This letter-heading, or datable compliments slip is adhered to the front cover of the album and from the part-printed year indication (“190”) clearly shows that the document dates from the first decade of the 20th century. This fits well with Wikipedia’s account of the warehouse pasted below, which indicates that the architect was a local Oxford man, one HJ Tollit, who also designed an extension of Tower Brewery at Park End Wharf at about the same time. According to the handwritten, carefully-indicated cost data for the warehouse sections, it was actually built as follows, whether one section straight after the other or not I know not:
(Block A): Easternmost (nearest Carfax) section: built by Hallidays: £2,786;
(Block B): Middle section: built by Wooldridge: £3,000;
(Block D): Western (nearest the station) section: built by Kingerly (sic): £1,800;
(Block E): At rear, built by Kingerlee 1920: £6,500;
(Block F): Garage built by Hutchins & Green 1939 £12,692.
So, what happened to ‘Block C’? Just a slip of the pen?
And, clearly, from the showing of the steam traction engine drawing the three close-coupled wagons, that was the state-of-the-art technology as of about 1905, whereby the road-going part of the transport system could match (to some extent, but not in speed) that of the railway part.
WarehouseEdit (Wikipedia):
Archer, Cowley & Co's Cantay Depositories furniture warehouse was designed by Tollit and built in 1901.[8] Behind its decorative gabled red brick facade, Cantay Depositories has a steel frame and iron columns cast by William Lucy's[8] Eagle Ironworks in Jericho, Oxford. As a warehouse the building had 3,840 square feet (357 m2) of storage space and was segregated into sections by armoured, fire-proof doors that would close automatically in the event of fire.[8] Cantay House is now Oxford Conference Centre,[9] a nightclub, and a retail store.
So, what was WGRA (William Archer, my paternal grandfather), who in 1925 inherited James Archer’s share of the business and became (by buying-out the other partners) sole owner of the business not very long after that, doing all this time in the decade 1900 to 1910 when all this building down by Oxford’s newish station on the Botley Road? Answer: he was doing something else altogether. In 1900 he came back from six years working for his maternal uncle Edwin Albert Reid at his paper factory at Keisersveer. In 1901he put himself down in the census for that year as “Schoolteacher”, whereas his brother Bert (Albert) was working for Mr George Blake (a former carpenter from Eynsham, turned cabinet-maker and house-furnisher), in his house-furnishing business. However William soon joined his brother Bert in that business and stayed for 18 or 19 years, rising to a managerial position. It is clear from the dates entered against the latter-built blocks “E” and “F”, that only the garage block was actually built (in 1939) after WGRA joined the firm in 1925. Thus it is clear that all this work must have been done at the initiative of James rather than William Archer.
And how interesting that in 1900 to 1910 the Archer Cowley business included (perhaps as a major element of its business): “Builders’ Cartage Contractors: Sand, Ballast, Breeze, Rubble etc supplied”; that part of the business had discontinued by the time I was aware of the firm in the 1940s.