Archer Cowley & Co (“AC&Co”) is the transport firm set up in 1857 by James Archer, born 1836, so aged 21 in 1857, and son of John Archer, brewer, probably commencing with a horse and cart from his father’s brewery business. James Archer was a brother of Alfred George Archer, who became an Excise Officer (perhaps because he met such officers who came to test the specific gravity and thus the alcohol-content of his father’s beer), was moved in that job to Wells, Somerset, where he met and married his boss’s daughter, Olive Emma Reed, and hence the Archers’ connection with the Reeds, of Devon. Click here for an image of James Archer in his mature years.
James Archer’s daily pony & trap delivery to Abingdon went from strength to strength in the 19th century, probably partly because it started in the ‘age of transport’ begun by the railways and George Stephenson in 1825. Archer & Co (as it then was) capitalised on this by complementing the railways by providing furniture containers (then called “Lift Wagons”) which made transport of furniture by road and rail a systematised and cutting-edge technology.
James Archer married, but had no children, so when he approached retirement (in 1919 after 62 years in the business), he looked to his most suitable nephew, William George Reed Archer (“WGRA”), son of Alfred George Archer, to continue his work, and handed his share of the business over to him. At the time WGRA was working for his father-in-law, George Blake, in his house-furnishing business in Little Clarendon Street, ie a related but quite different business, though he had been a messenger-boy for Uncle James many years before, in 1894, when he was sixteen.
The banner heading of this page (and all the other pages of this website) is from a 1905 AC&Co invoice, and shows a typical scene in front of the Park End Street warehouse in those days. Click here to go to that invoice (NB: by double-clicking on that image you will see it much larger). In that ‘turn of the (19th) century scene, a steam traction engine is hauling a rake of three coupled Archer Cowley & Co wagons, while a pony and trap (perhaps an image intended to hark-back to the small-scale origins of the business) passes in the opposite direction.