DOWN MEMORY LANE
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Building workers uncovered a slice of Campbeltown’s baking history when they unwrapped ‘Top Blue’s’ bakery’s ovens. The men working on a Campbeltown Area Regeneration Scheme project, behind chemist Boots’s Longrow South pharmacy, revealed two cast iron ovens for the second time in two decades. The ovens were made by bakery manufacturing specialists T Melvin and Son of St Rollox Iron Works, Glasgow. The firm originally made bakery and dough mixing machinery latterly, in 1897, turning to internal combustion engines and, from 1898, offering gas engines ranging from 0.5 to nine nominal horse power (nhp). Thomas Melvin and Son exhibited machinery and mechanical appliances at the 1884 International Health Exhibition. Thomas Melvin, engineer and machine maker, was a colourful character, who in 1847 sued Archibald Wilson, superintendant of Glasgow police establishment, after Melvin and two workers were detained for theft of a peacock which had been found straying. The case was eventually decided in the Court of Session and can be read in a free ebook: Session cases, pages 477 to 480. A further mention of the firm comes in the records of Gourock Parish Church when Thomas Melvin and Sons are mentioned, June 26 1900, as being paid a total of £25 3s and sixpence for repairing and re-erecting an engine. For more on the bakery see below.
Boots pharmacist Andrea Belocchi holds a clear acetate covering preserving a Courier front page from 1998 left as a time capsule. It was discovered when Campbeltown Area Regeneration Scheme workers uncovered the bread ovens, described above, as part of a restoration of the deck above Boots’s Longrow South shop. It seems unlikely that earlier workers, from an Ayr shopfitters, thought their capsule would be uncovered just 20 years later. In 1998 Courier reporters, Sharon Bennie (née Harvey) and Nancie Smith, wrote that the bake house had been in use within the living memory of some Campbeltown folk. The shop was owned by the late Kate Black of Tangy’s father Tommy Blue and known as ‘Top Blue’s’, while ‘Bottom Blue’s’ was where Coastal Design’s shop trades on Hall Street. Tommy was a master baker and trained confectioner and his iced cakes and shortbread won him awards across the UK, including in London, until his untimely death on the golf course aged 47. Apparently during the 1930s’ depression Father Webb, formerly of St Kieran’s church, used to take Blue’s bread, teabread and baking round the houses of people who were out of work.