With the method of Christmas and festive procuring reaching a frenzy, that is the right time to revisit the historical past of an Edinburgh icon – Jenners division retailer. At Nationwide Museums Scotland we maintain the Jenners Archive together with a number of objects from Jenners which have entered the museum’s assortment. Be a part of Julie Holder, Assistant Curator of Trendy and Up to date Scottish Historical past & Archaeology, as she tells the Jenners story by way of our objects and archives.
If you happen to stay close to Edinburgh, you most likely have a photograph of the Jenners’ Christmas tree someplace in your telephone or social media posts. The final one I took was in December 2018, with a go to to Jenners being a conventional a part of the run as much as Christmas for my household.
Jenners was Scotland’s oldest impartial division retailer. The enterprise was bought by the Douglas-Miller household to Home of Fraser in 2005 and the constructing was purchased by style retailer Anders Holch Povlsen in 2017. Then in 2021, the announcement was made that Jenners was closing its doorways for good. Nevertheless, like many occasions in its historical past, Jenners is making a comeback, with plans to repurpose the positioning as a boutique resort, restaurant and division retailer.
To start with…
In 1838, “Kennington and Jenner” was opened by drapers Charles Kennington and Charles Jenner. Their first commercial declared that their institution would include ‘each prevailing BRITISH and PARISIAN FASHION.’
The shop’s identify modified to “Charles Jenner and Co” in 1863 after the loss of life of Charles Kennington and rapidly expanded from a small material store to a significant division retailer.
Nevertheless, in November 1892 catastrophe struck. A fireplace that began within the in style Christmas bazaar within the retailer’s basement destroyed the constructing. Inside 5 weeks the Jenners manufacturing unit in Rose Road was tailored into a brief retailer and many of the workers had been again at work. Development started on the present “Jenners” constructing on Princes Road that has turn out to be a well-recognized a part of the Edinburgh skyline.
The brand new constructing, opened in 1895, was designed by Scottish architect William Hamilton Beattie and impressed by the structure of the Bodleian Library in Oxford. With its lofty grand gallery, writing room, and a luncheon and tearoom, the brand new retailer was introduced as a full leisure expertise. Buyers might spend a complete day looking, socialising and procuring in what many would name the “Harrods of the North”.
This was a high-end retailer that aimed to supply the private contact, with well-turned out store assistants, porters to show carpet squares for patrons, and even three commissionaires who opened doorways and summoned taxis. The enterprise later added fashionable extensions throughout the twentieth century and was visited by Queen Elizabeth II for its 150-year anniversary in 1988.
A day on the retailers
The stereotype of primarily girls working and procuring in shops developed throughout their heyday of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However though retailers supplied new employment alternatives for girls, together with as ‘store women’, male workers outnumbered girls in retail till nicely after the First World Conflict. Even then, males usually held well-paid managerial positions, whereas girls had been usually on seasonal or low-paid contracts.
Jenners did have departments aimed toward males however its advertising and marketing focused girls as key prospects, as might be seen from photographs of their catalogues. Certainly, one of many causes that Charles Jenner selected caryatids for the skin of the Jenners constructing in 1893 was to pay homage to the significance of girls consumers to the shop’s success.
Within the museum’s assortment we have now a fragile nineteenth century needlework field that was one of many early varieties of objects aimed toward feminine clientele. A younger Queen Victoria is depicted on the field’s lid within the gown and robes of the Order of the Garter, which she wore at her eldest son’s christening. The needle containers inside have miniature copies of work from the Tarantella Set of 1850 by George Baxter which ‘might be taken off the Lids for Women’ Albums’. Creating scrapbooks was a preferred pastime for center and upper-class women within the Victorian interval. Gadgets like this field hyperlink the predominantly feminine pastimes of stitching and scrapbooking with the essential function that ladies held in managing households within the nineteenth century.
Weddings, outfits for royal visits, and debutante balls all supplied a major quantity of commerce for Jenners in its first 100 years. The robes and headdresses worn when women had been introduced at Holyrood required weeks of fittings and alterations. The recreations of such occasions in historic TV dramas assist us respect the pomp and wealth of the marriage season, offering retailers with essential earnings.
Nevertheless, rationing and adjustments to British society throughout and after the Second World Conflict meant that Jenners moved away from its elitist picture and aimed to draw a broader vary of shoppers. For instance, the brooch pictured above from Jenners was worn by Mrs Florence Bruce Steven on her marriage ceremony day in 1940 to go along with a modest gray woollen gown and jacket with navy hat, gloves and bag.
Shiny and new!
The “modernity” of the division retailer has all the time been a part of their advertising and marketing, expressed by way of promoting (and utilizing) new applied sciences. When Jenners reopened in 1895, a lot was fabricated from the electrical lighting and hydraulic lifts, whereas shops throughout Britain put in money registers and elevators. In 1930, the Jenners Radio and Gramophone departments had been opened and run by Scottish engineer Alexander Steuart. In the meantime, many departments in Jenners bought the newest digital items, such because the “Sally Says” doll containing a disc gramophone from the Nineteen Seventies.
However as a lot as shops introduced themselves as new and fashionable, a lot of what they did expanded on older retail practices, simply on a a lot bigger scale! This included promoting objects at mounted costs, permitting looking, offering leisure areas like tearooms, and tempting prospects by way of intelligent advertising and marketing and fashionable show methods.
Some of the apparent markers of city shops was their monumental structure, like we see at Jenners. Nevertheless, the price of sustaining such giant buildings within the age of on-line procuring has introduced challenges. Now, the Jenners constructing is beginning a brand new chapter. Edinburgh consumers and people of us with fond recollections of Jenners Christmases previous are excited to see what occurs subsequent!
Christmas studying checklist
Canmore, Pictures of the Jenners Constructing
Mary G. Grierson, A Hundred Years in Princes Road 1838-1938 (Edinburgh: Jenners, 1938)
Sheila McNamara, Jenners A Brief Historical past 1838-1988 (Edinburgh: Jenners, 1988)
Geoffrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain (eds), Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Division Retailer, 1850-1939 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999)
