It was entered via a short passage and the first sight to meet his customers was a large leather apron hung on the wall. In each of the fifty-two pockets on this apron was a cut-throat razor. Each razor was used for one week and then rested for the next fifty-one weeks. Archie’s assistant, George Price was the shaving expert and many of their customers had their own shaving pot with their name on. In common with many hairdressers in that time, Archie was also a tobacconist. He was an agent for Ronson lighters and used to repair them.
Like his father before him, who was a fitness instructor, Archie worked at Cheltenham College just across the road. However, Archie’s visit was much less strenuous for the boys because all they had to do was to sit still and have their hair cut! Archie, whose wife Trixie, had her own hairdressing salon a few doors away stayed at these premises until the late 1960s.
In 1969 a paint and decorating shop known as The Red House was established here and later this became part of NatWest Bank (see below).
149 Bath Road (formerly 3 Westall Buildings)
After (and possibly before) Mr Winstone’s death in 1894 No. 3 Westall Buildings was run by Joseph Bendall as an ironmongers and builders merchant. In May 1896 there was a fire, which was discovered by Mr Bendall as he was closing the shop at 11.20 pm. He had to run to the local fire station to raise the alarm and obtain help (telephones were still uncommon) whilst his neighbours and a posse of policemen, under the direction of Inspector Parker, fought the fire with buckets of water. The fire was quickly brought under control but the damage amounted to a considerable £100.
For the first twenty years or so of the 20th century this was the business of the London Central Meat Co Ltd, a national chain which also had two butcher’s shops in the High Street. It remained in the butchery trade when the Gloucestershire Co-operative and Independent Society acquired it for their butchery department. It stayed in the hands of the Co-op becoming their bakery department at the start of the Second World War. Over the next three dozen years it changed to their fish department, their laundry and finally their dry-cleaners.
151 Bath Road (formerly Leicester House)
In 1881 this was a draper’s shop belonging to John French, his wife Maria and their three teenage daughters. This trade would continue here for at least the next 80 years.
Bought by the Lord family in the 1880s, this was their home for about 70 years. Henry Lord and his sister Jane remained unmarried and lived here with Mary, their widowed mother. Jane, Henry and their younger brother, Walter were born in Bampton, Oxfordshire. All three were drapers and they had another brother, James, who was a grocer in Wootton Bassett, Wiltshire.
In the 1881 census, Walter and his wife, Anne lived in the High Street, Cheltenham with their two daughters, Eva Annie and Agnes Ethel. They had four more children, two daughters and two sons, some of them born after they had left Cheltenham to live in the London area.
In February 1894 at the age of just 49, Jane Lord died leaving all her estate to her brother Henry. She was buried in the churchyard at Leckhampton. Henry died seven years later in September 1901 and requested in his will to be buried alongside her.
By now, Walter and his family had returned to Cheltenham. Henry having no family of his own, left a share of the drapers business to his niece, Agnes. She was assisted by her elder sister, Eva until the spring of 1909 when Eva died at the tragically young age of 32. Ethel Gertrude, another spinster sister, then joined Agnes and the business continued.
