The Jewel of Knightsbridge

by Harrod, Robin;

  Henry decided to use his acquired skills and run his own grocery business, with the initial support from his father, although he did not try to rival the shop in Kensington. Over many years Henry ran a large number of retail establishments, and although some were sequential, many overlapped for some time. The dates and places have been gleaned using the census records, the electoral register, trade directory entries, the places and dates of birth of his children, and some family gossip.

  Henry Digby obviously felt that the route to success was with multiple small branches rather than one large shop. He was successful in a modest fashion; in 1891, for instance, he was employing nine men and a boy. His first shop, 40 Old Compton Street, was, like its neighbours, a four-storey house. From the 1820s onwards it had been a drapery store, but by the time of the 1871 census, Henry Digby was running the business with two assistants and a domestic servant, and his occupation is given as ‘grocer and tea dealer’. He was single, but married in October of the same year.

  Henry married 22-year-old Caroline Wade in Colchester, Essex, in 1871, and they set up home in Old Compton Street. She was the fourth daughter of Thomas Wade, a Suffolk ironmonger, and she was born in Clare, in south Suffolk, where her father worked for many years. They were a local family and Caroline was one of their eight children.

  At the time of their marriage, Caroline was working as a milliner in London, less than half a mile from Old Compton Street. They may have met in London, but her home town of Clare was the birthplace of Henry’s grandmother, Tamah Mason, almost 100 years earlier, and Henry’s grandfather William Harrod had lived there for a while. So Henry, like his father, may have gone back to his roots to find his bride and perhaps she had moved to London to be closer.

  Henry and his family lived in Old Compton Street for about thirteen years, and the first five of their twelve children were born there. Remarkably for the time, eleven survived to adulthood. He ran a business there for much longer, probably thirty years in total. He was in the trade directories at that address until 1886, and in the electoral registers until 1893, although by these dates he was no longer living there.

  The British Library holds a publicity leaflet from the shop in Old Compton Street dated 26 May 1885 which, apart from the header, gives a price list for teas and coffees. It reads:

  H.D. Harrod (Grocery Stores) Best Grocery Stores, 40 Old Compton Street.

  Notice. The well-known Christmas Club; which always gives satisfaction to its supporters has commenced, and we invite all to join at once to secure the benefits. We present to every subscriber of 8/- a bottle of Foreign Port or Sherry, and to every subscriber of 6/- 1/4lb. of Black or Green tea … Sugars, Fruit, Sago, Tapioca, Rice … at smallest profit on cost and the best value in London.

  During this period of apparent stability for Henry, Brompton Road had been transformed by his brother Charles. Henry seemed to be quite happy running his business on a smaller scale and had no wish to expand or emulate his brother’s model. Henry did, however, expand in terms of the number of his shops.

  He started shops in Theobalds Road, north of Holborn, the Caledonian Road, King Street in Hammersmith and Newington Butts in Southwark. As one closed, others were opened in other parts of London, although there was some overlap. Henry had two grocery shops in Theobalds Road, No. 92 in 1880 and No. 104 in 1890. Grocery shops at 41 King Street and 341 Caledonian Road followed in the last decade of the nineteenth and first decade of the twentieth century.

  A confectionery shop at 7 Newington Butts ran between 1909 and 1913. He may have had a shop at 42 Half Moon Street in Piccadilly for a year or two; he is listed on the electoral register at this address, but this was a ‘dwelling house’ so may have been a domestic property he rented out. He may have had some sort of storage facility at 112 High Street, Peckham, as it is mentioned in a land registry document years later regarding transfer of the property to his wife after his death.

  Henry and the family had moved to Goldhawk Road, just west of Shepherd’s Bush, by the time of the 1881 census. The house, ‘The Hawthorns’ at 264 Goldhawk Road, was large enough to accommodate their burgeoning family. They had moved there with four children, a daughter Florence having died at the age of 1 in 1878. By 1881 there were two more in the house. A further child was born there during their three-year stay, making a total of seven. The 1881 census describes Henry as a ‘grocer, employing nine men and one boy’.

