DAVID FULLER (1948-)
David Fuller ran an exclusive men’s outfitter shop in Church Road, Great Bookham for more than 52 years, beginning as a school-leaver joining his father’s business and ending in retirement in October 2019. The shop drew business from a wide radius both within and far outside Surrey. He is seen above right with his assistant, Pat Sandy, just before the shop closed.
Interview date: 2 December 2019
Location: Great Bookham
Interviewer: Tony Matthews
Family origins
TM: Your full name and date of birth?
DF: David Fuller, 24 June 1948.
TM: Where were you born?
DF: St Helier Hospital, Sutton.
TM: Where were your parents living at the time?
DF: Sutton
TM: When did they move to Bookham?
DF: They moved to Fetcham first, approximately 1949-1950, and from Fetcham to Bookham 1954. Childs Hall Road, this address. Same house.
TM: What were their names?
DF: George Fuller and mother Jean Fuller. Father was a Sutton man, born and bred in Sutton. My mother in various places. Her father was a travelling income tax inspector so more north, Hull, different places. My mother came down eventually during the war as a physiotherapist at St Helier Hospital where she met my father right at the end of the war when he was shipped back home with a broken back. She was a physiotherapist who put him through hell. They got together and married a year later and a year later I was born in 1948.
TM: Were you an only child?
DF: One sister, Jane, was born while we were at Fetcham in I think 1951 and then my sister Kate was born in this house in 1959.
Starting the business
DF: My father already had a business. When they first got married they had virtually nothing. Started up an insurance round on bicycles before I was born. Around the Sutton area. They bought an insurance round book. He wasn’t very keen on that because the only time anyone got anything was when somebody passed away. They got payouts then.
Before television they then bought a van and started up a travelling library. Fitted it out with books and using the same customers as the insurance round more or less. He went through different stages. He built it up but as television was coming in he had to start something else. So he started selling different items, clothing and all sorts of things just to keep going, just to make a living. It was just adapting to the times really.
He had a well respected business on the road around St Helier estate and around Sutton. As we moved over this way also customers in Ashtead, Fetcham and Bookham. As times changed he moved more into clothing and linens, all from good quality houses up in London, near St Paul’s. People had more money, they didn’t need so much on credit and they asked us what else do you do? Do you do furniture? He had a contact in Sutton for quality furniture such as Ercol and other brand names which were good prices. There was a company which had been going for a number of years in Benhill Avenue and they had good contacts for prices so my father managed to sell carpets and furniture as well as clothing to his customers.
How I got involved
When I left school I just expected to work for him. There was no pressure. I just expected to work for him. It was good enough. One of his customers had a little shoe repair shop down at The Green at Claygate. This shoe repairer was moving to a larger shop. This little shop was a lockup next to what was then Cullens grocery stores. My dad said how about it? I was 16 years old.
It was only a tiny shop. He fitted it out with electric lights and put some of his stock in there. He felt very guilty about me being in there on my own at 16 or 17 years old, taking me down every day, either he or my mother. Eventually I learned to drive, driving from Bookham to Claygate in my first car.
We were there for about a year or 18 months until my father got to know of a shop that was available in Church Road in Bookham which had been a butcher’s shop. Originally Madge’s the butcher’s shop, then it was Tottman’s butcher’s shop. That was being renovated by the landlord into two shops. So there were two brand new shops. My father knew the joint landlord. Stephen Fortescue who was the local solicitor got to know of this shop becoming available. Father moved and shut the Claygate one. It was good experience for 18 months for me. That was 1966.
Creating the premises in Bookham
From there I didn’t quite know what was going to be required by the public so we had clothing, footwear and we did have some furniture in there as well as trying to find out what was going to be required. Eventually it was obvious that clothing and footwear were going to be more popular. So again as times were changing my father concentrated on the shop and got rid of the furniture, carpets etc, rugs on to his customers who wanted them, to clear the stock and ran his credit business down.
He just concentrated on the shop as a family. My mother was involved and one of my sisters. The older sister helped when she left school. Then two years after 1966 the shop next door, No 7 Church Road, was being built between what was then Gardiners cycle shop and what is now The Grange. The then landlord, who was the father of the present landlord, said to my father you can have the new shop as long as you take the upstairs as well because at that time you couldn’t get rid of offices. So my father wouldn’t be beaten and took the upstairs and the downstairs which was quite a godsend really because it proved to give us a nice lot of space for what was needed. That took off very well. We were very busy from 1968 onwards.
