Christine Ellis married into the Ellis family. She talks about the changing market in the later years of Andy Ellis Tailors.
There are still a lot of people that are looking for the type of shop that Ross [Ellis] has, rather than a large department store; that was the kind of feeling. We’d get a variety of people. We had one chap, for example – he’d won quite a lot of money the night before – and he came and he bought shoes and slacks and shirts and he just seemed thrilled that he could get the whole lot in a small space instead of going from floor to floor, sorting through a great pile of stuff. He was delighted, and the service that he got as well. A few young, very young people came in. They’d be looking for suits, etcetera, for formals; probably wasn’t quite what they wanted to, they probably wanted something that they felt was a little more trendy, even though Ross could have made them whatever they wanted; sort of more ready-made; they were after something really fast.
