“STOP ME & BUY ONE!”
Wall’s ice cream in Epsom & Ewell

In 1786, Richard Wall opened a butcher’s stall in St James’s Market, London. Under his son, Thomas, and grandson, another Thomas, the business grew and, by the early 1900s, was nationally known for its range of meat-based products. In the 1890s, the Wall family moved to Sutton, where grandson Thomas is kindly remembered as a significant local benefactor – witness the local history plaque (pictured below) on his former home at Blythewood, 25 Worcester Road, Sutton.

The London Borough of Sutton’s plaque commemorating Thomas Wall.
Photograph with thanks to the Croydon Advertiser, copyright acknowledged.

Every year, the family-run company – now known as T Wall & Sons – had to lay off staff in the summer as demand for its sausages, pies and meat fell. In 1913, Thomas (the second) conceived the idea of making ice cream in the summer to avoid those lay-offs. However, work on the idea was halted by the First World War. Thomas retired in 1920 and Wall’s was bought by the precursor to today’s international conglomerate, Unilever. Under the new management, the ice cream proposal was resurrected and pursued.

Wall’s opened their first ice cream factory in Acton in 1922. The venture quickly became a success. While commercial refrigeration was by then commonplace, very few homes had a “fridge” and, to increase sales, Wall’s developed a home delivery network, based on local depots. These home deliveries were made via a fleet of specially made tricycles with an insulated cold box, as in the photograph below. There were also some specially made bicycles with a smaller box over a small front wheel.

A typical Wall’s delivery tricycle.
Image with thanks to the Epsom & Ewell Local History Centre.

Deliveries were made in response to telephoned orders, and came in containers that would keep the ice cream frozen for up to four hours. The deliverymen (and they seem always to have been male) also had rounds, during which they would look out for a W in the window of their clients asking them to call in for a sale.

A Wall’s price list and, on its reverse, a W sign used to ask the roundsman to call.
Images with thanks to the Epsom & Ewell Local History Centre.

[The prices on the card above (and the one further below) are, of course, pre-decimal when each £1 contained 240 pennies. 12 of those pence made a shilling of which there were 20 in a pound. Thus, a 3d. chocolate coated bar cost just more than 1p (the exact conversion of which is 2.4d) and a double size brick at 1/6 (one shilling and sixpence) cost 7½p – in both cases of course ignoring inflation.]

The first record of a depot in the Borough is found in the 1934 Kelly’s Directory for Epsom which , in the “Commercial” section, has “Wall T. & Sons Ltd. ice cream mfrs. Ashley works, South st. T N 9819”. Mention of “Ashley works” in the directories for other years show that they were at 57 South Street, Epsom. (They, and the adjacent No 59, were later demolished and their footprint is today filled by “Rutland House”.) While the entry refers to the company as “manufacturers”, it seems clear that the Epsom site was only a distribution depot.

South Street was only a temporary base. The company soon moved into an Art Deco style depot at 168 East Street, just on the Epsom side of the boundary with Ewell. The 1936 Kelly’s directory explicitly refers to this as an “Ice Cream Depot” (while the 1938 edition reverts to “ice cream mfrs”). It is understood that the building was specifically commissioned by Wall’s. In any event, it was newly built: the site is empty on the 1932 Ordnance Survey map.

The following photograph is of the Depot and the large staff at 168 East Street in its very early days – from the flags and bunting, understood to have been taken in connection with the coronation of George V1 in 1937.

The Wall’s ice cream depot at 168 East Street, understood to date from 1937.
Photograph by Harry Parker of 113 East Street, with thanks to Epsom Cycling Club.

Enlarged below is a section on the left of the photograph above showing a two and three wheeled delivery bike. The front of the storage box on each carries the famous slogan “STOP ME / AND / BUY ONE”.

Detail of the previous photograph showing the two and three wheeled delivery bikes.

Earlier in this article, we showed a generic Wall’s price list. We also have the following  example of the card specific to the East Street depot with, on the other side, a list of the wide range of available flavours.

Both sides of the East Street depot’s card.
Images with thanks to the Epsom & Ewell Local History Centre.

Wartime rationing and post-war austerity were no friends to the ice cream business. In due course, it got into full gear again but, with more homes getting refrigerators with freezing compartments and the advent of “Mr Whippy” etc ice cream vans, the business model was changing. While the 1952 Kelly’s directory lists “Walls T. & Sons Ltd. ice cream depot” still at 168 East Street, it closed shortly thereafter.

In 1954, the vacant premises were taken by leather goods manufacturer C T Osborne (Chossy) Ltd, makers of the famous Chossy range of bicycle saddle bags. (Something of that company’s local origins may be read in our article about Charles Victor Osborne and his family who died in April 1941 when their home in Sidcup was bombed. Chossy’s original works in Bermondsey were also bombed out of existence, later in 1941.)

The ‘Chossy’ works at 168 East Street, Epsom in 1992.
Photograph with thanks to “SludgeGulper” © 1992 via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The Chossy business was wound up in the mid-1990s. The site was eventually redeveloped for housing in 2017 – the last substantive (but not the original) occupant being remembered by calling the block of flats on East Street “Chossy House”.

Roger Morgan © 2021