When I was experienced enough to take my turn on the "traps" I was so excited. The office was on the first floor so customers would come up the stairs, ring the bell in the waiting room and I would answer by unlocking and raising one of the 3 traps.

The Co-op encouraged people to save with its Penny Bank. Adults and children could make a deposit from 1d (old penny) upwards to £2.

Penny Bank deposits, whether small or large merited the same procedure. You entered the amount in the customer's Pink bank book and signed it before making an entry in the Penny Bank receipt book. The amount of any cash withdrawn was also written in the bank book and a withdrawal form signed by the customer and initialled by the clerk.

At the end of the week the clerk responsible for "keeping" the Ledger up to date tore out the perforated receipts and withdrawal forms, sorted them numerically and entered them all in the ledger before balancing every page and making a summary.

The pages of names and addresses in the ledgers were all laboriously copied out by hand for each new half-year.

These heavy ledgers were kept within the office in a walk-in safe that had a thick steel door and concrete walls.

When Rushden Society took over Irthlingborough Co-op the office was closed and an employee from Rushden then sat in the supermarket to receive payments for bills etc. Eventually Rushden closed the last shop, and a hundred years of Co-operation in Irthlingborough was ended.

The Irthlingborough Historical Society tried to find what had happened to all the lovely photographs which had been hanging for years around the walls in the Boardroom. I was given this task and rang first the Manager of Rushden Society who gave me the number of a colleague. He in turn supplied a number for a retired employee who might know. In all, 8 phone calls were made to the various people suggested. The 8th person suggested the Rushden Society Manager might know. The calls had gone full circle!

Later it was found that a skip had been placed at the bottom of the stairs leading to the office and Boardroom and everything was thrown down into the skip.

As two Penny Bank ledgers have recently surfaced (in 2010), including the one in which I had made entries, it would be great to know what else was removed for safe keeping.