[Bell Historians] Gillett & Bland

[Andrew Wilby]

Company name changes are not instant things as we have seen with the 
recent merger between Eayre and Smith and Taylor's.

Changes can happen at ownership level which take time to be implemented 
in the company name. Then there's the letterhead and stationary issue. 
Do you scrap the old immediately or use your stocks. The same can apply 
to other stores items.
 From the owners point of view what stamp goes on the bell product may 
not be the greatest of their concerns and fresh instructions to the 
molding shop the last of their worries?
Some contracts as we know can take years to deliver so you can have jobs 
contracted under one name and delivered under another etc.

As CJP suggests the actual legal status of the company at any time will 
be found in the Board minute books, if they exist, and the records at 
Company's House.


TESco haven't changes their email addresses or the signage on the 
foundry yet but there's no significance in that!
(as of a few weeks ago anyway!)

Andrew




Chris Pickford wrote:
> The best accounts of G&J are in George Elphick's "Sussex" and Bill 
> Butler's "Musical Handbells", and I generally regard the dates there 
> as being 'best available' for the official changes in company name. At 
> some point, I ought to check company registration and business 
> directory sources for this firm as I now have for a number of others.
>  
> The listing I sent yesterday is based entirely on signatures found in 
> inscriptions - and it shows a problem (i.e. match against official 
> dates) rather than offering a definitive guide. There is, of course, 
> the possibility of innacuracy of recording (people not being quite 
> careful enough in noting whether a bell says G&B or G&B & Co etc) - 
> although I tried not to include bells where details seemed vague or 
> suspect. What made me start down this route of exploration was the 
> fact that clock frames, in particular, are unreliable - as the dates 
> for the occurrence of different company names seem to be even more 
> wild than those found on bells. What I would say here, though, is that 
> there are many examples of bells of this period not in my sample list 
> because the only available information is an attribution to a founder 
> - not the actual inscription (i.e. writers have thought "Gillett = 
> boring = no need to record in full" or have merely taken details from 
> tower notices). Recording full inscriptions really is quite important 
> in establishing dates and names with accuracy.
>  
> 1877 may be a starting date, but I haven't found any proper record 
> (i.e. recording inscriptions) of bells of this year - the first year 
> the firm cast bells themselves.
>  
> Re G&J, John Baldwin has just checked Stockleigh English with John 
> Scott and the two bells there are "signed" by G&J in 1890 - so that 
> takes the occurrence of G&J as a signature back to 1890. As I recall 
> from a trawl of the records, output from the foundry was quite low in 
> the period around 1890 - after an initial explosion of activity in the 
> 1880s - and examples are quite thin on the ground. It would be good to 
> know of more inscriptions from bells of this period in order to 
> pinpoint the change more closely. At the moment, the sample is too 
> small for reliable interpretation
>  
> CP
> 
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