Women's Month - Day three

[girlofprey]

In England, we have a chain of bookshops called WH Smith. They are not really pure bookshops - they sell probably as much stationary and newspapers as they do books - but they are pretty much the largest bookshop chain in England. There's a WH Smith in even small towns - it's where I bought all my books, as a child. When it was founded, the business was actually called HW Smith, after Henry Walton Smith, who started it. But he died about three months after starting it up, and it was his wife Anna who then had to run it single-handedly, while raising their children. She went into business with another man, Zacchaeus Coates, but didn't have anyone at home to help her with housework and raising the children, unless she could raise the money for it. But she ran the business, and made it a success, and eventually passed it on to her sons after 20 years. Her son William Henry Smith - who was born two weeks before his father died, showing just how much childcare she had to do - turned out to be the better businessman of the two sons, and took over most of the running of the business after his mother died, and then renamed it WH Smith after himself. Rather than A Smith, after his amazing mother, which it clearly should have been.

Comments

[breyzyyin]

Oh wow, she sounds like she was an incredible woman. This was a really informative post! ♥