Published in Windlesora 09 (1990)
© WLHG
Up until the early 1930s, J. Gane & Co. of 125 High Street, Eton was still advertising itself as ‘under Royal Patronage, purveyors of hunting, shooting and all kinds of sporting boots and shoes’, and that customers were ‘waited upon by appointment’.
It was not just a shoe shop, but a boot and shoe manufactory. It would make any sort of shape of boot or shoe to order. Wooden lasts were kept for all customers regardless and altered from time to time as the customer’s feet changed shape or developed coms, so that an order by post from the Northwest frontier of India, or an estate in Ireland, could be completed and dispatched in the sure knowledge that the boots, when received would be a perfect fit.
Just as with the tailors of Eton, Gane’s catered for the Eton College boys and were very often kept them as customers for the rest of their lives. To ensure this continuity, a senior member of the firm would attend the boys in their houses at Eton, Colleges at Oxford or Cambridge, or travel to London to wait on old boys in their clubs, to measure them for their shoes, discuss style or personal whims, and to fit their customers. The Royal patronage was no idle boast and included foreign royalty as well as British.
Such service could go to extremes, provided the customer could pay. On one occasion a customer who was deer stalking in the Highlands bagged a very fine stag. He had it skinned on the spot and sent the skin straight off the stag’s back by train to Gane’s, with instructions to make him a pair of deerskin brogues from it. The season was warm and the goods service slow, so the skin arrived full of maggots, but it was cleaned and salted and dispatched to a tannery and, in due course, a pair of shoes was made from the least damaged parts of the skin.
Another customer from Maidenhead, which was still a mecca for the bright young things and full of illegal drinking clubs and wild parties, required a special pair of sandals. They were to show off his toenails which he painted red, for the big toe, and green or blue for the rest.
The firm also catered for the military men and for working men but repairs to their heavy boots were usually contracted out to cobblers in Eton Wick and elsewhere.
Up until the middle of the twentieth century, the shopkeepers of Eton High Street were all local people, and probably second or third sons of the surrounding yeomen farmers. For example, W. V. Brown, the great-great- grandson of Tom Brown, the founder of the tailoring firm by Barnes Pool bridge in 1784, started up a hatters and shirt makers business further down the same side of the High Street in the first half of the nineteenth century. His sister Sarah married Philip Headington of Cippenham Court Farm in 1863, and her daughter Edith married my grandfather F. C. Bayley, a younger son of William Bayley of Britwell Court Farm. He went into business in London and in the early twentieth century added the businesses of V. W. Brown and J. Gane to his three London shops, and decreed that each of his sons should take over one of these businesses.
Externally the place has changed little over the years, but internally, and in its organisation, there is very little of the old set up surviving. The firm used to employ two lady book-keepers, the only female staff, but they were closeted in a tiny office off the shop and appeared never to come out except to go home. There would be two or three men, under Mr. C. J. Howard, in the shop to deal with customers and they kept contact with the office, the cutting room, the stitching room, the repairs and polishing room and the storeroom, by means of a system of lead speaking tubes. These terminated with a lignum vitae mouthpiece, a bit like a shallow funnel, and the hole in the centre was stopped up with a matching whistle on a length of cord or chain. Each terminal was numbered, and to call up one just removed the whistle and blew into the mouthpiece the required number of times, and then put your ear to it. A voice would reply from the room called and the message could then be passed – the high tech. of c.1880 but quite unaffected by power cuts, and no breakdowns.
Between the front and back of the building was a dark, well-ventilated store for the skins from which everything was made. There were two, or possibly four, piles – as high as a man – of full skins, about 1.8m by 1.2m. Opening on to an internal courtyard was the room with the heavy stitching machine, and the boy who polished and heel balled all the repaired shoes. In the courtyard was a large, ancient vine which produced luscious big black grapes. It was a cutting from the royal vine south of the Castle in Windsor. There was also a large water butt to collect rainwater to augment the supply from the pump over a well.
