Ike Smith''s Hardware And Bicycle Store

A Memory of Warrington.

My grandfather, Isaac Smith, had a hardware and bicycle shop on these premises, known universally as the 'Tudor Cottages', from some time towards the close of WW1 to the late 1930s. The premises were owned by Rylands Bros, the nearby wire works, at which Ike (also Ikey) had worked at one time (I infer from census records), and at which his oldest son Arthur later worked until 1955. He set up his business, my father told me, with the compensation he received from being temporarily blinded (for about 6 months), while working on top secret poison gas research while he was a foreman at Warrington Gas Works, sometime around 1916. The whole family, including the children, were apparently required to sign the Official Secrets Act, and my father (also Stan) only told me this story just before he himself died in 1980.
At some time in the later 1930s, Rylands Bros persuaded my granddad to move out of the shop while they redecorated it, I understand, with the promise of his return. Isaac was not in fact allowed to return, and the place was then converted into a managers' canteen, which it remained until the time Rylands's became part of British Steel in the 1960s.  My mother and father did their 'courting' in the shop's upstairs loft-like rooms. As a young boy helping his dad, my father knocked a nail in the plaster wall which exposed what turned out to be Stuart stucco work. The experts were called in, so this may be on record. There is an article / correspondence about Ike Smith and the shop in the 'Warrington Guardian' some time in the 1980s. I think the undertaker Henry Hough had the remaining one of the three premises, my granddad having the 2 main rooms on the left as you faced them.
There is a family story that, at the time of the Spanish Flu epidemic in 1918, my granddad remarked to his neighbour that business had been slow that week, to which Henry replied that he 'hadn't buried a living soul all week'. A plaque on an outside wall says that Oliver Cromwell lodged on or near the spot during his Lancashire campaign against the Royalist forces on August 20 1648. Given the civic vandalism that demolished all but the facade of the 1870s Parochial School, also on Church Street, as recently as 2002, and even more recently (2005) the listed 1863 building of the Boteler Grammar School, on School Brow nearby, one worries that this fine old site, dating to the 1630s at least, may go the same way as many other monuments of Warrington's past, despite its listing.