Chapter 7
Before I move on to 1975, I have some more comments to make
about 1974.
I see from notes dated a few years ago that we rented the
Old Ciderhouse, Back Lane, Glastonbury from Leo Garvin for £1,000 a year, later
increased to £2,000, and that we were introduced to this by Cyril Driver of
IMCO, who had been the last tenant. We
were there making frames and cutting mounts for the next five years. We didn’t use the cellars as they were
inclined to flood. On 3rd
June we took on John Grinter at £2.24/hour, and Yvonne Jones and Norma West for
£1.13/hour.
The huge obsolete guillotine which we had first installed
out at Baltonsborough in Roly Bisgrove’s barn was moved here, used for cutting
up mount board, though the apertures had to be cut afterwards by hand. Our daughter Ruth, who now runs Glastonbury
Galleries, has a marvellous computerised machine which can be programmed to cut
sophisticated shapes. But remember we were
in the early days of picture framing, still using the oval forma for our mounts.
I have found in my keeping box for that year a couple of
booklets written by our landlord. One
is entitled “Garvin’s Gazette Oct-Dec 1974 (52nd Year)” and the
other is the Golden Jubilee of L.Garvin & Co. Ltd. 1920-1970, which is a
fascinating story of how Leo Garvin came over to London from Denmark, and which
contains a photo of an elderly gentleman outside his Victorian house, which I
think we visited, somewhere up on the Mendips, and where perhaps he moved after
the war.
Their main business became the importing of honey from all
over the world. He describes his first
few years of business “in a small, rather dark, one room office in Change
Alley, off Cornhill … with one typist and the writer, Managing Director, Sales
Manager, Advertising Manager, Cashier and office boy all rolled into one.” Sounds familiar. He also dealt in milk powder, which became
an important part of the business during the war. It was during the war that they became
involved in producing cider and acquired the Cider House. (I can remember going there to buy a bottle
of cider in the early 50’s.) He also
tells a funny story of trying to dig peat on Dartmoor at Bridestowe, from which
“we retired, wiser but considerably lighter of pocket.”
Tony Osmond had
became our full-time manager on 2 January at £3.62/hour – he would have worked
at 5A High Street, where we expanded into 4 rooms including one tiny room as an
office, shared by Tony, his wife Vera, and myself.
The main room at 5A was where John Chaffey was in charge of
putting together the orders for framed or mounted only prints, and somewhere
along the corridor was a cupboard where Linda Garland would assemble the black
and white prints ready for the hand painters to colour. Natasha Smith became hand painting
supervisor on 2 December at £1.68/hour – did she take over from John, or was
there someone else before her? John
Chaffey (known as John Chaff, to distinguish from John Grint and John M) also
supervised the packing and dispatching of parcels.
We obtained specially designed packing boxes from Clifton
Containers in Bristol into which framed and mounted only prints were placed for
dispatch by Royal Mail Parcel Service – the lorry would call at 5A several
times a week to collect the orders.
Glass of course is fragile and everything was wedged with newspaper, as
bubble wrap and other materials had not yet been invented. We consumed large quantities, so all our
staff had to bring us their newspapers – how did we collect enough? The parcel weight was limited to 10 kgs I
think.
There were breakages of course, in spite of the large
“fragile” labels. On one occasion, the
customer provided us with evidence that the delivery lorry had actually run
over the parcel – there were the tyre marks.
Another problem was naughty customers. If a customer was known to be a late payer
(the rule was within a month of invoice), they had a red sticker on their
ledger card. I don’t know what mark we
used for the ones which never paid.
Certainly we would not let them have another order until they had done
so. And our agents were asked to chase
these up. No doubt there were occasions
when we had to take someone to the Small Claims Court.