  A photograph of Henry Digby, probably around this time when he would have been in his 30s or early 40s, shows a handsome man, looking very much like his brother, Charles. Other photographs held by the family show Henry’s wife, Caroline, at the same sort of age and also a decade or so older. Charles Digby’s wife was also called Caroline, and the similarity in the ages of the two Carolines and the prevailing fashion and hairstyle of the era has led to the situation where both Charles’s descendants and Henry’s descendants have told to me that the same photograph labelled, ‘Caroline Harrod’, is their Caroline. Despite one Charles Digby descendant owning an old locket with that photograph inside, comparing other photographs of the two Carolines makes me lean towards the likelihood that the photograph is of Caroline Harrod née Wade, Henry’s wife; but I cannot be certain.

  By 1883, Henry, Caroline and family were living at 21 Oxford Road, Chiswick, and they stayed there for at least eight years. Their last four children were born there. The 1891 census reveals that nine of his children were at home and two were staying with their cousins, Charles Digby’s children. At least that suggests the two families were on talking terms.

  The end of the nineteenth century marked a distinct change for Henry and his family. Henry’s father, Charles Henry, had died in 1885 and Henry decided to move out of London. Over the next twenty years or so he closed all of his London premises – the reason for this is unknown.

  Henry Digby opened a shop at 25 High Street, in Winchester, sometime in the 1890s – probably in 1892. The shop in Winchester had been previously occupied by J. Tracey, another grocer, until 1890. In the street directories, the Harrod name first appears in Winchester in 1893 and is there until 1906. It is listed in the 1895 Kelly’s Directory as ‘Harrod & Co., Grocers and Wine Merchants, agents for W&A Gilbey’. The family lived at the shop from 1893 to 1904, and whilst running this Winchester shop several of the shops in London continued to trade, so Henry may have travelled back and forth.

  In the course of correspondence with the Harrods’ archivist in 1987, I was sent a letter which suggested that Henry Digby opened the Winchester shop ten years earlier in 1880, and ran this until 1907 when he returned to Knightsbridge to work. No evidence has been found to substantiate this. There is no evidence he was in Winchester before 1892 or that he returned to Harrods after 1906.

  A flyer for the Winchester shop and a branch opened at 1 Market Street, dated 1905, was shown to me by Harrods archives, and gives the prices of his wines, spirits and beers. Port was 1/- to 4/- (1/-, or one shilling, was the equivalent of 5p in decimal coinage), gin from 1s 6d and tea 1/- to 3/-. ‘Lowest cash prices’ were offered.

  By 1904, Henry and his family had moved to a new home, Ivydene, East Hill, in Winchester, where they remained at least until Henry’s death in 1915, aged 69. East Hill later became known as Quarry Road. After Henry’s death, Caroline continued living in Winchester, latterly looked after by her eldest daughter, Edith. Caroline died in 1938, aged 88.

  The family has many photographs of Henry in late middle age in his garden with Caroline and their family. They were often dressed in tennis gear and obviously made good use of their tennis court. They looked a happy lot. There were still some of Henry Harrod’s family in Winchester in 1965. An article in The Hampshire by Joy Peach recounted that her next-door neighbours were two spinster sisters, the oldest and youngest of a large Victorian family. Miss Edith Harrod was in her nineties, and Miss Eveline almost twenty years younger. Edith was by this time doubled up with spinal arthritis, and had to walk about with her eyes looking down at her feet. This so
unds as though she had severe spinal osteoporosis.

  The sisters had lived there for sixty years altogether; Miss Edith, the eldest daughter, had remained single and stayed at home to look after her ageing parents, whilst Eveline, in her turn, gave up her job as a supervisor at Edmunds, the drapers in the High Street, to look after her sister when she needed help. Joy repeated the story that Henry was reputed to have worked at Harrods some years after his brother had left the store, starting in the year he had bought Ivydene. I think perhaps she was getting mixed up with his brother, as we will see later.

