High streets and rows of shops can be seen as a mirror of our societies, our behaviour as consumers and those who own the businesses. Recently, the flower shop Elliott Clark in the Inverleith/Goldenacre area of Edinburgh closed its doors after over 40 years of servicing the community; selling flowers to local residents, marking the different seasons of the year, celebrating weddings and binding wreaths for funerals.
Many were sad to see this local ‘institution’ gone and it is a sign of the times where online trade, rising rents, higher import duties and employment costs make local businesses’ survival difficult. As we said our farewells, the departing owner of the flower shop told me how the area has changed over the decades. His mum had bought the shop in the 1980s. At the time there were butcher shops, banks and even a fishmonger present along the row of shops.
One recollection from the departing shop owner which caught my imagination, was his enthusiasm and investigations about a previous shop at his address – the Buttercup Dairy Company. I had never heard of the company, but he showed me some of the stained-glass windows that were at the back of the shop and ornate buttercup wooden carvings above a bevelled full-length mirror. He told me about his research into the once thriving dairy business at the beginning of the twentieth century.
As one shop passed to another owner, this once proprietor took pride in the history of his shop, and it inspired me to do some investigations of my own. It would seem that the founder and owner of ‘the Buttercup’, Andrew Ewing, was the personification of everything that many modern-day entrepreneurs appear to lack. He was compassionate, generous and as a devout Christian, he aimed to die as a “poor man”.
The man and entrepreneur Andrew Ewing
My internet research didn’t produce much information about the company, that once had over 250 shops throughout Scotland and northern England. The most information I found was in a second-hand book I purchased. It was written by Bill Scott in 2011, The Buttercup: The Remarkable Story of Andrew Ewing and the Buttercup Dairy Company.
Bill was born and had grown up on the dairy farm in the 1950s. His mother and grandparents worked on the poultry farm, and he had fond childhood memories of “Hen City” as it was once coined by the local press. He also has clear memories of the elderly figure Mr. Andrew Ewing, who was over 80 when Bill was a child. Ewing was a much liked ‘boss’ with generous habits; giving the children small half a crown when he encountered them on his walks around the farm. The farm was located in Clermiston Mains in Corstorphine, Edinburgh. The area is now the Buttercup Farm Park, a tribute to the once thriving poultry farm that provided much of Scotland with dairy products including eggs, butter, margarine, cooking fat, tea and condensed milk.
Ewing was born as a farmer’s son in 1869 in Stoneykirk, not far from Stranraer, and moved to Dundee after his father’s early death when he was a child. In Dundee he worked as an apprentice in a grocer’s store, and this is where his passion for the grocery business began. At the age of 25 he opened his first shop and 10 years later he was to establish the Buttercup Dairy Company in Kirkaldy. Edinburgh saw the opening of its first shop in 1908 and was to become the base of the business enterprise with the head office opening in 1915 at Easter Road, Leith.
The iconic shop design
Ewing was a marketing visionary and was very insistent on how his shops and his grocery goods were to be presented. All shops had the same green and white décor with the entrances decorated with a mural displaying a girl in a bonnet holding a buttercup under a cow’s head. A full-length mirror near the shop windows reflected and enhanced the groceries on offer and an iconic mosaic doorstep welcomed the customer to the store. Ewing was a stickler for hygiene, and the shops were renowned for their pristine cleanliness. The Buttercup shop employees were exclusively women. They were considered ‘tidier’ and no doubt cheaper to employ than men. The butter was sold in blocks which were ‘patted’ to shape and wrapped in paper with the company’s iconic logo that decorated the shops’ entrances.
Previously most of the eggs that were sold in Scotland were imported from Poland and Denmark. Ewing’s vision was to have home grown eggs that were thus fresher and more appealing to consumers. The eggs were stamped with the company’s name “Buttercup Poultry Farm – New Laid” and there were marketing slogans “Start the day with a Buttercup egg” in the shops. In its heyday the Buttercup Poultry Farm produced over 100,000 eggs a day.
Being a devout Christian and practising member of the Baptist Church, Ewing insisted that all eggs which were laid Sundays should be donated to charity. What a far cry from the entrepreneurial spirit we encounter today where maximum profit is the overbearing doctrine. There are many anecdotes of Mr. Ewing dropping packages to those who were needy or giving his employees on Saturday mornings £1 pound and young apprentices 10 shillings. He was equally generous to his many nieces and nephews, who in some cases, worked in the company or whom he helped with financial support to buy houses or advance their career paths. Ewing married twice but remained childless.
The Buttercup Dairy decline
At the beginning of the 1930s the success of the Buttercup began to wane. Stiff competition from other grocery suppliers who offered a broader range of products had its toll. The ongoing effects of the 1929 Depression also had a negative impact. There were also managerial mistakes. Ewing gave posts to little qualified family members. He also insisted that the poultry farm would also be run exclusively by women who at the time were not as well qualified or experienced as their male counterparts. His generosity also was beginning to adversely impact the company that was ever more in debt. The donation of the ‘Sunday’ eggs meant a loss of £30,000 per year, a considerable amount even in today’s money. Adding to the financial malaise, there was a fire in 1936 that destroyed the hatchery meaning that the livestock of chickens couldn’t renew itself.
By the 1940s, Buttercup shops were being sold off or re-let to generate liquidity. Then with the ongoing war, which meant grocery rationing and restraints on importing products from the Continent, more issues compromised the Buttercup enterprise. After the war, remaining stores were sold and in 1955 only 12 shops remained mostly in Glasgow and Edinburgh. This period saw the selling of land north of the farm for council housing and the Easter Road depot in Leith was also sold.
Andrew Ewing’s legacy
Andrew Ewing died in 1956 aged 87. He left a business that was a shadow of its former success. Yet his memory lived on in those who had known and worked for him. He was fondly remembered for his generosity and modesty. There was no official obituary as he wished to draw no attention to himself. He also fulfilled his goal to die a “poor man”. The last Buttercup shop closed in 1965, and his niece inherited a business that was near insolvency.
Yet, the fondness with which Bill Scott’s book was written and the enthusiasm that the later owner of 14 Montagu Terrace would express for the shop that preceded his by many years strikes a chord. The dedication that Andrew Ewing displayed to his employees, his enterprise and the pioneering spirit that nowadays would be called ‘corporate identity’ paired with his devotion to the ornate design of the Buttercup stores, ensures that this commercial legacy of a modest and generous man lives on.
*For the purpose of this article I have used Bill Scott’s book as the primary source,The Buttercup: The Remarkable Story of Andrew Ewing and the Buttercup Dairy Company (2011 edition). I have not used footnotes as this impedes the style of the article. All given information can be verified in the book.
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