Many people will have happy memories of Hart’s Ices when they visited St. Ives in their youth. Belinda Ratnayake’s family made the famous ice cream, and she has been researching its history. Belinda lives in St. Ives.

In 1895 my great grandfather Samuel Hart began making ice cream. He suffered from chronic asthma and spent his time devising ways of making enough money to keep his family of seven children clothed and fed. The children were instrumental in carrying out the working part of all his schemes.

One of his daughters, my grandmother, told of having to walk up and down Porthminster beach selling bananas and of having to sell fish from door to door or scrubbing neighbours’ granite steps for a penny in her lunch break from school.

Going out to play was not part of a child’s life in Downalong St. Ives at the turn of the last Century. To begin with and for many years the ice cream was made by hand. My gran and one of her brothers would turn the churns by hand until the mixture was set. She would then be left with her cart on a stand in the Market Place besides what is now Praed’s Baby Shop to sell the ice cream. She was about ten years old and although she was a tall girl for her age she had to stand on a box to be able to reach down inside the tub of ice cream. Her Da had told her that when she had sold all the ice cream she could have a penny to go to the bakers on the corner to buy a Chelsea bun. She watched the people going in and out of the bakers all morning and the pile of buns going down and down, wondering if there would be any left by the time she had sold all the ice cream. There were no weights and measures controls on the portions on ice cream and no proper scoops for serving it. Occasionally if her father saw a queue forming he would signal to cut the portions down a bit to make the ice cream go further.

The money from her day’s work would feed the family for a couple of days. Her brothers also had jobs to do to help support the family.

One of her older brothers, Humphrey, took over the ice cream business from his father and made and sold it from his home in Umfula Place in the Stennack. He ran the business from here for about ten years when, because of failing health, he sold it to his brother Sam.

My great aunt Bessie, Sam’s wife made the ice cream and sold it with the help of her three sons, Sam, Phil and Edward and their wives. Her daughter Miriam ran the house for her mother and cooked for them all.

The ice cream was now made in a cellar in Back Lane just behind their home and what later became the ice cream parlour. The equipment was somewhat more sophisticated now with my aunt turning a purpose made drum with ice and salt on the inside and the mixture being poured over the outside. When the ice cream was set it was packed into tubs or churns and again packed with ice and salt and sent out to the sons on their carts stationed around the town.

During the Second World War when the usual cardboard tubs were not available the ice cream was sold in paper bun cases and scallop shells, or people would bring their own containers to be filled. It was after the war that the first motorized vehicle was purchased. Ice cream was then taken all around the Penwith area. My mother remembers accompanying her cousin Phil on some of these trips with people running out of their homes shouting “Ert’s ices a’ penny scoop” When they had sold out they came back to St. Ives, loaded up and started out again. Another of her cousins, Edward, would encourage her to eat as many ices as she could he was only allowed to go to the local dance when the ice cream was all gone. Mum says that sometimes her insides were quite frozen. As this was the only motor vehicle in the family it was used for everything, visiting relatives or going for picnics and outings. On one occasion the older son, Sam, was pulled in by the police for speeding the van when trying to get to a family funeral in St. Austell. As there were only two seats in the van, everyone else had to sit up in the glassed display section hanging onto the sides, so that they didn’t fly through the windows.

In 1936 the cellar behind the house was no longer available and new premises had to be found. Yet another brother became involved with the business, my great uncle Ned bought a large building in Fish Street better known locally as Dick’s Hill. Part of this building would become the ice cream factory and stores and the other part became The Regal Café run by my grandmother and her sister Lizzie and later by my parents.

Here the machinery was now top of the rage for ice cream making. I often used to go to my parents’ café through the factory, up some wooden stairs at the back, through a trap door into the pantry above. My love of ice cream didn’t draw me on this route but rather the sight of ice cream being produced. I was fascinated by the process, by the shiny machinery and the water flowing constantly over the tiled floor and my aunt shoveling great scoops of the pale creamy stuff into insulated ‘dippers’ for the shop and the stand on the wharf. I wonder just how many thousands of people have sat on Doble’s Wall and enjoyed a cornet or wafer or have sat inside the ice cream parlour eating a banana split or, my favorite, a raspberry sundae, all topped off with Harry Tregenza’s clotted cream.

Hart’s shut up shop in 1983, just a few years short of a century of ice cream making and has been greatly missed by generations of locals and visitors alike.