The Jewel of Knightsbridge E-Book

Robin Harrod

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 415

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

In 1836, Charles Henry Harrod found himself in a prison hulk awaiting transportation to Tasmania for seven years' hard labour. He had been convicted at the Old Bailey of receiving stolen goods, and this should have been the beginning of the end for his fledgling business and his family. And yet, in miraculously escaping his fate and vowing to turn his back on crime, he would become the much esteemed founder of the now legendary Harrods in London's fashionable Knightsbridge district. Some years later Charles was succeeded by his son, who brought with him the necessary energy and drive to take the shop from a successful local grocer's to a remarkable and complex department store, patronised by the wealthy and famous. Robin Harrod's fascinating family story reveals the previously unknown origins of the store, and follows its remarkable fortunes through family scandal, the devastating fire of 1883 and its subsequent rise from the ashes, to the end of the nineteenth century when its shares were floated on the stock exchange, thus completing one of the most extraordinary comeback stories in the history of commerce.

Leseprobe

Cover illustration: Harrods store. (Gibson Blanc/Alamy)

First published 2017

This paperback edition first published 2025

The History Press

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© Robin Harrod, 2017, 2025

The right of Robin Harrod to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

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ISBN 978 0 75098 194 1

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CONTENTS

Introduction

1 In the Beginning, there was a Draper

2 Out of Essex: The Origin of the Harrod Family

3 The First Grocery

4 The Move to Kensington

5 Charles Digby Takes Over

6 Out of the Ashes

7 Harrods Goes Public

8 Retirement

9 Charles Digby’s Family

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION

‘Harrods of London’, ‘Harrods of Knightsbridge’ or just plain ‘Harrods’ are all names that are used for the famous London store and are recognised instantly worldwide. The shop is an institution. Although it’s always described as being on Knightsbridge, the splendid seven-storey building with its Edwardian terracotta facade is actually situated on the Brompton Road. Even in the early part of the twentieth century, any post addressed to ‘Harrods, England’ would be safely delivered. The store was by then so confident of its place in the world that it used the telegraphic address, ‘Everything, London’, and adopted the motto, Omnia, Omnibus, Ubique, meaning ‘Everything for Everybody, Everywhere’.

Some facts about the store will illustrate the enormity of the place:

The main building has about 1 million sq.ft of sales floor, with more again being allocated to offices, staff areas and stockrooms. In addition, Harrods also uses other buildings in the immediate area. As a comparison, Selfridges is just over half that size.

At night the facade of Harrods is lit up with 12,000 light bulbs, several hundred of which need replacing each day.

The baroque dome at the highest point contains a water storage tank, filled from its own source. Harrods, in common with several other well-known London institutions, has its own water supply, derived from artesian wells that were sunk under the building many years ago. There are three wells, and one is nearly 500ft deep.

The store makes more money per square foot than any other store in the world and attracts 15 million customers a year.

Until 2014, there was a model of the store on display in the shop in the form of a silver cigar box, which dated back to 1927. This was the result of a wager 100 years ago regarding the turnover of the shop. In 1917 Harry Selfridge made a bet with Richard Burbidge, the managing director of Harrods at the time, that Selfridges would overtake Harrods in annual returns within six years of the declaration of peace at the end of the First World War. The prize was to be a model of the loser’s shop. By 1927 Harry Selfridge admitted defeat and agreed to change the model to one of Harrods. The model was crafted in Harrods’ own workshops in Trevor Square, representing the store in that year, and the £400 bill was sent to Selfridge. Despite the loss, good relations between the two individuals and their shops were maintained. For many years, the model graced first Sir Richard’s and then his son’s desk.

A Burbidge descendant brought me up to date recently about the model. Some years ago Al Fayed offered to buy the model which was on loan to Harrods, but was refused. Subsequently, the family sold it at auction through Christie’s for £85,000.

The research that has formed the basis for this history of the early days of Harrods revealed that the founding Mr Harrod, Charles Henry Harrod, actually started trading in 1824, a decade earlier than previously thought, at premises on the south side of the Thames. The first shop was not, however, a grocery business; the grocery store was started in the 1830s and moved to the present site twenty years later. The first version of a Harrod’s grocery shop, in the East End of London, was a truly humble affair, and the next shop, now sited on the Brompton Road, started life as a simple one-storey shop with the living accommodation attached behind.

The success and growth of Harrod’s grocery business was kick-started by tea. Events in China during the 1830s, and later in Assam, were the driving force behind the growth in the tea trade in Britain. Until 1833, the East India Company had held a monopoly over the trade in China tea and had ignored the native tea produced in the northern part of India. When the monopoly was removed in that year, there was an explosion of wholesale tea dealers, and then retailers, in London. Tea plants were imported from China to India and production of the Assam black tea continued to grow. Harrod and many others took advantage of the new prospects the trade offered.

