The news that W H Smith plans to sell its 500 or so High St stores sent me down a research rabbit hole.
While in recent times Smith’s has sold a range of left and left-ish publications not so long ago it was known as W H Smug and had a troubled relationship with, for example, Private Eye. William Henry Smith (1825-1901) was the man responsible for Smith’s entering the railway station bookstall business and, a religious dissenter, he was known as ‘Old Morality’.
With the railway boom of the 1840s Smith saw a market for reading newspapers and cheap books (known as Yellowbacks) on trains and the first W H Smith station bookstall opened at Euston on 1st November 1848. Expansion was rapid and by 1860 all major railway lines and stations in England had a Smiths.
Dickens in an 1860 story… makes reference to the less than satisfactory catering arrangements at Rugby station and in passing mentions Smiths, without complaint.
The Great Western and London and North-West railway hiked station kiosk rents in 1905 which led W H Smith to open 150 shops in nearby High Streets. Its their successors which are up for sale. The railway business will remain- they have a captive audience.
It did make me wonder however if the early W H Smith station kiosks sold the Chartist Northern Star which ran until 1852 and was even at that point a well known paper. One issue might be whether readers of the paper were travelling by train at this point. Later working class passengers were much of the railway’s custom but again whether Smiths sold the weekly radical but sensationalist Reynolds’s Newspaper I have yet to discover.
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