John and I went on photographic trips in the spring. My notes describe how on May 7 we drove to
Exeter, where John took photos of the cathedral and we visited The Blue Boy
Gallery (one of our customers), driving on to Penzance before returning on May
10 via Dunster Castle. We set off again
on May 14 until Thursday 23 May, when we visited Chepstow Castle; Cardiff Castle; “bought stuffed birds at Machynlleth”; Harlech Castle; Conway Castle; Chester Cathedral; Rievaulx Abbey; York Minster;
Fountains Abbey; Harewood House
and Peterborough Cathedral, where we were taken round the Palace garden by the
gardeners Mr & Mrs Barnard.
My grandfather Claude Martin Blagden was Bishop of
Peterborough from 1927 – 1949 and was one of the senior bishops who sat in the
House of Lords. The express trains used
to stop specially at Peterborough station to pick him up and drop him off from
his trips to London. Before the war, my
father said, they had 25 staff! This
would have included gardeners and secretaries and a chauffeur as well as
domestic servants. During the war, when
I stayed as a child (10 or 12 years old), there were land girls helping in the
garden and Grandad the Bish was adept at laying and clearing away the table
after meals, no doubt produced by Grannie Hester. I remember bedrooms which were called
“Cathedral 1” and “Cathedral 2” and Heaven’s Gate Bathroom.
After the war when I was a teenager, he leaped on and off London buses in his gaiters and took me to see the House of Lords, which was at the time was occupied by the House of Commons, since that had been bombed. I even typed much of his memoir “Well Remembered”, published in 1953, the year after he died, by his son in law Paul Hodder-Williams, who was MD of Hodder & Stoughton.
After the war when I was a teenager, he leaped on and off
London buses in his gaiters and took me to see the House of Lords, which was at
the time was occupied by the House of Commons, since that had been bombed. I even typed much of his memoir “Well
Remembered”, published in 1953, the year after he died, by his son in law Paul
Hodder-Williams, who was MD of Hodder & Stoughton.
After visiting Peterborough, we went on to Cambridge and
Woburn Abbey, calling on the RSPB at Sandy Lodge (who stocked our bird prints
in their shop). This is only some of
the venues – there are lots of comments about buildings being no good – covered
with scaffolding or because it was raining – visiting customers, difficulties
with finding bed and breakfasts.
“Carlisle Castle and Holm Cutram Abbey – neither very attractive and
wasted a whole morning.” Altogether we
travelled 1,500 miles in around 14 days.
John went on to draw many of these castles and cathedrals
And at the end of May we visited my sister and brother in
law, Sal and Ben Lewers, and we all went to the opera at Glydebourne. Next day we drove down to Canterbury and
then, at Dover Castle “John hurt his
right foot by jumping off a bank into the road”. Poor John was in great pain so I had to take
over the driving, and he was obliged to sit on the grass while I walked over to Bodiam Castle. After returning to Sal and Ben for the
night, we visited our accountant Mr Sayers at Woking and came home “via
Stonehenge”.
Here is the
invitation to our stand at the Harrogate Gift Fair in the Crown Hotel, July
14-18 1974, This was our first time at
Harrogate, though Peter Dufour had displayed some of our prints on his stand
the year before. The Crown was a
grouping of exhibitors who couldn’t fit into the other venues and our “passage”
in this hotel provided us with adequate space, with nearby rooms occupied by
Denby and other well known names, so that plenty of prospective buyers passed
through. John designed the layout of
the prints beforehand – I have a copy of this particular exhibition carefully
executed on graph paper with all the references, consisting of about 40 10 x 8”
prints and 50 smaller framed pictures, so it was quite a spread. Presumably we provided display boards onto
which the pictures were hung, as I don’t think we would have been allowed to
bang nails into the walls! Somehow he
fixed spotlights on a couple of beams balanced precariously across the
passage. One year, a beam came crashing
down on Mona Russell’s head as we were erecting the stand, nearly knocking her
out. She was our agent for that area and
must have been quite elderly (late sixties?) at the time, but she carried on
bravely without complaint.
