2001 - The GW Tasker story

As the well respected name of butcher GW Tasker disappears from Market Rasen's Queen Street, the Mail looks back on almost 90 years of service to the commercial life of the town.


ORIGINALLY in Waterloo Street, Tasker's opened in 1913, to start three generations of the family business.
The second generation of the family to own the business was George Westerman Tasker and his wife Florence, who was the daughter of the landlord of the Greyhound (where the Chase now stands).
Granddaughter Anne (now Baroness Gibson) says her earliest memories of her grandparents are from the early '40s, with both of them working in the shop with her grandmother in the cubicle where the money was taken.
George had lost a leg and Len Parrott helped to run the shop for him. Harold Plumtree, a well-known Market Rasen personality, was an errand boy at the time.
George had four sons – Ted, Tom, Harry and Frank. But only Harry, Anne's father, was prepared to take over the business, which he did in 1945 after returning from army service in the War. Even though he really wanted to be a policeman.
Harry however, had to buy out his four brothers, to whom the business had been intended equally, and did so with the help of a loan from the town's Midland Bank.
Harry and his wife Jessie and daughter Anne, left their home at 9 Church Street and moved into the house behind the shop, now in Queen Street, exchanging homes with George and Florence, who moved into the Church Street house.
Anne has memories of her mother working all Friday night in the shop, preparing joints for Saturday, while she was looked after by an aunt. The shop was one of the first butchers in the area to have a refrigerated window.
In the 1960s, Harry and his family moved to a bungalow in Gainsborough Road, but in 1967 he was tragically killed in a road accident. As his daughter Anne was an only child, and by now living in Suffolk, the business was sold to Geoff, Michael and Norman Thompson, who had worked for Harry Tasker for a number of years and had become a junior partner in the business.
The name of Tasker was retained because, said Geoff: "We were pleased to trade under the respected name of Tasker." They also acquired the Payne and Starbuck building immediately behind.
Now, as Lancaster's take over the business, the name of GW Tasker will disappear forever, but of course, to be replaced by a name equally respected as a butcher in the town and, having been founded in 1892, one with an even longer history.

Queen Street early in the century, probably, judging by the flags, on the occasion of the Coronation of Edward VII in 1902. The house which later became Tasker's shop is on the extreme right at the junction with Waterloo Street.

A later photograph of the same scene, probably the early '60s. Now Tasker's shop can be seen clearly. (Both photographs courtesy of Maurice Higham)

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