Jenny Lock
Jenny talks about Skeet and Jeffes

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My grandfather was William Skeet, and I am his granddaughter Jenny Skeet. He had a blacksmith that came and worked for him, and then they had a horse and cart who did a bit of delivering. That was 1891, and then about 15 years later he saw a piece of land in Chobham Road, something called Crown Land, that was the site of his next premises, and he bought that for £3000. It was a field, and he built his building, which lasted until 1968, which a lot of people in Woking still remember now, and I remember that building. And he was joined at that stage by another man called Mr Jeffes, who worked for another builder’s merchant and he was a salesman, and together they made a very good team. I think my grandfather was more of a nuts and bolts financial man, and Hartley Jeffes was a salesman.

If they wanted to buy one screw they could buy one screw, so uneconomic! But they were so thrilled if they didn’t have to buy a whole packet, and I think, in the old days of course everything was weighed. You weighed your metal, and screws, and nails, and things.

My father used to do a tremendous sort of catalogue, hardback catalogue, with every single thing we sold, illustrated and priced. And I can remember now in the ’50s I was a schoolgirl; he used to have everything out on the dining room table, all these pictures and little bits of writing underneath and he would take the whole lot to the publishers in Guildford, and they would print these catalogues. He would oversee that, yes, he was very much a sort of detail man. He was lovely, he didn’t ever want anybody to leave, and when I first joined the company I think there were 17 men who were over age of retirement, and they loved it. They came and they - they didn’t actually play cards but they didn’t do a lot! And I think it was one of the first things I said to him, I said, ‘Look father, you’ve got all these people, I know we don’t pay them very much, but actually we do pay them something, and I think they’ve got to go,’ and he was horrified. But they did go. But he himself always said one boy - this is talking about apprentices - one boy is a boy, two boys are half a boy, and three boys are no boys at all, because they sort of gang up and muck about.

But the other difficulty was that of course being an old company, an old established company, some people joined us from school to sweep the yard at 16, and they never really got beyond that. I mean obviously some of them did, but some of the older ones they expected to stay there until they were 65, and, you know, there wasn’t a yard to sweep! Well you didn’t do it like that. And that was hard too, and they were lovely, you know, and they were very pro-family.