Living over the Shop

The next update will not be completed until the weekend of 6th March as I am travelling.

Sorry for the delay.

Not many people will know, not only was The Duke of Lancaster our dream business, but it was also our home during the late seventies and through the eighties.  It also remained the home of a number of other people too, well past 1990 in fact.

Looking back at how hard it was then makes me take a step back and think, how did we do that? It genuinely defies believe.

For long periods of time we had no electricity at all and many a time we would find ourselves getting back to the ship at the dead of night and have to literally feel our way through the ship to our living quarters.

There is cold and there is cold, but The Duke is a huge steel box, with very little, if indeed any lagging or insulation. Couple this to the fact that she spends half of each day mostly submerged in the cold, icey waters of the Dee, it doesn’t take much imagination to realize how cold it was.

Times were beginning to get hard, and money was really, really tight. We hadn’t reached the stage of closing The Ship to the public and we were still living on board when we started trading in Liverpool under the Solitaire name.

We were very much living hand to mouth using a very small pot of stock money to trade. Bill Arrow was a remarkable help for us, he became our ad-hoc chauffeur, getting up in time for us to leave Mostyn at 5:00 in the morning to drive to London to buy stock.

The shop was started using only a few thousand pounds which we had borrowed for stock and everything was done on a shoestring budget.

We would always buy our stocks direct from the factories, often not knowing what we would find when we arrived. I still had many of my contacts from when I worked in Wolverhampton and they became increasingly handy in the early days.

It was then back in the van to drive half the length of the country to ‘the fridge’ as we had come to call her, often not arriving back until 2:00am the day after we’d set off.

We’d snatch some sleep, fighting against the cold and the elements, before taking the stock over to the shop in Liverpool to unload, very often repeating the process the following day.

The shop in Liverpool wasn’t what you’d expect with the boutiques of Bold and Bond Street in spitting distance. The Shop was makeshift to say the least and when you realize the origins you’ll appreciate why.

The shop itself was completely empty and the building in desperate need of repair, in fact it was later identified by the council as needing development, but again that’s another story.

We piled a full wagon load of wooden pallets and placed in the centre of the full length of the store. We then ripped up old cardboard cartons and placed them inside out on top to hide the pallets as best we could. Finally we covered the whole length with sheepskin mittens.

I fully appreciate this isn’t the most conventional way to open a prestigious city centre store but we were desperate to build up the turnover. The more money we could generate the more stock we had to trade with.

Time was critical in turning the money we’d made back into stock as soon as we could. I remember one evening, we closed the shop early, around 4:00pm so I could catch the London Train.

I remember grabbing the takings, all cash, running from the shop and up the hill to Lime Street Station. I caught the early evening train to London.

A sheepskin supplier, Harvey Miller, from Wadeson Street in the East End had agreed to stay open later and serve us with more mittens. He packaged them all up in these huge boxes and had taken them across London to meet us at Euston.

The deal was very quickly done and we had time for a quick cuppa before getting back on the Mail Train, the last train of the day, back to Liverpool.

I remember distinctly that we looked like the man from the “Big Fry” advert on the telly, carrying huge boxes onto the train with us. By the way, it really is worth looking up the Big Fry advert on google to understand where I’m coming from!

But the night didn’t end with a nice gentle tootle back to Bootle, no we had to take the mittens around to Pat’s Mothers and picked up our van at around 2:30 am.

We had scheduled to meet another supplier the following morning in Glastonbury at 6:00am so we had to get a move on or else we would have missed the chance.

We got straight into the van and drove like demons down the motorway, picked up the second load and drove back up the motorway to Liverpool.

We arrived back in Liverpool, consolidated all the stock, put it out in the shop and managed to open the doors at 10:30 with brand new gleaming stock.

We considered that to be all in a days’ work, that’s the way it was.

We carried on that frenetic pace for many, many years and Company House records show that the business peaked with a turnover or around 5 or 6 million pounds a year.

Why did we do it? To expose what we consider to be a corrupt North Wales council and our refusal to give into them but looking back now, I really can’t believe we did it.

Our refusal to give in would eventually lead to the High Courts