Ginny Hemmings has kindly sent us the following memories about Banks’ Bakers & Confectioners.

“My Grandmother, Kathleen, is the daughter of Tom and Gertie Banks who owned and ran Banks’ Bakers and Confectioners store in Suffolk Parade from the mid 1930s to the early 1950s. It is now being used as a photography studio. We took my Grandma along just over a year ago to see what she remembered as she often talks of her days there during the war.

Today, if you enter the shop, there is a fairly large room in front of you. This room used to be divided in two, making the shop front a great deal smaller. Beyond the backroom – the kitchen, I believe, you could step outside to the old bakehouse, which still remains in place today. From the backroom, there were also steps down to the cellar. Grandma remembered huddling on those steps when the air raid sirens went off – particularly the night that a bomb was dropped on Cheltenham’s Promenade. She remembers hearing the plane fly incredibly low. Grandma was kept at home during the war because she worked in the bakery.

Her bedroom, upstairs, shared a wall with The Daffodil cinema; there were many nights during the war that she would sit with her ear pressed to the wall, listening to the sounds of the movie and to the audience’s response. She also recalls the air raid marshall shining a torch onto her bedroom ceiling to prompt her to open the window and chat to him down on the pavement below!”