Newtown’s last link with one of its most famous sons

NEWS that Shop Direct is to close its call centre in Newtown, along with other sites at Sunderland and Burnley with the total loss of 1,500 jobs, finally brings to an end the Mid Wales town’s association with one of the greatest innovations in retailing: home shopping.

It was here that Pryce Pryce-Jones established the world’s first mail order business in 1855. A world class entrepreneur, he also innovated many of the marketing techniques still in use today. Although the Royal Welsh Warehouse, the purpose-built premises he moved to in 1879 when his international business outgrew its first base of operations, will remain, Newtown’s ongoing link with home shopping will not.

Born in Llanllwchaearn, just outside Newtown, Pryce-Jones was apprenticed to a local draper at the age of 12, and worked in the town’s Broad Street until striking out on his own when he was 21-years-old. He stayed in drapery and began selling Welsh flannel that was produced by the local wool industry.

It was three things that transformed his fortunes: the reform of the Post Office; a rail line to Newtown; and the rural sparsity of the area, more commonly seen these days as an entrepreneurial barrier and cause of socially exclusion. Pryce-Jones would send out leaflets to customers in the remote Powys countryside. They would choose from the lists and goods would be sent out by road.

When the trains arrived, Pryce-Jones realised he could adapt his business to an international model and began providing flannel as far afield as the United States and Australia. He would also the names of his most famous customers, including Queen Victoria and Florence Nightingale, on labels and promotional leaflets in one of the first examples of celebrity endorsement.

A year after the move to the Royal Welsh Warehouse, Pryce-Jones’ business could boast over 100,000 customers and he was given a knighthood by his most famous customer in 1887. He also served as an MP for the area. He died in 1920 and never lived to see his business badly hit by the Great Depression, before it was taken over by a Liverpool company in 1938. That would eventually become Great Universal, whose catalogues were much loved by 1970s mums (and the lingerie sections much admired by their sons), and which would in turn become Shop Direct.

Ironically, it was the internet – the very thing that is often touted as key to turning around the fortunes of rural Wales – that led to a sharp drop-off in calls to Shop Direct. So let’ remember that this global phenomenon and way of life, particularly in America, was given to the world by a smart-thinking Welshman.