Remembering Miss Muriel M Hurr

Simon Loftus writes: "Miss Hurr was wonderfully patient and kind (in a quiet, rather timid way) when I went to her shop as a boy - to buy string, a kite or a penknife. She would sort through all the knives under the glass lid of her counter to find the one that I best liked the look of, and then search again to find another that seemed identical but bore a lower price tag - since she never upped the price of old stock. Sometimes the item that I wanted would be stored out of reach on a high shelf or hanging from a nail, and then she would reach for a long stick with a hook on the end, to fetch it down. It was a magical place for me. I loved the smell of rope and leather, the amazing clutter of unexpected and often unidentifiable things, the enamelled advertisment for Elliman's Embrocation, and Miss Hurr herself.

'Decimalisation? It'll never catch on in Southwold.' she said to me once, in a slightly anxious tone of voice. And when it did come, she struggled along for a while, still charging in old money and struggling with the conversion tables. But it was all too much for her and soon she shut up shop, and then, soon after, she was dead. Alas!"

Belinda Grant remembers: "She stocked everything and her shop was very narrow with a very high counter and a high ceiling. There were shelves all the way up and she would get things down with great hooks on poles. I found Miss Hurr quite frightening." (Belinda Grant remembering her childhood in Southwold in an interview for the Southwold Organ, May 2006.)