This page is one of several pages which are based on articles in our book entitled Royal Leamington Spa, A History in 100 Buildings which was published in 2018 and is no longer in print.
Burgis & Colbourne, also known as The Bedford Stores, was founded by Charles Richard Burgis in 1855, at the age of 24. He broke away from his Oxfordshire family to set up on his own in fashionable Royal Leamington Spa, opening his first shop in Regent Street, followed by a branch in Brunswick Street (later No 8). This was later disposed of to the father of one of Messrs Burgis & Colbourne’s managers, as further stores were opened north of the river. Twenty years after starting in business in the town, Charles Burgis joined forces with fellow grocer James Colbourne, who had also come to the town from further afield. In 1874, both Burgis and Colbourne were living in Warwick Street on opposite corners of Chandos Street. Their first joint venture opened as The Bedford Stores at 43 and 45 Bedford Street, followed by a branch at Lansdowne Street, and another opposite the Chandos Street stores where Charles Burgis had moved after Regent Street.
Bedford Stores around 1900
The business prospered: in 1882 they took over the Athenaeum Library at Nos 80 and 82 the Parade, a handsome four-storey building with a porticoed entrance supported by four pillars. Above this was a full-height statue of Minerva, flanked by busts of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron. The Library was lit by a large oblong lantern light, with a glass chandelier suspended from it. Leading from it was a conservatory opening on to a lawned garden and thereafter, Bedford Street. Balls and Concerts were often held there.
Once Burgis and Colbourne took over, they carried out a number of reconstructions, including the development of an arcade from the Parade through to Bedford Street. Further expansion took the partners into neighbouring properties both on the Parade and on Bedford Street, and they had become a limited company with £100,000 capital by 1874. The Leamington Spa and Warwick Historical & Pictorial publication of 1899-1900 described the building as “one of the greatest ornaments to the Parade, admired by all for its lightness and elegance.” The frontage was built largely of iron and plate glass, with large windows up to the third floor, displaying the goods of different departments. Burgis and Colbourne kept the ground floor Athenaeum Library, said to be the oldest in the town, and added to it the most up-to- date volumes of standard and recent works.
As House of Fraser
They took over the premises of Jones the chemists to the south of the Stores about 1900. The shop front of No 78 was rebuilt in 1910. They acquired Jones the trunk retailers to the north in 1930. The expansion of Messrs Burgis & Colbourne was not universally admired: they were thought aggressive, and responsible for the hardship suffered by smaller (and possibly less ambitious) local tradesmen.
Charles Burgis was the figurehead, and a stickler for good business practice. He set high personal standards, and expected his employees to follow suit. He had been an apprentice in the days when there were few holidays, people of all ages worked long hours, and life was generally much tougher, – conditions he sometimes enjoyed bringing to the attention of the younger generations and his staff. Of his 11 children, only the eldest son Charles Coles Burgis, born in 1858, and James Frederick, the fourth son, born in 1861 followed their father into business, Charles as Wines and Spirits manager in the Stores, and James who founded the accountants Burgis and Bullock, as Company Secretary. Old Charles was always first into work. He sat on a high stool at the shop entrance observing the arrival of his employees – and woe betide anyone who was late.
He was a man of his time: a typical employer who kept his distance from the staff, but under the stern exterior there was a kind-hearted man and a considerable benefactor to his adopted town, particularly in his support for the ‘Home for Incurables.’ For nine years he was also chairman of a Leamington workmen’s benevolent fund which was used to relieve the sick and distressed of the district or those left penniless by the death of the breadwinner. Like Charles Burgis, James Colbourne was also twice married, had a large family, and two of his sons (Thomas Solomon and William Edward) were involved in the business.
Burgis and Colbourne Ltd, were ‘General Providers’. By the 1940s, a very good business in wines, spirits and beers had been built up between the world wars, helped at least in part by the delivery service by motor van in the 1930s. A fleet of vans was garaged in Chandos Street, where a substantial building (now the site of Chandos Street car-park) also housed additional storerooms, and coffee beans were roasted. The cellars were quite extensive, running the length of the building and from front to back. James, Charles Burgis’ great-grandson remembered traditional un-pasteurised Guinness, Worthington and Bass beers being bottled there. The Guinness came in wooden barrels straight from Dublin, and good wines were bottled by hand from original wooden casks shipped in from France.
“The Stores” were a by-word for quality, and even in wartime, people travelled from miles around to shop there. Mrs Milburn from Berkswell, in the diaries she kept throughout WW2 as she waited for her prisoner-of- war son Alan to return, mentions walking along a deserted Parade shortly after the Coventry Blitz, – glad to find that the ‘Stores’ were open. When she had a special parcel of medicine and vitamins to send to Alan in January 1941, she wrote, “I must go to Leamington and get the Stores to pack the parcel tomorrow”.
