1862- 1879
1862
After several attempts, John Menzies secures the bookstall concession for Waverley station in the heart of Edinburgh - on his own front door. It costs him £180.
Waverley railway station bookstall.
1867
The partnership of John Menzies and Company is formed, reflecting the growing scope of the company. The rent for Waverly has risen to £400.
In 1867, the two boys, John and Charles, were too young to be a part of it. The founder at that point established a tradition which his heirs have honoured to the present day. He selected four men from the business, Messrs Turner, Macnab & Mackenzie, and took them into partnership.
In a short story about the Menzies Group, compiled almost a hundred years later, H.M. Graham notes:
`This was a wise innovation, and one the Menzies family have followed.... Every employee in the Group is eligible for election to the Board of Directors. No fewer than eleven of the present directors of the companies that form the Group started as boys and worked their way by stages to the boardroom.'
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1868
The first Glasgow wholesale warehouse opens, giving the company its first foothold in the west.
The Glasgow 'Experiment'
One of the Menzies relics is a stout leather briefcase with three brass locks and a reversible plate with EDINBURGH on one side and GLASGOW on the other: the inter-departmental mail carrier.
Inter-office communication
As a museumpiece, the old leather bag is nothing to make a fuss about, but it's a reminder of the innocent improvisations of a bygone age, which those who battle with the telephone - and computer-aided communications of today may sometimes envy.
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1871
The Edinburgh warehouse moves to 12 Hanover Street.
Menzies must have had to ask himself, as he stretched his finances to the limit, the questions which go together in most expanding commercial operations:
"Can I afford to? Can I afford not to?"
The £9000 overdraft he acquired in 1859 was increased to £11,000 in 1871. His successors gradually reduced the figure to nil.
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1879
John Menzies, the founder, dies, and the business is taken over by his sons John and Charles. Forty-six years on and profits are around £5,000. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, profits remain fairly steady around £8,000.
Nearly half a century earlier he had sat alone by candlelight, marking proofs of Vignette Views and guides to the principal Scottish lochs.
Now the ramifications of his business extended over most of those views and lochs; shopkeepers throughout Scotland depended on the smooth running of the enterprise he had created.
It was easy for him, a modern captain of commerce might say. He came along on the crest of Railway Mania and the halfpenny press. The public pegged its expectations and the means of satisfying those expectations were at hand; his schemes could hardly help coming to fruition.
So hindsight shows us.
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