Once the shop had moved to Brompton Road, it grew organically on the same site, gradually acquiring the historic features which have epitomised its image over the last 100 years. Members of the Harrod family remained in charge of the business until 1891, when it was sold and a limited company was formed. The rate of expansion continued at a pace after the change of ownership.

The last part of the present rectangular site was finally acquired in 1911, and the splendid building has occupied the same footprint since that year. Almost all the improvements and innovations to the store that followed were either in a vertical direction or were internal changes. The Brompton Road aspect was faced with Doulton terracotta tiles, and the lavish interiors, also decorated with Doulton tiles, were the work of the designer Frederick Sage.

The year 1911 was a momentous one for the store, and for the country, for it was the year that saw the coronation of King George V. Harrods: The Store and the Legend, a book written by Tim Dale in 1981, states that in 1911:

A souvenir brochure printed by the store at that time starts, ‘His Most Gracious Majesty’s memorable words, “Wake up England” have not been forgotten by his people, and Harrods today presents a striking example of what can be done by British Capital and British Labour combined with British Enterprise.’ Stirring words indeed.

How did a small local grocery shop that started 185 years ago grow into the successful department store that now dominates the Brompton Road in London? The chapters that follow will answer the question.

Harrods has certainly been very successful, but it has never claimed to be the oldest department store in Britain. Which store can claim that accolade depends on how one defines a department store – and there are several candidates. The list is not confined to London, and some provincial stores that started trading in the eighteenth century can probably be included in the genre, and were certainly in existence before Harrods. One of them, Bennett’s, on Irongate in Derby, which was founded in 1734, exists to this day, 291 years later. Although it was threatened by the nearby Westfield Centre a few years ago, the store continues today as an Ironmonger.

Several other London stores claim their origins in the 1830s, but Fortnum & Mason probably lays claim to be the oldest; they have been on the same site since 1707. However, they have never diversified into the full complement of departments which many would consider needed to be included as a ‘department store’. Selfridges, the second largest store in the UK, did not open until 1909.

Harrods have frequently led the trade in innovative retailing. It was the first store to take out a full-page advertisement in the Times, and the first store to boast a ‘moving stair’, a primitive form of escalator which was presented to an interested but mistrustful public in 1898.

The present store still boasts the green and gold liveried doormen and the green-and-gold-painted delivery vans that were introduced decades ago. The original vans were of course horse-drawn, and the mechanised vans which followed were well in advance of what we now think of as part of our modern eco-sensitive era. The first electric Harrods van, running on solid tyres, was in use in 1919, and between 1936 and 1939 Harrods built a fleet of sixty such vans.

The ownership of Harrods has often been a subject of speculation during the last sixty years or so. After decades of ownership by the Harrod family, my great-grandfather sold the store in 1889, and it was floated as a limited liability company.

The Burbidge family, father Richard, then son, Woodman, and finally grandson, Richard, ran the store for many years and introduced some dramatic and groundbreaking innovations during their tenure. They continued the tradition of my ancestors by putting the customer first, and concentrating on the quality of the goods and service. In the 1920s Woodman Burbidge began to build a Harrods empire, acquiring other London shops, including Dickens & Jones and Swan & Edgar. Further stores were added after the Second World War.

A takeover battle took place in 1959 involving Debenhams, House of Fraser and United Drapery Stores, and eventually Harrods became part of the House of Fraser Group.

In the late 1970s Lonrho acquired a substantial holding and then in 1985 the Investment and Trust Company owned by Mohamed Al-Fayed took over the store. Thought by many to be ‘over the top’, and too ‘show-business’, Al Fayed was a natural shopkeeper. He started life as a stallholder in his home town of Alexandria and he had great attention to detail. During his years in charge the shop grew into a tourist attraction as much as a luxury store.

Al Fayed was in control until May 2010 when Harrods was sold to Qatar Holdings, the sovereign wealth fund of the State of Qatar. Harrods remains in their hands to date. Al Fayed died in 2023 and has subsequently fallen from grace after numerous allegations of misconduct.

So, after many years of involvement with other stores as part of a group, Harrods now stands alone, but boasts Air Harrod, Harrods Aviation, and Harrods Estates as parts of the business. Harrods Bank ran until 2018 when it was sold to Tandem.

Although to the local inhabitants of the area, now mostly very well-heeled, Harrods is still their local grocery store. However, the shop has become progressively more upmarket in the last few decades and appeals particularly to those foreign visitors to London from the United States, the Far East, Russia and the Arabian Peninsula. It is an iconic showcase for luxury goods as well as an attraction in its own right.

My interest in the store and the Harrod family began in 1986 when my 11-year-old daughter came home from school, asking if my wife and I could help to fill in a family history tree that she had been studying in class. I was in trouble with the family tree. My mother had died earlier that year and my father had died some years before. I knew a limited amount about my mother’s family but nothing about my father’s. He had been an orphan and had ‘changed hands’ several times during his early life. He had always had strong views regarding his birth family, saying, ‘If they didn’t want me, I don’t want them.’

