It’s strange how things can, for no apparent reason, form tenuous links out of the ether, links that strengthen and then take hold before finally forming into a single narrative strand.
This particular strand began to take shape as I absent-mindedly browsed through the internet’s netherworld. Whilst I scrolled through some random page or other, there suddenly popped up a link to a local interest story. With the daydreaming abandon of the easily-led, I didn’t think twice, clicking on, then following the line down the virtual rabbit hole to a story about my local shopping centre. One further click in the midst of this article opened a video of the shopping centre shot over thirty years ago, while I was still a young boy.
Within seconds I was transported back through the decades, and I read aloud the signs of some of the shops that fuzzed into view: Merrett’s, Barrat’s, Freeman Hardy Willis, Tandy, reciting them like a litany, knowing full well that they, and many of those patronising them in the video, are long since gone.
Then, from nowhere, only a few days later, my Twitter feed led me to a page discussing something called ‘ghost signs’. Not having heard of these before, I investigated once again and discovered that ghost signs are the hand-painted signs of long defunct and disappeared businesses and agencies, signs that, despite their obsolete nature, still cling to side walls and gables, lurk beneath signs and in shadows like long-forgotten pieces of pop art, the original versions of those stylised kitchen signs and pictures that can now be purchased in homeware stores everywhere to add a burst of ‘retro’ design chic to any home.
I knew these signs immediately. Well, I didn’t know those exact signs, but I knew some of their ilk. For years, every time I visited the town centre to do some shopping, I would peer up at the gable of a furniture shop to see FT Bowden – Wholesale Fruit and Potato Merchant proudly emblazoned there. I spent hours over the years wondering about F T Bowden: had he been a hard taskmaster or a generous, kind boss? Maybe he’d reward his delivery boys with an apple, or perhaps they were more likely to be offered a clip around the ear.
Bowden is gone forever now, hidden from the world beneath two coats of magnolia masonry paint, but he’s not the only ghost around here.
After browsing through the Twitter page I grabbed my coat and walked two minutes around the corner to a local pharmacy. Even though it’s probably only noticed by a handful of people each year, there, on the side wall of the pharmacy, tucked down an alley, is a series of ghost signs layered, one over the other.
Most noticeable is the black square of PERCY G. GAEN LTD. NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE DISPENSARY, which was later written over with the simpler PERCY G. GAEN LTD. DISPENSING CHEMISTS offering a little slice of British social history.
However, beneath these are the faded yet grand remnants of an even older sign, barely legible now which contains the words ‘Provision Merchant’. This one word alone sparked off a series of stories in my head. I wondered, was this merchant ever in competition with F T Bowden? In my head I began to concoct numerous pre-war dramas and sitcom scenes in which two opposing grocers existed at war with each other, battling for custom and high street dominance over the banked up piles of their cabbages and carrots: Cry ‘Havoc!’, and let slip the leeks of war! Perhaps I should take the subject more seriously, as the timings of the signs don’t rule out the possibility of this merchant having filed off to fight the Germans across the dark fields of Europe, never to return home. Or maybe he simply retired, the building segueing into the dispensary it would become, leaving a nice gap in the market for Bowden to slip in and establish himself.
Of course, these stories are mine. Maybe an extensive trawl through local historical books and records would reveal the truth behind my fabrications, but it is possible that the real histories of these men, just like countless others like them, are lost to time, paint and demolition. Still, it’s said that history remembers, even if just faintly, the names and deeds of those who would otherwise be forgotten men and women if they remain spoken, hence the importance of bards and skalds throughout history.
Well, I’m no bard, nor am I a skald, but I do have these few poor words, and so, Messrs. Bowden and Gaen, I offer them to you; perhaps they’ll allow you to linger in our local story for a little while longer yet.
