A Lost Cambridge Bookshop . . .
One hundred years ago, in 1919, a small bookshop opened at 73 Bridge Street, Cambridge. Webb & Brown was started by my grandfather, Frederick Webb and his partner Bill Brown. Most details of the business are lost in the mists of time but I have been able to find out a bit about the shop – short lived and now long forgotten even in this city of booksellers. Frederick George Henry Webb was born in 1889, the eldest son of a Romsey Town railway man. From the early 1900s my grandfather’s family lived in at 82 Ainsworth Street, a terrace of railway cottages off Mill Road. After leaving school, probably in about 1903, Fred worked for George Peck, chemists, in Trumpington Street. I’m not sure why he entered bookselling. Fred was certainly working as a bookseller’s assistant when the 1911 census was taken and he put down Bowes & Bowes bookshop in Trinity Street as his employer when he enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1914. Fred Webb, 1920s Bowes and Bowes b...