Barton's the chemist

Barton's the chemist

In 1869 Thomas Prior sold his chemist shop in Bridge Street to Henry Barton. So started a St Ives institution, Barton's the chemist. The shop remained in family ownership for almost 120 years, closing for business in 1987. Read on to learn about Henry Barton and his customers.

Who was Henry Barton?

Born in 1844, Henry's family was well off. His father farmed the 565 acres of Wiggin Hill Farm, St Ives, employing 21 men and 5 boys. Henry and his six siblings had a governess and 5 servants.

Thomas Prior opened his chemist shop at 10 Bridge Street, St Ives in 1820. Henry bought the business in 1869, aged 25 years. Before then a druggist required no training or qualifications. In 1871 Henry was living above the shop. He shared the accommodation with his sister, an assistant and a servant. Henry recorded his occupation as 'Pharmaceutical Chemist'. For this title he had to be a member of the Pharmaceutical Society by examination. Soon after taking over the business Henry placed the advert below in the local newspaper.

As indicated by the advert, a pharmaceutical chemist could not survive by selling drugs alone. Even more exotic stock was mentioned in the 1988 talk given by Bob Burn-Murdoch transcribed below, quack medicines included.

Henry married Marianne Bedford, a widow, in 1871. Space in the nine rooms over the shop must have been at a premium by 1881. Living with Henry were his wife and her two daughters. Also Henry's and Marianne's own children. All seven were born within eight years, a prodigious rate of production. A shop assistant, servant and nursemaid completed the household.

Henry's wife died late in 1881. He married Margaret Clayton in 1884. Five more children followed in quick succession. Things remained cosy in 1891. With Henry and his second wife were eight of the children (four aged under five years, the youngest 11 months). And a shop assistant, a servant and a nursemaid.

By 1901 they were down to five children, a shop assistant and a servant. And by 1911 just Henry and his second wife lived with a servant. His son also shared the accommodation. Henry employed Frederick as a chemist and druggist.

Henry's second wife died in 1914. Henry died in 1921. He left almost £4,000 in his will, equal today to almost £200,000. Barton's the Chemist continued to trade under the ownership of Henry's son, Frederick. Henry's grandson Kenderick ran the business after his father until it closed in 1987.

The shop front remains unaltered, the c1720 building is listed.

Barton's books
In 1988 Bob Burn-Murdoch, Curator of the Norris Museum, gave an interesting and amusing talk to the Huntingdonshire Local History Society about the contents of the old shop books donated to the Museum. Below is a transcript of that talk.

BARTON'S BOOKS

R Burn-Murdoch, Curator, Norris Museum, St. Ives

The recent closure of Barton's chemist's shop in Bridge Street, St. Ives, marked the end of an era. The sign over the door reading “Established 1820” was no exaggeration, for it was indeed in that year that one Thomas Prior opened a chemist's shop on the premises. In 1869 Prior sold the business to Henry Barton, who ran the shop until his death in 1921. He was succeeded by his son Frederick Cooke Barton (died 1953) and his grandson Kenderick Michael Cooke Barton. It was Michael Barton's retirement in 1987 that brought the long succession to an end.

The shop was housed in a fine three-storey building of red brick, dating from 1728. The shop front and the shop fittings dated mostly from the nineteenth century. (The shop front is listed, and should survive the present alterations. Every other nineteenth-century shop front in St. Ives was swept away long ago). On the closure of the business Mr Barton kindly gave a number of items to the Norris Museum, including the big brass sign that used to be fitted under the window, and some of the old "shop rounds" and other jars and bottles from the interior. All these objects are now on display in the Museum.

Mr Barton also gave the Museum the old shop books - prescription books, ledgers and notebooks - and other papers. A study of this material gives a fascinating insight into the workings of the business, and into the intimate life of St Ives in the reign of Queen Victoria.

The shop's trade in the nineteenth century was far more varied than that of a present-day chemist's. The ledgers give details of the making up of prescriptions, and the supply of photographic materials and patent medicines (Lacey's Gout Mixture, Mexican Hair Renewer, Woodward's Gripe Water, Johnson's Soothing Syrup, Owbridge's Lung Tonic and many more); but the business was more extensive than that. Farmers were sold Tobacco Juice, Fly Oil, Foot Rot Ointment, and quite frightening quantities of arsenic. Painters, carpenters and wheelwrights bought Knotting, White Lead, Carriage Varnish, and paints that have since been relegated to the artist's colour-box: Burnt Sienna, Brunswick Green, Chinese Red and Celestial Blue. A baker in Crown Street bought cream of tartar and essence of lemon; a Merryland pork butcher ordered ground white pepper 14 pounds at a time; and a variety of other customers came to Barton's for everything from canary seed to ketchup and from bath sponges to pig physic. It would be interesting to know the particular qualities of “Coffin Varnish” or “Invalid Champagne"; whether "Eureka Weed Killer” was as triumphant as its name suggests; and what exactly was "Poor Man's Friend”, at fivepence-farthing a pot.

Barton's was licensed to sell liquor as well. Mr Golding the Town Crier is entered the ledger for a bill-poster's brush, also sherry and port. Mr Williams the Sweep buys paraffin and gin. More respectable clients have longer accounts for whisky, cognac, sherry and a variety of wines. In 1874, for example, we find the curate of Wyton placing regular orders for port and sherry, buying anything up to 21 bottles of sherry and six of port each month. This rate of consumption is perhaps not as alarming as it sounds, especially if he was entertaining guests: Trollope's saintly old clergyman Mr Harding considered a pint of sherry to be the proper accompaniment to a mutton chop (The Warden, 1855, chapter 16), while Howard Coote remembered that a bottle of port per person was considered quite normal after-dinner drinking in nineteenth-century Huntingdonshire, when dinner was eaten early and the port-drinking might be spread over four or five hours (While I Remember, 1937, pp26-7).