So, although my brothers and I had speculated whether we might be related to the Harrods family, we did not know anything, and in any case had respected his wishes and not pursued any investigation during his lifetime. Our speculations were fuelled by one of the few facts known by my father – that he had been born in a nursing home in Kensington, not very far from the Brompton Road.

Until I started my research, my family in East Yorkshire and I had been blissfully unaware that we actually had anything to do with Harrods apart from sharing the name. My story of discovery is documented elsewhere, but to cut a very long story short, I subsequently found that I was the great-great-grandson of the founder, Charles Henry Harrod. By a quirk of fate, my brothers and I were the only direct descendants of both the founder and his son to have retained the surname ‘Harrod’.

What followed for me was forty years of research into the Harrod family and its ramifications, and this has inevitably led me into the story of the early history of the store. I have been well supported in my research by other living members of my newly found family and in the past by successive Archivists at Harrods. The family have given me photographs and stories of my ancestors, and the Archivists were very helpful allowing access to their records and images. I could not have completed this book without their help and I acknowledge their contribution here, rather than repeatedly with each individual piece of information or document used.

So, how did this magnificent institution begin and develop into what it is today? I hope to answer here most of the why, when and how questions you might ask about its origins.

1

IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WAS A DRAPER

In 1824 Charles Henry Harrod, later to become a giant of the grocery business, was a single man of 25 and of no great consequence. He was living in Southwark. Though referred to here as Charles Henry, to differentiate him from his son, Charles Digby, certainly at times he was known as Henry or Henry Charles.

Contrary to what has previously been documented in various descriptions of Harrods, his first shop was not a grocery shop. In his books about Harrods, Tim Dale points out that there are many articles about Harrods which state that it was the only large London store not to have started life as a draper’s, but as a grocer’s shop. British History Online, for instance, states, ‘Harrods is untypical of the great London department stores in having risen not from a drapery or general goods business but from a grocer’s shop.’ These statements have proved to be incorrect and Harrods was not especially thrilled to hear the news when this was discovered.

Charles Henry started renting premises at 228 Borough High Street, Southwark, in the April of 1824. The rate records and the Surrey land tax records for the parish of St George the Martyr, Southwark, list him there in every quarter until 1831 but give no indication of his occupation.

Southwark, the district south of London Bridge, has been populated since the Roman era. For most of that time the only crossing of the Thames had been London Bridge and its precursors. The area of London south of the Thames grew much more slowly than the rest of the city. The growth was limited by a lack of additional bridges across the river and the relatively marshy ground. Following the opening of Westminster Bridge in 1750 and then Blackfriars Bridge in 1769, the area blossomed. In 1800 the population of Southwark was about 66,000, only about 7 per cent of the city as a whole, and then between 1801 and 1851 the population nearly doubled.

Southwark and its high street, known as Borough High Street, were full of craftsmen and shopkeepers. There were a disproportionately large number of inns, partly due to the proximity of the riverside and its trade, but more particularly because of the presence of a thriving local brewing industry. Several prisons were also located here, including the King’s Bench Prison and the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison. The Marshalsea, featured in Dickens’ novels, had been founded in the 1300s and had been rebuilt in the early 1800s. Best known as a debtors’ prison, it also housed those convicted of subversion, sailors who had mutinied and those accused of piracy. It closed in 1842.

The brewing connection with the district came about because until 1750 the High Street and London Bridge was the sole route for all the hop trade traffic from Kent, Surrey and Sussex. The proprietors of the coaching inns thrived on the trade and became very affluent. The medieval pilgrimage route to and from Canterbury and the route from the hop fields of Kent lay through Borough High Street. Warehouses for the hops, managed by brokers called hop factors, were built together with showrooms for the goods. Breweries followed in the same area. The two main breweries in Southwark were, rather oddly, both called the Anchor Brewery. One eventually became the Courage Brewery, and the other, much older, eventually merged with Courage in 1955.

Many of the warehouses and breweries were destroyed by bombing in the Second World War and the industry then moved to Paddocks Wood, near Tunbridge Wells in Kent. (Coincidentally, one of my uncles managed a hop farm in Paddock Wood for about ten years in the 1950s.)

Charles Harrod may have frequented the inns, though this is doubtful as he is known in later life to have been teetotal. He certainly did not get involved in the brewing industry. The first records listing Charles’s occupation are in the London street directories held at Southwark Local Studies Library and now available partially online. In the Pigot & Co. Directory for 1826 and 1827, the entry for 228 High Street, Borough, lists ‘Harrod & Wicking, Linen Drapers, retail’. The next listing is in the 1829 Post Office Directory, which shows Charles Harrod working on his own at the same address as ‘Harrod C.H., Mercer & Haberdasher’.

