13 September — 51st anniversary of French hypermarket Carrefour encroaching onto UK soil by opening a flagship store in… Caerphilly. Not all that remarkable in itself, perhaps, but its 6th birthday was one to remember — what with the 40ft, three-ton animatronic gorilla and all.
I cannot tell you how grateful I am to Graham for alerting me to the hypermarket’s arrival in 1970s Wales:
…which prompted Mark to remember ~ahem~ the name they gave the 40ft mechanical gorilla:
I think we can all grasp the (legal) niceties of not using ‘kong’ — and the need for something that rhymes with it, to remind us of it, and that isn’t ‘dong’, but: Bloody. Hell. You can see why ITV chose not to focus on that when they went on a nostalgia trip a few years back.
A few years later, Wales Online went into more depth about how revolutionary the whole business was.
We were used to the weekly goods shop in the local Co-op, three aisles and a single check-out manned by the marvellously cheery Mary.
“You went there on foot,” apparently, “they put your groceries in a cardboard box and delivered them later that afternoon in a little van”. Then, along came a hypermarché “10 times the size of anything that preceded it — 100,000-plus square feet of retail heaven”.
Apparently, “Cardiff lawyer David Pinnell also has recollections of super-sized shopping”:
It did, indeed, as the article suggests, “change the way Britain shopped forever”, but — in the words of Magnum P.I. — I know what you’re thinking: enough of the social history, Coates. Tell us more about the fucking enormous gorilla.
Nowhere in any of the articles I’ve read is there any explanation of what the gorilla had to do with the hypermarket. Perhaps both were just big and therefore it made sense. However, in a marvellous bit of detail, former goods manager Trevor Davies remembers that:
…and he had a damsel in distress, too, who sat in his hand: model Cheryl Perry, then Miss Caerphilly, who you can see gamely being interviewed for this news report:
I’d like to tell you there was something we could learn here, that this has given us access to some profound insight into the way we live now, but I’m buggered if I can find it.
Anyway, here’s another picture of a three-ton, 40ft gorilla:
