Shopping Saturday - Selfridges decorations for the Coronation in 1937

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Selfridges is a store that has always known how to put on a show. A special occasion like a coronation is a great excuse to hang out the flags - literally. This week Britain has been marking the 60th anniversary of the present queen's coronation, so it seems like an appropriate time to look back at the coronation of her father, King George VI, in 1937.

The whole of Selfridge's Oxford Street and Orchard Street frontages were decorated with flags, sculptures, pictures and banners bearing the Royal arms, and the company produced a 20-page booklet, from which these illustrations are taken.

 The centrepiece was a sculptural group 'The Empire's Homage to the Throne' over the main entrance, and above this was the Royal Medallion featuring portraits of the new king and queen.

Above this was a giant representation of the Imperial State Crown, amid a gold and silver sunburst, and the whole thing was surmounted by the figure of Peace 'Let Peace Prevail' which towered 150 feet above ground level.

Just above window level on the Oxford Street front was a series of 18 bas-relief panels depicting scenes in British history, from the Druids and Stonehenge to the Armistice in 1918. These were flanked by two 35-foot high sculptures representing Canada and India.

Round the corner in Orchard Street was a giant picture depicting the great seaports of the British empire, with a border consisting of the house flags and funnel markings of major British shipping companies. Either side of this were two more sculptures, this time for Australia and South Africa. Finally, each of the large plate-glass windows all round the store at street level, normally full of merchandise, contained an oil painting of a scene from the His Majesty's life. There were 30 of these in all. It must have been quite a sight.

Shopping Saturday - Marks in Time

Marks and Spencer is close to the heart of many a Brit, or at least close to their skin - or in their underwear drawer.  Marks in Time is the website of the M&S company Archives, and it recently celebrated its first anniversary. The archive itself is housed in the University of Leeds, and the website is well worth a visit, whether you are a serious student of retail history or you just like looking at old pictures. The site makes very good use of the company's extensive collection of images - photographs of buildings and people, and packaging and merchandise. For the Baby Boomer generation, that iconic 1970's fashion statement platform shoes will take you right back! You can do simple or advanced searches of the catalogue, with an option to select only items with images, and you can choose from a drop-down menu of subjects such as 'wartime', 'food and home', 'children' and so on. When I searched for all items with images in the category 'women', I found, as expected, lots of clothing items, but also wine labels and bars of chocolate. Makes sense, I suppose.

As well as the archive catalogue, there is a history of the company since its famous start as a Penny Bazaar in Leeds Market, complete with a timeline, biographies and memories. There is also a fine collection of resources for schools, including a game where you match the fashion to the decade. I have already spent more time than I intended to exploring - well, it's cold outside! Feel free to do the same.

Shopping Saturday - Shetland House, Edinburgh

I haven't done a 'Shopping Saturday' post for a while; in fact my blogging has been a little erratic of late as I've been travelling a lot. I have just returned from a week in Oxford where I attended a summer school class on 19th Century Working Lives with the wonderful Dr Alan Crosby. He is a regular contributor to Who Do You Think You Are? magazine, and you can find him online on the magazine's Local history blog. This is marginally relevant to my shopping post, because while in Oxford I was on the look-out for second-hand books, as usual. This is harder than it used to be, since many booksellers no longer have shop premises, they trade online instead. Many of my Oxford favourites have disappeared in the last decade, but there is still the second-hand section of Blackwell's (an interesting shop in its own right), the Oxfam bookshops, and, on Thursdays, a couple of stalls in the market at Gloucester Green. This is where I found a few treasures this year - quite cheap, too. One was Black's Guide to West Kent (1906), which includes the Medway Towns, where I grew up; still not relevant to the subject in hand, but hold on, I'm getting there.

Post Office Edinburgh and Leith  Directory 1911-12

Like other books of its kind, the West Kent guide is full of advertisements, many of them illustrated, for places and services all over the British Isles. One which particularly caught my eye was the one above. Knowing that the National Library of Scotland has a big collection of online trade directories, I thought I would use these to see how long the business was in in existence, starting with the most recent online edition of the Post Office Directory for Edinburgh directory, 1911-12. When I clicked on the link to the title page for this directory, I was amazed to find not only an advertisement for the very same shop, but a picture of it, too! The actual directory entry reads 'Shetland House, John White & Co., Manufacturers of Shetland Shawls, Hosiery, Underclothing, Etc.' . Tracing back through the directory years, John White & Co were at 10 Frederick Street in 1891-92 described as 'successor to W B Mackenzie'. In fact, John White was the successor to W B Mackenzie all the way back to 1861! In 1858 12 Frederick Street was occupied by William White, woollen draper, men's mercer, and hatter. This turned out to be John's older brother. An assortment of census returns shows that they also had three sisters, and the family came from Crieff, Perthshire.

