Boots Scribbling Diary 1939

Boots Scribbling Diary 1939
Note by Francis Bennion
A tidy advantage of being born, as I was, on 2 January is that throughout life
one’s calendar year runs with that of the nation. The nation’s 1939
corresponded with my own year of being sixteen. An eventful year it was.
On 3 September Neville Chamberlain declared war on Germany, thus
inaugurating World War Two. My own big date was when I left school and
got my first job (as an errand boy with Timothy White’s and Taylors,
pharmacists - or as we would then say - chemists. All this I faithfully
recorded, with much other news less important, in the pages of my Boots
Scribbling Diary 1939, here presented. On the last page there is a useful
summary of the contents.
There is another connection with Boots. It is a family story that my maternal
grandfather the late Laban Robinson was offered a partnership by his
business friend Jesse Boot, the founder of Boots Cash Chemists and later
first Lord Trent. Like another business associate of Jesse, John Harston, to
whom a similar offer was made, Laban turned it down on the ground that the
business was not in his opinion likely to succeed.
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The Flinns, by the way, were my Uncle and Aunt (the only ones I had).