When Leamington people were careful to distinguish between the ‘trade’ and ‘shade’ sides of the Parade, the Stores kept up an unvarying standard: a uniformed commissionaire stood at the door, ready to help a nanny with a perambulator, or ferry parcels out to a waiting car. In 1940, Burgis & Colbourne published a price list which was the size of a modern paperback novel, which containing the following cautionary notes:
“Owing to existing War Conditions, the prices quoted could only be taken as an approximate guide; Country orders could not be fulfilled the same day; cash was requested for small purchases as a number of the Company’s staff had been called up for service; and of course, Ration Books had to be sent with all orders – unless the Stores had already detached whole pages of coupons”. The general index covered items from an apple corer and artists’ materials to York pudding pans and almost everything imaginable in between. The Café was famous; the Food Hall, with its butchery, fish counter and bakery, legendary. There was a bookshop and lending library and an extensive children’s toy department. They sold invalid chairs and all the well-known makes of baby equipment. Their extensive sports department offered lawn tennis nets, ‘own brand’ posts and line markers, and equipment for tennis, squash, badminton, football, athletics, hockey and golf.
In 1963 the Stores were bought out by the Army & Navy Stores of London, and improvements and extensions were carried out. A decade later, Army & Navy Stores Ltd were themselves acquired by House of Fraser of Glasgow. There were several alterations to the store around 1972. From 1976 onwards, the Stores traded briefly as Rackhams, (an old Birmingham-based store of approximately the same vintage as Burgis & Colbourne, owned by Harrods of London since the mid-1950s) When the Burgis & Colbourne business was liquidated in 1982, the Leamington store was officially renamed House of Fraser.
The name of Colbourne is remembered in Colbourne Grove on Beverley Hills estate which was built about 1985.
Sources:
Charles Richard Burgis: A Memoir of an old fashioned Grocer (James Burgis,2008)
Mrs Milburn’s Diaries: An Englishwoman’s day-to- day reflections 1939-45, ed Peter Donnelly, Fontana/Collins 1979.
Leamington Spa & Warwick Pictorial 1899-1900
Leamington Courier online archive.
Price List, Burgis & Colbourne Ltd, February and May 1940
Royal Leamington Spa: A Century’s Growth and Development (1800-1900) pp71-72
www.housefraserarchive.ac.uk
Footnote on the Development of Shops
The shops in the town around 1780 were in the south of the town grouped around High Street (also named London Road or Turnpike) and Church Street (or Lane). Several of these were probably the workshops of craftsmen (and women) such as shoemakers, basket-makers and dressmakers. A typical shoemaker was Benjamin Satchwell (see article on his cottage) at the Post Office just off Church Street in the end of what is New Street in 2017.
Much of the essential food was sold at markets and stalls set up by the farmers and growers with travelling pedlars selling more exotic products. There was a market shown on a map dated 1783 on the corner of High Street and Church Street. There was later a market off Abbott Street at various dates from 1813. One report names it Prince’s Market. Covent Garden Market off Warwick Street opened about 1828 but the one in Abbott Street continued as the Old Market. When the Old Market was sold in 1846 it was advertised as including 10 shops and extensive sheds on iron pillars; the frontage to Bath Place was 130 ft. It probably closed in 1855.
There was a simultaneous growth in the number of visitors and the number of shops in the period up to 1820. Most of the new shops were south of the river and saw development in Bath Street as well as Church Street and High Street. Clemens Street was built from about 1808 and had shops from the early days.
The growth of the town on the ground was both north and south of the river to start with and the occasional owner or occupant turned the front room into a primitive shop. Houses in the Parade were built from about 1808 and were solely for use as dwellings, either by well-off owners or as holiday lets. The idea of shops in the Parade was probably as shocking as putting shops in Lansdowne Crescent would be today. The functional shops developed in back streets such as Bedford Street and Satchwell Street as well as the south of the town. The first shop in the Parade was probably a milliner who made hats on the premises and showed them off in the front room but the location is not known.
During the next 20 or 30 years the town’s population developed at an astonishing pace and many ground floor rooms of houses were converted to shops of one kind or another. As one example, the number of shops listed in a directory in the Parade in 1840 between Victoria Bridge and Warwick Street was over fifty. Most of the shops changed hands very frequently and a life of ten years was an achievement. Whether shopkeepers made a fortune and sold up or cut their losses it is not possible to determine.
The Parade, Warwick Street, Regent Street and adjoining streets were lined with small, local shopkeepers by 1860. It was not until the 1880s that regional and national chains of retailers developed and began to take over shops in the town.
One of the first national chains in the town was W H Smith newsagents about 1885. Melias the grocers and, perhaps surprisingly, Sketchleys the cleaners were in town by 1895.
There was a big influx of national chains before the first World War including Freeman Hardy and Willis, shoes, Empire butchers, London Central Meat and Pearks, grocers,
It is also appropriate to mention the local shopkeepers who survived for a relatively long time. Working from the north on the Parade the shops which are most often remembered were Edward Grey’s (1913), Burgis and Colbourne’s, Woodward’s (1913), Bobby’s (1925) and Francis’s (1860).
Margaret Rushton, 2018