Grandad's Shop

Broad Street 1930
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For many years Dunster's Library in Broad Street was owned and operated by my grandfather, Sydney Mould. The shop was over three storeys, and contained many sections. It was a bookshop and stationers, It sold seaside accessories, it sold shrimping nets, it sold postcards, it sold cameras, and if you wanted a professional set of photos of your children, my grandfather would oblige. He used a strange system called "Polyphoto." It took many photos of about 35mm negative size all on the same glass plate. Part of the kit was some toy which would be used to attract the young model's attention. That was why it worked well! One of the camers that were sold at the shop was a Kodak 127 Box, sold for 5/-, and backed up by Kodak's official advertising poster, which was a photo of a waterfall taken with the camera by Sidney Mould. He made the original poster himself, the Kodak Rep saw it and Kodak bought the rights to it. The shop had a back door, but if you entered by it you found yourself on the second floor. Broad Street was steep. By the time of my first memories, my grandfather had retired and moved to Cobb House Flats. However Dunster's Library remains an important part of my childhood memories, and the polyphoto set of me aged about 10 months is proof that I had been inside the studio. Oh, that "Library" name. It dated back to the days when that meant bookshop. However, under pressure from the local council he added a "Dunster's Lending Library" section for several years, giving the council time to gather funds to build their own Library. When that opened, my grandfather closed his lending section with great relief. He had always insisted on checking every book in the lending library himself, in order to keep some very staight laced ladies quiet. Victorian attitudes still hung on in Dorset in the 1940s.