William Roper and the Kilburn Bon Marche

The Bon Marche was a large draper’s shop situated between the Old Bell and the Black Lion in Kilburn High Road. Today the site has been demolished and redeveloped.

William Roper was born in 1839 in Harkstead, a small village in Suffolk, the son of a farmer. He became a draper and moved to London, where he married Stephanie (Fannie) Delbart on 10 Sept 1864 at St Marylebone Church. She was a dressmaker from France and her father Alphonse Delbart, was a perfumer. Fannie lived in St Georges Hanover Square, and in 1869 as Madame Roper she opened a dress shop at 31 Somerset Street. This was a very fashionable area of London near Portman Square and today it lies under Selfridges.

At the same time William Roper opened a drapers in Kilburn, probably using inheritance money from his father who had died at Harkstead in 1864. Beginning with just one small shop, over time William expanded until he had Nos. 36, 36a and 40 Kilburn High Road. Business was good, and by 1881 there were 31 staff living nearby in Bell Terrace. By 1876 the shop was called the Kilburn Bon Marche, named after the famous shop in Paris and no doubt due to Madame Fannie Roper.

Roper continued to expand, and he took over property in the adjoining Goldsmith’s Place and part of the Kilburn and Maida Vale Railway station. In addition to men and ladies clothing he was now selling carpets and house furnishings.

In 1897 the shop was the scene of probably the first moving picture display in the neighbourhood, a display of the cinematograph.

As a young boy aged six, the theatre critic Charles Landstone went along with his older sisters. He later wrote:

I, of course, had no idea what we were going to see, though one of my sisters told me it would be like the pantomime. We were ushered down into a small basement at the store; my puzzled mind could only make out a large white cloth which was stretched on the wall facing us, and my sister told me that that was the curtain. I kept asking when it was going to go up, but no one took any notice of me. Eventually to my surprise, the lights went out and moving pictures appeared on the screen. It was all very murky and shaky, and it had no perspective: when figures approached the camera they looked like ghosts. There was a picture of Queen Victoria which was just discernible but it certainly was intriguing.

Searching through the Kilburn Times, we found several stories about the Bon Marche.

On 7 May 1897 twenty-year old Emma Harding went into the shop and bought a yard of black ribbon which cost four and three-quarter pence. She paid for it with a crown (5 shillings). The assistant Francis Kiddell wrapped it in a cash ball with the receipt and put it in the cash railway which carried it overhead to Hetty Grey the cashier. She realised it felt light and called William Youles one of the partners. He questioned Emma who said she had received it in change when she had a tea in High Barnet earlier that day. She was handed over to PC William Goodwin and charged with ‘uttering a counterfeit coin with the intention to defraud.’ She appeared at the Old Bailey on 24 May when witnesses gave evidence that on the 7 May Emma had passed four silver crowns for the purchase of various small items at Highgate, Barnet and Kilburn. They said she was wearing a dark green dress and a fashionable toque hat.

The Toque Hat

Emma said she was a laundress who lived at Great Wild Street in the poor area of St Giles. She was found guilty and sentenced to 18 months with hard labour. She had a number of previous convictions and was listed by the Met as a habitual criminal and had already served a total of 29 months in jail. Several of her brothers had also been sentenced for ‘coining’ – passing counterfeit crowns. Her mother and several of the children ended up in the workhouse.

In 1905 there were a series of thefts over a three-month period. Looking at the dates, the managers became suspicious about a commercial traveller who sold hats to the shop. Detective Sergeant William Loder of the West Hampstead police came to the shop and hid behind a fixture. After an hour and a half, the rep Frederick Flower arrived with his driver George Hurn. Loder watched as Flower and Hurn took 15 corsets from the display racks and placed them in a large box. While Flower went out with a buyer to a show room, Hurn took the box outside to his carriage. DS Loder arrested Hurn and then Flower, who protested his innocence. 

Edwardian corsets with very tight waists

They appeared at the Marylebone Police Court in September accused of the theft of the corsets valued at £7. Flower aged 33, lived in Haringey and had been a commercial traveller for two wholesale millinery firms for 11-years and earned £270 a year. He was found guilty and sentenced to two months imprisonment. The magistrate decided that 34-year old Hurn from Clapham, had only acted under Flower’s instructions and he was released.

William and Fannie Roper moved from Somerset Street to Cricklewood House on the junction of Edgware Road and Cricklewood Lane. After a long illness, William died there in May 1891 and was buried in Hampstead Cemetery in Fortune Green Road. He left £31,982, worth about £3.7M today. Fannie moved to Elsworthy Road near Primrose Hill and took the name of Cricklewood House with her. She died there in April 1907.

After William’s death the company was run as ‘W. Roper and Co.’ by William Richer Youles and Walter Baker, with Walter John Pyke who was the general manager and company accountant.

In January 1907 the firm agreed to an earlier closing time at 2.00 instead of 5.00 on Saturday. As a result, the staff decided to form a social club which for some reason they called the ‘East Anglia Sports Club’. They held tennis, cricket, and football matches at the Hyde Edgware. There was also an annual dinner held at the Holborn Restaurant.

Enlarged Bon Marche

On 15 January 1908 the partnership between Baker and Youles was formerly dissolved, leaving Baker in control of the firm. We do not know why this happened, but there were tragic consequences.

On the 1 September 1908 William Youles told his wife Alice that he had a very bad head and asked if she could hear it ‘cracking’. She said he should go to his doctor, and he left their house at 22a St Charles Square Ladbroke Grove. Instead of going to Shoot Up Hill in Kilburn to see Dr George, he went to 71 Chevening Road Kensal Rise to the house of Walter Pyke the accountant, who he had known for 18 years. When he arrived, Mrs Pyke invited him in and said her husband was not there. She said that Youles looked very hot and exhausted and as his hands were dirty, she suggested he should use the bathroom. While downstairs in the kitchen, she heard a shot and a fall in the bathroom. The police arrived and after breaking down the door which was locked from the inside, they found Youles lying dead on the floor. He had shot himself in the right temple and the revolver had fallen into the bath. Police enquiries found that he had bought the revolver from the shop of gunsmith Charles Hellis at 119 Edgware Road last July, when he presented a licence to kill game.

At the inquest Alice Youles said William had been depressed since January and was worried about the dissolution of the business. He now had nothing to do and was not sleeping at night. He had suffered with pains in his head for the last two years. Asked if had ever threatened to take his own life, Alice replied, he had previously said ‘he would be better out of the world than in it.’

His brother Frank Youles said that William had been strange and depressed for 18 months and felt that he was no good. The coroner asked if he was fit to conduct business, and Frank replied that he did not think so. The coroner concluded, ‘No doubt he was worried over business matters, and rightly or wrongly he imagined he had a grievance against some people.’ He suggested a verdict of ‘suicide whilst of unsound mind’ and the jury agreed. William Youles was aged 53.

We could not find out what had happened between Youles, Baker and Pyke to cause the rift, or if Youles was suffering from a mental illness which led to such a dramatic event.

The shop continued to trade successfully and held annual sales of items of fire-damaged goods or bankrupt stock. However, there was growing competition from other large shops in Kilburn such as B.B. Evans and David Fern and Co. and in 1927 W. Roper and Co, were taken over by John Thrifty and Co. This was an investment company formed by A.E. Cowper and T. Anthony who were directors of Selfridges, to buy properties and set up a chain of shops. In 1932 they sold the Kilburn shop to the London Co-operative Society, who remained there for many years.