What can I find out about the company my father worked for?
QMy father, Ernest Aylott (b1893 in Dulwich East), started work as an errand boy for the grocery chain WH Cullen’s, and worked his way up to manager. Prior to his marriage, he managed branches at Putney and Richmond, and was relief manager for many south coast shops, including Poole and Bournemouth. When he was about to marry in 1931, he became permanent manager of the branch at 67 Church Street, Kensington, and moved to a flat at 75 Church Street. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he moved to the relative safety of Hertfordshire with his wife and two children, and worked at WH Cullen’s at Rickmansworth. He died at Croxley Green in 1943.
However, I’ve not been able to find a single thing about WH Cullen’s – it’s as if the chain never existed. Sylvia Pitcher
ACullen’s hasn’t quite been wiped off the face of the Earth, but it’s certainly true that there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of information available.
However, through a general Google search, I found an article in the archive of the magazine The Commercial Motor ( bit.ly/ CommercialMotor) containing photographs of two of Cullen’s fleet of 24 vans. The company had 145 branches by 1950, mostly in London, but also in Bognor, Bournemouth, Brighton, Luton, Southend and Worthing.
I also found a photograph of Cullen’s Lewisham store, from c1897. If you search Collage: The London Picture Archive ( collage. cityoflondon.gov.uk), you can find more photographs of Cullen’s shops, although I had to specify ‘Kensington Church Street’ to find a 1975 photo of the store your father managed.
The British Newspaper Archive ( british newspaper archive.co.uk) contains several advertisements for WH Cullen’s. The Pall Mall Gazette of 25 April 1912, for example, advertises a clearance sale of “tea, coffee, cocoa, sugar, rice, jams and sundry goods” with example prices and lists the company’s 100 shops.
Cullen’s branches are also in Ancestry’s collection ‘British Phone Books, 1880–1984’ ( bit. ly/anc-phone-books), with more than 60 in the London telephone directory for 1967.
More generally, The National Archives has created a free online research guide to businesses whose records are held at TNA ( bit.ly/tna-companies). There is also a research guide to company records in other repositories ( bit. ly/tna-companies-elsewhere), including those at Companies House, with website links.
Alan Stewart