Most furniture collectors and dealers are familiar with the name Gillow or Gillows, and many people who neither know or care about antique furniture have heard of Waring & Gillows, the department store whose branches were to be found in the centre of many English towns until a decade or so ago when even the branch in Lancaster closed its doors. Like many famous people, institutions of firms, myths and legends have inevitably become entangled with the facts so perhaps, on the eve of the long-awaited publication of Gillows of Lancaster and London 1730-1840, now is an appropriate time to try and separate a few facts from the fiction which surrounds the firm and its furniture.

Figure.4 A very handsome bookcase in mahogany and satinwood impressed 'HY WALKER LANCASTER' on the secretaire drawer. It was made for Charles Fox (1749-1806), the beminent Whig politician and the first Foreign Secretary, for St.Anne's Hill House, Chertsey, Surrey, his country residence until his death in 1806. He was the son of Henry Fox, 1st Baron Holland, and his wife Lady Caroline Fox. Their family home was Holland House, Kensington. In the grounds of their 500-acre estate was Little Holland House, the London residence of Richard Gillow ll and his wife Elizabeth Stapleton. Did Richard Gillow recommend his ex-journeyman Henry Walker to Charles Fox? (Freshfords Fine Art)

To start at the beginning, it was Waring & Gillows' assertion, emblazoned on their letter heading, that the firm was founded in Lancaster in 1695, and indeed the firm held their 250th anniversary celebration in Lancaster in 1946. However, Robert Gillow, cabinetmaker, the founder of the Lancaster firm, gave his age as 64 years in August 1767 when a census of Roman Catholics was taken in England, so he must have been born about 1702-03 at the earliest. Robert Gillow (d.1772) (figure 2), was the son of Richard Gillow, a devout Roman Catholic yeoman farmer of Great Singleton near Kirkham in the Fylde area of Lancashire, who was convicted and imprisoned in Lancaster Castle Gaol for sheltering a priest, his brother-in-law, Father Swarbrick in January 1717, and Richard died later the same year. Probably as a consequence of this upheaval, his son Robert Gillow was not apprenticed to John Robinson, a Lancaster joiner, until 1720-21. On completing his seven-year apprenticeship in 1727-28, he paid the customary fee to the Corporation of Lancaster to become a Freeman, and set up his joinery business in about 1728-29. Why the spurious date 1695 was used by Waring & Gillow remains a mystery.
A summary of the Gillow firm with key dates and facts is included in the book but, briefly, the history is as follows. After three generations, the Gillow family having successfully built up the only furniture business to have both a branch in the metropolis and in the provinces, gradually withdrew from trade beginning in about 1813. The new partners were Leonard Redmayne (who ran the Lancaster branch), Henry and Edward Whiteside and William James Ferguson who ran the London business in Oxford Street (founded in 1769-70). This partnership was principally a management buy-out (paid for in instalments), mainly by ex-Gillow apprentices who continued to trade under the Gillow name, as did subsequent partnerships. However, it was not until as late as 1897 that Samuel James Waring & Sons went into partnership with Gillows, over 200 years later than the date used by Waring & Gillows.
Another assertion is that Robert Gillow (d.1772) was the first cabinetmaker to import mahogany into Lancaster. Although his first notebook clearly shows that, from the early 1730s, most of his furniture was made in mahogany, he was only one of several master joiners who worked in the port of Lancaster and they would all have had easy access to this newly fashionable wood. Crucially, his apprenticeship commenced in 1721, the same year that the tax on hardwoods was abolished which encouraged the importation of mahogany through many ports on the western seaboard of England including Liverpool, Whitehaven and Lancaster. Robert Gillow would therefore have been familiar with the wood, but it is unlikely that he was the first woodworker to import it since he did not complete his apprenticeship until the late 1720s.