Coal scuttles, chaff cutters and AGA cookers: Our history, as far as we know it

There's a photograph in our archives of a man with a spectacular moustache, standing proudly on the doorstep of the old Edwards & Godding shop in Newbury Market Square. He wears a three-piece suit with a pocket square and a high starched collar. Beside him, a man in field boots carries a long shovel under one arm and a roll of something heavy duty under the other. Further along, two men – one in a bowler hat, one in a flat cap – negotiate over a hand-powered chaff cutter. The windows and the pavement in front of the shop are peppered with wares: hanging oil lamps, pots and pans, coal scuttles, stoves, a great travelling trunk and something we've recently identified as a hip bath.
 

The photograph is Edwardian, we think – taken sometime between 1900 and 1910 – and I'm sorry to say we don't know who any of the people are. Perhaps the very dignified man in the doorway was a customer. Perhaps he worked there. I often wonder if he was a Mr Edwards, or a Mr Godding. Perhaps the business had been in his family for generations too. I like to think so.

Edwards & Godding was founded as an ironmongers in 1790, so by the time the photograph was taken the company was already well over a hundred years old. That puts our man in the doorway more or less halfway between the business's founding year and today.

He's been on my mind a lot recently, as we launch our new brand identity, which nods back to the company's heritage. I'd love to be able to ask him about the business and about his hopes for the future. I bet he'd never have dreamed that all these years later Edwards & Godding would still be going strong, or that in 2026 we would be sharing that photograph of him, standing proudly in the doorway, in an article on a newfangled thing called the internet.

Now and again somebody gets in touch to say they've come across something with our name on it, which is always a treat. A late nineteenth century village water pump.  A Victorian cooker. A bread knife with an ivory handle. A little porcelain vase. And a lawn roller, just like the one in the photograph, which stood out the front of our Reading showroom for years until it was stolen. (We'd really like it back, if anyone's seen it.)

Some years ago somebody came across an earthenware flask in the foundations of the old Newbury cricket pavilion, with our name stamped into it in a neat circle. Our new brand seal takes its cue from that merchant's mark – you can read about the thinking behind the new design here. 

In 1932 we became one of the five original distributors of AGA cookers in the country. In January of that same year we sold our first AGA cooker to the High Sheriff of Berkshire, Captain Geoffrey Herbert Palmer of Woolhampton Court. The business has had its ups and downs over the years, but we have sold at least one AGA cooker every year since – even through the war years.

My grandparents, Ivor and Pat Fidler, had both grown up in the old railway cottages in Newbury. They were children of railway workers, and they met and married young. My grandad started on the factory floor at Sterling Cables and worked his way up to managing director there over his late teens and twenties. Then they decided they'd rather work for themselves, and purchased Edwards & Godding in the sixties.

They both worked exceptionally hard, and I think about that a great deal. They wanted a different life for themselves and for their family, and they got there through grit and determination. Eventually they handed the business down to my mum, Denise, and my uncle Jonathan, who ran it with my dad, Duncan, for years. Jonathan stepped away in the 2000s, and it was my mum and dad from then on.

My grandmother worked in the business every day. At home, she had a large four-door 30amp AGA in British Racing Green, and cooked with wonderful fresh fruit and veg from her garden, which I loved. I remember cooking with her on that AGA in her kitchen. But Nanny, my great-grandmother, was the real cook. She was always in charge of Christmas Day lunch and any other big celebration, with Mum and I helping. I remember sitting at her big wooden kitchen table podding peas and broad beans, cutting the crosses in the sprouts.

The business was a big part of our childhood, and growing up, my brothers and I were always being roped into something or other. If you were ill and off school you didn't stay at home, you went into the office 'to help with the filing'. Alex and Ben were called on for installations in the summer, when the engineers were on holiday. I helped out at cookery demonstrations in the showrooms and at Newbury Show, and remember washing up for Mary Berry on several occasions, which was quite an honour!

Growing up we always had an AGA at home – a four-door oil AGA in Claret, later converted to 13amp. Mum loved that cooker. She cooked on it every day from scratch, and lived by the motto 'Never knowingly undercatered'. There was always plenty of food – she always had something on hand to stretch a meal to accommodate whichever friend my brothers or I had brought home. She loved baking too and made delicious tray bakes and biscuits too. She worked in the business part time while we were at school, and built the family with great care and attention.

Until the late nineties, the business was based purely on AGA and Rayburn. Then we began to supply other range cookers, refrigeration and kitchen appliances from our two showrooms in Reading and Woodstock. My husband Ed and I both joined the business in 2007. My brother Alex joined as an installation engineer in his early twenties and now oversees our service team. Ed became managing director in about 2017. A couple of years after that we began designing and building beautiful bespoke kitchens.

To this day, we work only with the very best kitchen brands and sell only the appliances we'd choose for our own kitchens. Our ethos has stayed much the same as my grandparents' and my parents' before us: look after people properly. We like to give our customers as much of our time and focus as they need.

That wooden kitchen table, where I sat podding peas for Nanny, is in our kitchen now. It's been the site of three generations of family meals, of Christmas dinners, celebrations, homework sessions and long conversations over endless cups of tea. It's where I work most days, and where I'm sitting writing this today, with the gentle warmth from the AGA behind me. 

I wish I could show the man in the doorway around the business today. Our two showrooms, our brilliant team, the kitchens we've designed and built ourselves. I don't suppose he'd know what to make of an induction hob or a bespoke kitchen, let alone a new brand identity. But I think he'd recognise those cast iron AGA cookers well enough, and perhaps our approach to looking after our customers too.

Our heritage is one of the things we're most proud of. After all this time, it's less about the individual people and more about looking after something, trying to do a little better by our customers with each generation, and protecting it for the next. A true legacy. I like to think our man in the doorway would be very pleased by that.