As soon as we had
returned from Harrogate Gift Fair on Friday 19 July, we needed to get ready for
our holiday in Scotland. I see that on
Saturday we need to drive to Castle Cary Station to meet Rob and Ruth off the
London train – presumably Julie had accompanied us to Harrogate while the other
two stayed with Deena and Bry (John’s parents) in Hampstead.
Anyway, we then
board the motorail at Bristol, travelling with our Volvo estate car on the
sleeper train to Stirling and driving to Edinburgh to stay for a couple of
days, before making our way to Mr & Mrs Jack Cameron’s cottage,
“Rockfield”, for the rest of the fortnight’s holiday. The Camerons moved out of their home in the
summer, sleeping in a caravan on the croft and spending most of the day in a
large shed outside the back door. We
continued our exploration of the Ardnamurchan Peninsular, using this lovely
folder entitled “Strontian – car tours and notes for the visitor” dated 1972
with leaflets covering Ardgour, Moidart, Ardamurchan and Morvern. One of these sheets includes the
Ardnamurchan Lighthouse: “The road ends
a short distance from the lighthouse.
Here you may clamber down the rocky shore and stand on the most westerly
point of the mainland of Great Britain, over 20 miles further west than Lands
End The view to the Hebrides is
magnificent, more so from the lighthouse, which may be visited at the
discretion of the head lighthouse keeper.”
The lighthouse was
still run by a keeper at that time, and we climbed up to the balcony which runs
round the light and watched the keeper taking weather records and also
inspected the huge boilers which produced the energy for the fog warning
system. After that, we went to Sanna
beach and some of us were brave enough to swim in the clear, cold sea before we
enjoyed a picnic in the dunes – or “machair” as it is called in Scotland. The coarse grasses were full of wild flowers
and to begin with I thought the little yellow ones were cinquefoil. But upon crouching down to spend a penny, I
discovered what turned out to be a yellow pansy, which we called the “seaside
pansy” – John drew this and a number of other flowers, sitting in the front
porch of “Rockfield” where there was good light.
We must have packed
up on Friday 9 August, driving back to Stirling across the Corran Ferry – we
needed an early start and I think the first ferry ran at 8 am – in order to put
the car on the train again and return to Bristol overnight. On Sunday, we put Rob on a train to London.
Our business
adhered to the tradition of the “factory fortnight” stipulated by both Clarks
and Morlands, consisting of the last week in July and the first week in August,
which made it more convenient for some of our part-time staff whose families
worked for those factories. This is not
usually the best time to visit Scotland, but we seemed to be lucky with the
weather; one year when we stayed with
the Camerons, she reported that the village stores had overheard some French
visitors complaining of the heat. When
we returned home, the floods were out on the moors.
By this time we
must have employed quite a few people, most of them part timers, though John
Chaffey (in charge of the workroom at 5A), John Grinter (in the Old Ciderhouse,
making frames) and Tony Osmond (our manager) were all full time. Tony’s wife Vera kept our accounts in her
meticulous beautiful script together with a typewriter for the invoices (quarto
in those days), using the Kalamazoo system of ledger cards and carbon paper,
which enabled everything to be recorded again on the ledger sheets.
Linda Garland must
have been full time too, in charge of the painting round and preparing orders
for the workroom to put together, plus running errands up to the Post Office,
though the completed parcels were either collected from 5A by the Post Office
service, or were wheeled up the High Street on a trolley by one of the
men. She was also involved with using
the duplicating machine, which consisted of an inked roller round which the
prepared stencil was stretched, which had previously been cut into a special
foolscap sheet on the typewriter. When
the handle was turned, a printed page was produced – used for some pricelists
and for the dear customer newsletter I used to write at Christmas. Proper pricelists and other material were
printed for us at Clarks Printing works and later by someone else in
Street. The office was a tiny sliver of
a room with a bench each side – maybe Vera and I worked cox and box while Tony
was able to use the other side. John of
course was at home, designing new ranges, taking the original drawings to
Radstock Reproductions to be made into plates ready for Bigwood & Staple,
Bridgwater, to print.
