WILLIAM AND MARY: MONARCHS OF IRON
It was the little emblem, five diamond shapes arranged into a larger diamond, that first drew my attention to the row of shops along New Road in Chippenham, numbers 63-66 to be precise, which are on the left as you walk up beyond Foghamshire as far as the Black Horse. They all have this device, which on a coat of arms a herald would call ‘Five Fusils in a Cross’, and they were clearly all built as a single project. I wondered whether this was the mark of a major developer or landowner, and when they were built. Then I noticed the answer to my second question, 1907, picked out on the rainwater heads. And that gave me the clue to answer my first.
But before we go into detail, there are two matters to consider. One is New Road. Historians like to talk about palimpsests – traces of former features peeking from the past through what is there now – and they also compare their study with peeling layers of onions. But New Road is more of a collage, bits stuck on at different periods – the road itself (1792), the railway viaduct which dominates the scene (1841), the houses and shops of various dates, Victorian and Edwardian (1837-1911), the street furniture and incessant traffic (1930s onwards), and the row of angular shops and offices replacing the town mill (1957). How does our 1907 development fit into all this?
The second matter has to do with historical evidence. We all enjoy and demand a level of privacy in our own family and personal relations. But when it comes to historians studying 19th- and 20th-century people, all kinds of private details are available, from directories, maps, newspapers, census returns, and the records created when we are born, married or die – far more than their contemporaries would have known about each other. Historians mine all these as a matter of course, often merely by sitting in front of a computer, but we should always carry out our research with respect – these were real people, like us, making their way in their world as best they could, just as we do in ours.
So, to return to 63-66 New Road, the ‘developer’ in 1907 was William King, ‘general and furnishing ironmonger and oil merchant’, as he described himself in 1911. When he took this gamble of Edwardian bravado in 1907 he had already occupied and been trading from the site for the past quarter of a century: ‘the same old firm at the same old spot’, as he reminded his customers when he announced the reopening in June 1908. His advertisement begged to inform everyone that they had moved back to ‘a well fitted commodious shop and stock rooms which give us a better advantage of showing and stocking our goods’. And looking now at the enormous first-floor picture window one can imagine what he was aiming to achieve.
His investment seems to have paid off. For one thing, as well as his new shop at no. 66, he had built three others, nos. 63-65, on his former premises which he could now let out to smaller businesses, a milliner, confectioner and clothier in the first instance. Already for some years his son, William junior, was assisting in the business, and would eventually take over when his father died in 1935. It was he, one assumes, who penned an advertisement in 1938, boasting ‘nearly 60 years of progress’ , and claiming that, ‘during the whole of that period they have endeavoured to give to their numerous customers of Chippenham and neighbourhood their courteous service and attention, and to show the same integrity which has always characterised their business since its inception’.
By 1950 William junior was ill, and suffered burns when he fell into a fire at his home. There had been an earlier, dramatic, fire at the shop premises in 1936 when a short circuit in a lorry parked next to the oil store triggered an explosion, so that the roof fell in and large quantities of goods were destroyed. After that Kings employed a Cirencester firm of architects to make alterations and extensions to the shop. But, looking at the plan now, one senses retrenchment – behind the elegant picture window now is merely a storeroom. Kings continued, nevertheless, through the war and the years of austerity that followed, selling ironmongery and paraffin, and their last appearance in the phone book was in 1969. From 1970 to 1992 the premises were occupied by E & S Shops, do-it-yourself and gardening, so continuing in a modern guise the ironmongery tradition. Then, after a spell as a charity shop it became a restaurant, as it is now.
But what of William King, the founder? His mother came from Chippenham, but he was born in Amersham in the Chilterns, where she had met his father, and where they lived for a few years before returning to her home town. James King, his father, was a farm labourer, and was perhaps uncomfortable in the urban surroundings of Foghamshire, where they were living in 1861. A decade later he had gone, but his mother remained (she died a year later), and the 14-year-old William was a grocer’s porter. His older sister Jane was working as a servant in the family of a Chippenham ironmonger, Charles Downham, and it was perhaps this that sparked William’s interest in the trade. In 1880 he married Mary Bigwood from Corsham, and they settled in Back Lane, a poor area of town, where the following year he was himself in business as an ironmonger.
The big break for William and Mary was about to come. Charles Downham had at first described himself as a tinman and brazier, and in the 1830s seem to have been based in River Street with premises also in the Shambles. But by 1841 he and his wife were living on the corner of Foghamshire and New Road, where the Kings later had their shop. Downham traded – as ‘ironmonger’ rather than the archaic-sounding ‘tinman’ – until his death in 1878, after more than 40 years in the business, and then his son took over briefly. But around 1880 (according to family tradition), or about 1884 (as directories suggest), William and Mary King took on what had clearly been a long-standing and successful concern.
My original curiosity about the diamond pattern has led me to a history, not at all dramatic, but perhaps significant in its way – as an example of thousands of similar stories. As trading in the open market declined during the Georgian period, so specialist shops proliferated. In Chippenham in the 1840s New Road, with its railway viaduct straddling and dominating the view up the hill, must have seemed the symbol of modernity, the place to open a business. So Downham moved there, and several others, and they thrived. They invested their success in ostentatious stonebuilt and elaborately carved shopfronts and facades (shoddy brick behind, in some cases), and for decades they prospered and became part of the Chippenham establishment. When William senior died in 1935 his effects were valued at more than £8,000, a considerable sum.
But what were they like as people. William and Mary were committed Methodists, who worshipped in the monumental chapel built on Monkton Hill in 1909. The Baptists erected theirs, equally enormous, almost opposite the Kings’ shop, and the Salvation Army built their citadel nearby. The Kings lived above the shop, and so were hemmed in between the storeroom of their merchandise on one side and the Temperance Hall, built on the site of a pub in 1863, on the other. William never became involved in local politics, and his recreation seems to have been bowls. His son, William junior, also a Methodist, was a fine singer, who regularly performed with choral groups. Singing, as anyone who has belted out revivalist hymns will tell you, is a notable and enthusiastic nonconformist trait. Did the people who lived on this side of the river still consider themselves as outsiders, successful innovators but slightly nonconforming, as their predecessors had been for centuries? The history of New Road may run deeper than the everyday pedestrian imagines. And that corner of it, where the King’s built their shop, was where Chippenham people went for their pots and pans, and nails and brackets, for 150 years. Doubtless there are many townspeople who still remember shopping there, even old Mr King junior. But why the five diamonds – can anyone explain?
John Chandler
22 Nov 2025