The Tale of the Vintage Scissors

A customer bought some old, but unused 8” scissors of ours from e-bay and immediately sent a question to us about how old we thought they were. As I have been at  Whiteley’s for so long, I recognised them and took them down to Andrew, our longest standing employee, to see what he thought.

We were agreed that they must have been between 35 and 40 years old. He recognised the screw and we both recognised the label. Andrew asked me if I remembered the green boxes that we used to send out all our scissors in, then and I said I did but sadly we didn’t have any of them left and hadn’t had for 30 years!

Whiteley labels

We also, for years – when I was a young  teenager at school, had sticky labels in the same green that were about 1.5” by 0.5“, which had “Whiteley 332” on them in the same script as that on the green box.

They were on a roll and could be peeled off, so naturally I took them to school. A friend decided it was a really good plan to put one of these sticky labels upside down on each of the staff chairs in assembly and they all sat on them and so were walking around the school with my name on the backs of their skirts/trousers.

There was endless giggling and sniggering and it ended with me in the Head’s study being seriously ticked off for cheek, disrespect etc etc. The friend never confessed and I never said a word!