Albert Walter Gamage, Herefordian entrepreneur & businessman

Albert Walter Gamage was one of the pioneers of the department store, a feature of our modern townscape that we take for granted. In its day, Gamage's was one of the most famous and prestigious stores in London.
Albert Walter was born on July 14th 1855 at 2 Victoria Street, Hereford. He was the seventeenth child of Henry Gammage, a plumber and glazier and Trypenia Gammage, née Carr. Henry and Trypenia had married in Warwickshire on August 8th 1831. Having given birth to at least three children in Birmingham, Henrietta (1833), Henry Smith (1835), and Tryphena (1836), they had probably moved to Hereford by 1838 where they parented Rosa (1838), Lucy Jane (1840), David Carr (1841), Edwin Thomas (1843), Louisa (1846), Agnes Clara (1848), and then several years later Melivia (1854), then Albert.

The family later moved to 22 Widemarsh Street.
Some of his siblings opened a draper's and miliner's shop in Kington in 1866, had setting up business at premises now occupied by Sergeants' shop at 13 High Street, and according to Kington historian William Edwards, the shop was devoted to ladies' wear. I think that Walter would have been too young to play much of a part in this shop at least to begin with for he was only eleven at the time. The main movers were likely to have been his sister, Louisa and his brother, Edwin who would have been about twenty and twenty-two rrespectively. Indeed the 1901 census lists Louisa and Melivia was working as fancy drapers and milliners in New Windsor, Berkshire, with Edwin in business as a general draper and silk merchant in New Milverton, Warwickshire, the county of his parents' marriage. It is possible that Walter gained experience helping out later on.
"I feel sure that the lovely hats must have made many weep in their desire for them", says Edwards, but he adds: "The Gamage's were unpopular in the town, but in London Walter's ability to dress his windows won him immediate success". Popular or not, the Gamages were still trading in the town in 1881, for early in March that year, Thomas Carleton Skarratt, the Kington diarist, records: "Mr Esp's stock was valued on his behalf by Mr Gammage [sic]".

When he was nineteen to went to London and took employment with the drapery firm of Spencer, Turner & Bolero in Lisson Grove , then at the wholesale drapery warehouse run by Hitchcock, Williams & Co, situated in St Paul's Churchyard. In both places, he took lodgings where he worked which was considered a bit unusual.

