Retailers reported a run on face masks and higher sales of cough medicines and eye lotions.
2.
As recently as 1954 Stanley Coleman wrote in his'Treasury of Folklore : London'" that you may ask [ at the bar ] for eye lotion and the publican will measure you out an ounce or two " though it no longer came from the well in the cellar which had dried up when Edgware Road Tube station had been built on the site.