I have reached 1975 and some exciting events are about to
take place. I have been looking at my
office and home diaries for this year which, although they only contain
“appointments”, are useful guides to what happens next.
Ruth is still boarding at Sidcot, while Rob attends Plymouth
Technical College and Julie is at the Somerset College of Art, so there is lots
of going backwards and forwards arranging their visits home in the holidays and
trips to London to stay with John’s parents, Deena and Bry. Everyone – including my in-laws – would have
spent Christmas with us at Schehallion and now on Thursday 2 January I see that
we hire a van from Abbey Garage (which used to occupy the site now Heritage
Court in Magdalene Street) and start moving into the Old Ciderhouse, Back Lane.
Glastonbury Prints now occupies 4 rooms on the first floor
at 5A High Street and we are preparing for the spring trade shows – John and I
are off to the Torquay Gift Fair on Saturday 12 January “after putting Whisky
and Soda into kennels”. Have I
mentioned our naughty beagles before?
As the old Rosetor Hotel was going to be demolished, our group of
exhibitors under the umbrella of Sheriff Textiles has moved to the San Remo
Hotel (see the leaflet which we would have posted to all our customers before
Christmas).
Then on Saturday 1 February we leave for the International
Gifts Fair, Blackpool, where, as before, we occupy a 10 ft square stand on the
top floor of the “Talbot Hall” – the multi-storey car park swathed in
waterproof material and adapted for this purpose. As usual, the weather closes in as we drive
north, but we manage to unload all our boxes of framed prints and carry them up
the very steep and long flight of stairs.
This trade show (together with Torquay) was mainly organised
by Trade Promotion Services (TPS), which was a commercial offshoot from the
Giftware Association. The secretary of
TPS, Harry Polley, had discovered that we were Quakers, and visited our stand,
pouring out his troubles. Apparently
Elkan Symons, who was the President of the Giftware Association, had taken the
bold step – without consulting his membership – of booking the International
Gift Fair next year in the National Exhibition Centre, Birmingham. This was to be the opening event at the NEC,
shared with the Hardware trade, and seemed a reasonable move to us considering
the poor quality of places like the Talbot Hall where, in the loos, the water
condensed off the ceilings and dripped on top of one … and John was so cold he
wore his pyjamas underneath his suit.
But the members were furious.
They loved Blackpool, ;enjoying staying locally in the hotels and
meeting up after the day’s show. They
did not want to move!
During the show we would have met lots of new customers
including the odd export. When were we
first contacted by Monsieur Dumont of Paris?
And our agents will have taken turns in manning the stand as usual,
advising us on whether we should open a new account with a certain shop in
their area, making sure it did not compete with an existing customer. I think I used to try and keep to one outlet
in a town up to about 10,000 population.
We were arranging with a Mr Barnet to appear in his mail order magazine
and at some point we became involved with “Made in Europe”, which included a
complete Glastonbury Prints colour catalogue in their publication and we were
able to buy copies of this insert for our own use (our first one in
colour).
Returning home with lots of orders ahead, I see that we are
also becoming more involved with the National Federation of Self Employed,
attending a meeting in the Johnson Hall, Yeovil on Wednesday 26 February, and
three weeks later we catch a coach to London to participate in a demo regarding
pensions and benefits for the self-employed “attended by 2,000 members” – see p
40 of “The Growth of a Business Pressure Group” published in 1999. I don’t remember any details of this exploit
however.
Probably early in March, walking back via the High Street
and up Bove Town and Wick Hollow for lunch with John, who worked mostly at home
producing new pictures for the range, while I would spend the day squeezed into
our tiny office, which I shared with Tony and Vera Osmond, I noticed that sale
boards had gone up outside the former Boots the chemist property. Number 10 had been empty for a couple of
years after Boots had moved to Street.
We had been looking vaguely for somewhere else in which to house the workshops
and office presently occupying four rooms on the first floor at 5A. We had
even gone round Dr Boyd’s former house, 43 High Street (now Becketts Inn). In order to obtain planning permission to
manufacture goods in the High Street, one had to have a shop selling what was
made. I felt that tourists would not make it up so far beyond St John’s Church,
although the property had an attractive frontage which could have been
developed as a retail outlet, together with a building in the garden which
would have housed the workshops.
Anyway, I burst into our house after panting up Wick Hollow
and the first words I spoke were: “Number 10 is up for sale”. Things moved very fast after that. On Friday 21 March at 4 o’clock we look round
the property with local architect Alan Tilsley. We must have visited our Nat West Bank
manager, Mr. Bonner and arranged a loan for the purchase price. Palmer & Snell were in charge of the
sale which was to be a “closed bid”, which we had never come across before. So with some trepidation we presented Roy
Simpson with an envelope containing our bid of £12,500; Roy took it with a smile, saying “I think it
feels warm”.
As you will see from the enclosed sale particulars, (Palmer,
Snell & Co) the property comprised over 3,000 square feet, with
three floors fronting the high street and two floors reaching back to the Abbey
wall and abutting the Assembly Rooms.
There was a “flying freehold” over the entrance to the alleyway from the
pavement; a right of way over the
alleyway (which was owned by the Abbey Trustees as this had been one of the
entrances to the Abbey through the
whalebone arch after the Abbey was purchased by the Diocese in 1907, until the
gate was closed in the early 50’s), and another “flying freehold”. Boots had bought the property from Barrett
Brothers in 1939 and had only occupied the ground floor front shop; the stock room, now occupied by the Pilgrim
Centre; and perhaps they used the adjoining back room as
storage (we expanded this shop area in the 80’s); I think they must have used part of the first
floor above the shop as their rest room.
