A sorry tale from November 1911: apparently Archer Cowley’s lift van was sent by the GWR to the wrong place, arriving at Downton, Wiltshire when it should have been at Baguley, south Manchester. This caused much unnecessary expense and wastage of time, amounting to £6.2.6d of costs for which Archer Cowley duly billed the GWR.
In 1911, WGRA was working for Mr Blake at his furniture shop in Little Clarendon Street, having joined him in 1901. He (WGRA) had three children already and was to work for Mr Blake a further 8 years before he joined James Archer in 1919.
WGRA has attached a typewritten note referring to the delays caused by the railways, to this invoice addressed to The Great Western Failwy, at Oxford station.
As you can see, there is a pencil-handwritten note at the bottom: “Repeated14/12/11 (and) 26/2/12” meaning, perhaps, that a further copy of the invoice was sent to the GWR on those dates, due to non-payment of the sum of £6.2.6d. Whether it ever was paid, is now presumably lost forever in the mists of time. Not to mention the fog of war which descended on Britain in August 1914, only two and a half years after the latter of those reminder dates. The “Great War” of 1914-1918. "The war to end all wars" as it became known when its horror became apparent. And it was at Oxford GWR station that the (perhaps not entirely apocryphal) event in August 1914 on the day that war broke out, occurred, when ‘Aunty Blake’ (as she was known to my Aunt Nora, my father’s younger-by-three-years sister) rushed to gather up the members of the Archer family returning from a railway outing in the countryside (of perhaps Berkshire) and to usher them to the safety of their own home, after being exposed on that perilous expedition' in wartime' to heaven-knows-what dangers from the rascally Germans who were now (and had been for at least a few hours) at war with us. Aunty Blake was the wife of George Blake, the former carpenter, turned furniture-maker and house-furnisher, who became very wealthy in his own lifetime, starting from nothing, piurely on account of his own business acumen. Aunty Blake was also the actual aunt of Lizzie Gilder, who married WGRA, and was my grandmother.