This Is Cheshire

Full credit to this shop ..

From the Guardian Series, first published Thursday 23rd Jan 2003.

OLD KNUTSFORDIANS seem to be getting thin on the ground nowadays but perhaps there are some who remember Wildgoose's shop in King Street, where Boots is today.

It was more than just a drapers shop kitting out man, woman and child in style.

It also sold furnishing and dress materials from bolts of cloth, measured by brass rulers set into the long counter edges.

There was a high cash desk with wires, which whizzed the small canister with the bill and cash inside, backwards and forwards above one's head, while customers sat on a bent wooden chair.

I remember dark recesses at the back of the shop where, no doubt, tailors and seamstresses sometimes worked.

Fred Buckley, now 97, remembers a tailor living behind the shop in the first decades of the 1900s.

An apprenticeship document shows William Wildgoose was working there around 1855 and by 1860 he must have taken over the King Street shop, which was then a milliners.

For some years he had only half the premises while the part adjoining Silk Mill Street was occupied by Doctor Gleeson and later became the Working Men's Conservative Club until the present one was built and Wildgoose's expanded.

Their advertisement around that time shows William and his sons George and Frank at the double fronted doorways of the shop. Frank Wildgoose bred silver-haired collie show dogs and exercised them on the Heath. They became famous for winning prizes and medals.

One, Canute Treasure, had its portrait painted in 1912 by artist Reuben W Binks.

He was an artist noted for such work because he had painted similar pictures for royalty - perhaps before they specialised in corgis.

This portrait recently came to light and any information on the family or their dogs would be appreciated. Opposite the old shop was en even older building which had once been a farm.William Hope, ironmonger and tin plate worker, was living there when Wildgoose's was founded about 1860.

Does anyone have a better picture of this old property, which was demolished when the District Bank was built, now Barclays?

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