The Wicking connection in 1826 and 1827 was obviously a transient one, as there is no mention of him at the same address again. In Pigot’s 1839 Directory, there is a Matthew Wicking who was a ‘Linen Draper and Silk Mercer’ at 9 Ludgate Hill, just west of St Paul’s Cathedral. To muddy the water further, the 1846 Post Office Directory lists a James Wicking at the Half Moon Public House, 132 Borough High Street – that would be real diversification!

Contact with a living descendant of the Wicking family who was doing his own family research confirmed the presence of his family in Southwark, but no further details were available and no obvious connection was known to the Harrod family. Further confirmation of the transient relationship between Harrod and Wicking was found when an online version of the London Gazette was searched. Issue 18210, published on 10 January 1826, page 57, contained the following announcement:

Notice is hereby given, that the Partnership which subsisted between the undersigned, William Wicking and Charles Henry Harrod, in the business of Linen-Drapers, at No. 228, High Street, Southwark, was dissolved by mutual consent on 31 December last; and that the business will in future be carried on by the said Charles Henry Harrod only, by whom all debts due to and from the late firm are to be received and paid – Witness their hands this 3rd day of January 1826.

Charles Henry Harrod

William Wicking

What a relief; ‘Harrod and Wicking’s of Knightsbridge’ just does not sound as good as ‘Harrods’!

The records reveal that Charles Harrod continued as the ratepayer and tenant at 228 High Street from 1824 until 1831. He was listed in Robson’s 1832 Directory at the same address, and in other directories prior to that variously as ‘Harrod, Draper’, ‘Harrod. C.H., Mercer & Haberdasher’, and ‘C.H. Harrod, Haberdasher’.

My conclusion at the time of that research was that Charles Harrod had started in business in 1824 and then taken Wicking into partnership for a couple of years. When things did not work out, for whatever reason, he had continued once again on his own until 1831. Further research, however, revealed different information. Sometimes in retrospect, it is perhaps a bad idea to continue researching the same subject repeatedly.

William Wicking was almost certainly born in Surrey. The Wicking family were based in Crowhurst in Surrey which, although just south of the M25 near Oxted, was still in the diocese of Southwark. There are two likely ‘William’ candidates in the records, one baptised in 1801 and the other in 1802. The two may have been cousins.

Prior to the 1826 partnership with Charles Harrod, a different combination was listed in the 1822 Pigot’s Street Directory at 228 High Street. ‘Gainsford & Wicking, Linen Drapers, Retail’ were the residents that year and also in 1825–26. They had another business at 119 King Street in 1821, and at Mermaid Court in 1831, both called ‘Gainsford & Wicking, Linen Drapers’. King Street and Mermaid Court were almost opposite 228 High Street. An entry in British History Online mentions the partnership:

The old Marshalsea site was sold to Samuel Davis, cooper, in 1802, but the prisoners were not removed until 1811. No. 119 [now 163] Borough High Street, and the building over the entrance to Mermaid Court were acquired about 1824 by a firm of wholesale drapers, Gainsford and Wicking, who erected a five-storey building with a double-fronted shop there.

So it looks as though the Harrod story in Southwark was a little more complicated than I had originally thought. William Wicking, or at least someone in his family, was already running a business at the same premises before Charles Harrod became the rate payer. Harrod took over the rent in 1824 despite not being involved in the partnership until 1826. ‘Gainsford & Wicking’ appear to have built their own premises across the road so were obviously not short of funds.

There is no obvious way to explain these confusing facts. Perhaps ‘Gainsford & Wicking’ involved one member of the Wicking family and a different member of the family set up with Harrod for those two years. That Harrod was responsible for the rent from 1824 onwards suggests that he must have had some money to invest in the existing business, which cannot be confirmed. It is possible the dates are blurred by the delay inevitable in reporting changes of ownership and then a new printing of a directory.

It is also possible that Harrod and Wicking just fell out. However, outside events may also have influenced the changes in partnerships. The competition between mercers could have forced closures of shops and realignments in their ownership. Checking the listed shops in Borough High Street for 1838 shows that there were no fewer than eleven silk or linen mercers in the same road, so competition was strong. Further evidence for this is another entry in Pigot’s 1839 London Directory for ‘Gainsford & Gaude’ at 119 High Street – yet another combination.

Another factor which might be of some importance is that in 1825 there was a financial crash, something which may sound very familiar to present-day readers. After the austerity years of the Napoleonic Wars, which ended in 1815, a few months after the Battle of Waterloo Britain was ready to change direction but was left with large debts. The National Debt was 200 per cent, twice the country’s GDP. Compared this with today’s, which is just above 80 per cent.

The state of industrialisation and low cost of the workforce meant that the country was in a good position to reverse the problem, and in a wave of overenthusiasm there had been a huge investment by British individuals and banks in overseas ventures and trade. The almost inevitable result was called ‘the Panic of 1825’.

