When Keith Pickles mentioned that he had got his first trick from Ellisdons, (see The November Meeting report in this issue), it opened up a real wealth of memories for me. Ellisdons seemed to be on the back page of almost every comic when I was a boy and the range of items for sale were unbelievable to young impressionable lad like me. Ellisdons is now of course long gone but I decided to do a little research to see if I could rekindle some of those memories. The following is adapted from the introduction by Sid Templar, founder of Hawkins Bazaar, to a reprint of a selection of pages from the Ellisdons catalogues of 1938 and 1956 “Established in 1898", their literature used to claim, but that was in Australia, dealing in somewhat more practical merchandise. Then, in the early 1930s, for reasons unexplained, three generations of the Ellisdon family arrived in England and acquired premises in High Holborn. Within four years they were issuing wonderful catalogues and claiming to be "The Largest Mail Order House for Novelties in the World". How or why this came about is not clear, but for the next thirty years many of us 'pranksters' had reason to be glad that it did, though our victims may have felt otherwise. At its peak, the business was mailing 100,000 catalogues: as well as importing from Europe and the Far East, it employed a large workforce preparing and manufacturing at various sites in London and, later, Bedford. The decline, when it came in the '70s, was rapid, sparked by an assortment of factors, prominent amongst them, as is so often the case, the retirement of the last member of the founding family. It is sometimes difficult, when reading old catalogues, to imagine who would have bought from them. Here there is no problem, the average 9 or 10 year old boy at the time would be a loyal and probably typical Ellisdon customer, pockets no doubt stuffed with whizz-bangs, stink-bombs and metal discs which could be made to sound like breaking glass. "Mail Order people are all rogues," Sid’s mother frequently warned him. "They'll run off with your money and there'll be nothing you can do about it." But they didn't. Indeed when he wrote and told them that their Seebackroscope fell far short of his expectations they sent him a sheet of halfpenny stamps. I am glad that this booklet will enable others to be introduced to or reminded of what was available in an age when neither product nor copywriting had to 'comply' with anything. The good news is that this reprint of Ellisdons catalogue can be obtained from Tobar Ltd., St Margaret, Harleston, Norfolk IP20 0PJ. If you can’t get a copy I will scan it on a CD and it will be available through the BMC library. All you need is a computer to read it. I have to thank Allen Tipton who is writing a full article on Ellisdons for the Abra magazine for helping me with material for this article. |
