 The Turnham Green workshop seems to have been retained well into the nineteenth century, for the inscription on a bat in the pavilion of Southgate Cricket Club, a gift to mark the centenary 1855-1955 reads “This bat was made in 1854 by the firm of Aguila Clapshaw and Son, then of Turnham Green and since 1890 of Southgate. Presented by Bernard I Taylor”.
Aguila III was joined by his younger brother Charles who was born in Farnham in 1813. The two of them moved their London Office in 1840 to New Street, City Road, and five years later to 2 Nelson Place, City Road, but this time without Charles who set up on his own at 3 West Place, Islington Green (note the proximity to addresses for William Salmon, Priscilla Clapshaw and Edward Louis Salmon). The year 1850 found Aguila Clapshaw at 3 Upper Fountain Place, City Road, and Charles Clapshaw at 26 Queen's Row, Pentonville Road. Aquila’s son, Samuel Clapshaw was born in Peerless Row in 1837 (Queen Victoria’s accession). Sam finished his apprenticeship as a cricket bat maker in 1856, and after four years as a journeyman took over the business as a master cricket bat maker on the death of his Father in 1860. His brother-in-law, William Salmon, who had married Priscilla, his Sister, had joined Aquila in the firm, when he had moved from Frindsbury and Strood in Kent to London at about the same time. His uncle, Charles, was still in competition. An Aquila Clapshaw bat dated 1860 is in the Lord’s Museum, and it may be one of the bats that Prince Albert played with at the St John’s Wood ground. The Prince Consort not only bought his bats from Clapshaws, but gave the firm the Royal Warrant.
A third member of the family set up in London in 1856 - Mark Clapshaw, who lived at 14 Lower Kennington Green. Sam was joined by his brother Albert (that is Albert Alfred Clapshaw born 1842, who went on to break away and make bats in Horbury, Yorkshire) and in the 1860s and 1870s some dozen craftsmen were employed in the City Road workshops - each turning out ten to twelve bats a day, some 25 going through the shop at any time. Around 1870 Sam moved the business from City Road to Palace Road, New Southgate and took into partnership, Albert Henry Salmon, and, when Sam died in 1876, it was under the latter’s aegis that Aquila Clapshaw & Salmon continued to trade for another hundred years, with Gold Medals at the Melbourne Exhibitions of 1888 and 1889, and the Jamaica Exhibition of 1891.
In February 1900 the company registered a trade mark featuring a figure of W.G.Grace. Three sons of Edward Louis Salmon, the elder brother of Albert Henry Salmon and himself a son of William Salmon, continued in the firm up to the 1940s.
In 1910, the Firm was taken over by Bernard Taylor’s Father, whose wife was a Clapshaw (it is difficult to find out which Clapshaw daughter married into the Taylors, as they are now dead, and Taylor is a very common name when searching blind - a job yet to be done) Output was some 40,000 bats a year, as well as other wood products, such as stumps, hockey sticks, tennis, squash and badminton racquets. The site was a 5 acre plot. Bernard Taylor joined the Firm in 1930.
In 1951 the Firm is noted as Aquila Clapshaw and Salmon Ltd., and continues to be so in 1955, 1958, 1966 (260 Chase Road, Southgate N14 - Palmers Green 0393) and 1969.
A
search at Companies House revealed that Aquila Clapshaw and Salmon, Ltd, Company Registered Number 489802, was dissolved on December 31, 1976, and all papers have been disposed of. That then is the end of a family firm that in its prime was very successful, and of some historical importance in the annals of cricketing history.
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