Army & Navy Co-op

We paid our annual visit to the holiday book shop in Bognor Regis yesterday and managed half a dozen items, large and small. We thought the once grand building to the left might once have been a hotel, or perhaps a public house of the better sort. In the days when Bognor Regis was a holiday destination of the better sort.

Shop one

One of the items was an old map from Bartholomew's of Duncan Street of Edinburgh, via the Army & Navy Co-operative Society Ltd of Victoria Street, Westminster, London.

Shop two

Membership card (from Wikipedia)

A shop which I do not think I had heard of before, but perusal of Wikipedia reveals that the shop I know as the Army & Navy of Victoria Street, started life as a co-operative society for officers in the army and navy sometime in the 19th century, only becoming a limited company in the 1930's. During its expansion it swallowed up what had been a distillery. From where I associated to the brewery across the road, noticed at reference 1. Maybe the whole area used to stink of booze, rather like the east end of Edinburgh, when I first knew it, more than forty years ago now.

Gobbled up by the House of Fraser in the 1970's, gobbled up in turn by some Icelanders in the new century and now in the possession of Sports Direct - the boss of which is, I believe, known as a serious drinker and so taking us back to the shop's beginnings. Serious drinking which came to my attention in the course of a bizarre court case in 2017. The officers might not be too pleased: what they said in their cups stayed in the cups.

Half open

Fully open

The map was a motoring map of the British Isles, one of those maps printed in rectangular segments on a canvas back, which makes for easy folding, but which has not been done, to my knowledge, for years. In this case, 40 segments of roughly four and a half inches by eight inches each.

Although I can find no date, the map appears to date from the days when the United Kingdom really was united and included the whole of the other island - which I learned today is only slightly smaller than the Iceland mentioned above. On the other hand, it is described as a motoring map and there must have been enough motor cars about to make such a map worthwhile. While Bognor Regis is still called Bognor, which means the map must have been compiled, if not printed, before 1929, the year of Bognor's regalisation. So my guess is somewhere in the decade 1910 to 1920. At which time the cover price of 7/6 would have been a rather more serious matter than the 90d = 34.5p ('d' for old pennies) would be now - although then, I suppose, only serious people drove motor cars. Weekly wage for a working man - that is to say, not a serious man - perhaps £5?

Detail

A nicely designed map, giving a good sense of topography and including a lot of information about the distances between places, this last partly in tabular form bottom left, partly by printing the length of stages in small red numbers on the map itself, visible if not legible if you click on the detail above. Plus area maps of London, Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dublin. With the first of these suggesting that Wimbledon was in the outer reaches of London proper, while Mitcham and Morden were villages out to the south. Never mind about places like Epsom.

On which, BH reminded me that when her mother's mother moved to East Sheen, presumably not many years before this map was printed, East Sheen was almost in the country, rather as Epsom is now.

Well worth the tenner I paid for it.

Reference 1: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2014/03/c-major-quintet.html.