Black Country Museum: Pharmacy/Hardware store

By: Matthew DeLorenzo

Welcome to the museum that shows you the Black Country as it used to be. In the museum you will find buildings that have been moved here from around the Black Country. For example, The pharmacy and the hardware store.

 

 

 

 

The Pharmacy

 This store was owned by Mr. Harold Emile Doo in 1929. His father was also a chemist and pharmacist. As most families in the early 20th century, Mr. Doo apprenticed under his father. The store was located in a small town called Netherton, England. A lot of the things like the bottles, chemicals, utensils, etc. came from the actual shop. In the late 1970s Mr. Doo died. His daughter asked the Black Country Museum if they wanted to come and inspect the inside of the old shop and transport some of the actual materials for their reconstruction of the old Black Country shop. The museum bought the materials and reconstructed the actual building inside their living museum in 1979.

 

There were no clinics in the beginning of the 1900's. People would bring their infants to the pharmacist to weigh their child. It would cost a person a penny, which in 1929 was less than a pence.

In 1929, before the National Health Service existed, you had to pay to see a doctor which was quite expensive at that time because of low wages. A person that fell ill and couldn’t afford to go visit the doctor would instead go to the local pharmacist where the chemist, like Mr. Doo, would either sell you something from the shelves, or mix together some chemicals to create a potion to sell at a cheaper price rather than seeing a doctor.

 

 Back in the late 19th and early 20th century, people would usually use their finger to brush their teeth and as for toothpaste, people would mix together salt and soot (carbon particles from the coal furnace). Along with many other things the pharmacy would sell toothbrushes, which were made up of animal bones and pig bristle. As well as toothbrushes, the pharmacy sold toothpaste which they also made themselves.

 



Pharmacies in the 1920s were the only place where you could purchase olive oil. The pharmacist would buy in whole sale from big cities like Birmingham and sell it at his shop.

 The Hardware Store

 The E. Langston Hardware store is a reconstruction of a 1930 hardware store in a Black Country. The store was owned by Louie Gough. The building was originally a newspaper store but when the museum bought the building they figured it would be more beneficial if they transformed it into a classic hardware shop. In 1980 the museum reconstructed the building inside the Black Country Living Museum. The shop would sell “anything your mother needed” like pots, pans, buckets, metal ware, brushes, glass, silverware, cleaning supplies, paints, and a variety of soaps. Additionally, the man that was acting as the owner in the museum and the person I interviewed said the Hardware store would be the only shop in the entire town that would have electricity while others had gas lighting.

 
 
 

The Mangle is one of the various machines that the hardware store would sell. It was a machine that a person would use after they would hand wash their clothes. Since there was no drying machine in the early 20th century people would use "The Mangle" to squeeze the water out of the clothes before hanging them.

A funny thing I saw inside the reconstruction of a normal house of the Black Country in the 1930s was an old school Kit Kat bar. Kit Kat was created by Rowntree’s of York, England and is now produced world-wide. The Kit Kat brand goes back to 1911 when Rowntree trademarked the chocolate treat.