The stock market crash started in the Bank of England following the collapse of speculative investments in Latin America. The crisis was felt most in England, where it resulted in the closing of six London banks and sixty country banks – about 10 per cent of the total. Inaction by the Bank of England led to delay and backlogs, and was followed by widespread bankruptcies, recession and unemployment. Documents about Charles Harrod written several years later report that he ‘was ruined by the mercantile Panic of 1825’, having been a ‘respectable and responsible tradesman’.

Although the financial crash might have been a problem in his life, Harrod was obviously not completely ruined. He continued the business on his own at 228 High Street and, between 1827 and 1831 or 1832, both there and at another premises in the area at Maidstone Buildings, a cul-de-sac next door to No. 228.

Despite that report, Charles Henry must have turned things around or been rescued, as he was confident enough about his future to get married. On 18 February 1830, a year before he moved away from the Southwark area, Charles Henry Harrod married Elizabeth Digby in the parish church of Birch in Essex. A special licence was required from Lambeth Palace as Elizabeth was under 21 years old. There is some confusion about her birthdate but Elizabeth was born around 1810 and so she was probably 19 years old.

The licence was dated 15 February in the same year, and stated, ‘Appeared Personally, Charles Henry Harrod of the Parish of St George Southwark in the County of Surrey a Bachelor aged twenty one years and upwards.’ Charles Henry swore an oath that the consent of Elizabeth’s father, James Digby, had been obtained. The witnesses at the wedding were William Digby and James Digby Junior, who were the eldest two of Elizabeth’s brothers; Mary Bateman, who is not known; and Eliza Mason, originally thought to be a relation from Charles’s mother’s family. However, more recently, research has unearthed a previously unknown sister to Charles Henry, named Eliza. It is a distinct possibility, which we will see later, that she had been adopted by the Mason family after her parents’ deaths.

Elizabeth Digby was the eldest daughter of James Digby Senior, a successful Essex pork butcher and miller. The Digby connection may have been the source of some financial support for Charles. The Digby family were for many generations butchers, millers, farmers or agricultural workers in and around Birch, a couple of miles south of Colchester, and certainly, for a while, were quite an affluent lot, owning mills and land locally. We shall hear more about the Digbys later.

Maidstone Buildings, Harrod’s second property in the area, was also found in the rate records, but proved to be in the parish of St Saviour’s, Southwark, whereas 228 High Street was in the parish of St George the Martyr. Tallis’s brilliant drawings and maps of early nineteenth-century London (1838–40), and Horwood’s map of Southwark, updated in 1813, show that although Maidstone Buildings and 228 High Street are in different parishes, Maidstone Buildings is a mews street off the west side of Borough High Street, the entrance being under an archway on the building listed as No. 231, next door to No. 228. The boundary between St George and St Saviour’s falls, remarkably, exactly between the two buildings.

The Tallis drawings are well worth a look for anyone interested in the London of the early nineteenth century. They show in some detail the facades of the buildings, their relationship with other buildings and the side streets, and list the ownership. The Tallis drawings also show the ‘Gainsford & Wicking’ premises at 119 High Street, almost opposite 228 and next to King Street and Mermaid Court.

The numbering of High Street, Southwark, has changed completely since the 1830s. The site of Harrod’s premises can be found on the west side of the present High Street, just north of Union Street; 228 Borough High Street is now numbered 76 High Street and is a cafe, with a gated and locked archway leading to Maidstone Buildings between Nos 72 and 76 High Street. Borough High Street is one of the oldest streets in London, having been the main thoroughfare from London Bridge to Kent for centuries. 72-76 is four-storey building with a basement. The buildings in the mews at the rear were originally hop warehouses. Before 1968, the London telephone exchanges had names rather than the present numerical system. Southwark was known simply as HOP due to the number of hop merchants in the area.

Today, the High Street has a varied standard of retail premises and is a bustling road with heavy traffic. Maidstone Buildings is a contrast, a rather quiet and more fashionable mews area behind the security gates, home to offices and living accommodation. The buildings still boast the old winches on the outside of the upper floors for hoisting goods up and down..

The rate records show that after Harrod left the area in 1831, Maidstone Buildings was rented by James Pike, a hop factor. The buildings still boast the old winches on the outside of the upper floors for hoisting goods up and down. A 2006 planning application described Maidstone Buildings as follows:

… comprises former hop stores that have been converted into residential flats and they consist of two parallel, three and four-storey buildings that lie on either side of a central access road. The main entrance is via an archway between Nos 72 and 76 Borough High Street.

Other documents show that Charles Henry had interests in other premises south of the river. In his 1885 will, he leaves to one of his sons ‘4 leasehold messuages, Nos 11, 12, 13 and 14 New Church Street, Bermondsey’. New Church Street no longer exists but is in the same place that is now occupied by Llewellyn Street. This is about a mile as the crow flies from Borough High Street and backs onto the wharves of the river.

