered seeing, both part of the popular 19^th century Rock of Ages series. There are many on eBay. They combined religious fervour with busty damsels to enliven the church hall. Where did they come from? We remembered that her mum used to store the jumble for their local church in the 1960s. They must have been unsold rejects from that era. They’re now in our garage. I will ask a local amateur theatrical group if they want them.

The thing about jumble sales is they were never picky. They’d take anything and everything. Charity shops nowadays are much snottier. They don’t want rubbish filling their pristine brand new shop fittings. They can only sell electrical goods if they’ve been tested and checked by an electrician. You should see the skip full of unwanted donations behind some charity shops.

We filled a friend’s pick up with unwanted furniture and bric-a-brac and drove to a selected hospice shop. They looked it over and said ‘We can’t sell any of that.’ We were disconsolate but took it to the British Heart Foundation instead and filled out the Gift Aid form. We got an e-mail a few weeks later. They got about a hundred pounds for it. Good for them.

A SHORT STORY

One of the FICTIONAL short stories in I’ll Tell Everything I Know, my set of early 60s stories (under the name Dart Travis) is based on the youth club church hall teen band practice:

VERY LAST DAY (linked)

It’s one of two sample stories on the DART TRAVIS blog.