Celebrating 75 years: White Horse Bookshop’s 1943 party – with real Woolton pie

To mark its 75th birthday the White Horse Bookshop is inviting people to a pre-Christmas 1943-style party from 5.30pm on Friday, December 7 – “It’ll be partying while you shop!”

The bookshop staff will there in appropriate civilian period costumes and there will certainly be at least one Air Raid Warden in attendance.  Period costumes will be rewarded with a special discount on books bought during the evening.  Come along and help them celebrate.

Manager Angus MacLennan has not yet revealed what 1940s costume he will appear in. 

The bookshop’s Debby Guest is cooking a Wootlon Pie – to bring some culinary realism to the evening.  For those too young to remember, from 1940 Lord Woolton was the nation’s Minister of Food.  His name became attached to the widely promoted recipe for a vegetable pie topped with a potato pastry crust. 

At a time when vegetables were often cooked to within an inch of their lives, the pie had a varied reputation.  When the ‘official recipe’ was published it was claimed that many people who had tasted the pie ‘pronounced it good’:  “Like many  another economical dish, it can be described as wholesome fare”. 

With meat tightly rationed, it was also essential fare.  We can expect Debby Guest’s Woolton pie to look and taste a lot better than the one pictured above!

On Friday evening you might get find a rock cake or two and some tinned fruit – though we are assured no ‘dried egg’ will be involved.  As for a GI or two….?

There will also be, of course, be 1940s music to keep you ‘In The Mood’.  The bookshop’s Gaby Venus knows a thing or two about music from this era – she is part of The Wield Glenn Miller Tribute Group.

If you are stuck for one or more Christmas presents, 1940s books will, of course, be available.  If you don’t mind jumping ahead a year, you could buy your favourite aunt H.E. Bates’ Fair Stood the Wind for France  – a vintage tale published in 1944.

Last year the bookshop held a very successful Victorian evening – harking back to the Victorian themed days that used to flood the High Street with nineteenth century fashions and foods for the Christmas lights switch-on.  This year 1943…next year perhaps a small step into the twenty-first century!