In an attempt to find out more about Charles Henry’s presence in Southwark, contact was made with Duncan Field, the latest in a long line of Fields who own Field & Sons, an estate agency in the area, which was founded around 1804. He had already retired from the business, but was happy to meet and let me look at their archives. The Southwark branch of his firm is still run from their original building at what is now 54 Borough High Street and was previously No. 240. Quite probably a Field ancestor would have dealt with the letting of the property at No. 228 to Harrod.

My contact with Duncan Field came about by a rather devious route. His wife, Shirley Harrison, is a writer who had researched a book about Southwark. She had spent some time in 2008 in the Harrods archives looking for material for her book about Winnie the Pooh. Because of her interest in Southwark, the Harrods archivist Sebastian Wormell by chance mentioned my recent research there, and the connection was made. At Duncan’s invitation, the cellar of their ancient premises was inspected to see if records of the properties at Nos 228 or 231 were still in existence. Sadly, no documents before 1850 had survived the many years of floods and fire, so the search was fruitless, but interesting.

My attempts to find more information about Charles Henry Harrod were confused by the discovery of several other Charles Henry Harrods in Southwark – three altogether, all in the same family. They proved to belong to a family who had originated in Lincolnshire and by chance are involved later in another part of the Harrod story.

So, Charles Henry Harrod had spent seven years in Southwark attempting to make a success of his drapery business. But, something made him change direction, both literally and metaphorically.

There were probably several different factors in his decision. The competition in the drapery trade, both locally and elsewhere in London, may have overwhelmed Charles. In Pigot’s 1839 London Directory, there are lists of wholesale and retail dealers and agents of most trades. Lumping them all together, there were just over 1,300 businesses involved in the linen, silk and haberdashery trade in London. In contrast, there were fewer than 300 involved in the tea business. As was discussed earlier in the introduction, there were enormous opportunities in tea following the loss of the East India Trading Company’s monopoly in 1833. The tea trade alone had been worth £30 million a year to the company. Tea was one of the main consumer goods brought to Britain from the East and the trade expanded rapidly in the first half of the nineteenth century. Tea drinking was previously an expensive and fashionable pastime in Britain, but as tea became cheaper more people could afford it and perhaps Charles saw an opportunity.

The means to fulfil the promise of that opportunity was also being developed in London at this time. Until the early nineteenth century, all shipping had to unload their cargoes directly from the banks of the Thames in the Pool of London, just downstream of London Bridge. As trade increased, the riverside became more crowded and damage and delays became inevitable. In the early part of the century, large docks were opened on the north side of the Thames, firstly the West India Docks in the Isle of Dogs, for trade from that part of the world, then the East India Docks slightly further east. In 1820 the Regents Canal was opened, allowing travel by boat from Limehouse across London and into the canal network to the Midlands. Travel by canal was faster than road transport and steam-driven railways were as yet still in their infancy. This opened up a new faster distribution network. By 1835, three quarters of trade on this canal originated from the shipping on the Thames.

There were few warehouses in the larger docks, as goods were usually unloaded directly into transport and taken directly for delivery or for storage elsewhere in London. St Katharine Dock was completed and opened in 1828. This was the only project by Thomas Telford in London, built near the Tower of London on a site that required the demolition of the Hospital of St Katharine by the Tower and over 1,000 slum homes. It was almost unique in offering six-storey warehouses on the quayside to enable unloading directly into the storage area.

Before the existence of the new docks, eight days might be needed in the summer and fourteen in the winter to unload a ship of 350 tons. At St Katharine, however, the average time now occupied in discharging a ship of 250 tons was twelve hours, and one of 500 tons, two or three days. St Katherine Dock was, however, not a great success as it could not take the larger vessels, and eventually it was joined up with the Western Dock in Wapping. The result was that it had never been easier to dock and unload your cargo. It was a good time to be importing and selling goods from the rest of the world.

There was another factor which may have influenced Charles Henry’s decision to change both his trade and his geographical location, and that was finance. It does not look as though he had been a very successful draper and haberdasher. He may have needed financial help to survive the 1825 crash. In 1834, just after the Harrods moved from Southwark, Charles’s wife Elizabeth was left £300 following the death of her father. Depending upon which indices are used, this is something like £15,000 in today’s buying power – just about enough to help him to set up the new business.

The last entry in the Southwark records for Charles Henry Harrod is in the 1832 Robson’s Directory, where C.H. Harrod is listed once again as a haberdasher. A fresh start was in progress …

2

OUT OF ESSEX: THE ORIGIN OF THE HARROD FAMILY

How and why Charles Henry Harrod appeared in Southwark in 1824 is not clear, but any possible explanation requires a look back at his origins. Charles was the second son, and third child of William and Tamah Harrod. He was born in Lexden in Essex on 16 April 1799. Lexden was then a separate village entity but is now a suburb of Colchester.

Though the Harrod family at that time were almost certainly Nonconformists, Charles Henry was baptised on Christmas Day 1799 at the old medieval church of St Leonard in Lexden. St Leonard’s was demolished in 1920 and replaced by a ‘modern’ church. Though unusual now, there is a certain historical and biblical logic to the choice of Christmas Day for baptism. It was a much more popular choice in times gone by. I have been told it might have been because the incumbents made no charge on Christmas Day.

