OLD FIRM TO CLOSE

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32568, 30 March 1971, Page 1

OLD FIRM TO CLOSE

After four generations and 90 years of service to the public of Christchurch and mid-Canter-bury, the firm of George H. Woods. Ltd, grain and produce merchants, is about to close. When William Woods bought the property on the comer of Barbadoes Street and Ferry Road in 1881, it included a two-storey building in use as a grocery store and as a grocer’s home. To the present, that building has remained the headquarters of the Woods firm. What is now the office, crammed with desks, cupboards, filing cabinets and three safes, was the livingroom for three generations. The older of the two present partners, Mr L. S. Woods,

was born in that room be cause his mother was nor well enough at the time to use the stairs to the upper floor bedrooms. For more than 80 years, the firm conducted what it once advertised as "Woods’ Mammoth Hay, Chaff and Corn Mills,” but when the bulk handling of grain was introduced to the milling industry, capital requirements became too great for smaller firms. Poultry farmers, once among the Woods family’s leading customers, now have their feed delivered by tanker. Until the late 19605, Woods employees had the dubious pleasure of delivering grain by the ton and carting every pound of it, in 1801 b sacks, from their trucks to bins as far away as 100 yards. According to the firm’s

younger partner, Mr N. M. Woods, the company would have gone out of business years ago if it had not been for the loyalty of older employees. Today’s young workers, he says, have no burning ambition to carry 1801 b on their backs.

The Woods heyday was the era of the horse and buggy, when the firm tried to keep at least 100 tons of chaff in reserve. Later, it conducted a thriving trade in vegetables—as is shown by invoice books full of items such as "10 tons of table potatoes, at £3 5s a ton,” and “15 tons of carrots, at £2 12s 6d a ton.” (The price of those potatoes was 3jib for Ic, and the year was 1925). But since the Second World War, Woods customers have been shrinking steadily in

size and number. The poultry farmer who used to make a living from 1000 birds has been supplanted by the man with 6000 birds and bulk delivery. The family man who used to buy a sugar bag of seed potatoes- every year now buys 71b, and the man who used to buy 71b has turned his vegetable garden into a back lawn. Now, with a good offer for the property, the Woods family has no hesitation in selling. As if to emphasise the trends that have turned an essential industry into a redundant trade, the section will be razed and turned into a used-car yard. The photograph, taken some time before 1920, shows the premises when the company was in its heyday.