Normans Music ......One hundred years of one music shop in Eltham

Outside Normans Music on Well Hall Road

I have fond memories of Normans Music shop on Well Hall Road.*

During the 1960s it was where I went to buy my records, and where I got my copy of Bert Weedon’s Play in a Day guide to learning the guitar.

Sadly I lacked the patience and perhaps the skill and never mastered the instrument, not that it stopped me visiting the shop on a regular basis.

What I didn’t know at the time was that it had already been long established by the time I walked into the shop in 1964.

Today they can look back on a century of serving the community here in Eltham.

Long after the Co-op vacated the High Street and Hinds and Harry Fenton vanished along with lots of smaller shops which were household names, they are still doing the business.

They set up shop on Eltham High Street in 1914 were at 112 in 1916 and moved around the corner on to Well Hall Road in 1923.

Back then they had been owned by Morley’s of Lewisham but when the business moved it changed its name to the Eltham Music House adopting the present name in 1961.

And in that century of trading they pretty much reflect the changes in the music industry.  At the start much of their business would still have been selling sheet music which people bought to play themselves.

And I was reminded of this when I came across a 1907 postcard sent by a young Clara to her friend Miss Carless of Guildford recounting that she had “just bought four new songs this morning, ” which included Oh, Oh Antonio, and In the Twi Twi Twilight and Has anyone seen a German Band?"

A young Clive Biley with Roger and Mick of Lynx4 1964

By the 1950s the shop had moved with the times and was selling radios, televisions, and radiograms along with an ever expanding range of musical instruments.

In 1961 they adopted their present name and attracted a new generation of young people keen to make their own music, including Lynx 4 who came together in the early 60s when two of the group bought their guitars from Normans.

So I am intrigued with what the current owner Francis Eastwood might be planning for the centenary which Francis tells me will “centre on the months of June and July.  

We have a local guitar teacher bringing some of his pupils to play outside the shop on one Saturday, and one of the local school choirs coming on another.  

Inside the shop

On Sunday June 22nd , we have a celebratory concert With Clint's Jazz Band in the Bob Hope Theatre, and we are sponsoring a performance of Elgar's Sea Pictures as part of the Eltham Choral Society concert on July 12th.”

In that 100 years there have only been five owners of the shop.  Francis is the fifth and as a historian I rather like that continuity.

Nor is that quite all, because in the course of doing the research I came across a picture of Lynx4 with  “a young Clive Biley of Normans Music in Well Hall Road Eltham London, SE9.  Roger and Mick bought their guitars here.”

Clive and his father owned the shop in the 1960s and Clive still works there part time.

All of which just goes to show that once you start looking for a story it takes you in all sorts of directions.

Pictures; from the collection of Francis Eastwood and from the web site of Lynx4

Additional material from Francis Eastwood

*Normans Music, http://normansmusic.co.uk/

**Lynx4, http://www.lynx4.com/26180.html

From an original suggestion by Chrissie Rose