Tributes paid to former village chip shop owner

Mary Crossland was fondly known in the village for serving behind the counter of Crown View Fisheries with her late husband Ernest. She died on March 30.

The couple took over the shop, which was opposite the Cock and Crown pub, from Mary’s parents Henry and Nellie Borrill in 1952.

Until her long and happy retirement from the early 1980s, Mary ran the shop with the rule that “if you wouldn’t eat it yourself, don’t sell it,” daughter Judith Evans said.

She added: “Parents with young children will remember that she would always wrap a small parcel of chips for the children to take home as their own little parcel.

“Everybody had to say please and thank you or they would not be served,” she said.

After meeting at a St Patrick’s Day dance at Normanton Baths in 1940, Ernest and Mary married at St Peter’s Church in Kirkthorpe in 1944.

Mrs Evans said: “Dad was overseas in the army and wrote to tell mum he would be home in apple blossom time and he would ‘be home to change your name to mine’.”

The song (I’ll Be With You) In Apple Blossom Time, popularised during the war years, will be played at her funeral.

Mary, of Willow Park care home, leaves daughters Judith and Margaret, four granchildren and three great-granddaughters. The funeral will be at Pontefract Crematorium from11.40am on Wednesday.