1880–1904 The Idea
Below: Clement and Mary.
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station to be dispatched to London by train. Delivery of each order therefore became quite costly, and customers had to be asked to collect their orders from Paddington Station. Then Clement had a wheeze. No-one used the firstclass carriages during the day, so he would buy a first-class ticket, pack out the carriage with wallpaper parcels, travel to Paddington with them, then hire a taxi (which I suppose would have been horse and trap at the time) and deliver them personally. This worked well for a while until one day the station master tapped him on the shoulder and said “Enough is enough”. John Line and his young colleagues, hungry for business, had to think again about how to serve their London customers. The answer of course was to open a branch in London. They found premises in Aldgate and Clement was asked by John Line to start the new London branch. It was by then the early 1890s and Clement, now with a young family, moved to London from High Wycombe, where they had been living, finding accommodation in Wood Green. By the turn of the century Clement Brewer had had nearly fifteen years’ experience in the wallpaper trade. By this time he also had six children to keep. His third son, Kenneth (my father), born in 1895,
could just remember going hand in hand with his father to the Leadenhall Market to buy the Sunday chicken. However, the London air took its toll on Clement’s health and his doctor advised him to take his family and move to the south coast where the sea air would be the best cure. What a quandary this must have been for Clement and Mary with all their children. He would need to be sure of getting work wherever they were to settle. Mary’s brother Arthur, who had accompanied Clement to America, was still running his Venetian blinds business in Bexhill. Perhaps Clement could find work with him? That is exactly what happened and the Brewer family moved to the Sussex coast in 1901. Unfortunately, within a year the blinds business was heading for failure and Clement had to start looking for work again. He found a job, working as a clerk in the Eastbourne office of a building firm called Glovers. The new venture
Whilst working for Glovers, Clement’s business mind reacted to the chaotic way in which a builder or a decorator in Eastbourne obtained wallpaper for