(27.9.16): So, at long last, we know what Mr Cowley and Mr Rippington looked like. My dad, worked with them for about ten years from the mid-twenties, and he (FGBA) said (something like): ‘Mr Rippington was a bit of a drinker’, and I can’t help thinking that this possibility does seem to stare-out of his photo. And I think Dad said that he drove a Bull-Nose Morris. Well, that was quite a likely possibility in the town where such cars were made. From recollection, Messrs Cowley and Rippington were members of the firm until about 1936 when WGRA (William Archer, my grandfather) bought them out, and it became a ‘family firm’ run by WGRA with the assistance of his sons Arthur and Fred (AWA and FGBA), and with his daughters Gladys Elisabeth and Olive and Nora as paid co-directors. So the business from the middle-ish thirties to the end of its days in 1969 (which encompasses my entire youth from birth in 1941) provided income for a father and his five children, and their families. Not bad going.
I have done some research into censuses and so on in relation to Mark Cowley and Mr Rippington, and I will paste that information into a page or two of this site, with a link from this location: click here for a link to information about Cowley and Rippington.(not yet available 27.9.16).