FEATURE
Carrs - the Butchers Just when Howard Keel was getting his deep baritone voice around ‘Bless your beautiful hide’ in the film Seven Brides for Seven Brothers in the fifties, so Robert Lionel Gillson Carr (Bob) and his wife Elizabeth (Betty) had brought their seven daughters to Market Deeping where they set up shop on the Market Place. The butcher’s shop now proudly bearing the name R.L Carr and the telephone number 276 had been a butcher’s for years before – the name Shuttlewood was still discernible on the window. It occupied a large plot stretching down to the river by the Coach House and included the site where Linfords Fish and Chip Shop is now, which was the sitting room, and was extended to include a sizeable bake-house and slaughterhouse at the rear. Bob also had another shop in Lincoln Road, Peterborough. He moved his young family from the Chestnuts in Peakirk, where they had lived since ’47 to Deeping in 1952. Eventually Bob sold the Peterborough shop. But while butchery was Bob’s stock in trade, his first love, inherited from his father, was for horses, and it was opportune that the Market Deeping property included three loose boxes and a store. It was here that he kept Ruby the hunter on which he rode to hounds with the Cottesmore. He was also a familiar figure at the point-to-point meetings in the district, riding Scarlet Viking, one of his school of ponies which he would transport using the same horse box in which he would bring cattle back from the Monday market at Ethel Webber Stamford. No surprise, then, that Maggie McKay (née Holmes), who was bought up at the Imperial Café at the time, remembers him always wearing his riding boots. Silver was the most popular of all of the ponies in the stables, bought from Mr Tebbs of Deeping St James originally for Pauline, the eldest, but all of the girls, when considered old enough to ride at age seven, learnt on Silver before graduating to their own ponies.
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Reported in a local paper, Bob sustained head injuries when returning from the Leicester races in his shooting brake – he collided with a six-wheel lorry just outside Tallington near the Dow-mac gravel pit entrance. Fortunately he was only in Peterborough Memorial Hospital for a week before returning home and to work. Bob then went on to ride at the Fitzwilliam point-to-point with 40 stitches in his head! Bob Carr’s father, Robert William, was the first of three sons born to Robert and Jane Carr (née Gillson) and was baptised in 1884 at Witham on the Hill. He had started his career in butchery working for Samuel Maylon in Great Shelford. He later moved to Leeds where he worked for Dewhurst the Butcher, and it was here that he had met Ethel Webber, a very talented milliner who had made hats for Queen Victoria and who had a position at Schofield’s, the premier department store in the city. They married at Leeds Emmanuel Church in 1908. A Sergeant during the First World War, he served in the 14th Northumberland Fusiliers based in Melton Mowbray. As well as being a farrier he trained horses to pull gun carriages and was involved in the procurement of local horses for the war effort. Robert William and Ethel had nine children, all treated by their Victorian father as little soldiers, a regime that Robert Lionel rebelled against; he absconded twice, once at twelve and again at 16 when he went to London and worked for a butcher, but was brought home by his mother. When he did finally leave home he rented a small wooden shop in a Bedfordshire village near Luton Hoo. On one notable occasion he had taken his Reliant Robin to collect eggs from a local farmer. Using a washing basket for the job, all was going well until he saw the local hunt and followed it, when he did finally get back to the shop all the eggs were broken! Bob met his wife Elizabeth Knott in Skegness where she worked with a friend, Elsie, in Woolworths. Betty’s family had been surgical instrument manufacturers in a cottage industry in Sheffield. After their wedding in