Albert Walter teamed up with a colleague, Frank Spain in 1878 with whom he sunk savings of £150 into leasing a little hosiery shop whose front was a mere 5 feet wide, at 128 Holborn. He embarked on that venture because a local trader had told him that what Holborn lacked was a decent hosiery shop. Above the door Albert Walter hung his prophetic motto 'Tall Oaks from Little Acorns Grow'. Frank and Albert slept in the back room of the shop and only spared themselves fourteen shillings a week for living expenses. However by the end of the first year of trading they had made 1,632 pounds.
Albert Walter and Frank had success selling special hair brushes which they sold much more cheaply that their competitors. Albert, like other men who went on to running department stores, hit on the idea of buying in bulk and selling at a low profit. Indeed his business maxim was 'Always be satisfied with small profits'.
By 1881 Albert Walter had bought out his partner, Spain, and set about reorganizing the business to branch and and grow by selling a wider range of goods.
He searched far and wide for these new products, and undertook many trips all over Europe and North America for them. He later on became a legend in his own lifetime by stuggling through snow storms in the backwoods of Michigan for a new type of toy gun. He suffered frostbite on his ears when travelling to a trade fair in Chicago.
He called in on Frau Steiff's teddy-bear factory in the Black Forest, and went on to becoming the greatest importer of her teddies.
In 1888 Albert Walter married Jeanne Muir Murdoch, the second daughter of J.G Murdoch of Camden Square. They had four children , EriC, Daphne, Leslie and Cecil.
After the new safety bicycle was introduced in 1885, Albert Walter grasped the business opportunity straight away and arranged for bikes to be built under the Gamage label.
With more stock Gamage's obviously needed more space. He managed this by buying up bit by bit adjacent businesses until he had about two acres of floorspace. By the nature of its acquisition it was, despite various alterations a series of rooms, passages, steps, and ramps which meant looking for something a form of adventure. He had constructed an impressive neo-Gothic facade in front of this hotchpotch.
Gamage's differed from other large department stores in the capital in that it was not orientated towards lady shoppers but rather to the City gents who worked in the square mile immediately south and east of Holborn. However, of course lots of these fellows would return to a shopping trip at the weekends with their wives and children, for it was a veritable toy emporium. At the Christmas bazaar, it was a child's dream, where new toys were presented which had often been discovered by Albert Walter himself.
Albert Walter was at the cutting edge of innovation. For example, he forged stong links with his suppliers, frequently using companies that made goods just for him so that he could skirt around firms that had a low opinion of the way he slashed prices. When the nations's demand for cars started growing, Albert began selling them under his own label, and even opened a special motoring department in the shop. He was the first to bring out a huge mail-order catalogue (about a thousand pages long). This reveals much about the tastes of Edwardian England. The 900-page mail-order catalogue of 1911 gave up no fewer than forty-nine pages to bicycles, motor-bicycles and cycling equipment.
Albert Walter was also the first to take out full-page adverts in newspapers, such as when a plug for Gamage's occupied the front page of the Daily Mail on July 12th 1904, announcing an expansion of the shop, calling it the People's Popular Emporium.
Gamage's became the official outfitter for the Boy Scouts. Indeed the building up of the outdoor side of the store was in step with Albert's own sporty tastes. He came to be the president of lots of athletic clubs, and also be the the donor behind loads of challenge cups and shileds.
Among 41 burials found at the former Kwik Save site in Commercial Road were those of the mother and sister of Albert Walter Gamage.
ARCHAEOLOGISTS have unearthed a good omen for pub chain JD Wetherspoon at the site of its soon to open premises in Hereford. The grave of Hereford City councillor, Thomas Birch, who in 1870 championed the right of the working man to drink beer on Sunday, was one of 41 burials found at the former Kwik Save site in Commercial Road. Research revealed Baptist Thomas Birch, an accountant and one time rate collector for Hereford City Council, argued against a proposed motion to close the city's pubs on the Sabbath. "He pointed out that, unlike the working classes, council members had wines and spirits at their own houses, and could drink on Sunday," said Huw Sherlock of Archenfield Archaeology. "He added that the working man had little time to spare on a weekday and why should he be debarred from having his beer on Sunday." JD Wetherspoon, which tries to incorporate local history in the name of its 465 pubs, will now consider the Birch connection in naming the £1million Commercial Road premises, due to open by Christmas. Cllr Birch was found in a grave along with his father, Thomas Snr, a glass and china retailer whose shop at the 1841 census was located in High Town, next to the Booth Hall passage. Also in the same grave was Cllr Birch's wife Ann, nee Hatton. The couple had shared a three-storey house at 34 Commercial Road, now the site of the Barclay's Business Centre but then opposite the county prison, now the site of the Odeon Cinema and bus station. The Baptist cemetery was in use between 1838 and 1880. "Very little care had been taken to respect the burials when the supermarket was built in the 1980s and human bones were found scattered throughout back-filled trenches from that time," said Mr Sherlock. In one grave, the body of a girl in her teens was found with a thick coil of hair still attached to her skull, held in place by a pin. Some of the graves which were identified and researched include the blind minister, the Rev. John James Waite, and Typhena Gamage. Both the mother and sister of AW Gamage, of the department store in Holborn, were buried in the cemetery. All bones found have been carefully lifted from the site and are currently being studied at Birmingham University for signs of diet and disease before re-committal in Hereford by a Baptist Minister. Huw Sherlock said: "Archaeology in Hereford has tended to focus on the material aspects of culture and the remains of buildings and roads. This project will help to improve our direct knowledge of the people of Hereford.

Gamage's 1902 Catalogue

This shows how times have changed. Using such words these days would be considered an outrage, and would be likely to lead to arrest, but as far as I know, Albert Walter did not mean it in malice, it was just part of the lexicon of that era.

This would also be considered unacceptable today, just like the 'Black and White Minstral Show' that was taken off the air.

This would have caused a rumpus like it did recently in a shop in sleepy Bromyard. Again I doubt that any offence was intended.

This would probably be deemed far too biblical for modern secular Britain.

Here is another one from Gamage's catalogue that would be held to be far too racially stereotyping in this day and age.

Dolls were popular then as they are today with young girls. These ones done out of course in Edwardian fashion.

This shows the early development of the motor car, and reflects people's interest in them in an age when very few could actually afford one.

This sort of vehicle could be seen today on the London to Brighton rally in which all cars have to be pre-1907.

A hundred years ago traction engines were common on farms in an age where few people in the countryside had electricity.

The development and evolution of the steam engine was a British invention, so why shouldn't we have been proud of it?

Here are some more.

The rocking horse, a charming toy from an age of innocence and when horses were a common sight in our English towns. At that time there were about sixty thousand horses in London.

In that age lots of animals were used in circuses. I remember seeing elephants camped out next door to Holmer school where the leisure centre now stands.

This was the time of the Boer War in which the Afrikaner leaders were vilified.

Steam and clockwork cars were working models before batteries or mains electricity.

In those days every high street and large village had its own butcher's shop.

Working models of machinery when Britain was the workshop of the world.

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