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U.C.P. Memories

Occasionally we'd visit the UCP tripe stall for some cow 'eel ("makes a nice pie") or black pudding for my dad's tea. The sight of all that tripe and other mysterious things, looking rather like the wash leather that my mum cleaned the windows with, made me feel slightly queasy. I much preferred the dinky pork pies that the butcher sold.
• Source: www.tamesidefamilyhistory.co.uk

Tripe and other offal also formed the basis of cheap restaurants, with a longer pedigree. Lancashire was a particular stronghold, and there were attempts to go up-market in the early twentieth century, as at Vose and Son's Tripe de Luxe Restaurant and Tea Room, which opened in Wigan in 1917 and featured panelled walls, furniture 'of the Early English style', and a Ladies' Orchestra (Houlihan, 1988, p. 6). Soon afterwards this trend was pursued by combines with chains of restaurants, most famously Parry Scragg and United Cattle Products, which survived into the 1970s.
• Source: Book "In Search of Hospitality" by Conrad Lashley and Alison Morrison

Jimmy knew that the best had still to come. It was nearly midday and his father would take him to a restaurant. Hew knew which one it would be. There was one on every Lancashire high street, distinguishable by the red oval sign, initialed with the letters U.C.P. The United Cattle Products Company satisfied the daily teatime demands by thousands of Lancastrians for whom tripe was not a national music hall joke but a cheap and palatable dish. Many a cotton spinner and weaver carried a newspaper wrapped parcel of tripe in her basket collected on her way home from work in the mill.
• Source: Book "Course for Home" by Robert Jamieson and W. M. "Matt" Jamieson

I remember Saturday mornings when [my father] took me with him to the UCP shop - a Lancashire institution, it stood for United Cattle Products - on Stretford Road. In the window were white trays full of animal parts, Lancashire delicacies like cow-heels and chitterlings and brawn, at which I dare not look. There were marble tables inside, cruets with fat, stoppered bottles of malt vinegar, and a sour, steamy atmosphere. He ate tripe and onions, ladled out from steaming vats behind the counter, that he laced with pepper and vinegar. I didn't want any, not even to try a mouthful off his plate. He would laugh, and afterwards buy me a penny apple from the greengrocers next door.
• Source: Book "West: A Journey Through the Landscapes of Loss" by Jim Perrin

She always enters sickrooms bearing bowls of calf's-foot jelly. This intrigued me, because even if I grew up in northwest England, the heartland of the UCP empire (combined shops and restaurants owned by United Cattle Products, with steamed-up windows, huge displays of tripe, and a strange smell of boiled cow), I was never given calf's-foot jelly when I was feeeling ill.
• Source: Book "Turkish Delight & Treasure Hunts" by Jane Brocket

That Christmas, Julie, a struggling student, had to take on part-time work. She became a waitress at the unuzually named United Cattle Products Restaurant in Birmingham. "It wasn't really a great deal of fun because the head waitress thought all students were layabouts and scroungers, and she tried to make our lives a misery", she recalled in Julie Walters Is an Alien. "There were a few bright moments about my time there - one special day when the Welsh Lotario himself, Tom Jones, strode into the place in a tight-trousered way and asked to sample our fine cuisine". The singer, at the height of his first dalliance with fame, having just signed for his hit TV show, This is Tom Jones, was pleased with his fare and left a whole pound as a tip.
• Source: Book "Julie Walters: Seriously Funny - An Unauthorised Biography" by Lucy Ellis and Bryony Sutherland

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