  A remarkable insight into Henry Digby’s view on the Harrod shop and his relationship with his father and brother is revealed by a letter shown to me by Sebastian Wormell, the Harrods archivist, in 2008. The letter is itself a copy, as handwritten at the top it states, ‘Copy of letter, supplied by Mr [William] Kibble to Harrods Secretary in 1924’.

  William Kibble was a relation by marriage of the Harrods, via Charles Digby’s wife, and so a cousin to Charles and Henry. He worked for a long time in the store, having taken Henry’s place in the Brompton Road store when he left. The letter is from Henry, presumably to William Kibble, and probably written during the last few years of Henry’s life. It sounds as though William Kibble had asked Henry for his recollections of the early days in the store. After Henry Digby had died in 1915, the letter was passed on to the Harrods archive in 1924. Sebastian thinks the typed copy was probably made around 1943 for the novelist Gilbert Frankau, who was working on an official history of Harrods at the time. The letter reads:

  Ivy Dene, East Hill, Winchester. Jan’y 27

  Dear Sir,

  Yours to hand. I am glad to see you are still in the land of the living like myself and hope you will continue in good health and long life yet to come.

  You ask me for facts which I can’t give as I was a boy and therefore am not clear. But I will tell you all I know and as far as I can recollect my father took over the business from a Mr Burdin [sic] who went to some other country as near as I know 1853 or 1854 and carried it on in conjunction with his Wholesale Business which he had in Eastcheap at the time. We all moved into the house at the back of the shop – I went to school close bye and helped in the shop on and off till about 1858 when I went away in the country to live. [He would have been about 13 years old then]. My brother C.D. Harrod took it over in 1861and my father went to live opposite the Museum. I returned home about 1863 and went and lived with my brother until as you know I went to Compton Limited and you came into my place. You would know the year, I think it was 1866. During my last term with my brother we made the first move to improve the business by having a new front put in which you recollect, and it was that that drew the attention of the Public to our shop and I dare say the windows the first time. We steadily advanced especially in the Tea Trade and built up as very nice counter trade which you know was when I left it about 200 to 250 per week and very profitable. The rest you know as you were on the spot when he took up the store trading and succeeded.

  I have given you all I know except mere trifles. But if anything comes of it I should like my Father’s name to be much honoured before all other things as he was the person which was the principal factor in the making of success, for without his Father’s help my brother could have done nothing.

  My Father’s name was Charles Digby Harrod so there can be no mistake.

  With kind regards and well wishes,

  I remain,

  Yours faithfully, [signed] H.D. Harrod

  A fascinating letter for many reasons. It must have been written between 1905 (when Charles Digby died) and 1915, when Henry Digby died. The date at the top is 27 January, though no year is given. There are a number of mistakes in the letter, so perhaps Henry was having memory problems, and a few points merit further discussion. To have called his father ‘Charles Digby Harrod’ not ‘Chares Henry’ was, in the context of the letter, a Freudian slip. The point was being strongly made and came from a deep-seated mutual antipathy and perhaps jealousy – no love lost there. The letter was almost certainly handwritten, and was copy-typed either by Kibble himself or a Harrods secretary, so this might just be a terrible transcription error. Odd to address a cousin as ‘Dear Sir’, but letters were much more formal in those days. ‘Yours to hand’, is the equivalent of today’s ‘in reply to your letter’.

  It is not clear whether the 200 to 250 per week refers to cash turnover or number of items. If the former, no wonder it was so profitable! He asserts that his father took over the Brompton business in around 1861. Although Henry says he was away until 1863, he must have come back when his mother died at the end of 1860, and he was back working with his father and brother at the time of the 1861 census, unless this was just a holiday job. The letter confirms that brothers Charles and Henry worked together for a while in the shop. When Charles took over in 1861, Henry would have been only 15 or 16 years old. Henry was keen to stress his role in the early changes to the shop.

  Many of my details about Henry and Caroline’s children were supplied by Brian Heather, who lived in Truro but sadly died in 2010. He was the cousin of Winifred Mabel Heather, a granddaughter of Henry Digby Harrod by his second child and daughter, Kate Emily. Brian had written in 1995 to the Harrods archivist, then Nadine Hansen, stating that he knew that Winifred Mabel Heather had a family Bible with family details, and Nadine passed the letter to me. My brothers and I were shown that book during a visit in 2008. It had apparently been bought by Harrods at auction after Winifred’s and Marjorie’s deaths, together with some photographs.

