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 bookshop, Trinity Street, Cambridge

In March 1919 Fred was demobilised and returned from frontline duties to his hometown of Cambridge. Bowes & Bowes may have kept his job open for him, but Fred had a different plan. He was inspired perhaps by the success of William Heffer, who had started out selling stationery and books in Fitzroy Street in 1876 but had since expanded into two more shops in the city centre, revolutionising the way books were sold.[i] My grandfather knew the trade and maybe detected a postwar trend for poetry and popular fiction, boosted by changing reading habits during the war and signs of a peacetime surge in tourism – holiday-makers needed holiday reading. After the First World War, as Frank Arthur Mumby put it in his history of publishing and bookselling, ‘booksellers found it necessary to stock books for the plain man, as well as for the student’.[ii] There was also a renewed need for stationery, as undergraduates came flooding back into Cambridge following the Armistice.

Using his retail knowledge Fred took the brave step of opening his own shop, in partnership with a young man he most likely met in the army or at Bowes.

BILL BROWN

Just how well Fred knew William Charles Brown is not clear. At twenty-three, Bill was seven years my grandfather’s junior: hence, I suppose, why Fred’s name came first over the door, as the more experienced and senior partner. Bill’s prior connection with bookselling, if any, isn’t known. When he was young, his father had run university lodgings at 30 Sidney Street. These premises were shared, at ground level at least, with the booksellers Galloway & Porter, established on this site at the turn of the century. So I suppose it could be that Bill had worked there as a junior assistant or errand boy before the war.

When war came, Fred and Bill both joined the Territorial Force, to serve in the Royal Army Medical Corps (1st Eastern General Hospital). They enlisted on the same day – 8 November 1914. In Fred’s case, at least, this was probably in response to a Romsey Town recruitment drive held at Romsey School a few days earlier. According to a newspaper report of this meeting, headlined ‘A Call to Arms . . . Urgent Need for More Men’, Alderman Campkin made an ‘urgent appeal to the young men of Romsey Town to join Kitchener’s army . . . Join at once!’[iii]

Fred (number 1770) was twenty-five years old. Judging from the description in his service record, he was 5 feet 7 inches and weighed 9 stone. Bill (number 1756) was a larger, thickset man of 5 feet 10 inches and five days away from his eighteenth birthday – I expect he told the recruiting officer he was nineteen, the minimum age to sign up.

If they didn’t already know each other, this must have been how Fred and Bill became friendly, although their service records show they were probably together only for their initial training. Fred eventually made the rank of sergeant and Bill was discharged a lance corporal at the end of the war.

By 1914 the Browns were living and running student apartments at 19–21 Trinity Street, above Matthews grocery department store (now the site of Heffers bookshop). Next door was Ransom & Son, tobacconist and university gown outfitters, and two doors down at number 24, opposite Trinity College, was W. Tomlin & Son, another long-established university bookseller who also had a branch at 73 Bridge Street, on the corner of All Saints Passage.

Tomlin’s closed their Bridge Street branch during the First World War. It may be that Bill Brown heard about the vacant shop from his near neighbour, William Tomlin, or perhaps he had even worked for Tomlin’s. Either way an agreement was signed and in the second half of 1919 Webb & Brown, ‘booksellers, newsagents and stationers’ opened their doors at 73 Bridge Street. The location, next door to Stearn & Sons, photographers, was a good one, on a bustling thoroughfare at the heart of the town and with several colleges on the doorstep.

Bridge Street, Cambridge

How their venture would have been initially funded is a mystery: Fred, who couldn’t have earned much more than thirty shillings a week as an assistant at Bowes, may have had some savings from his prewar job – but that can’t have applied to Bill, who’d spent his entire adult life so far in military service. When his father died in 1933, Bill inherited a modest sum, but nothing that would suggest family wealth.

Webb & Brown were probably fairly typical bookseller-stationers, offering a mix of books, newspapers, magazines and stationery. Their earliest adverts appeared in late-1919 issues of the Cambridge Magazine and the following year in The Bookseller trade magazine. A larger box advert, with a simple logo, was placed in the 1921 edition of The Student’s Handbook to the University and Colleges of Cambridge offering ‘Lecture Note Books, Loose Leaf Note Books, College Note and Envelopes, Scribbling Paper, Blotting Paper’, as well as pens, pencils, slide rules etc.

Not Webb and Brown but Harry Tuck's bookshop in Rose Crescent, 1921. A very similar bookseller-newsagent though (pic courtesy of Mike Petty)

They also boasted ‘a large selection of popular fiction always in stock’. One imagines shelves of best sellers by contemporary favourites – John Galsworthy, E.F. Benson, Rider Haggard and so on – and no doubt many now forgotten potboilers. An advert in Rutter’s Guide to Cambridge (sharing the page with one for Tomlin’s) suggests their books were aimed at tourists more than students, with the suggestion: ‘While holiday making in Cambridge you will no doubt want something to read. Pay a visit to Webb & Brown’. Who could resist parting with six shillings for the latest collection of M.R. James ghost stories before a tour of the colleges?

A few classified adverts appear in the Cambridge newspapers in 1920. Amongst those seeking artificial teeth and second-hand lino in the ‘Various Wants’ column are requests from Webb & Brown for a child’s cot, a ‘playground’ and a gramophone. This may have been for a customer: neither Fred nor Bill were married. More intriguing is an advertisement offering for sale a ‘half-hoop diamond engagement ring, valued at £8, a good offer £5 10s. Apply B, c/o Webb and Brown, 73 Bridge Street’. Was this a cynical attempt on Bill’s part to recoup something from an unsuccessful proposal or broken engagement?

