Comments
Comment: It was always a most interesting shop with the windows full of musical instruments, covers of LP records of both popular and classical music, and also sheet music. Inside the shop there was also a lot more to see and, at the counter, there was a vast collection of 78rpm records containing all the latest line of pop music. I remember going to the shop also for music exams, when I was about eight or nine.
For anybody learning to play the piano, there was a periodic testing, whereby you had to pay for an examiner, and were awarded grades. Maybe I imagined myself playing for large audiences one day... or maybe I had been listening too much to Sparky's Magic Piano, which was popular in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Then there was Mr Backhouse himself, a very nice, friendly man with a hearty and distinctive laugh.
Also, at Backhouse's, which I remember as being slightly musty, I bought my very first single record, You Don't Have To Be A Baby To Cry by a girl duo called The Caravelles.
Gallery
“The recent listing of shops long gone in Milford failed to mention the music emporium of Backhouse. I am sure that the likes of your good self, and all the budding guitarists in Milford, would gather on a Saturday morning to purchase the latest releases on vinyl, and spend hard-earned cash on a long playing record, 12 songs for the princely sum of 19 shillings and 11 pence. Also, we would buy one or two guitar strings to replace broken ones from a night's guitar thrashing, rehearsing in someone's front room. We had a Backhouse shop in Dimond Street, Pembroke Dock, run by two charming ladies.”