A. Goldberg & Sons plc

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A. Goldberg & Sons was founded in 1908 by Abraham Goldberg, a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe who had arrived in Glasgow via Dublin where he had married and where his first son was born.[1] After starting a business on the South Side of Glasgow buying bales of cloth and making them up into goods for sale to wholesalers[2] he moved to premises in Candleriggs in the 1920s.[1]


History

The following example of Abraham Goldberg shows how an immigrant’s fate was tied up with that of the city. At the turn of the 20th century Goldberg bought his first bale of cloth in Glasgow. He took it to his room-and-kitchen home in Gorbals’ Main Street and started making it up into piece-goods for sale to wholesalers. This proved to be the start of a multi-million pound business. He established the firm A. Goldberg & Sons plc. and within two generations this firm was one of the largest retailers in Scotland, having been developed into a modern department store. During the early 1920s Goldberg acquired premises in Candleriggs and a little more than a decade later he established a very successful public company. By 1989 the firm owned large stores all over Scotland and several retail chains with an estimated value of £32m. - that is, if an unsuccessful take-over bid by Black Leisure was anything to go by. By that stage there was little about the firm which was specifically Jewish. The disc jockey in the Wrygges shop in Glasgow’s Argyle Street played the same loud pop music which was so much in vogue as elsewhere in the late 1980s. But the firm was also one of the first high street retailers to get into financial difficulties during the recession that hit Britain early in the 1990s and A. Goldberg & Sons disappeared into receivership.

Goldbergs in the 1980s

The 1980s saw many changes in the British retail sector and a significant, if not major, player was the Scottish-based company of Goldberg & Sons (AGS). This case study attempts to draw out the salient factors at work through the late 1970s and 1980s that saw AGS initially succeed, but finally fail. By the mid-1980s AGS was one of only three Scottish-based retailers still quoted on the Stock Exchange. Founded in 1908, it was a quoted company from 1938 and had always had a member of the Goldberg family at its head. The Goldberg story has the hallmark of many fashion companies--founded by a Lithuanian Jew, buying bales of cloth and making it up into piece-goods for sale to wholesalers, through to the creation of a 135-store nationwide fashion business by the mid-1980s.
The founder of the company, Abraham Goldberg, was Chairman from 1908 to 1934 when he handed power to his two sons, Ephraim and Michael. Together they brought the company to the stock market and saw the development of the business from the one department store in Glasgow to the building by in-house contractors, of the Edinburgh department store and the beginnings of a small department store chain in central Scotland. From 1970 to 1974 stores were opened in Falkirk, Ayr, Paisley, Kirkcaldy, Motherwell, Dundee, Kilmarnock, Airdrie, Dunfermline, East Kilbride and Greenock, with an average sales floor space of 7,500 sq. ft. These sold a range of family fashions, household goods and electrical items. They were scaled-down versions of the main Glasgow department store.
From 1974 onwards Mark Goldberg, grandson of Abraham, took the position of Chairman. At that time AGS was the only Scottish public company with a woman director. In the mid-1970s AGS became the first retailer in Europe to introduce a comprehensive electronic point of sale (EPoS) system (an IBM system that was in place until 1987). Until that time all sales transactions were recorded in day-books, an operation which involved having 500 bookkeepers. Not only was the process costly in terms of people employed, it also created large queues in the stores. But the company took its time in choosing its new system.[3]

Involvement in Zionism

A women’s section was formed in 1928.[4] This group, the Glasgow Ladies Zionist Organisation later affiliated to WIZO, was headed by the relatively unknown Mrs. Selma Teitleman. Later she and her husband, a general practitioner, changed the name to Mann. Most committee members were wives of well-known communal leaders. The group had a difficult start at a meeting in Sloan’s Cafe in Buchanan Street because of a “poor attendence”,[5] but quickly got down to work. Some 44 members were enrolled in one month. One of the first activities was the creation of a sewing class on Monday evenings in Mrs. Nettler’s home and the sale of work in Geneen’s Restaurant.[6] They decided during a drawing room meeting at the home of one of the ladies that “no toasts - as suggested by the men - would be necessary,”[7] thus showing a measure of independence and dislike of alcohol.
The ladies’ section further organised social functions, often in the homes of their more affluent members, like a Garden Fete in 1933 in Abraham Goldberg’s residence in Pollokshields which was opened by Abraham Links.[8] Monthly meetings were held for members and money was raised for Zionist causes. During their third year, the ladies collected in total £482 (of which £148 went to the Women’s Zionist Federation and £277 to the JNF). Apart from the income of social functions, the sale of work and occasional donations, 138 women paid an annual subscription of 10s. 6d. None of the subscribers lived in the Gorbals165 which confirms the middle class status of this group.[9]
Sec for example JE 14/1/1938 for a report on the orange groves and citrus essence factory of Abraham Goldberg in Palestine.

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Notes

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 for Glasgow's Jewish community] The Herald
  2. ↑ Records of A Goldberg & Sons Ltd, retailers, Glasgow, Scotland - Archives Hub archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk
  3. ↑ https://www.proquest.com/docview/210967753?sourcetype=Scholarly%20Journals
  4. ↑ 160
  5. ↑ 161
  6. ↑ 162
  7. ↑ 163
  8. ↑ 164
  9. ↑ Ben Braber Integration of Jewish immigrants in Glasgow, 1880-1939, Thesis in Modern History, 1992, Glasgow University
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