53 Railway Street, Hertford c1900-1964

Fish and Chip Shop

By Jenny Carpenter

These two photographs show the fish and chip shop that used to occupy the site of 53 Railway Street, Hertford. My great grandparents, the Dodsons, owned it from the early 1900s until the early 1930s when it was taken over by my grandparents, Alwyn and Mabel Tovell, who ran it as a fish and chip shop and restaurant until the mid 1960s. My grandmother died in 1962 and my grandfather retired a few years later and moved to Ramsgate in Kent.

The lady standing outside Dodsons is Olive Harding from Ware, my grandmother’s niece who worked in the shop for many years, for the Dodsons and the Tovells. She married Jack Hawkins during the second world war and continued to live in Ware.

This page was added on 25/06/2013.

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  • My grandmother worked here around the time of WW1 when it was managed by her sister and brother in law Ada and George Farman. It was called Tovells then. The Farman’s had moved from a shop in Luton where their baby had died in a fire in a chimney while sleeping above the fish and chip shop they were managing at the time. My Grandparents met because of this shop, she was helping her sister and my grandfather was supplying the potatoes for the chips!

    By Marilyn Taylor (06/08/2016)