Nostalgia with Margaret Watson: A centenarian who enjoyed his food and made a great pork pie

Margaret Watson writes: It was a Stanley Holloway monologue, which she recited word perfect, and she couldn’t understand why we were all so surprised.

The lady concerned has lived all her life in Hanging Heaton and she isn’t the only centenarian from this particular village.

A neighbour of hers, who also comes from Hanging Heaton and went to the same school – Mill Lane – had celebrated her hundredth birthday shortly before.

I just wish these centenarians would put pen to paper and write their memoirs because they have such rich memories.

In my journalistic career I have interviewed a number of local people who have lived past their hundredth birthday.

They have been an inspiration to me and I still enjoy reading about them, so I hope you do too, because I hope to repeat some of them in the coming months.

One man I was delighted to interview some years ago was Alec Fozard, a retired butcher, who used to supply our family with stand pies at Christmas.

I’m glad I interviewed him when I did because sadly he passed away the following year aged 101.

I think of him every year around Christmas time because his name was a byword in our family at this time.

Alec, had a butcher’s shop in Halifax Road, Staincliffe, and every year mother opened a Christmas club with him, contributing a small sum weekly.

His shop was just across the road from two rag warehouses where most of my family worked.

They were owned by two brothers, Percy Walker, where my sisters, Joan, Eileen and Doreen worked, and Frederick Arnold Walker, where my brother Joseph worked.

Every week in the run up to Christmas, mother would tell one of my sisters to take half-a-crown from her wage packet to give to Mr Fozard for her club.

Alec, like most butchers made his own stand-pies and black pudding, and it wouldn’t have been Christmas in our house without them.

We tucked into them with gusto with no thoughts of putting on weight or clogging up our arteries because the word cholesterol wasn’t included in our vocabulary. Oh happy days!

Meeting Alec after all those years was a joy and amazingly, despite having lived what most would describe as an unhealthy lifestyle; this centenarian didn’t have one single health problem

He was still eating plenty of meat, loved fish and chips and pork pies, enjoyed full English breakfasts, Sunday roasts with Yorkshire puddings, as well as slices of fat and bread.

When I interviewed him he was still living on his own, was cooking his own meals, did all his own baking, including vanilla slices and Eccles cakes, and according to his family, his Yorkshire puddings were the best in the world.

His weight remained more or less steady at ten stones, his blood pressure was absolutely normal, and he didn’t take any medication whatsoever, which surprised even his doctor.

To celebrate his hundredth birthday, he made a special centenary stand-pie, just to prove he still had it in him.

Alec was the first to admit that health experts would have described his diet as unhealthy, but that didn’t worry him in the least because he felt so fit and well.

He told me: “I’ve always eaten plenty of meat and I love home-cooked fish and chips, but maybe different bodies react differently to different foods.

”I enjoy my food and so do my family, We all come together for meals and sometimes there are 15 of us sitting down together.

“We talk a lot about food, and we have home-cooked fish and chips every Friday.”

Alec continued to bake his own Christmas cakes, and the year before he passed away, he baked 20 of them.

During his years as a butcher, he made all his own pies and sausages as well as black pudding, polony and haslet.

Alec was just 13 when he made his first pork pie while working as an

apprentice for a Bradford butcher in 1921.

But, while still a young man he suffered from a disease of the ear which affected his hearing, and his father suggested it might be easier if he started his own business.

“He had seen a paper shop in Halifax Road which he said could be converted into a butcher’s shop,” recalled Alec. “We decided to take the risk and buy it, and we never looked back.”

At the same time, his wife Louisa was running her own greengrocer’s and bakery in nearby Kilpin Hill Lane, which she continued to run until their family, a daughter and two sons, came along.

Commenting on his long and healthy life, Alec said he had no secret recipe to pass on, but he did wonder if it could be to do with the fact that he had always been content with his lot.

“I had a very happy marriage and I have a wonderful family, and I never really wanted more than I had. I was always content,” he told me.

Alec had been a widower for two years when I interviewed him and he was still content with his life.

He also loved his new flat which was near to his daughter Judith and son-in-law Jim Batty, who visited him every day right until his death.

He was never happier than when he was cooking or baking in his spotless, modern kitchen, among all his pots and pans.

Alec, who ran his shop in Staincliffe for nearly 40 years, believes it was good quality ingredients which made a good pork pie.

I have been making pork pies for nearly 90 years and I don’t think I’ll stop now,” he said.

And, he never did. Bless him.

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