Read Online The Passing Bells by Phillip Rock - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Phillip Rock
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Lydia said, âI like it very much.â
âSo do I. Itâs for the winter campaign. Well, ta-ta.â He stepped out of the lift on the fourth floor and Lydia continued upward to her fatherâs office.
Archie Foxe had an office of his own, complete with a desk that had once belonged to the Duke of Wellington when he had been Prime Minister, but he rarely spent time there. He was a roamer, a compulsive walker, going from office to office and desk to desk from the ground floor to the top, overseeing, supervising, suggesting, demanding, criticizing and praising, as the case might be, every one of his employees, from clerks to members of the board. Trailing after him would be one of his harassed stout-legged male secretaries, a shorthand notebook and a pencil constantly at the ready. One filled notebook represented a very slow day indeed.
Archie Foxe had been destined to make money and had never felt the slightest surprise that he had done so. He had never thanked God for his good fortune and was quick to point out that neither luck nor the Almighty had had anything to do with it.
âHard work and a bloody good idea,â was Archie Foxeâs sole business philosophy. He was sixty years old and had been born in the slums of Shadwell in Londonâs East End on New Yearâs Day, 1854. He would not talk about his childhood with anyone, not even his own daughter, nor had he done so with the woman he married late in life and who had died when Lydia was a child, an upper-class woman from Cumberland, who, had he told her, would not have comprehended his stories, or would have thought them mere Dickensian fictions. It had been a childhood of stinking hovels and workhouses, of a father drifting away in despair to gin-caused madness and a mother dying of consumption in a freezing attic. He could see the place of his childhood from the top-floor windows of Foxe House, the great serpentine stretches of the Thames below Blackfriars Bridge. It was not a distance that could be measured in miles.
Archie Foxe had been sent from a childrenâs house of detention to Bethnal Green at the age of nine to be an apprentice in a butcher shop in Smithfield Market. The butcherâs brother owned a bake shop, and Archieâs job was to chop up scraps of near-putrid beef and veal, which the bake-shop owner turned into gelatinous meat pies. The vileness of those pies inspired Archie to make better ones, which he did after quitting his apprenticeship at the age of seventeen. He entered into partnership with a middle-aged widow who owned a tiny bakery near Covent Garden. The two of them made the pies at night, and Archie took them around to various eating establishments and public houses and sold them during the day. They couldnât make enough of them, and within a year they had rented a building and had ten meat cutters and pastry men working for them.
âIt was just a question of pilinâ one thing on another,â Archie would tell a magazine writer many years later. The bakery growing, the acquisition of horses and delivery wagons, the expansion of productâbeef and veal pies, beef pies with kidney, veal and pork pies, pork pies with currants and apple chunks. . . .
âAnd then the puttinâ of the pies in tins, shippinâ âem to India . . . Australia . . . all round the bloody world.â
The widow sold her share of the partnership to Archie in 1880 to spend the balance of her days in a comfortable house in the country with four servants.
â âAvinâ it all to meself was really what did it. I could feel free like . . . just do what I ruddy well wanted.â
What he wanted were a few shops in strategic places on the corners of major thoroughfaresâclean, well-lighted places where ordinary blokes could have a cup of tea or coffee and something good and filling to eat and be waited on by a pretty young woman dressed in a blue uniform with a
âSo do I. Itâs for the winter campaign. Well, ta-ta.â He stepped out of the lift on the fourth floor and Lydia continued upward to her fatherâs office.
Archie Foxe had an office of his own, complete with a desk that had once belonged to the Duke of Wellington when he had been Prime Minister, but he rarely spent time there. He was a roamer, a compulsive walker, going from office to office and desk to desk from the ground floor to the top, overseeing, supervising, suggesting, demanding, criticizing and praising, as the case might be, every one of his employees, from clerks to members of the board. Trailing after him would be one of his harassed stout-legged male secretaries, a shorthand notebook and a pencil constantly at the ready. One filled notebook represented a very slow day indeed.
Archie Foxe had been destined to make money and had never felt the slightest surprise that he had done so. He had never thanked God for his good fortune and was quick to point out that neither luck nor the Almighty had had anything to do with it.
âHard work and a bloody good idea,â was Archie Foxeâs sole business philosophy. He was sixty years old and had been born in the slums of Shadwell in Londonâs East End on New Yearâs Day, 1854. He would not talk about his childhood with anyone, not even his own daughter, nor had he done so with the woman he married late in life and who had died when Lydia was a child, an upper-class woman from Cumberland, who, had he told her, would not have comprehended his stories, or would have thought them mere Dickensian fictions. It had been a childhood of stinking hovels and workhouses, of a father drifting away in despair to gin-caused madness and a mother dying of consumption in a freezing attic. He could see the place of his childhood from the top-floor windows of Foxe House, the great serpentine stretches of the Thames below Blackfriars Bridge. It was not a distance that could be measured in miles.
Archie Foxe had been sent from a childrenâs house of detention to Bethnal Green at the age of nine to be an apprentice in a butcher shop in Smithfield Market. The butcherâs brother owned a bake shop, and Archieâs job was to chop up scraps of near-putrid beef and veal, which the bake-shop owner turned into gelatinous meat pies. The vileness of those pies inspired Archie to make better ones, which he did after quitting his apprenticeship at the age of seventeen. He entered into partnership with a middle-aged widow who owned a tiny bakery near Covent Garden. The two of them made the pies at night, and Archie took them around to various eating establishments and public houses and sold them during the day. They couldnât make enough of them, and within a year they had rented a building and had ten meat cutters and pastry men working for them.
âIt was just a question of pilinâ one thing on another,â Archie would tell a magazine writer many years later. The bakery growing, the acquisition of horses and delivery wagons, the expansion of productâbeef and veal pies, beef pies with kidney, veal and pork pies, pork pies with currants and apple chunks. . . .
âAnd then the puttinâ of the pies in tins, shippinâ âem to India . . . Australia . . . all round the bloody world.â
The widow sold her share of the partnership to Archie in 1880 to spend the balance of her days in a comfortable house in the country with four servants.
â âAvinâ it all to meself was really what did it. I could feel free like . . . just do what I ruddy well wanted.â
What he wanted were a few shops in strategic places on the corners of major thoroughfaresâclean, well-lighted places where ordinary blokes could have a cup of tea or coffee and something good and filling to eat and be waited on by a pretty young woman dressed in a blue uniform with a
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