The right market niche
Again things were gradually changing. Whereas people had perhaps just one car in the family and very much local shopping, a tremendous amount of customers we had through the week, each week. People then started to shop outside the area but even so the business was still progressing and the following year or two afterwards we took three rooms above our old shop to expand the stock.
Through different recessions we went backwards a little at different times but like everybody else but we carried on. Then we just persevered and adapted again to the times, doing different things. We didn’t do quite so much footwear in the end and concentrated on clothing.
About 1994 things were fairly slow with people shopping more out in the stores because the stores were doing everyone else’s business and it was spread so thin on the ground. My father passed away in 1994 and we were doing extra large sizes which we felt was a good market to be in at that time but we weren’t quite sure where to publicise it apart from the Yellow Pages.
After my father passed away I had caricatures made up of big men. I discovered free newspaper advertising which we developed over a couple of years. We went in papers in a 20 or 30-mile radius, specifically advertising the extra large sizes. I wanted to make sure I had plenty of stock and had good quality suppliers. It was no good people coming to a village shop in Bookham if we hadn’t got the stock to offer.
It gradually snowballed from a very low base in 1994 of turnover. The following 18 months and two years we had a 40% increase whereas I was spending about £8000 on advertising just purely on big sizes. I thought this is quite good and we carried on increasing the spending up to about £12,000 or £13,000 and the following year we had another 40% rise. It was just a market that men weren’t being catered for. The stores were not catering for the extra large man to any extent. So we went up another 40%.
The following year I kept the advertising at the same amount and it went up another 15%. Then it levelled off a little bit but it had gone up to an incredible turnover by 2001 for a village shop especially. Then it tapered off a bit after the 9/11 tragedy in the States and people were starting to experience endowment crisis problems. The public generally seemed to be taking more notice of their endowments and pensions. So it dipped rather the following year or so but it was still an extremely good turnover and we maintained a very good business and turnover for the next number of years.
Business expansion
We weren’t doing as much footwear as we had been and it was the larger sizes that kept us in business and it did help the regular sizes as well because of the advertising. We created a website in the early 1990s which eventually was developed into some online trading just for the big sizes. Nothing tremendous on that but we did have a good turnover, had some very good customers on the big sizes. The main thing about the website was that it acted better than the Yellow Pages.
That was incredible because even people just around the corner, maybe in Fetcham, who didn’t realise we were there, looked online for bigger sizes and just around the corner there we were. As well as local people we were getting people from all over the country travelling to us. We had quite a few from Scotland because there was not the choice available in Scotland. Not necessarily travelling to us but ordering online. People travelled up from the south coast because it was a good drive, a good day out to come. We had a good selection so they used to come up and spend a day and buy an outfit of some sort. All sorts of places. London. South London. It was amazing.
TM: Did you intend to expand into other premises?
DF: The only time I did was in approximately 2000/2001 when we were at our height. I did wonder maybe at that time the shop Turtons in Leatherhead were retiring themselves. I did wonder about that. But considering I had a very good gentleman working for me who was very experienced and as my father always used to say, if you are doing one job, do it properly. I’ve seen so many times people splitting themselves up into different businesses or two shops and I’ve been told that two shops are very difficult. Three or four shops are better if you get decent managers but there is the problem of getting decent managers. So I concluded that it would be far better sticking to what we know, working with Chris, who was working with me at that time, and continuing as we were and not losing contact with the existing business rather than splitting up and creating two problems rather than one. It worked out to be the right decision because as trade changed through the years it wouldn’t have been sensible.
Changes in Bookham
TM: How have the High Street and Church Road changed since 1966?
DF: I think in the trade association about two years ago someone made a survey of the amount of places where you could buy – including pubs and restaurants – eat or drink food and I think it was 18. In Bookham at that time. Which seems quite incredible seeing that was not long after the last recession of 2008. What amazes me is that in the previous recession sandwich shops and coffee shops were the first to go because people economised. But in this last recession of 2008/9 onwards they seemed to proliferate. It’s quite extraordinary really when people are supposedly raking round for money they are walking around with cups of coffee costing £3 and buying their daily sandwiches. When my wife and I went to work we made our sandwiches each morning. We boiled up our tea or coffee at work just because we had always done it. Nothing against going out for a day perhaps and having a cup of coffee perhaps in a restaurant, not at all, but it just amazes everybody I think when people have complained about being short of money but don’t do anything to help themselves.
