Grocer – Abingdon on Thames Town Council

On 10 June 1689 both Harim Pleydell of The Corner House, Ock Street and his third cousin, the Revd Richard Pleydell MA, Headmaster of Roysse’s School, were among the loyal population of Abingdon who had been called together to take the Oath of Allegiance to the new Sovereigns, William and Mary.

The Pleydells are first known in the fifteenth century at Coleshill, near Faringdon. The family spread through the Vale of the White Horse, and by the mid-seventeenth century Pleydells held leases from Abingdon Corporation.

Sarah Pleydell’s half-penny token issued in 1667. It is 20 mm across. The reverse side has ‘Abingdon 1667 Her halfe penny S.P.’ The token in the photograph belongs to a direct descendant of Sarah Pleydell.
(Image © David Jarman 2008)

Harim’s father, Samuel Pleydell (1611-1663) was born in Cricklade, and moved to Abingdon shortly after receiving a legacy of £100 in 1633 under his father’s will. He set up in business as a grocer, and married Sarah Stacey from Stadhampton. In the Corporation Chamberlain’s accounts for 8 May 1645 there is an entry recording that Samuel was to be paid £5.4s.1d for supplying beer to that value at the request of the Corporation to Sir Thomas Fairfax’s Parliamentary troops.

Samuel died in 1663, but his wife Sarah continued the business and in 1667 issued a half-penny trading token made of copper to overcome the local shortage of small change.

Harim (1658-1738) followed his father’s occupation as a grocer. Both Samuel and Harim in turn leased the Corner House, Ock Street, probably on the site of Barclay’s Bank in The Square. Harim married Margaret, daughter of Edward Cleeve of Wootton in 1683. Of their twelve children three died young and most of the others moved from Abingdon.

After 1750 the Pleydell family’s presence in Abingdon was much reduced. The Revd Richard Pleydell had never married and his brothers’ interests lay largely in London and in Gloucestershire, whilst the last known living member of Harim’s family in Abingdon was his son John’s daughter Sophia, who lived in Oxford, but who was buried at St. Nicholas’ Church in 1806.

© David Jarman, 2013

© AAAHS and contributors 2013

Thomas Richardson was a prominent Abingdon townsman. He built up a grocery business serving the town and the surrounding area and, as a leading member of the Wesleyan community, he had a prominent role in building Abingdon’s first Methodist chapel. He was born in Bicester in 1801, and seems to have been living in Abingdon by 1829 when he married Mary Warren, born in Stony Stratford in 1806. They had two children, Elizabeth, born about 1834, and Charles, about 1836. By 1831 he was occupying premises in Ock Street, just east of where the Post Office Sorting Office is now (2015).

These premises were among the more valuable properties in the street, with an estimated rental value – although he owned them – of over £32. Of the 136 properties on the south side of the street, only seven had a higher valuation. The building provided space for his family, a couple of servants, and at least some of his employees. Richardson would remain there for the rest of his life.

In religion, Richardson was a nonconformist. In 1846, it was he who received the Town Council’s permission to ‘pull down two tenements in the Ock Street and build a Wesleyan chapel on the site thereof’. The site was immediately to the west of Richardson’s house. The 1851 census shows a Wesleyan minister among his household.

In his politics, Richardson was a Liberal. In 1832, he spoke at a public meeting, seconding a petition to be sent to Westminster in support of the local MP, John Maberly, and parliamentary reform. In the parliamentary election of 1854 he was named in the newspapers as a supporter of J T Norris, who favoured ending discrimination against nonconformists. In the same year his fellow-Liberals nominated him for a vacant place on the borough council, but he declined to stand, citing pressure of business.

Richardson’s grocery business was solid and stable. In 1861, he described himself to the census enumerator as employing twelve people. There were branches in Marcham, Blewbury and Steventon. Advertisements show that he shared agency contracts for branded goods with another prominent local businessman, E J Trendell. He was seen as sufficiently reliable to be charged on several occasions with winding up the affairs of fellow-grocers who had become bankrupt. There may have been a period of unease when, in 1854, a Faringdon grocer accused of selling coffee adulterated with 30% of chicory declared that he had bought it in good faith from Richardson. The local magistrates evidently believed him, but such chicanery was commonplace enough at the time, and there is no record of further action being taken.

Thomas Richardson died in January 1874. His son and heir Charles had ambitions to live as a gentleman, and the business was immediately sold to George Rant for £5000. The site at 56 Ock Street would be the main shop of Rant & Tombs till it was demolished in 1965. Charles left Abingdon about 1881, became bankrupt in 1893, and died in 1911. Charles’s third daughter Dorothy (1873-1957) achieved fame as a feminist writer and a sometime lover of H G Wells.

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