The downstairs lavatory, which opened out of the stock room, had been
created from an old air raid shelter (and has now been changed into a tiny walled yard).
The rest of the building was pretty well in ruins; there was a hole in the roof of the second
floor over the alleyway and the rain had caused another hole in the floor of
the room below. The rear of the property
had been virtually boarded up since the end of the war. Some American solders had been billeted in
Glastonbury in 1944 before “D-Day” and had used the Assembly Rooms and the back
of Number 10 – there was a connecting door between the two properties – for
their leisure facilities. There were
tanks painted on the wall of the Billiard Room and “Troop Office – keep out”
was just visible under the paint on a door leading to a tiny passage of a room.
The building was a labyrinth on different levels with
unexpected staircases, wavy corridors (I used to call the main one on the first
floor leading to the billiard room
“the sandy passage” after Beatrix Potter), uneven floors, steps,
peculiar attics, and one of the back rooms housed a set of gents urinals left
over from the war. (see the valuation
dated 10 October 1975 listing all the rooms).
Planning blight presently affected the last third of the
property, together with the Assembly Rooms and the rear of all the buildings
from Hanover Square, because the County Council proposed to extend Silver
Street (plan herewith, produced by the County Surveyor, Taunton, April
1975).
This of course was the
reason for the low valuation. We
decided, with the aid of our builder Don Cribb, to put the roof in order,
decorate the front, renovate the shop and leave the blighted bit alone. However, planning blight may have been
lifted soon after we acquired Number 10 because on Tuesday 12 August we are
shown round the Assembly Rooms by Mr. Boggan from Somerset County Council, with
the offer to purchase that property for £500.
We did seriously consider this for our framing workshop
instead of the Old Ciderhouse, but following a rather poor survey we withdrew
and a group of townspeople stepped in and set up the Assembly Rooms Trust – see
Bruce Garrard’s book “Free State”, launched on 6 June 2014. However, we must have prevaricated over this
for the next year or so because John used to go through the connecting door in
the billiard room and practise setting up our trade stands in this space. It must have been when we were preparing for
Harrogate Gift Fair one evening in 1976, when I was upstairs in the offices on
the top floor at the front of the building and at about 8 o’clock I felt a
shiver down my spine. Something strange
had happened to John. I should have
gone to investigate. An hour or so
later he climbed the stairs and announced: “I was nearly killed by a huge piece
of ceiling plaster – I could feel the wind as it whistled past my
shoulder.” We were told later that the
ceiling was indeed unsafe.
Planning permission for retail shop with workshops above was
lodged with Mendip District Council on 2 May and in September we were granted
“change of use of vacant shop to craft workshop and picture gallery”. On June 3rd Mr. Henzel Thomas of
CoSIRA (Council for Small Industries in Rural Areas) came and had a look (we
later took out a mortgage with that organisation, see below). Completion of the conveyance of the property
is dated 4 July. The summer was full of
high hopes and excitement. The builders
did a marvellous job, while Eric Wilkins and his father fitted out the
shop. Don Cribb’s men found a charming
love letter under the floorboards upstairs where some of the Americans might
have been billeted just before D-Day; it
is dated May 1944 from “Ruby”, Fort Laramie.
(see the copy which I produced as
a card some years later). We framed the original letter, unfortunately
sticking it to the backing board as we didn’t understand about archival storage
in those days, and a few years ago I gave it to the Rural Life Museum.
In between all these events we are attending more NFSE
meetings, and visit Mr Judd, manager of Fred Keetch’s framing workshop in
Taunton. Later when the shop opened, we
used to farm out our bespoke picture framing service to them, as we only mass
produced a limited range of frames and mounts for Glastonbury Prints in the Old
Ciderhouse. We also visit our
accountant at Woking again and I advertise in the Gazette for a “shop
assistant”.
John goes down to Bigwood & Staple and Bridgwater, who
are printing a new range of pictures, and then on Saturday 19 July we are off
to Harrogate Gift Fair. My note says
that we have 32 ft of wall space in the passage at the Crown Hotel. We found this a very good position as buyers
visiting more prestigious companies like Denby, who were in the room towards
the end, had to go past us on their way.
No sooner than we have returned from Harrogate Gift Fair on
the following Friday, we have to pack our things for a fortnight’s holiday,
leaving on Saturday 26 July, when it would take us 12 hours to drive 500 miles
to Strontian including queuing for 2 hours for the Ballachuilish Ferry. Glastonbury Prints would be closed too for
what was known locally as the “factory fortnight”. We observed Morlands and Clarks holidays as
some of our staff had family members who worked for those companies and it made
everything easier.
These are some of the expenses and renovations which took
place during the next few months:
Don Cribb & Co Ltd,(builders), 46a Northload Street,
Glastonbury £5,000
Timber Decay Treatment, Farmborough, Nr Bath
606
Eric Wilkins, (shop display), 96 Main Street, Walton
1,330
David Fear (electrical contractors), Bristol
2,364
J. Barker & Son (plumber), 27 Northload Street,
Glastonbury 1,963
JTS Alarms, Bristol
418
K. Bancroft (carpets), 14 Benedict Street, Glastonbury 259
Paul, signwriters
23
Benches, shelves & fitments for workroom, inc.
labour
824
Painting & decorating – undertaken by our own women
employees
and including 570
hours labour @ £1 hour
775
Total recorded expenses
£13,562
In addition of course one needs to add the ridiculously low
purchase cost of £12,500 (because of
planning blight and the poor condition of the remaining building), and legal
expenses etc. I think our CoSIRA
mortgage was probably around £30,000.
(before and after photos of Number 10)
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