Years after my family interest in the firm had ceased, I went into the shop in the school summer holidays and found that the old man, ‘helping out’ while the regular staff were on holiday, was the man who had been boot boy when my father took over the management of the place – having left school and finished a course of study at the Cordwainers College to learn the trade. The old man ‘helping out’ reminisced happily of how the staff tended to tease their young boss about his numerous girl friends. ‘But when he met your mother’ said the old man, ‘we knew that this one was different, because when I made jokes about her, your father picked me up and shoved me head first into the water butt!’. Fifty years on he only remembered the funny side of the affair, but today a different view might have been taken.
The most prestigious job in the firm was that of cutter – the man who cut the shapes from the skin to be made into shoes. Clever cutting to avoid waste was a fine art, and although my father worked with old Mr Bell, a hardworking but dour Scot, for many years, and learned all he could from him, he could never surpass his skill. He doubtless approved of the fact that my father’s wartime cavalry squadron commander was a Scot also, because he was occasionally given a haggis for Hogmanay that my father had been sent from his friend in Edinburgh. Hogmanay was the only time Mr Bell would celebrate with a wee dram at work. He was even reputed to unbend sufficiently to give an exhibition of sword dancing in the cutting room, over crossed cutting knives on the floor.
It was only after the First World War that the firm purchased a bicycle with a large basket on the front for the boot boy to use to deliver repaired boots and shoes to the Eton College houses. Up until that time, the boots had been packed into a long narrow cloth covered trunk about five feet long and eighteen inches wide by eight deep, secured by a leather strap round the middle. The boy would carry this full of boots on his back from the shop round the College houses to leave mended boots and pick up ones to be mended.
Those of the staff who did not live in Eton or Eton Wick would cycle into work, my father included. When we lived in Sussex Lodge, a three-storey house on the Bath Road in Slough, opposite the northern end of Upton Road, my father would still use the old route followed by the Eton Montem until it was stopped. He would go down Upton Road and past the church to the point where the two footpaths across Eton playing fields met the Datchet Road, by the sluices in the stream where the mill used to be, then across the playing fields to Sheep Bridge and through the College grounds and Fellows Garden to come out in Eton High Street by Barnes Bridge. This route is no longer considered to be a public right of way.
The shop boasted one curiosity which was still there when I last visited it. Strapped to the centre post holding up the main beam in the shop is an ancient pair of wooden skis. I always understood that they were left behind by a customer in the time of Mr J. Gane to ensure that a new pair of boots fitted the skis as well as the owner’s feet. He never returned. In my father’s time the firm also made special boots and shoes for people crippled by war wounds or natural foot deformities. The shoemaker had to carve and make up pieces of cork to simulate the shape of a healthy foot, as well as carving the last. This latter task usually consisted of adapting a standard, mass-produced last by lengthening it and adding bits to make the foot’s shape. As a hobby my father used his wood-carving skills to carve portraits of horses, using offcuts of the mahogany that the Eton boat builder used in the construction of the college boats. The model of the coach called ‘The Coronet’, which ran from London to Windsor, together with the horses and people, which is in the Royal Borough collection, is his work, and all the leather harness came from Gane & Co. – the only deviation into saddlery.
It was my father also who invented the Eton slipper, a light leather slipper but with the main front part made out of heavy velvet corduroy. By saving leather the cost of the slipper was reduced and sales increased.
Among my grandfather’s later employees in W. V. Brown’s, were an energetic young couple, Mr New and Miss Lingwood. They wished to better themselves and gain the management team; but as my grandfather, as was the custom at the time, wished to retain complete control of his businesses, they were turned down. As a result they left and married and set up in opposition on the opposite side of the High Street. History shows how right they were to do so. In the latter half of the century they were able to buy out and take over both W. V. Brown’s – whose premises are now occupied by a Bank – and J. Gane & Co.
Michael H. H. Bayley
Windsor Local History Group 