The ancient
guillotine had been installed in the Ciderhouse, as I have already described,
together with simple machinery for cutting and pinning the frames. We could cut large pieces of mountboard into
10 x 8” and 4 ½ x 3 ½ “ sizes, then the oval apertures would be cut by hand
using John’s metal forma – later perhaps we obtained a simple machine to do
this.
I think we invested
in a little van so that John Grinter, or perhaps his assistant Ron Dunsmore,
could bring the required frames and mounts up to 5A, no doubt using
instructions provided by Tony after the current orders were analysed. We offered 4 choices of frame – F1 etc – and
around the same number of mount colours.
Agents were supplied with a box of loose mounts, frames and a large folder
containing one of each hand coloured print in the range. The various permutations of mount and frame
could be demonstrated by putting these over the images. The first set of agents sample boxes were
made individually by John, lined with sheepskin of course, but later we
invested in suitable suitcases – I still have three of these!
On Saturday 12
October, Julie and I fly from Gatwick to Los Angeles, Californjia, with a group
of other Europeans on a subsided trip, celebrating the 300th
anniversary of American Independence under the banner “Meet the
Americans”. We must have been met at
the airport by our hosts Bev and her husband driven to their home in San Diego,
where they entertained us for over a week.
Somewhere I have a diary of this visit, together with masses of slides. I do remember that we went across the border
to Tihuana in Mexico one day, where I bought a huge heavy glass lampshade for
10 dollars and a kiss. I still have it
– now in a cupboard. It had to be
packed carefully in a large cardboard box and somehow we were allowed to secure
it on an extra seat on the plane back home.
Years later, an American couple visited Glastonbury Galleries and bought
a very large heavy framed and glazed painting from us, declaring that they
would not have any problem getting it back.
They visited us again the following year and told us that it had been
safely secured behind the pilot’s seat
From my diary I see
that I am still doing meals on wheels with Pam Bracher; attending WEA English Classes; taking Julie to Taunton College of Art, Rob
to Plymouth Technical College and Ruth to Sidcot when the autumn term
begins; going out to supper with
friends; attending West Pennard WI
(there was no Women’s Institute in Glastonbury in those days); on top of helping to run the business. John would visit the workrooms at 5A and the
frame making department in the Old Ciderhouse nearly every day and then work at
home. But a couple of times a week he
would be overtaken by migraines – he reckoned he lost each day a week because
of this, poor John. Maybe I have
already said that these continued right up to about 1998 when he had an
angioplasty. It was a small hole in his
heart, perhaps caused by conflict and tension at Morlands 30 years ago, when
Uncle Humphrey Morland was keeping John back in order to make room for his own
son.
In succession from
the early sixties, for the next forty odd years I took my turn as secretary of
the following organisations:-
West Pennard WI
(just mentioned above);
National Federation
of Small Businesses, Wells Branch - I will be coming to that organisation
later;
Glastonbury Chamber
of Commerce - I don’t think this organisation is still alive – we must have
joined when we bought the shop and John became chairman in 1976/7, while I did
a stint as chairman in 1986/87;
Glastonbury in
Bloom - Bill Knight and I started this
in 1982, though we didn’t hold it every year, then Alan Gloak took over a
decade later and built it up to what it is today;
Glastonbury
Conservation Society;
Mid Somerset Camera
Club – I was also chairman for one year only, sometime in the late 90’s
perhaps.
I have thrown away
all the paper records of these organisations, but I must have some more recent
material on this computer which I will investigate when I have the time! In the early days I would have used shorthand,
but I soon forgot how to do this and scribbled instead. Fortunately I have never forgotten how to
touch-type, because I continued to use this facility regularly. Sadly I threw away my old Imperial
typewriter when we moved a couple of years ago. When did we have our first computer? Our son Rob is an IT specialist and I have
an invoice from Watford Electronics Ltd dated 29/5/96 totalling £1,693.19, so
perhaps that is the one.
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