The choice of a Church of England baptism was probably forced upon his parents by the lack of a local Nonconformist church at that time, although there were several not that far away. Charles later in his life seems to have been very relaxed about dipping into both the established Church of England and the Nonconformist religions as and when it suited him. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Nonconformists of all types sometimes had problems with the registration of births, marriages and deaths. ‘Nonconformist’ or ‘Dissenter’ was a term used in England and Wales after the Act of Uniformity of 1662, to apply to those who did not conform to, or dissented from, the teaching and practices of the ‘accepted’ Church. The term included Reformed Christians, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists and Methodists.

Lord Hardwicke’s Act, passed in 1754, required that couples had to be married in the Church of England for their marriage to be legal, regardless of what religion they belonged to, although an exception was made for Jews and Quakers. This state of affairs lasted until 1837 when civil registration began and the law then just required Nonconformist groups to send their registers into the Public Record Office. Nonconformists were often buried in parish churchyards until a local chapel was established and obtained its own burial grounds, but this changed when civic cemeteries started opening in 1853.

William and Tamah Harrod, the parents of Charles Henry Harrod, are the earliest direct Harrod ancestors of the family who have been found to date. They were both born in the second half of the eighteenth century and their origins have proved resistant to research. After more than 35 years of research, though I have discovered most of their descendants and have met most of the living ones, milking them of as much information as they held, I have found no proven ancestors for William, and some limited information about Tamar’s family. I had hoped that advancing DNA techniques, such as matching and thru-lines, would solve the problem, but so far I have had no breakthrough..

Many other Harrod families, both here and abroad, have made contact with me during this time. They have often been found to have family trees stretching back well beyond the time of our earliest ancestors in the mid 1700s, but so far I have not been able to find any connection between their families and mine. The connection must exist somewhere, as Harrod is not a particularly common name, and there will surely prove to be a common ancestor for most of us. The variations of the name, Herod, Harold, Hereward, Harwood and Harewood have led to confusion which will no doubt be sorted out one day by wider DNA studies of families.

Contact with other researchers was mostly made through genealogical websites, where your family tree can be made available to others if you wish. Initially I found some contacts via the archivists at Harrods store, who gets letters from time to time from Harrod family ‘wanabees’. Most of them hoped that they, like us, were related to the ‘Harrods of Knightsbridge’. Sadly, this is seldom the case, but each contact raises the possibility for me that further connections with our tree might be discovered.

William Harrod was my great-great-great-grandfather and was born in about 1767. His birth details have never been found and the birthdate is a calculation back from later dates in his life and from his given age at death. He was an exciseman (or tax collector and enforcer), and spent his working life initially in Suffolk and later in Essex. He may not have been the only family member working with the excise; as another, seemingly unlinked Harrod, George Gateland Harrod, a resident of Southwark, also worked in the Excise Office in London. If they were related, the Southwark connection might also have decided Charles Henry’s choice of district for his first shop.

William worked with the excise for twenty years, five years in Suffolk between 1792 and 1797, and fifteen years in Essex between 1797 and 1812. He died in 1812, perhaps during the course of his work. Despite hundreds of hours on the case, visits to Suffolk and Essex, and research further afield, I have never found his birthplace or parents. There were initially some reasons to believe that he may have his origins in London or close by, and only moved elsewhere with his work. A William Harrod of the right vintage in Lincolnshire looked promising for a while but lived out his life as a schoolmaster. The right William must be out there somewhere!

At the present moment, the villages in north-east Suffolk, just south of Lowestoft, seem the most likely bet for his birthplace. There are a clutch of Harrods around Thetford, Wangford and Blything in that part of Suffolk. There are also some at Henstead, and the surrounding villages of Barsham and Benacre. The National Gravestones Index records Harrods at the nearby villages of Kirkly, Rushmere and Worlingham – this part of England seems to be full of them. Situated in south-east Suffolk, Shotley is just north of the Stour Estuary, and the parish records there include a William Harrod as a taxpayer, but give no date.

So, what led William to start work for the excise at the age of 25 is a mystery. In the late eighteenth century, excise and customs were separate organisations with different tasks. Where they overlapped, such as with imported goods, there was often much rivalry and, not infrequently, skulduggery. An exciseman, sometimes called a ‘gauger’, was employed by the government in what today would be the joint HM Customs & Excise, to ensure that people paid their taxes. Gauger, pronounced ‘gay-jer’, comes from the old French ‘jaugier’, or someone who measures.

