Serving up a treat
Last week Rowan featured a menu for the Frankton Junction railway station dining rooms. Those of us who recall the railway station dining rooms can remember waiters (in the bigger stations) – not refreshment rooms. Refreshment rooms were all takeaway food – pies, sandwiches and great huge bricks of fruit cake. By contrast, the dining rooms were like restaurants. Orders were placed and food prepared while you sat and smoked a ‘Three Castles’ and drank your coffee.
This group is the dining room staff. Twenty two in all including, centre front, the manager in his suit and hat and, on his left, the senior lady who would be in charge of the dining room but not the kitchen or butchery. There are waitresses, kitchen hands, cooks, maybe the chap front right is an actual chef or, maybe not. Frankton was the busiest junction in the country so these folk would have known they had done a day’s work.