While Rev. McDougall of Wyton bought nothing but port and sherry, the rector of Houghton varied his purchases of whisky, port and claret with occasional orders of black tea, coffee and cough lozenges, while the rector of Holywell confined himself to soda water. Most of the wine sold by Barton's was described simply as “claret”, but other wines included Roussillon, Sauternes, Burgundy, Moselle and Hock. Named vintage clarets included an 1880 Château Loudenne (from the château in the Médoc owned by Barton's wholesalers, the London firm of Gilbey's). A bottle of this wine cost a princely 2s.4d. (12p) in 1888, nearly twice the price of the usual, unnamed claret.

The respectable customers in Barton's ledgers received their goods on account, with the bills being sent out every quarter in accordance with the leisurely practice of the period. Such extended credit sometimes brought losses. Being a chemist's shop, it seems inevitable that some of the accounts should end with the word “dead” written under them, but other unpaid accounts have remarks like “bad”, “bankrupt”, “gone away” or “won't pay”. The account of the rector of a village near St. Ives is labelled "good for nothing”, while another customer is sweepingly marked down as both “bad” and “dead”! Some debts were settled by recourse to the law, and one 1871 account is marked “The first person I put in County Court, HB”.

The sale of large quantities of arsenic has already been mentioned. In 1880, for example, a Hilton farmer bought 60 pounds of it, at fourpence a pound (although he later returned 40 pounds, and never paid for the other 20). Sales of this size were by no means uncommon, the poison being used to treat seed-corn before sowing it. Smaller quantities were sold to kill rats. From the 1880s, Barton's kept a special Arsenic Sale Book, as required by a recent Act of Parliament. Anyone buying arsenic had to give their name, occupation, and the purpose for which the arsenic was required. Among the laconic entries in the Arsenic Book (Occupation: “bird stuffer''. Purpose for which arsenic is required: “to stuff birds") are several instances of arsenic being sold to ratcatchers (or “vermin destroyers", as they preferred to be called) who couldn't sign their names, but would bear away their pound of arsenic after simply making a cross in the book (“Thos Crick his mark"). Hemingford Abbots shepherd Sam Hart could just about sign his name, but his shaky grasp of literacy seemed to become ever more shaky as the years went by. One wonders whether he was remembering to wash his hands after handling the arsenic (see signatures below).

The Arsenic Book had a serious purpose. It was through his signature in the poisons book of a Thrapston chemist that Walter Horsford was brought to justice for the St Neots poisoning case of 1898. He was a Spaldwick farmer, and had mentioned rats on his farm as his reason for buying one and a half drachms of strychnine - enough to kill 150 people.

But the greatest source of fascination in Barton's books must be in the insight they give into the lives of local people. The fascination is increased when the people in question are already known to history for other reasons. For example, his customers included Walter Dendy Sadler (1854-1923), the Hemingford Grey artist. Dendy Sadler's lively historical scenes are still popular nowadays, and are sometimes seen reproduced on greetings cards. It is no doubt possible to learn a great deal about an artist by studying his paintings, but how much more can one learn by studying his chemist's bill! In 1897-8 we find Dendy Sadler buying Argonaut Hat Polish, Dr Scott's Pills, Syrup of Senna and Syrup of Figs, Chilblain Liniment and Dog Soap. Here, surely, is the real Dendy Sadler (though it must be borne in mind, of course, that some of these purchases may have been for other members of his household).

We are afforded similar intimate views of Rev. Thomas Lloyd, the energetic minister of St. Ives Free Church (insect powder, rosemary hair wash, half a dozen bottles of port, and a tin for sardines on Christmas Eve); Albert Worts, the convivial landlord of the Dolphin Hotel (Love's Health Givers and Breeze's Pills); Sydney Jarman, editor of the Hunts County Guardian (Canary Port and Canary Sack); Rev. George Jordan, curate and local historian (cherry whisky and various liqueurs); and Cyril Watts the auctioneer (a lifelong bachelor, despite his purchases of tooth powder and scent spray). 

And there were the myriad customers from the ordinary townspeople: Mr Ginn on the Quay, with his cigars and his dozens of claret; the beautifully named Mr Roseblade of Hilton, buying sheep ointment and physic balls; and poor Miss Clayton of East Street, ordering Higginson's Enema, brandy, carbolic soap, insect powder and castor oil, all in the space of a couple of months. Did their neighbours know that Colonel Herriot of Hemingford Abbots was getting through a bottle of whisky a day, or that Miss Knox of Elsworth Rectory was using Mason's Henna Hair Dye? Henry Barton knew, and the secrets are passed on to us through his carefully kept ledgers.

As the Great War loomed, Barton's adapted to the changing times, supplying port to the Officers' Mess of the Fife and Forfar Yeomanry (in Wych House on the Broadway, while the regiment was stationed in St Ives in 1914-15), and Bovril, Cod Liver Oil and Extract of Malt to an organisation called the St Ives Guild of Help - the children of the poor were presumably the intended victims. And so the adaptions continued through more changing times, until the shutters went up for the last time in 1987.