Woolworth's was not only the place where you could get bargain goods.

Parents often told their young children that was where babies came from!

Former Lord Mayor of Oxford Ann Spokes Symonds, in her book, Storks, Black Bags and Gooseberry Bushes, reveals how children were told that they had been bought in a shop.

She quotes a woman from Devon called Barbara, who made a new friend called Beryl when she went to school at the age of five.

Barbara recalled: “Beryl had, much to my envy, a baby brother. When I asked my mother why I could not have a brother, I was told we could not afford one.

“Apparently, Beryl’s mother had selected the boy at Woolworth’s.

“I wished to know why I had never seen any babies for sale there and was told they were kept on the first floor away from the gaze of ordinary customers.”

A girl from Churchill, near Chipping Norton, who wanted a baby sister, was told to “save her farthings”.

Since she received only a penny a week pocket money and half of it had to go in the missionary box at Sunday School, she never saved enough.

When she went to work, she asked what she should do with her 400 farthings.

It was suggested that they should be put in the charity box at the shop where her father was painting and decorating.

Afterwards, her father told her he wished he had told her the truth about babies because it had taken him all his dinner break to put the coins in the box as they went in only one at a time!