CHAPTEU V 



A GREAT CARUYING FIRM : THE STORY OF 

 PICKFORD AND CO. 



To the incurious public, who are as familiar with 

 the name of " Pickford's " as with that of their 

 favourite morning newspaper, and to whom the 

 siffht of one of Pickford's vans is a mere common- 

 place of daily life, this great carrying firm is just 

 a part of our modern commercial system. To 

 suff£?est to that favourite abstraction— the " average 

 man"^ — so commonly cited, that Pickford's is a 

 firm whose origin is to be traced back two hundred 

 and fifty or three hundred years would be a rash 

 thing. He would tell you that this is a firm of 

 railway carriers, and that, as railways are not yet 

 a hundred years old, Pickford's certainly cannot 

 be two centuries older. 



Thus do later changes overlie and conceal 

 earlier methods of business. 



Our average citizen would be wrong in two 

 things : in his premisses, that the firm is wholly 

 one of railway carriers; and in his conclusions, 

 that it came into existence Avith railways them- 

 selves. The origin of Pickford's is, indeed, lost in 

 the mists that gather round the social and com- 

 mercial life of the early seventeenth century ; for 



