On your right is number six Turl Street, where Edward Ducker founded this shoemaking business in eighteen ninety-eight. From this small frontage, he shod generations of Oxford undergraduates in handmade bespoke shoes and boots - bespoke simply means custom-made for one person, one pair of feet, no cheating with standard sizes. By two thousand and sixteen, Duckers had outlasted every rival in the city. It was one of the very few traditional hand-sewn shoemakers outside London’s West End... and people called it the home of the Oxford brogue.
But the sharpest story here is almost invisible. The Bodleian catalogue states, with remarkable coldness, that on Ducker’s death in nineteen forty-seven, his wife took over the business, but died two weeks later. She is not even named there. She ran an Oxford firm for a fortnight, and history practically shrugged.
The last chapter has the same pattern. Bob Avery and his wife Isobel made the shoes and ran the shop together from two thousand and six. When Duckers closed at the end of November two thousand and sixteen, Bob, aged seventy-one, said, “The skills for making these shoes just don’t seem to be there any more.” Isobel, like Mrs Ducker before her, appears only in passing.
The Bodleian bought eleven leather-bound ledgers in February two thousand and seventeen, covering nineteen ten to nineteen fifty-eight. They record J-R-R Tolkien buying black rugby boots for fourteen shillings and sixpence - about fifty pounds today - Evelyn Waugh ordering around twenty pairs, H-H Asquith choosing lambswool slippers, and Lady Ottoline Morrell sending in boot repairs. The ledgers remember the gentlemen’s feet; Mrs Ducker and Isobel Avery survive as footnotes in their own shop.
When you’re ready, the Covered Market is about two minutes away.
