Looking back at Owen Owen

THERE was a definite feel of Are You Being Served? about Coventry’s old Owen Owen store which sold everything from high fashion to hardware and haberdashery for more than 50 years.

The television sit-com from the 1970s had more than a few echoes of life in the four-floor department store owned by Duncan Norman and his son “Mr John.”

And yes, there had originally been a Mr Owen Owen - he was a Welshman whose daughter had married into the Norman family from Liverpool.

Despite being part of a small chain, local people became fond of the up-market store.

Not least because the first Owen Owen, on the corner of the Burges and Trinity Street, had been bombed along with the rest of the city centre during the 1940 Coventry Blitz.

That first shop offered housewives of the 1930s the unique opportunity of buying everything they wanted all under one roof.

Back in 1937 that was a whole new shopping experience. But not one destined to last.

The store had only been open for two years when the Second World War started in 1939. A year later it became an empty smoking shell with outside walls intact, but the roof blasted away.

The replacement store, which officially opened amid huge excitement on October 1, 1954, was just a few yards up the road, in Broadgate.

The new manager was a woman, a Miss Pinnock, who presided over 400 staff working in 100 departments from the basement brooms and buckets to the glories of jewellery, perfume, bedding and baby linen. Then there were the 12 assistants just to serve ladies stockings.