Frank Tyler and Utility Furniture

Following on from the enquiry I received, I looked again at the "Bought of" list to see if I remembered any of the items and whether any of them might still be around. The first entry appears to begin with the abbreviation "Ut." which I presume stands for "Utility". Utility furniture was very much a feature of Britain in the 1940s and early 1950s - try a Google search if you want to know more.

Many of the items sounded like the furniture I grew up with - we had a sideboard, dining table and four chairs and a desk which could be the same thing as the "writing table" in the list. By the time I was born, grandfather Albert was dead and grandmother Ada was no longer living at Red Hill, Chislehurst. So it is always possible that some or all of this furniture could have passed on to my parents. Below is a photo of a dining table, chairs and desk which appear identical to those I remember. I do not recognise the location. It is not Basildon Road, Abbey Wood where I grew up, so perhaps it is Red Hill. If you look carefully at the right hand corner of the table top, you will notice a slight indentation on the edge. Beneath the table top itself were retractable leaves which could be pulled out to extend the surface.

Most of the furniture has now gone the way of all things, but I still have one of the dining chairs.

Frank Tyler & Co Ltd

I have previously posted a couple of items of correspondence from the above firm.

I heard recently from a lady in the USA. She has a vintage cabinet which still has the original 1910 receipt showing it had been bought from Frank Tyler. She had been researching the company, found my blog and contacted me to ask if I had any more information.

A search on Google showed various retail outlets at 91 to 105 Newington Butts (now SE1, not SE11 as shown in the Frank Tyler letterheads). I then took myself off to the site and found Sherston Court, a six storey building with commercial premises at ground level and apartments above. I would guess it is of late 1950s or early 1960s origin. Judging by the scaffolding, some sort of rennovation work is under way. I could not find 107-111, but William Hill is at 105 and the entrance to the apartments is immediately adjacent. It is apparent that the shops within Sherston Court have re-used the numbers of previous buildings, so caution must be exercised about saying I have found the precise location of Frank Tyler's premises. Here is what I found:

The letterheads had given the location as "exactly opposite the clock tower". Across the road is park on the site of St. Mary's churchyard. A plaque there tells that the clock tower was demolished in 1971 and a memorial stone (which I did not manage to find) now marks the site.

A walk to Kennington Lane found that numbers 14-16 which housed the upholstery and cabinet works are gone and the site is now occupied by a builders' merchant.

As a footnote, a Google search revealed a WikiPatents entry showing that a Dennis Guy Farnsworth, then of 14 Kennington Lane, had lodged a patent in 1950 for "Apparatus for determining the position of pistons in an internal-combustion engine". (He later moved to Chingford and lodged another patent for towing apparatus.)

http://www.wikipatents.com/gb/0669902.html