ALL SAINTS PASSAGE

Trading at Bridge Street must have gone well as after a couple of years Webb & Brown expanded. When a ladies’ hairdressers vacated two doors down in All Saints Passage, so they acquired a second lease and by 1922 Webb & Brown was listed in Cambridge Kelly’s street directory at both 73 Bridge Street and 6 All Saints Passage. This expansion seemed to herald their undoing.

The following year Bill Brown is listed as actually living at 73 Bridge Street, his father having retired from the rooms in Trinity Street (my grandfather continued to live at the family home in Ainsworth Street, no doubt cycling in each morning). However, within two years Bill’s name disappears entirely from the electoral register at Bridge Street and my grandfather would appear to have sole charge of the business, first at both addresses and then just at All Saints Passage. 

Webb & Brown had vacated 73 Bridge Street by October 1925. The last entry for the business is in Spalding’s street directory of Cambridge for 1926–27, at 6 All Saints Passage. On the 1927 electoral register 73 Bridge Street is an ironmonger and 6 All Saints Passage was apparently unoccupied. (Interestingly, not long after this, number 5 All Saints Passage was a bookshop, run by the communist Griffin Campbell Maclurin, who was killed in the Spanish Civil War.)[vi]

It isn’t clear exactly what went wrong at Webb & Brown – a lack of business experience perhaps, or was Bill’s investment exhausted, leading to his withdrawal?

The looming national crisis can’t have helped. In November 1925 workers at the principal book wholesaler, Simpkin Marshall, went on strike. Bookstalls and small newsagent-booksellers were hardest hit. Then worse: the book trade chain of supply that provincial shops like Webb & Brown relied upon ground to a halt during the General Strike of May 1926 and took some months to recover, crippling many retailers.[vii]

It is just possible there were some issues with the lease that forced Fred out. There are no records in the Trinity College archives relating specifically to Webb & Brown, however there is one dated 13 October 1925: ‘The Master etc. of Trinity College, Cambridge to Edwin John Pigott of 8 Hinton Avenue, Cambridge, ironmonger. Counterpart lease for 7 years of a lock-up shop, no.73 Bridge Street, Cambridge. Rent 78l’. The rent of £78 is a clue perhaps to how much it had cost Webb & Brown. 

According to St John’s College’s annual The Eagle: ‘Number 73 [Bridge Street] became the shop of a wine merchant and then a bookseller until the 1930s [sic], when occupied by Piggots the cutler. Numbers 73 and 7 All Saints’ Passage were conveyed by Trinity College to St John’s in 1938, along with number 6.’[viii] This change of landlord was long after Webb & Brown vacated but it does suggest these addresses were perhaps all leased under the same terms.

I suspect there were other, more domestic, factors to blame too. Fred had married my grandmother in 1921 and their second child arrived in 1926, around the time the shop probably closed. Perhaps the added pressures of family life contributed to the business failure.

My grandfather didn’t open another shop, although he was still describing himself as a ‘bookseller’ in the 1935–36 Cambridge Directory, the mention of his occupation indicating he worked on his own account. No doubt finding the bookselling impossible without a shop he then started a paper round, cycling round Cambridge in all weathers. He was described as a ‘newsagent’ by July 1939, when, according to a newspaper report, he was one of forty-five cyclists fined two shillings for not stopping at a traffic light in Pembroke Street.

In the 1939 Register, taken for the purpose of issuing of identity cards after the outbreak of war, he was still described as a ‘newsagent’. He and Bill Brown had definitely gone their separate ways. That same year Bill was listed as a despatch manager at a department store – probably Robert Sayle (now John Lewis), as he was named as a mourner at the funeral of one of their senior managers. He died at Chesterton Hospital in 1965.

Soon after this, Fred abandoned bookselling and stationery altogether and took work as a door-to-door salesman for Betterwear. This was the well-known ‘brush manufacturers’, whose Cambridge office in 1938 was ironically at 7 Downing Street, a few yards from the location of Fred’s cycling offence. Based at Romford, Essex, the Betterwear company (renamed Betterware in 1970) was founded in 1928 and the smartly dressed Betterwear man with his brown suitcase, visiting door to door selling brushes and other household products, was soon a popular figure on Britain’s residential streets. The company expanded considerably after the war.

My grandfather’s marriage was, by all accounts, not a happy one and he was divorced by my grandmother in the 1940s. He died in 1973, estranged from the family and an absent figure for me, growing up. I met him only once, maybe twice, when I was taken round to meet him by my father, following a rapprochement of sorts between the two. He died soon afterwards, as did my father, before I had the chance to ask either about my grandfather’s bookselling past.

73 Bridge Street, corner of All Saints Passage, 2019

All Saints Passage, 2019

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[i] See Julie E. Bounford, This Book is About Heffers (2016).

[ii] Frank Arthur Mumby, Publishing and Bookselling (1949) .

[iii] Cambridge Independent Press, 6 November 1914.

[iv] Cambridge Magazine.

[v] Students Handbook.

[vi] After which the shop relocated briefly to 1 Rose Crescent, where it was run by Lon Elliott until it closed in 1950, 

[vii] R.J.L. Kingsford, The Publishers Association 1896–1946 (1970) .

[viii] Malcolm Underwood, ‘The Triangle Site’, The Eagle (2006) .