KEN PYE

KEN PYE’s latest book,

Liverpool Murders and Misdemeanours,

features some of the city’s grimmest and most unusual crimes and their perpetrators. It’s available in all good bookshops or from Ken directly – as are all of his books, DVDs, and CDs.

Tel. 0151 427 2717 email – ken@discoverliverpool.com www.discover-liverpool.com

CHEAP AND CHEERFUL: Postcard of the original Church Street, Liverpool, storefront

WONDEROFWOOLIES

From New York to Liverpool – the story of a shopping icon

STORING MEMORIES: Clockwise from right, flagship Liverpool branch, ornate mausoleum, Church Street in the 1960s, a Five and Ten Cent Store, Frank, first shop to bear his name

FRANK Winfield Woolworth was born in New York in 1852.As a young man he trained as a clerk in a corner store in his home town.

But in 1878 he took the first small step towards creating a famous retail empire.

Aged 26, he opened his own shop, the Great Five Cent Store, in Utica, New York State, with everything for sale at the one price.

However, his first business venture failed because of its poor location and so, in 1880, he set up a new store in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

This was the first time that he put his name over the door of a store, in the distinctive gold letters of FW Woolworth & Co that were to become famous all overAmerica and Britain.

Business boomed, and he soon added a ten-cent line of goods in the branches of his stores that were now springing up all over the USA, which soon became known as The Five and Ten Cent Store.

In the early years of the 20th century, Frank had set his sights on Britain, and he came here with his “cheap and cheerful” concept of popular shopping.

He needed a very special location for his new store and he chose the retail centre of Liverpool for his pioneering premises. Woolworth built his first British store in Church Street in

1909 on the site of what is now the Clark’s shoe shop.At that time this stood directly opposite the ancient church of St Peter’s, which had given the street its name, but Frank wanted a new and much bigger store in the city.

Fortunately for him, this was at a time when Church Street was being widened by the Liverpool Corporation, and St Peter’s Church was demolished in 1922.Abrass Maltese cross set in a granite slab in the pavement still shows where the main door of this old building once stood.

New opportunities opened up for the Woolworth Company and they commissioned a brand new building on the site of the church. Named The Woolworth Building, it became their flagship store in the country.

The building still stands, although it has been considerably altered over the decades. In 2008 a large passageway was cut through it to allow a pedestrian entrance to the new Liverpool ONE shopping district.

Alarge clock was mounted over this and the shop-lined passage was named Keys Court. However, above the clock and in the pediment of the original structure can be seen another memorial to St Peter’s Church – a carved relief of the crossed keys of St Peter.

Known as Woolworth’s 3d & 6d Stores, branches were soon opening up in towns and cities all over the UK, to such an extent that by the 1960s and 70s, it was said that if a place did not have its own “Woolies” then “it was not a proper town”! Unfortunately, in 2009 all British Woolworth stores closed down, after the company failed and had to call in the receivers.

This meant that a much-loved British institution now came to a sad end, exactly 100 years after the founding of the first British “Woolies” .

Sadly, Frank did not live to see the opening of his new Liverpool store. He died in 1918 and was buried in a large and ornate mausoleum, in the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York City.

At the time of his death, and in equivalent modern currency rates, Frank was personally worth £61million, and his company was valued at £646 million!