Dunhill: Difference between revisions

For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to ' duty on 1st September, 1918, in the attack on Fregicourt. After encountering considerable opposition, he maneuvered his company skilfully in a flank attack, which,

Alfred Henry Dunhill puts me in mind of a young priest in charge of a temple full of things he treasures, and would like you, also, to enjoy. I know he will forgive me for saying this; for this tall slim man with the bushy nearly-black beard has a sense of quiet humor somewhere behind his wide: apart dark eyes. He could, I think, he grand company, if you got him away from “shop,” not in the way of noisy bonhomie, but in the way of stimulating conversation that would be full of thought. The chairman of Dunhills‘ smiles only occasionally, a wide smile that shows between curling mustache and curling beard - not, often when he is talking of the firm, the family, his father and his grandfather.  

His surroundings are extremely different from theirs. You feel when you go into the large low-ceilinged shop in Duke-street (it has two separate floor-levels, with a step down, being on the slope of that brief but aristocratic West End thoroughfare) that if you were to give five minutes, on the average, to examining, appreciatively, all the articles there are in it, it would take you about a fortnight working eight hours a day. It has hosts of glass cases such as jewellers affect; the walls are all glass-cases; and displayed - say rather, disposed - in the cases, and on them, and all about, are what, tobacconists call fancy goods chosen, evidently, with meticulous care. That is small wonder. For wherever Hitler is now, in Europe, there (and, as the Yankees say, many places else) Mr. Dunhill has been, collecting, choosing, for customer - say, rather, clients - such little possessions as men like to have by them all their lives.

I should call the carpet of the shop, a plain carpet, light bronze. The whole effect of the place is light brown. It has delicately-ornate wood-work. How much plate-glass there is in it altogether I hesitate (in these explosive days) to think. The commissionaire at the Jermyn-street door-way is in a dark reddish-brown uniform, gold braided, with a woven gilt “A.D." on his lapels. No one would dare to just pop into Dunhills’. You are ushered in. Let all be done (the shop seems to say) decorously and in a proper manner: there is no hurry; you have come not to buy so much as to select; and of course you have the money to pay. Whereupon you wish you had - to pay for everything you can see.  

I am therefore glad to introduce a revised edition with new illustrations based mainly on pipes in the Dunhill collection. Apart from minor changes the text is as my father wrote it in 1924.</q> , Alfred H. Dunhill, 1969.</blockquote>  

He retires in 1961 (chairmanship taken over by his sister Mary Dunhill) and dies ten years later.

<blockquote><q>My brother, Alfred Henry, who had become President of the Group on my appointment as chairman, died in 1971. Having worked in the firm for almost sixty years, he had been chairman for thirty-three of them and, in my view, had done more to promote the original business, as Father and Uncle Bertie had known it, than any other man in its history. When he joined the staff at the shop in 1912 the profits were £1000 per annum. By the time of his death they were over £1 million. The fact that they had risen to over £4 million by the time my nephew, Richard, succeeded me as chairman in 1976 is an indication of our growth rate in the early ’seventies, especially in the foreign markets I have mentioned. The business today is not only larger than it was during Alfred Henry’s time; it is differently managed and somewhat different in character. I therefore regard the end of my brother’s career as a kind of watershed which, historically, separates the earlier business from what it has become.</q> Dunhill, Mary. Our Family Business (The Bodley Head - Great Britain, 1979).</blockquote>