Shetland House at 32 Frederick Street is also listed in the Valuation Roll for 1915, still occupied by J White  & Co. The shop is still there, just off Princes Street in Edinburgh's New Town (ie the Georgian part) and the lease is even available, if you have £133,000 to spare for the rent.

'The property comprises a four storey, B-listed, stone building, with attic and basement, which was constructed 1786-92'

 

Shopping Saturday - my favourite piece of retail ephemera

My mother was going to throw this out. Fortunately I was around to rescue it. and now it lives in my sitting room where I can look at it every day. It's a painted plywood box that was used to store reels of sewing cotton in a draper's shop in the 1950s, and my mother acquired it when the shop was modernising or re-fitting, as far as I remember, about 50 years ago.

The top and three sides all have the distinctive Sylko thread logo, which also appeared on the cotton reels themselves, and these were visible to the customer in the shop. You can't see the drawers on the other side, not just because of the angle I chose for the photograph but because, sadly, they are long gone, although the runners are still there. Each drawer held several rows of reels of cotton, with cardboard dividers separating the rows. Mum used it to keep her buttons, needles and other sewing bits and pieces, including of course some cotton reels. I used to love this little chest of drawers, and I remember playing with it when I was small. It came with us through 7 house moves, and at some point the drawers went AWOL, I have no idea when. It hasn't been needed as a sewing box for a long time, because Mum's arthritis means she can't sew any more - not that she was big fan of sewing, she sewed on buttons, mended and even made clothes because she had to, not because she wanted to. Remember when you used to be able to save money by making your own clothes? Knitting was much more her thing.

 Here's a close-up view of the logo, although I'm pretty sure we didn't call them logos in the 50s. I like the fact that the box is rather shabby, and that the colours have mellowed a little with age. The box doesn't fulfill any practical purpose these days, it just sits on my sideboard. I keep my buttons and sewing gear in a big layered basket.

Writing this set me thinking about the old wooden cotton reels that were sold from boxes like this. I think I may have a few of them tucked away somewhere, and they are so much better than the plastic ones you get now. Once the thread had been used you could use them to make all kinds of interesting things; you could hammer three or four nails into one end of a wooden cotton reel and and turn it into a 'Knitting Nancy' for making long woollen cords. You could pile them up like building blocks, or turn them into dolls house furniture, or crude wheeled toys - I seem to remember something that involved matchsticks and twisted rubber bands as some kind of propulsion  system. Lightweight plastic just isn't the same.

 

Shopping Saturday - between boards

I came across an interesting little article while browsing through a magazine called 'The Leisure Hour', dated 1887. That's the kind of thing I do in my spare time.

It describes a largely forgotten aspect of the retail trade, the way that some shops promoted their wares. The writer describes a scene at 5:30 in the afternoon near Piccadilly Circus.

Two hundred [men] with boards and bills of various colours, are in front of me. They march down into a yard, fall into double lines like a regiment of soldiers, and take off their boards. Every man stands with his board in front of him. a man comes and inspects them when all are in, and soon the process of paying begins.

It is clear from the illustration that these men were a sorry lot. Many were former soldiers who did this work because it was better than not working at all. They were lucky to have been picked at all, since as many were rejected each morning as selected. The best dressed men had the best chance of being picked, and could earn the princely sum of 1s 2d for a day's work walking the streets. They could earn a little more, 1s 6d, if they were prepared to be 'dressed up and made into guys'. For the extra 4d a day they would endure the looks and remarks, and run the risk of being recognized by someone they knew. From 9 till 5, with and hour for lunch they were required to be on on display. If they were caught skulking, they might get no work for several days. These men were recruited and paid by agents, who seemed to make a tidy profit; the men were paid 1s 2d for a day's work, but the cost to the retailer was 2s.

