Ducker & Son was a traditional shoe makers in Turl Street in Oxford.
The
business was founded by Edward Ducker in 1898. A limited company was formed
following the deaths of Ducker and his wife in 1947.
The shop
was featured in the 2007 film Atonement.
Ducker
& Son closed at the end of November 2016. Its archives are now held in the
Bodleian Library.
Customers
included:
H. H.
Asquith - Prime Minister
Rowan
Atkinson - English actor and comedian known for Mr. Bean and Blackadder.
Jeremy
Clarkson - English broadcaster and writer known for BBC TV show Top Gear.
Matt Flynn
- English writer.
Eddie
Jordan - Irish businessman and former Formula One team boss.
Lady
Ottoline Morrell - Literary salonist
Matthew
Pinsent - English Olympic rower and broadcaster.
J.R.R.
Tolkien - English writer and Oxford don known for The Hobbit and The Lord of
the Rings.
Evelyn
Waugh - English writer known for Brideshead Revisited.
Rare
ledgers reveal shoe-buying habits of Tolkien and Waugh
Sales
records from Ducker & Son, bespoke shoemaker to authors and prime minister
Herbert Asquith, go on display in Oxford
Maev
Kennedy
Wed 22 Mar
2017 13.30 GMTLast modified on Tue 28 Nov 2017 03.19 GMT
JRR Tolkien
was among the well-heeled who shopped at Ducker & Son, which closed last
year.
On 11
October 1913, an Oxford undergraduate bought a pair of black leather football
boots for 14 shillings and sixpence and spent an extra sixpence on a pair of brown
laces. It was a substantial investment for an Exeter College student but he was
in good company: Ducker & Son shoe shop had princes and professors, prime
ministers and maharajas in its leather-bound ledgers.
The student
was JRR Tolkien, and the ledger recording his purchase has joined the largest
collection in the world of original manuscripts and drawings by the creator of
The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, in the archives of the Bodleian
library in Oxford.
The library
has bought the archives of Ducker & Son, the Turl Street home of the Oxford
brogue, which shod the great, good and relatively humble for a century, until
it closed at the end of last year because the partners could not find anyone to
take on the business.
A selection
from the 11 impeccably kept ledgers will be on display at the library on 25 and
26 March, tracing the many connections between its customers and the library
collections.
HH Asquith
is one of seven prime ministers whose papers are in the library. He served a
term as president of the Oxford Union in his student days, which were rather
grander than Tolkien’s, and bought a pair of lambswool slippers for 10/9 in
1923. Records show they were posted to his home in Abingdon.
In
contrast, the novelist Evelyn Waugh had a serious shoe habit: the ledgers
record over two pages that he bought 20 pairs of boots and shoes between 1930
and 1946.
Another
customer was Lady Ottoline Morrell, who kept open house for the Bloomsburies
and many other literary hangers-on at her country house in Garsington – many of
whom, including Aldous Huxley in Chrome Yellow and DH Lawrence in Women In
Love, responded by cruelly caricaturing her in their work.
A ledger
entry reveals another purchase by JRR Tolkien, when he was a fellow at Merton
College.
Her many
lovers included Bertrand Russell, who wrote of their first encounter: “For
external and accidental reasons, I did not have full relations with Ottoline
that evening but we agreed to become lovers as soon as possible.”
She was 6ft
and clearly had a heavy tread. In April 1916 Ducker virtually rebuilt a pair of
boots for her, replacing the soles, heels and straps and repairing the uppers,
one of three pairs repaired that month at a total cost of £1.8.4d.
HH the
Maharaja Holkar of India, as the ledger magnificently recorded him, who was
studying at Christ Church, had a pair of shoes restored and some slippers
enlarged in 1929.
There are
some mysteries and poignant stories within the simple entries. Baron Wilhelm
Friedrich Adam Lothar Max von Richthofen was a distant cousin of the German
fighter pilot known as the Red Baron. He bought a pair of shoes from Ducker
& Son in 1913, when he spent a year at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, but his
bill was not paid until 1989. The ledgers do not reveal who settled the
account.
The
Ponsonby Brothers, Charles and Ashley, were among many young Oxford men heading
for the first world war who bought marching boots and waterproofing at Ducker
& Son.
for more
than a century. Photograph: Oxford University Images/Richard Lofthouse Library
Ashley was
killed in action less than a year later, but Charles’s purchases continue for
many years later, as he became an MP, parliamentary private secretary to the
then foreign secretary Anthony Eden, honorary colonel of the Kent yeomanry, and
finally the 1st Baron Ponsonby of Wootton in 1956.
Chris
Fletcher, keeper of special collections at the Bodleian library, said staff
were delighted to save a piece of Oxford history. “People will have fun looking
at the buying habits of some familiar names, as well as taking a serious look
into a sustained historical record of social and business history in Oxford.”
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Oxford:
Ducker & Son Ltd
Written by
Nasir Hamid on June 6th, 2017
Ducker
& Son Ltd, Turl Street, Oxford, traditional shoemakers since 1898. All gone
now. Soon to be a wine shop, right next door to the Whiskey Shop. Just what
Oxford needs. When I found out that Duckers was closing for good I felt
compelled to document what was left of the shop. Over the years I have
photographed the shoes in the window countless times but this was the first
time I had actually set foot inside the shop. It’s a real shame to see this
shop close. When I got there in my lunch break there were lots of people coming
and going and it was difficult to not be in the way with a tripod set up. I
wanted some nice quality pictures so I decided to take a Pentax 67 with a
wide-angle lens. I knew the shop was quite dark inside so film choice was very
simple – Neopan Acros 100 because it doesn’t suffer from reciprocity failure
until you go past 1 minute exposures. Most of my exposures were around the 30
seconds mark. I only had enough time to finish one roll of 10 frames but that
was more than enough to get these results.
Photographs
by Simply Oxford photoblog Photography by Nasir Hamid: http://www.simplyoxford.com/oxford/oxford-ducker-son-ltd
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