Spotlight on Hill Road - page 6


All the Old Boys (and girls) J


ane Lilly of Clevedon Civic Society’s Local History Group, takes a personal look at the history of the family-run shops of Clevedon. Most of them have closed but one still trades in the town.


In the 1960s and 1970s, apart from my grandfather’s old grocery shop in Kenn Road, we shopped at Parker’s Bakery, Seeley’s Stationers, Hagley’s Drapery Shop, Ganniclifft’s Newsagent and occasionally Neale Brothers. His was the kind of grocer’s business that smelled of cheese, fireworks, potatoes and leather bootlaces. Only occasionally at Neale’s, because grandpa also sold ironmongery.


With the very recent closures of Seeley’s, Neale’s and


Challicom’s, I had a hard time thinking of a family run shop of any age in the town now. Then I remembered Rossiter’s the Jeweller’s in Hill Road.


The business was founded in Weston-super-Mare in 1832, but they appear in Clevedon in the 1871 census, when John Rossiter’s son Ebenezer, had lately set up a branch in the current premises in Hill Road with his older sister, Elizabeth as assistant.


When a younger sister, Eunice, married Clevedon watchmaker James Perrett in 1878, they took over the Hill Road shop. When James died in 1915, Eunice continued in ownership until her death in 1934. She had, like the rest of the family, trained with her father in the Weston shop,


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and would have been perfectly capable of managing the shop and workforce.


Now in the 6th generation of the


family, Rossiter’s continues with the Hill Road branch, as well as the original shop in Weston and branches in Bridgwater and Barnstaple.


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