Grasse and the London connection

For much of the nineteenth century, London was the largest city in the world: it probably overtook Beijing in the 1820s and was itself only overtaken by New York after the Great War. It was by far the world’s largest trading centre for commodities of all kinds.

A presence or representation of some kind in London would have been essential for Grasse’s major perfume companies, all of whom produced essential oils and other high value ingredients and components as well as finished perfumes.

Antoine Chiris label from 1930

Some of them, like Antoine Chiris, displayed their London connections in their labeling and promotional material.

It’s possible still to track where many Grasse companies' London agents, offices and warehouses were at the turn of the nineteenth century, using directories produced by Kelly’s, a publishing company which worked with the Royal Mail. Plotting their addresses on to today's street map shows seven of them clustered around Fenchurch Street, in the south east of the City. They are within a few hundred yards of each other, rather as they were in Grasse itself at the time.

Grasse perfumers' locations around Fenchurch Street (Google MyMaps)

Others, like Bruno Court, Cavallier and Lautier, were on the fringes of the City more to the west.

The City and its fringes. showing the perfumers further west (Google MyMaps)

Even those further away probably had specific reasons. London was Warrick Freres' head office and perhaps Honoré Payan wished to be nearer the West End because more of its business was in consumer perfumes.

Today, the City is all modern offices and gleaming skyscrapers for the financial sector, but in 1900 it was a hive of smaller buildings and companies, crammed into the medieval pattern of streets, alleys, passages and corridors and buying and selling all manner of goods.

The City, from a postcard sent by a visiting French tourist to Nevers in central France in 1904. The skyline was dominated by St Pauls (unlike today!) and the warren of streets is clear to see. Fenchurch Street is a little to the right.

Even when I worked there, in the early seventies, our porters reckoned that they could get anywhere in the City during the rain without getting wet! Kelly's lists 1,500 different merchants in the City in 1900 (and nearly 350 stockbrokers). The perfume companies’ small offices and agencies would have fitted in easily: they were very close to other similar companies, all busily trading the kind of high value products which typically Grasse produced.

The entries in Kelly’s for Grasse companies show that that most were represented by agents.

Entries in Kelly's Directory 1905 for Grasse companies

Some (Tombarel in the Kelly's entry in the illustration and Roure Bertrand in their advertising) say that they hold stock in London. Agents sold a range of products and represented other manufacturers as well as their principals in Grasse. Kelly's shows one, Domeier & Co, as representing Bertrand Freres from 1884 to 1905 and then Méro & Boyveau in 1910-1920, so they weren’t always loyal.

It is somewhat surprising that there is little information in Kelly’s about Antoine Chiris in 1905, since it was then Grasse’s largest company. According to Chiris’ own documents, their location in London was a subsidiary rather than just a branch or agency, but the only year in which Kelly’s identifies an office there is in 1910 in Great Tower Street. In 1930 they were in a prestigious site in Drapers Gardens, close to the Bank of England. It would be good to know more about their history in London.

Two other Grasse companies had particularly close links to London.

Warrick Brothers

Warrick Brothers is the only case which I can find where a company from London started a factory in Grasse. Its London location, which was also its head office, was in Nile Street, little more than an alley on the northern fringe of the City.

Warrick Brothers' site at 6 Nile Street today. Other than the building today probably being much cleaner, it's unlikely to have changed much since 1904.

Warrick Brothers appear in Kelly’s Directory in London as early as 1850, well before establishing their business in Grasse in 1883. Their factory was in rue Tracastel in what was originally a seminary.

Warrick Freres' factory drawn for a label, likely around 1900. It shows the address in London at 6 Nile Street.

The building still exists in the form of some quite attractive-looking apartments (see my blog on rue Tracastel here), contrasting with a distinctly utilitarian town depot remaining from the bottom floor below.

One of the Warrick family, Arthur, clearly moved to Grasse, since he is recorded as living here in the 1890s and 1900s, and one assumes he ran the factory.

Iron Jelloids tin, produced by Warrick Brothers

It seems that the Warricks closed their Grasse business in around 1910, but in England, the company thrived as a maker of medicinal pastilles. One of their products, known as Iron Jelloids, was later bought by the Beecham’s Pills company (today part of the giant pharmaceutical corporation GSK). They were still being sold as a 'tonic' as late as 1980.

Bruno Court

Bruno Court, whose factory was the old Cordeliers convent on the site which is now Monoprix, was closely associated with a major London perfume company named J. Grossmith & Son.

Bruno Court perfume label

Bruno Court’s Kelly’s entry cites Grossmith as their agents in London, but their links were much closer: in fact when Grossmiths refer, as they do in their literature, to ‘their factory in Grasse’, they mean Bruno Court.

Cold enfleurage at Bruno Court. Obviously regarded as work for women - one hopes Mr Grossmith Junior was taught about it!

Members of Grossmith’s staff, even including the son of the founder, John Lipscomb Grossmith, who subsequently became the company’s driving force, were sent to Grasse for training in the business.

Under John Lipscomb, the company became one of the largest in the UK, ranked alongside Yardley, Pears, Rimmel and Penhaligon. They had depots right across what is now the Commonwealth. They were the only British perfume company to win a gold medal at the Great Exhibition in 1851, and their perfumes included some very popular products, usually under eastern-sounding names such as ‘Phul-Nana’, ‘Hasu-no-Hana’ and ‘Shem-el-Nessin’.

Bruno Court was their principal supplier of raw materials, providing all kinds of essential oils and botanical extracts. The relationship continued for many years, only terminating, for some reason, in 1923.

Grossmith’s head office in Newgate Street was demolished by Second War bombing, and not a trace remains, but the company itself was revived by a descendant of the founder in 2007.

Phul-Nana by J Grossmith

Simon Brooke discovered and re-used the original company’s surviving formula books, and you can find Grossmith London's website here. Formulating and reviving these perfumes isn't as easy as it sounds, because some historic ingredients can no longer be found or are even illegal (civet for example). Mr Brooke and the 'new' JL Grossmith were helped to overcome such problems by Grasse’s Robertet – ironically, once a direct rival of Bruno Court.