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Gradual reconstruction and recovery after World War II |
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With
victory assured in the European War, even before the final victory
against Japan, Managers and colleagues began to return to their stores
as they were released from the army. The June 1945 Company
Magazine asked all employees who were being demobilised to make contact
with their Regional Office to make arrangements for their return.
The law gave everyone the right to return to the job they left when they joined the armed services. All appointments during wartime were temporary to meet the terms of this law. But it still left a major logistical exercise to identify which colleagues would be returning to work, and who would prefer to return to a different store. In some cases pro-tem Managers were moved back down from managing large stores during the war to the smaller stores that they had run in the late 1930s. A small sacrifice compared with the 149 men who died in action and would never return. |
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After restoring the Managers to their stores, the Company made their first priority the reinstatement of the Channel Island stores, amidst a big wave of sympathy for the people of Jersey and Guernsey who had suffered four years of Nazi occupation. | |||
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of mainland stores was much further off. There were severe
building restrictions after the war, with priority quite rightly being
given to the restoration of public buildings like schools and hospitals,
and rebuilding homes for the homeless.
Severe austerity measures, including continued rationing, were put in place partly to focus investment in the priority areas and partly to pay off the immense national debt that had been built up under the lease-lend arrangements put in place by President Roosevelt before American joined the war. Munitions, battle ships and other supplies from 1940 and 1941 still needed to be paid for. |
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was one new store opening in early 1946, which gave a flavour of things
to come. The building fabric of the store at Weybridge, Surrey
(No. 760) had been completed in 1939, but was converted into temporary
head office in case London was gassed, or as it turned out
blitzed. This turned out to be an inspired choice when The
Burlington Arcade between Regent Street and New Bond Street was blitzed
leaving New Bond Street House, the Woolworths headquarters damaged and
largely inaccessible for several weeks.
Now the Weybridge store was fitted with the finest Mahogany and was treated as the prototype for a new generation of Woolworths stores. The upper price limit was gone, allowing a much wider range of merchandise, with some items costing up to five shillings (expressed in signs as "5/-" and equivalent of 25p today). 5 shillings then would be the equivalent of around £7.50 today. Weybridge was, and is, an affluent commuter-belt town, and the new store proved very popular with local people. |
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Another
challenge was to remove reference to "Nothing over 6D" and
"3D and 6D Stores" from the fascias and windows of the
stores. Some customers joked that these signs should be changed to
"Nothing under 6D" because of the price inflation that had
occurred during the war.
With building materials rationed, the letters on the fascias were taken down, the 3D and 6D letters thrown away, the holes filled and the fascia repainted with bright red gloss paint, the F. W. Woolworth & Co. Ltd letters were repainted with gold gilt and either re-spaced to fill the fascia or supplemented with small diamond W logo at either side. |
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1948 building restrictions were relaxed in some parts of the country,
and the arduous task of reinstating the blitzed stores could
begin. Most of the 28 stores that were totally destroyed were in
large cities and big maritime towns - for example Plymouth, Devonport,
Bristol, Bournemouth, Southampton, Portsmouth (Commercial Road),
Southsea, Chatham, Dover, Norwich, Lowestoft and Hull (a.k.a. a Northern
coastal town) is like a catalogue of most of the major ports and
dockyards on the English Channel and North Sea coasts from Devon to
Yorkshire.
In the industrial and urban areas, losses were more random. In some of the largest cities - Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester Piccadilly, Leeds and York, for example, the Woolworths stores survived while all around them was destroyed - while in East Ham, Coventry, Manchester - St Mary's Gate, South Shields and Sheffield were all totally destroyed. |
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The company architects developed a new look Woolworths building, and proposed variants of this design for each of the stores that was to be rebuilt. The stores were larger and brighter; easier to get in and out of for customers, fast and economical to build, and could be opened in stages. A number of our stores, including Uxbridge, Portsmouth, Southsea, and South Shields (illustrated, left and above) still have the basic design today. | |||
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| By the end of the 1940s there was a marked difference between the stores that had survived the war and the newly re-opened stores. Compare the old store above - lit by individual light bulbs in globe shades, with oiled wooden floors and pillars everywhere - with the new look Norwich store which was conceived at the end of the decade. Sales in the new stores rocketed, leading to a major investment programme in the 1950s which took Woolies right to the top of the stock market. You can find out about it (including going on a virtual reality tour of a store 50 years ago) in our 1950s gallery, here in the Woolies Virtual Museum. | ||||
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World War II Gallery Home Page Xmas
1939: UK and USA a world apart Fire
from the sky - Blitz hits major cities |
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