Working in partnership helps county companies to thrive
» SOME of the best known companies in the county’s commercial past have been partnerships.
One that will be remembered by many in Cheltenham is Shirer and Lance. The department store closed in 1979, but the origins of the business went back to the 1830s when two employees of Cavendish House, Alexander Shirer and Donald Mcdougall, set up on their own in the drapery business, trading under the name of Shirer and Sons.
A few years later they joined forces with another Cheltenham retailer and adopted the name Shirer and Haddon with a shop in the Prom and a furniture showroom in Clarence Street. An eclectic range of goods and services was offered, as an advert from the time tells us.
They’d decorate your house, furnish it, make you a mantle or habit (was there really much demand) and arrange your funeral when the time came.
In 1837 Shirer and Haddon merged with a competitor called John Lance and Company. The business name changed to Shirer and Lance’s, once again providing employment for local sign writers.
The department store occupied most of the block at the High Street end of the Promenade that’s now home to Lakeland, Slater Menswear, a sushi restaurant, a corporate coffee shop and sundry other retail emporia.
During the Second World War Cheltenham’s air raid warning siren was located on the roof of Shirer and Lance’s and remained in use long after 1945 as the means by which the town’s part-time firemen were called to action when emergency demanded.
Shirer and Lance’s four storey, brick built furniture store in Clarence Street, was sold in 1974 and demolished to make way for what was then the Cheltenham and Gloucester Building Society’s headquarters.
A Gloucester partnership that was a city institution within living memory was Fielding and Platt. The engineering firm was founded by Samuel Fielding and James Platt, who in the 1860s acquired the Atlas Ironworks, High Orchard, Southgate Street where they made hydraulic machine tools and gas engines.
It was an inventive enterprise and the range of products, some of which were patented by the company, ventured into various market sectors. In 1871 they produced the world’s first portable hydraulic riveter and a few years later designed and made the first hydraulic press.
Working in tandem with the Worcester engineering concern Heenan and Froude, Fielding and Platt built Blackpool Tower. They manufactured the first commercially available vacuum cleaners to a design by the Gloucester inventor Hugh Cecil Booth and in the Second World War Churchill tanks rolled off the production line at the Southgate Street works.
Fielding and Platt was the first Gloucester company to build a sea going steam ship. The year was 1868, the vessel was the SS Sabrina and she was fitted out in luxurious style by the Gloucester Railway Carriage and Wagon Company.
Sabrina was commissioned by the directors of the newly-formed Gloucester and Berkeley Ship Canal Company and remained in their service for 72 years until sold to Mr Carl Kempson of Cheltenham in 1942 who moored her at Apperley.
After a spell as a houseboat in the 1970s, Sabrina was restored.
Today she is listed on the National Historic Ships Register and can be seen on the Thames around Henley, which is her present home.
Fielding and Platt was taken over by Heenan and Froude, then again by a company named Motherwell Bridge and in the year 2000 was relocated to Leeds.
A Tewkesbury partnership that is rarely recalled today was Owen and Uglow. That’s a shame, because they invented the everlasting sock.
Tewkesbury was once the third largest manufacturer of cotton socks in the country after Nottingham and Warwick.
In 1825 a cotton lace factory in East Street (the building is still there by the way, now flats) was opened and thrived for thirty years until the owner retired.
The building was then acquired by Messrs Owen and Uglow who’d come up with an idea that in sock terms was revolutionary. The name over the door of their new enterprise read “The Patent Renewable Hosiery Co.” and it struck fear and tremble into the hearts of hose makers elsewhere.
The ground breaking invention comprised a sock with a replaceable heel. When the heel of your sock wore through, as sock heels do, you somehow (the method is not recorded unfortunately) attached a new heel and put your best foot forward with a spring in your step, joyful in the knowledge that having to fork out on a new pair of socks had been avoided.
Sad to report though it is, Owen and Uglow went bankrupt. Their socks had overstretched them. Undaunted, the dynamic duo came back with another invention. The seamless shirt.
Did this assure their fortunes? Take a look at the shirt you’re wearing. Has it got seams? There’s your answer.