The High Street and Church Road hasn’t really changed because you can’t do a lot with it apart from maybe turning shops into residential or residential into shops. Fortunately with the church there you can’t expand there at all into the graveyard or the building. But there has been so much infilling around the area.
I remember when I went to school at Bookham School when I was six or seven years old walking across the fields from Childs Hall Road where The Garstons were at that time starting to be built. It has just continued to increase through the years. I know with one of the recessions during I think in the 1980s there was talk about some shops reverting to residential as a lot of the shops had been residential originally in the High Street in the early 1900s. Now again trading is very difficult and there could be a swing back again.
In Church Road itself, the Rectory had been where the car parking spaces are. That was developed into shops. I can remember having a coffee in what is now the DEBRA charity shop. That was a coffee shop. I remember walking home from school, going in there with Mother, having a hot Ribena, and walking away home. So that has seen some changes.
Lost newsagents
Further down Church Road on the corner of The Park there was a newsagents on one corner which in the 1960s was run by an old lady and then taken over by Frank Walker and his wife. I remember going to school from Bookham Station over to Cheam and he used to be standing down there in the morning selling newspapers when he first took over the shop. Then he developed the shop into a good business.
He eventually retired and I think it was passed on to one of the chains of newspaper shops and was never the same again. That is now residential. Only a couple of years ago it was converted into flats and on the other corner, which was a fine arts shop a similar thing has recently happened there. In fact it looks very nice on the corner of The Park. Nice buildings which are completely residential so that was quite an improvement really to the look of the place.
Many years ago I know on the Guildford Road [it] wasn’t as straight at the top of the High Street. The old road is still there where it sparred off. The bus used to go round the corner, round the bend. Eventually it was straightened out.
TM: Do you remember what Lower Shott was like?
DF: I know that Bookham Library was there which is now the vehicle testing station. Offices where my younger sister works there as a secretary and her son is working there as well. That was the original library. I used to cycle up to get the Sunday papers. From Childs Hall Road up to the top of The Lorne, across the main road and what has been the greengrocers. The corner shop. That was a newsagents.
Youth activities
The council estate was there, Overton Way. That was in the 1960s I used to cycle up there of course. I knew a lot of people. I joined the local boys club. My father knew some of his customers on the Sole Farm-Middle Mead estate behind us. Ken Vincent was a customer of my dad’s and he was leader of the boys club which was originated on a Friday night up at the Howard of Effingham School. Starting at seven o’clock there was a queue up on the steps waiting for Ken and the helpers to come along. We used the gymnasium for five a side football, gymnastics.
My father encouraged me to get started at 14 or 15 years old. I went out with some of the lads from the local estate. That used to be just Friday nights at that time. He used to run the local football. I couldn’t join the football club because I used to work on Saturdays but he used to run the Bookham Blues. Some money was raised and the Bookham Boys Club which is the community centre up the Dorking Road behind the tennis courts. That was quite a few evenings a week. We had darts matches and snooker matches or billiards matches with other boys clubs and youth clubs in the area.
Orienteering was initiated. We used to travel around doing orienteering on Sundays with the club. Ken Vincent did a marvellous job. He and his wife who lived in Sole Farm – Middle Mead – did a great job keeping that going. There were one or two helpers. Derek Pink who still lives down on the Edenside estate, he was one of the helpers and one or two others, local fellows. That was a great time and I stayed with the Bookham Boys Club until 1969-71. Then life changes and I joined other clubs.
Industrial estate
TM: Do you remember an industrial estate?
DF: Wildt, Mellor and Bromley. [Manufacturer of hosiery, knitted fabric and knitting machines. Founded 1884. Part of Sears Holdings from 1956. Won Queen’s Award for export in 1973.] I can remember right up to the early 1970s, well before it was demolished. The amount of coaches on a Friday night bringing the workers home past the shop. Eventually that was sold as development and Photo-Me took it over. I did know the managing director there, he was a customer of ours. He lived in Bookham. He and his wife. That was a very busy factory. There was another industrial factory down Little Bookham Street just past Weale’s on the way to the station. I think there is a residential development there now.