Family-run newsagents, Burrows, which has served the city of Ely in Cambridgeshire for 125 YEARS, and opened when Queen Victoria was still alive, is closing its doors this week.
Jeff Burrows, 76, who is the third generation of his family to run Burrows Newsagents, and started serving behind the counter when he was just eight, is retiring after running the shop for 60 years.
The newsagents was opened in 1899 by his grandfather, James Fredrick Burrows, a former journalist on the Ely Weekly Guardian, who would have selling papers with headlines for the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 and the outbreak of WW1 in 1914. To mark the occasion, the shop put a call out on social media to former employees to turn up at the shop at 9am last Saturday (April 19) and more than 80 paperboys and girls travelled from all over the country to be there.
Jeff’s niece, Annabel Reddick, who works at the shop, said: “We couldn’t believe it, we were expecting about 15 people to show, but more than 80 arrived, including one girl who now lives in Manchester and a man from Norfolk, who did his round in the 1950s. Many of them wrote down their memories, thanking Jeff and saying it was a great start to their working life.”
Malvin Rogerson, who worked as a paperboy 50 YEARS ago from 1973 to 1978 wrote: “Thanks for the education and the start in business. It has served me well.” Neil McKnight, who delivered the Sunday papers for five years from 1995 to 2000, wrote: “Hard graft but great memories.” Sheila Oakey said she worked as a papergirl from 1956 to Christmas 1959 and wrote: “Lots of memories.”
Jeff, who was born in 1948 and brought up in the shop, began working there when he was 17 and took over the running from his dad, Percy, five years later. Over the years he has employed more than 500 paper boys and girls, most aged between 13 and 16. He said that in its heyday in the 1970s the shop was selling more than 2,000 newspapers a day and now sells around 900 a day.
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