  Henry and Caroline, through their children and their marriages, became quite involved in the commercial life of the area. Some of their more notable offspring are described below:

  Their eldest child, Edith, born in 1873, was mentioned earlier. In the 1891 census, she and her sister Kate were staying with cousins, Amy and Beatrice, two of Charles Digby’s children, in Allerford House, North Somerset. After taking care of her parents in their old age, Edith died in 1969, aged 96.

  The second child, Kate, was born in 1874. She married Arthur Heather, the son of a pawnbroker in Winchester, and they moved to Newbury where they ran Heather’s Stores, which was listed as a ‘pawnbroker and furniture dealer’. Kate had a leather-bound book in which she noted the birthdays of her family and friends. Brian Heather, her nephew, initially lent me this book and then later decided I had better keep it for the family. It confirms many Harrod dates already discovered, suggesting that she remained in contact with her cousins, despite the rift between her father, Henry, and his brother, Charles. One of their daughters, Marjorie, was an artist and exhibited at the Royal Academy. Kate died in 1940, aged 73 and Arthur in 1943.

  The fifth child, Ethel, was born in 1878. She married William Butt, whose family were boot and shoe makers with a shop in the High Street in Winchester.

  Frank was the eighth child, and second son, of Henry and Caroline. He was born in 1882 and started his working life as a teacher in Swindon. He joined the Royal Hampshire Regiment early on in the First World War, aged 33. He was awarded the Military Cross in the Battle of the Somme in 1916, during an attack on German trenches near Gueudecourt in which the 2nd Hampshires were heavily involved. He was put forward for more honours by General Haig in early 1918 and later that year he was awarded the French decoration, the Croix de Guerre, by which time he was the Adjutant of the Regiment. After the war, in 1921, he married Charlotte David in Leeds. Frank went into the administrative side of education, working in local government. By 1936 he was Director of Education in Coventry, a post he held during the Second World War, until 1945. He was awarded an OBE in 1952, and advanced to CBE later.

  One of Frank’s children, Lionel, born 1924, also had an illustrious career in the army, and built up quite a CV. During his career he was awarded the OBE. He served in the Grenadier Guards during the Second World War, and later saw service in Suez, Cyprus and Hong Kong, before being posted to the Welsh Regiment. He was on the British Defence
Staff Washington between 1969 and 1970, and Military Attaché in Baghdad in 1971. In 1976 he was promoted to major general. He worked as Assistant Chief of Staff (Intelligence) to the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SHAPE) between 1976 and 1979.

  He became colonel of the Royal Regiment of Wales from 1977 to 1982, and this appointment proved to be his proudest moment. Having retired from the army in 1979, he became inspector of recruiting from 1979 until final retirement in 1990. His motto was ‘Soldiering must be fun’ – I think he found life fun as well.

  At a point in the 1980s when I was desperately searching for Harrod relatives, I got in touch with him after seeing his entry in Who’s Who. In his usual generous spirit, he was delighted to find new relatives and was very welcoming. He helped by putting us in touch with my father’s paternal family, and we met on several occasions. He died in 1995, aged 70.

  Dorothy Eveline was the twelfth and last child of Henry and Caroline, born in 1891. She remained single, looking after her eldest sister Edith into her old age. There was just over eighteen years between them. She lived for most of her life with her sisters Edith and Blanche at Ivydene, caring for her parents with them until their deaths. Dorothy died eight months after her oldest sister in 1969, aged 78.

  Henry Digby Harrod died in 1915 in Winchester. He was aged 69, and had outlived his older brother Charles by almost ten years. At the time of his death, he still owned businesses in London in Newington Butts, High Street, Peckham and Hammersmith. His estate was valued at £2,853 9s, a value today of about £200,000. His wife Caroline survived until 1938, dying at the age of 89.