They were also known by the name ‘collectors’, and rode together on horseback in groups referred to as a ‘ride’, as part of a county, a ‘collection’. It was not an occupation that was valued by ordinary people, and it would be fair to say that the excise men of this era were, to say the least, unpopular, and that attitudes towards them were ambivalent. Followers of Poldark will understand this! Many ordinary folk, especially those living near the coast, were either involved in, dependent upon, or turned a blind eye to the proceeds of smuggling and contraband. As a consequence of this situation, excise men were often employed away from their home area so as to avoid any conflict of interest or retribution.

The Board of Excise is not as ancient as Customs. A Board of Excise was established by the Long Parliament, and excise duties first levied in 1643. The Board of Excise was merged with the existing Board of Taxes and Board of Stamps to create the new Board of Inland Revenue in 1849.

Excise duties are inland duties levied on articles at the time of their manufacture, such as alcoholic drinks and tobacco, but duties have also been levied in the past on salt, paper and windows. As the excise became increasingly well organised in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the governments of the time started collecting excise duty on a wide range of goods. The numbers of officers also increased, partly helped by a small rise in their previously miserable pay. They took on ‘supernumeraries’, whose job it was to act as a clerk for the collector.

Famous excise officers include Robert Burns, the Scottish poet, and Thomas Paine, who later emigrated to America and became involved in the Independence movement. Though Robert Burns, who worked for the excise for eight years in Dumphries, found the work was relatively well paid, he was not totally comfortable in his profession. He was a diligent tax collector, and had to travel on horseback many hundreds of miles each week in pursuit of his duties, ‘Five days in the week, or four at least I must be on horseback and very frequently thirty or forty miles ere I return; besides four different kinds of book-keeping to post every day.’ He illustrates this part of his life in his poem, The Devil’s Awa wi’ th’ Exciseman (The Devil has Taken the Exciseman):

The deil cam fiddlin’ thro’ the town,

And danc’d awa wi’ th’ Exciseman,

And ilka wife cries, ‘Auld Mahoun,

I wish you luck o’ the prize, man’.

[Chorus]

The deil’s awa, the deil’s awa,

The deil’s awa wi’ the Exciseman,

He’s danc’d awa, he’s danc’d awa,

He’s danc’d awa wi’ the Exciseman.

We’ll mak our maut, and we’ll brew our drink,

We’ll laugh, sing, and rejoice, man,

And mony braw thanks to the meikle black deil,

That danc’d awa wi’ th’ Exciseman.

The deil’s awa, &c.

There’s threesome reels, there’s foursome reels,

There’s hornpipes and strathspeys, man,

But the ae best dance ere came to the land

Was-the deil’s awa wi’ the Exciseman.

The deil’s awa, &c.

The job was not without its dangers, and at times the collectors carried large amounts of money, so were usually armed. On other occasions, they might meet resistance to pay or attempts at retribution when the trader felt aggrieved. Did this happen to William?

William Harrod married Tamar Mason on the 18th. September 1794, in Hartest, a village situated in the triangle between Clare, Long Melford and Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk. He was twenty seven years old and she was seventeen. Their Banns of Marriage were published on three consecutive Sundays, the 10th., 17th. and 24th. August. Both were listed in the Hartest Parish Records as ‘of this Parish’, though there is no evidence that they lived in Hartest permanently.

The witnesses were Edmund Coe and Hannah Pettit, both members of local families. There is a Hannah Pettit to be found in the parish records; she was baptised in Hartest in 1779, so would have been 15 years old at the time of Tamah’s marriage. William’s wife signed the register of marriage as ‘Tamah’. She was recorded as ‘Thamar’ on the baptism entry for one of her children and ‘Tamar’ on the baptism entries for the rest of her children and in the register of her burial in Kelvedon, Essex. Her own signature as ‘Tamah’ seems likely to be the most accurate one.

The whole area around Hartest is on the edge of Constable country and much of the countryside looks like his paintings. It was one of the regions of the country where Nonconformist and Quaker activity increased during that time, and many Huguenots also came to live in the area. It does look, from their marriage and the children’s baptisms, as though William and Tamah were Nonconformists, despite the parish entries.

No photographs or paintings of William or Tamah have ever been found – not surprising given their dates.

At the time of their marriage in Hartest, William had been working for eighteen months on the nearby Clare Ride in south-west Suffolk. Long enough, one presumes, to meet a local girl. Prior to this, as his first post with the excise, he was on the Saxmundham Ride, about 30 miles away to the north-east, as a ‘supernumerary’. Saxmundham is about 20 miles south of Lowestoft and is not too far away from those Suffolk villages mentioned earlier. It would seem logical that his first job, though not actually in his home area, would be in the same county.

Hartest is a delightful Suffolk village, with a large triangular village green, a lovely simple church, and a pub which, prior to the 1830s, was a small manor house. The village is about 6 miles north of Clare, which is just on the Suffolk side of the Essex/Suffolk border. Clare is a small town with some seriously ancient houses and an enormous church. It had been a prosperous town since the Middle Ages and was heavily involved in the local wool and cloth trade, being especially renowned for its broad cloth until the 1600s, when different types of cloth began to be made and gradually took over.