Island Life Magazine Ltd December 2007/January 2008 | Page 37

INTERVIEW
up by war ensured the
success of Cullifords.
The business was greatly
helped when a Land Army
recruit came and asked her
mother for a job; she had
been head of the children’s
coat workroom at Jolly’s
of Bath. “Mrs Hughes
was a super woman,
very helpful to me. But
she went back to Bath
to have a baby, shortly
before Bath was blitzed.
We always wondered
what happened to her.”
Of course people are
always going to need
clothes, but the war threw
up particular difficulties.
“People needed clothes
and they had the money
– but money was not
worth anything if you
didn’t have coupons. You
needed seven coupons to
buy a dress, 18 to buy a
coat and five to buy a pair
of shoes. Mother would
take brown envelopes
of 100 coupons and
bank them like money,”
recalls Mrs Barrow.
On a buying trip to
London, Mrs Guy’s
bundles of coupons
would enable clothes to
be dispatched that day
by passenger train to
Lymington, then by boat
– with a carrier called Mr
Calloway, Mrs Barrow
remembers – and they
would be in the shop by
11o’clock the following
day. “Now it is a minimum
of a week before clothes
arrive,” Mrs Barrow sighs.
She was witness to
the changes brought by war to a way of
life. “Before the war the large houses in
West Wight were opened at Easter and
closed at the end of the season. In the
war they were requisitioned, and were
full of troops. But the Totland Bay Hotel
was taken over by the Queen Alexandra
nurses, and they became good customers.”
After the war the family opened a
shop in Yarmouth, and took over Fanny

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Trinder in Seaview. In the early ‘50s
they took over Packs, and Rice & Rice in
Shanklin, and with a marketing acumen
which seems ahead of its time, realised
the names Culliford and Packs were
too valuable to shed. The names were
merged to become Pack & Culliford. The
shops were on two sites in Ryde. True
to her calling, Elizabeth married in the
trade: Eric Barrow owned a firm called
Sally Pigtails which supplied Pack’s

life

children’s department. Mrs Barrows'
mother died in 1981, her husband
only five years later, and neither her
brother, David Guy, nor her sister and
brother-in-law Gillian and Bill Moody,
wanted to carry on with the business.
“I’d lost my husband, my son was in
London. I thought: ‘I’ll have my own
shop!’” Mrs Barrow says. When the
freeholders of the current shop in Cross
Street asked her to take it on – because

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