THOMAS Spencer was born in 1851 in Queen’s Place, off Queen’s Court, Caroline Square in Skipton - all named after Queen Caroline, the popular consort of King George IV.
Queen’s Court and Place were accessed by an archway through London House, occupied in Spencer’s childhood by a series of cut-price drapers two of whom went bankrupt. Much later London House became Woolworths and the frontage has been altered. Today, 1 Devonshire Place (renamed) is all that remains of what was Queen’s Place.
Spencer’s mother was the daughter of schoolmaster Joseph Horner who taught at Burnsall and then at Ramsgill in Nidderdale. Spencer’s mother and father and his paternal grandfather were shoemakers - women shoemakers usually sewed ‘uppers’.
When Thomas was five-years-old his grandfather and father died in the same year and the Spencer shoemaking business was taken over by their manager, Thomas Wilkinson, who became a successful local businessman selling wallpaper, shoes and boots in Caroline Square and acting as auctioneer for the fortnightly cattle fair held in the Square and High Street.
Skipton-born Tom Spencer. Pic: M&S Archive
In 1861 the Spencers still lived in Skipton and Thomas’ elder brother James was training as a shoemaker, but shoemaking was rapidly mechanising and was no longer a good career.
Despite the bankruptcies at London House, Thomas Spencer chose drapery. He may have begun his apprenticeship in Skipton but by 1871 was a live-in apprentice to Thomas Brown at 51 Kirkgate, Bradford and in 1873 he married Elizabeth Baxter of Water Street, Skipton.
Elizabeth’s father was a partner in the Baxter and Mackay drapery, tailoring and ready-made clothing business at 20-22 High Street - just left of the Black Horse main building - which supplied a “gorgeous suit of crimson and green cloth” for the Skipton town crier in 1888.
By 1888, Thomas Spencer was working as a buyer and cashier for the wholesale draper Isaac Dewhirst. He and Elizabeth were living in Burley in Leeds with a daughter, Grace Baxter Spencer, but moved to Gathorne Terrace in Harehills.
In 1890 Elizabeth died, leaving four motherless children: Grace, Ethel, Thomas and baby James. In 1891 Thomas married Agnes Whitfield, a fervent Anglican who was a Sunday School teacher in Leeds.
Meanwhile Michael Marks had arrived as a refugee in Leeds. He set up a business peddling small items for a penny each which was such a success that he wanted to expand.
Isaac Dewhirst lent him £5 to set up a Penny Bazaar stall in Leeds market where there is a memorial to the venture. Soon Michael Marks was employing staff and had a network of Penny Bazaar market stalls across the region but wanted to open shops.
Dewhirst suggested that his cashier might invest and canny Thomas Spencer put in £300, a large sum worth about £50,000 today, on condition that the business be named Marks & Spencer and they would share profits equally.
Thomas Spencer stopped working for Dewhirst who remained a major supplier to M&S. He threw himself into expanding the business from stalls to shops and managed a huge new purpose-built warehouse in Manchester.
Marks managed sales and they shared the buying. Very soon Marks and Spencer had dozens of shops across the country but not in Skipton.
The Spencers moved into a new villa in Prestwich. The fate of James and Ethel is unknown but Grace married and went to Bristol.
Thomas Spencer took young Simon Marks to cricket at Old Trafford regularly but he did not live long to enjoy cricket or his fortune.
In 1903 aged 51, after only nine years with M&S, he semi-retired and moved to a smart red-brick Georgian farmhouse in Whittington, Lichfield, Staffordshire.
It was a far cry from childhood in a crowded stone-built Skipton yard with a shared toilet. He kept farm animals and geese and died in 1905 from cardiac and liver disease put down to high alcohol consumption, a habit he passed on to his unhappy son, also Thomas.
Skipton plaque in memory of Thomas Spencer. Pic: Claire Nash
Thomas junior was ousted from the M&S board by Simon Marks and died young from delirium tremens at a barracks when called up during the First World War.
Agnes lived until 1959 when she died aged 98. More than 100 years after Thomas Spencer’s death, Marks and Spencer opened a store in his home town of Skipton.
Claire Nash