Founded 1900
Nineteen years after it was founded, the London & Lancashire Rubber Company's first official accounts showed nine month's sales totalling £4,570...and 14 shillings.  Although only equivalent to 70p today, that 14 shillings in the first year of peace after the First World War, represented an average man's wage for a day's work.  A year later, London & Lancashire Rubber Company- India Rubber wholesale merchants - was formally registered at Companies House.
    But the history of the newly limited company goes back much further than 1920. London & Lancashire Rubber Company - so called because it was founded in London and many of its products came from Lancashire - could provide evidence of years of successful trading.

   The firm had been founded in the last full year of Queen Victoria's reign - 1900 - by Alfred William Carnol Wheeler.  Alfred, a Justice of the Peace, and his wife Justina (nee Weeks) were named as London & Lancashire Rubber Company Limited's first directors.  But that does not tell the whole story. For 100 years later, at the start of the 21st Century and in a world significantly different from that in which Alfred first dreamed of setting up a successful company, there is still a Wheeler & a Weeks at the helm of London & Lancashire Rubber Co Ltd

They are Alfred's great-grandson Andy Wheeler and Justina's great-nephew Nick Weeks.
   The Joint Managing Directors - inheritors of the proud legacy of Alfred and Justina - see their role as preparing London & Lancs for at least another 100 years of service to DIY and hardware retailers and to the builders and plumbers merchants trades
 

Plungers go on but others go!
A few of the 1,200 plus products in the latest edition of the London & Lancashire Rubber Company's catalogue such as brass hosepipe connectors, sink plugs, toilet pan connectors and sink plungers have changed little since the company launched 100 years ago.  Others such as speaking tubes - pictured above with the company seal and an old catalogue - are sadly no longer stocked

Laurie Wheeler in the rubble of Laystall Street EC1

Bomb Shelter that wasn't - thankfully
London & Lancashire Rubber Company resisted the demands of a local council during the Second World War, possibly resulting in hundreds of lives being saved. For after war was declared in September 1939, the Company was served notice that the basement of its Laystall Street, EC1, premises would be commandeered as a public air raid shelter.  Having a primary school across the road made the warehouse ideal from the council's point of view. But London & Lancs, which had moved to the site only two years previously, needed the basement for stock storage and contested the council's demands. In April 1940, company records show that the council decided to waive its claim.
   Five months later, on September 27, the minutes of a board meeting held at the Two Blue posts pub, WC1, recalled the "destruction of the premises overnight" after a bomb fell through the roof and seven floors of the building and exploded in the basement. Had it been in use as a 'bomb shelter', who knows how many people would have died.

Decimus Park

London & Lancs bought its current modern premises in 2006. The purpose-built warehouse and offices are situated in a prime location, 20 minutes from the M25 giving excellent access to the country's motorway network while remaining convenient for the Capital. From this location, London & Lancs will continue to stock and distribute its wide and varied range of plumbing, building, hardware and ironmongery products to the retail and merchant trades. And as always, the Company will have a view to the future with new and innovative products.