This is a little-known aspect of retail history, and not a very happy one. For the men who did this often degrading work it was not just a low-paid job with a high embarrassment factor. If it was known that you had once 'carried the boards', it could harm your prospects of getting a respectable job in future. The sandwich-board men are often portrayed as figures of fun in cartoons, but I am not sure I will look at them in the same way again. So spare a thought the next time you see someone on a street corner holding one of those big 'Golf Sale' signs, or handing out leaflets in a shopping mall while dressed as a chicken. They are the the modern counterparts of the sandwich-board men, and it probably isn't their ideal career choice either.

Shopping Saturday - 'The Co-op'

Co-operative Wholesale Society billhead 1930s

One of the best-known and oldest established retail outfits in the United Kingdom is 'The Co-op'. It is more accurate to refer to the Co-operative Movement, of which the retail stores are just one part. There is lots of useful background information on the website of the National Co-operative Archive and for the retail side of the movement the Rochdale Pioneers Museum . Although the museum itself is closed for refurbishment until 2012, the site is full of useful information, including photographs. According to the site

Toad Lane, Rochdale is widely regarded as the home of the modern worldwide co-operative movement. This is not because it was the first consumer co-operative venture but because its Pioneers (founders) laid down a model of values and principles in their Rules that set out how, and why, to run a co-operative society.

This is a suitably careful wording, because, while Toad Lane is widely celebrated as the first Co-op shop, this can be disputed. In fact, the likely truth is that retail co-operation was an idea 'whose time had come'. In 2010 Co-operative News reported that a shop in Ripponden, Yorkshire could lay claim to being the first, in 1832, twelve years before the Toad Lane shop.

Retail co-ops were an early example of consumer power, where people banded together to purchase goods in bulk to get the best prices. Although this is mainly associated with the working classes, there were middle  class co-ops too; the Army & Navy Stores, now part of the House of Fraser group, began when a group of army and navy officers realised that it was cheaper to buy wines and spirits by the case. The now-defunct Civil Service Stores started in the same way, except that the commodity in question was tea!

The co-ops developed into regular retail shops, where the shareholders were the customers. Many people will have fond memories of shopping at the Co-op (or the 'Co-perative') as we called it in Scotland, and giving the cashier their 'divi' number, which would be marked up in a book, and the dividend would be distributed at intervals, according to how much you had spent. And you thought trading stamps, and now supermarket loyalty cards, were new ideas...?

Old stagers like me might also remember the overhead cash systems that were used in many shops, including the Co-op. There were a number of these systems, first introduced in the 1850s, and the one on the left shows the two halves of a wooden ball that were screwed together and used to send the customer's payment to the cashier's booth, and then back again with a receipt and any change. The wooden ball system used an arrangement of levers and pulleys to send the containers zipping back and forth over the heads of the customers. They must have made quite a racket on busy days in the shop. The system I remember used cylinders that were sucked through pneumatic tubes with a characteristic whooshing sound. I last saw them in use about 25 years ago in a very genteel department store in Cheshire. The wooden balls in the picture are from the reconstructed Co-op draper's shop in the wonderful Living Museum of the North at Beamish, County Durham. It's one of my favourite museums, and I can't recommend it highly enough. Visit if you can - if you're interested enough to read this blog all the way to the end, you'll love it. But wear comfortable shoes, there's a lot of walking.

Co-op draper's shop, Beamish

Advent Calendar - Father Christmas

This is a full-page advertisement from the Islington and Holloway Press, Saturday 17 December 1932. Jones Brothers was a department store in Holloway Road, north London. Assorted newspaper adverts show that it was quite a centre for the local community. In the summer there were flower shows and other activities, but the Christmas events must have been the highlight of the year.

There was a children's party, and of course they could visit Santa in his grotto and get a Sixpenny Surprise Parcel. The grotto for 1932 offered

'the Wonderide... undoubtedly the greatest attraction of its kind ever staged in North London. Nearly 5,500 people have journeyed on it already'

Or there was the Teddy Bear's Wedding

'This delightful show-piece with its dozens of moving figures is proving a centre of attraction to young and old. You certainly must not miss the amusing antics of Wally the Whale, and the unfortunate airman. See him on the Second Floor' 

This Christmas item has nothing to do with my family, but I worked at Jones Brothers from 1976 until 1990, when it closed, and I have many fond memories of my time there. Although the children's parties as advertised here had long gone before I worked there, the store laid on Christmas parties for the children of the staff; my two boys attended quite a few, and got their presents from Santa.

I remember that at some time in the 1980's some alterations were made to the store, and when some panelling was removed in the basement, the brick wall behind was found to be painted with with scenes from a Christmas grotto from years gone by.