1953- 1969
1953
The nationalisation of the railways involves reappraisal and renegotiation of bookstall franchises, although the end result is much as before, with John Menzies having 73 stalls and three kiosks in Scotland and two stalls and two kiosks in England.
Over the British Isles, the situation at the time of the new agreements of 1953 was much the same as it had been in the 1930s. Easons of Dublin had a monopoly in the Republic of Ireland and held some Northen Ireland stations too. Menzies controlled the region between Carlisle and the far north; Wymans had a substantial but scattered stake in the Midlands of England and the West Country and on the North Wales coast; W.H. Smith & Son, the largest bookstall company in the world, shared the Midlands with Wymans and held unchallenged most of the Southern and Eastern regions of what was then called British Railways.
1958
The company is now 125 years old. There are now 26 shops, 19 of which were acquired in the years following 1951.
When the Chairman, in the firm's one-hundred-and-twenty-fifth birthday book, said that many shops had fine traditions but that high overheads and increasing costs were forcing them to close down, he was referring specifically to Scottish bookshops; though the same applied to retail establishments generally.
There was nothing new in that, nor anything unusual in successful businesses buying up unsuccessful ones; that was the law of competition by which mankind lived.
As another Scot, Andrew Carnegie, had said many years before:
Without conflict and competition, we'd still be swinging through the trees.
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1959
Menzies take over the English firm of Wymans; this involves not only a formidable wholesaling headquarters in London, but 78 shops, about 200 bookstalls throughout the provinces and the well-known stationers Smythson of Bond Street. First edition of The Chronicle, a quarterly magazine for employees.
Intrigued by the coup of a northern invader whom few had heard of, the Investor's Chronicle did some hasty research and briefed its readership on the obscure private company which had so swiftly conquered a well-known public one:
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1960
John Menzies (Holdings) Ltd. is incorporated.
The day dawned when British Rail began energetically (some said ruthlessly) to implement the Beeching plan for streamlining the rail services and closing many stations - and the bookstalls with them.
At the end of 1962 John Menzies' bookstalls were at their numerical peak: 357. (The figure had shot up when the firm acquired Wyman's.)
Now there are 54.
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1961
In the year in which Charles Henry Pickles of Yorkshire and C. Porter Ltd. of Northern Ireland are acquired, pre-tax profits pass the £½ million mark.
In 1959, the Investor's Chronicle prophesied that - "We have not heard the end of the House of Menzies", and this was fulfilled rather sooner than most observers expected.
In the space of a week, in February of 1961, Menzies bought up two important provincial businesses, Pickles of Leeds and Porter of Belfast.
Charles Henry Pickles had been one of the pioneers of wholesaling in Yorkshire. He had opened his first wholesale warehouse in Leeds in 1892. He branched out to York (1899), to Huddersfield (1901), to Hull and Doncaster (1903), to Wakefield (1907) and to Dewsbury and Scarborough (1914). While on course for a big future he had been tragically hit by the First World War, losing more than a quarter of his staff, all the young men having joined up together.
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1962
Shares in John Menzies (Holdings) Ltd. are offered to the public, and Horace Marshall and Son Ltd. and its subsidiaries are acquired.
In 1962 John Menzies went public, announcing that its own employees at 63 depots, 330 bookstalls and 117 shops would be invited to participate in the share issue. But the strong personal hold on a company which had always prided itself on being a family business was to be maintained.
Of two and a half million ordinary shares issued, the Menzies family retained nearly two million. (In 1981 a new share participation scheme was formed. Employees with more than five years' service - a total of about 1800 - became eligible for allocations of shares which were to be bought by trustees with a percentage of the annual pre-tax profits of the firm.)
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1965
There are now 90 wholesale branches, 161 shops and 350 bookstalls.
For both financial and sentimental reasons the company lamented the closure of Edinburgh's Caledonian railway station, the nearest one to Menzies' headquarters. But on the whole it could well afford to lose the rest. The bookstalls had faced, as newsagents everywhere were facing, another problem in the affluent society: the difficulty in finding schoolchildren willing to get up early to serve in the shops and make deliveries for a few shillings a week. Dwindling passenger traffic on the railways was naturally the big factor; more cars, more buses meant fewer people reading a newspaper on the way to work.
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1969
A comprehensive training policy is launched and the company's first Training Centre is opened at Regent Terrace, Edinburgh. Company administration is restructured to accomodate continuing expansion and development.
Murray's Edinburgh Diary
Another sign that an era was drawing to a close was the disappearance in 1966 of Murray's Diary, that ancient stand-by of the travelling public. It hadn't altered in price (one penny) for a hundred and twenty-four years.
Books still came first at the bookstall. The Menzies one at Euston station sold five thousand copies of Alistair Maclean's Where Eagles Dare in eight weeks; in a year notorious for publishers' complaints that no one bought books any more.
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