Early Trading Laws

Late 70’s Britain was becoming a dire place live, the country was in crisis, unemployment was reaching record levels, shortened working weeks were the norm at most UK factories and redundancies an everyday occurrence in the rest. Pretty much like Britain today!

This was particularly the case on the North Wales coast which had seen the scaling back of Courtaulds in Greenfield and Flint and also the decline of one of the area’s largest manufacturing sites, British Steel in Shotton.

The 1970’s were also still governed by the archaic 1950’s Shops Act. This act prohibited the Sunday Trading that most working families now take for granted. Many of the shops around that time were unable to trade and if they were it was to very restrictive opening hours.

However, the public were crying out for two things in the cash strapped 70’s, the opportunity to go out as a family unit on a Sunday which was often the only day the entire family could be together and also the chance of a bargain. To facilitate these needs markets started springing up on Sunday’s all over the country, in many cases on old disused airstrips left over from the aero industry and also old RAF bases which hadn’t yet been converted for civilian use.

The public flocked to the markets in the early years and in the helicon days every major town and city in the country had a Sunday Market, many of them trading without licences.

One of the early pioneers of the Sunday Market was Nigel Maby of Spook Erection, he entered folklore with his market in Warwick, which, under the terms of the old 1950’s Shop act was eventually closed down by the local authorities. Undaunted by the closure, Nigel simply moved his operation to Scotland, where strangely enough, Sunday Trading Laws did not apply.

There were one or two exceptions to the Sunday Trading Laws, including allowing the provision to tourists at sea side resorts. Every market trader of the era were looking for ways to attempt to cash in on the public demand for Sunday opening and as such a number of niche ventures were started in order to circumvent or find loopholes in the 1950’s Shops Act.

I studied the 1950’s act and came across a very simple but never the less ingenious way to by-pass the act and an area where the Sunday Trading Laws didn’t apply by using a ship as a trading platform.

Being a simple village boy from Nottingham, I didn’t think it unfeasible to buy a ship, dock it somewhere and use it was a platform for trading, not only on a Sunday, but during the week as well. I did the simple math’s and it was soon evident to me that the potential earnings from a venture of this nature would far, far exceed the costs of ships I could find being pensioned off. I also very quickly became aware of a number of potential ships which would adequately suit the purpose.

Knowing that appropriate vessels were available at the right price, I genuinely believed that finding a dock would be the easy part. I was soon to be proved wrong.  After investigating sites in London, Goole and Liverpool, I found that for one reason or another, the viability of the sites was limited and proved to be non-starters.

Preston looked an early possibility and I entered into a series of negotiations to place a ship in the old docks in the town. The local authority originally warmed to the idea of the creation of jobs and revenue in their area, however, their fear of a union backlash if the venture employed non-union labour proved to be too much and they withdrew from the negotiations.

Finding a site close to a major conurbation was proving to be very, very difficult and I was beginning to feel it was likely to be impossible. I had almost given up hope of finding a suitable place for a ship, when I had a chance meeting with Jack Connell, a fisherman and market trader from Rhyl on the North Wales Coast.

Jack pointed me a little further down the North Wales Coast, just down from the busy little port of Mostyn, to an old derelict fishing dock at Llanerch-y-Mor.

All we needed to do now was find a ship to put there.