Memory boxes
Are you too young to go grey? Well Cambridge chemist EH Leigh had just the solution to that problem in the mid-1930s.
The product he recommended, to those who valued their looks, was Van-Grey.
According to Leigh’s advertising it was ‘positively not a dye or stain’, which rather begs the question as to how it could ‘grow the natural colour and lustre back into your hair’.
At the same time as Leigh was offering hope to those with ageing hair, he was erecting a new shop in Cambridge’s Victoria Street. It’s a narrow building with prominent first floor fac¸ ade bearing both of the name of the business and a wonderful plaster motif that depicts the tools of the chemist’s trade. A mortar and pestle are positioned forward of a bent ‘pipe’ that seems to be delivering a liquid into a small vessel.
The latter could be the bowl of Hygieia, in which case the ‘pipe’ shape might be a reference to the snake which is the other element of the Greek goddess’s symbol.
The building dates to 1937. It was designed by Leigh’s son George and built by Hamilton builder DI Gate.
At the time it was completed the small pharmacy was compared, in its style and quality fittings, to the new buildings that had been built in Napier since the 1931 earthquake.
George Leigh (1911-91) was working for the firm of Edgecumbe and White when he designed his father’s new premises; 1937 was also the year in which he registered as an architect.
Leigh was later to become a partner in the firm.
As Leigh, de Lisle and Fraser the practice designed the Founders’ Memorial Theatre in
1961.
In the mid-1930s EH Leigh had a chiropodist and practipedist on staff by the name of LW Gibbs.
Neither my New Oxford dictionary nor Google can enlighten me as to what a ‘practipedist’ was but I’m guessing we’d describe Mr Gibbs as a podiatrist today.
The pharmacy was also a Kodak dealer and housed an optician’s consulting room on the first floor.
Edward Henry Leigh died at the age of 102 in 1983 and is buried in the Hautapu Cemetery just north of Cambridge.
One can only imagine the changes he observed in pharmacy over such a long life.
He had passed the Pharmacy Board exams in botany and pharmacy in November 1900, and worked in Woodville, Hastings and Whangarei before taking over HL Possenniskie’s business in Cambridge in January 1934.
It is one of the delights of Cambridge’s main street that Leigh’s name and profession are still part of the town’s urban record.