The Jewel of Knightsbridge

by Harrod, Robin;

  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; Eliza Mason, probably a relation from Charles’s mother’s family; and Mary Bateman, who is not known.

  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 premi
ses 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. Though the High Street itself now has a variable standard of retail premises and is a bustling road with heavy traffic, Maidstone Buildings is, in contrast, a rather quiet and more fashionable mews area behind security gates, with a variety of offices and living accommodation.

  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 …

  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 Eng
land 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. During more than twenty-five years of research, 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 not found any definite ancestors.

  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 in the not too distant future by wider DNA studies of families.