Our tale this time takes us to Cheltenham. Or as it was known when I was a wee boy “Chelpenum”. Cheltenham is the second biggest town in Gloucestershire after Gloucester which is the county town. Cheltenham is famed as a spa town and the home of the Cheltenham races. Cheltenham stands on the small River Chelt, which rises nearby at Dowdeswell and runs through the town on its way to the Severn. It was first recorded in 803, as Celtan hom; the meaning has not been resolved with certainty, but latest scholarship concludes that the first element preserves a Celtic noun cilta, ‘steep hill’, here referring to the Cotswold scarp; the second element may mean ‘settlement’ or ‘water-meadow’.
The business of what we do in archives can be thought of as a 2-stage process. The first stage is what we call accessioning, and the second stage is full archival cataloguing. Accessioning involves an initial attempt to gather information about the records while cataloguing means the final stage of hopefully making it easy for the public to gain access to the documents and information that they need.
So, to return to our tale. Every Thursday morning, I carry out accessioning. Last Thursday on starting my work I couldn’t help but notice on the accession register a familiar name or even what could be said to be a famous name! This was The Famous of Cheltenham. I know that I thought, I used to go there. In case you don’t know The Famous is a menswear and boyswear clothes shop that for many years stood on Cheltenham’s High Street. That will be fun to accession I thought and so that is what I was lucky enough to be able to do.
The Famous is something of a Cheltenham landmark. It opened its doors on the present site in 1886, the same year as Coca Cola was launched and both Cheltenham Town and Arsenal football clubs were founded. It closed in 2012 after the recession left the owners unable to renew their lease. It was one of the last shops in the country to operate the once popular Lamson vacuum system, which sent money taken in the shop to a cashier’s office elsewhere in the building. The Cole family rented the property from a private landlord but could not afford to keep it going. Perhaps the best tribute to the shop is that there are probably not many people who went to school in Cheltenham who haven’t worn school uniform from the Famous.
Scrapbook produced to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the store’s opening. It contains some lovely colour photographs of the store’s staff and very informative newspaper cuttings. 
There are a lot of adverts in the collection so it is likely that the store was a regular advertiser in local newspapers. 
Another advert from The Famous, this time showing boys wear. 
What appears to be a Christmas Card sent to The Famous in 1929. The image is of The Promenade in Cheltenham. On the reverse is what appears to be information regarding the Cheltenham & Gloucester Building Society another well known local firm. 
Booklet produced for the 100th anniversary of the opening of the shop in 1986. This item will form an important resource in cataloguing the collection.
The accession consisted of 3 boxes full of what can only be described as treasure. These included amongst other things; photographs, postcards, scrapbooks, ledgers and newspaper adverts. They will form a superb resource for anybody interested in the history of commerce in Cheltenham and of the town in a wider sense. It will be an absolutely fascinating task to catalogue these records and make them available to the wider public. Hopefully, this can be done soon.
You just never know what you are going to find next do you!
Written by Jon Shepherd, Community Cataloguing Archivist
Gloucestershire Archives 