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Edward returning from France on a Channel Ferry |
Moody’s Wines was founded
in 1902 in Birkenhead,
Merseyside England, by Edward Moody, my great grand-father.
Edward had worked as a buyer of fine foods for Salmon and Gluckstein, who were London
based, and later became part of Joe Lyons. He apparently travelled to France
and the Low Countries looking for tasty stuff to be sold by his employers. He left Salmon and Gluckstein
and moved to Liverpool in the early 1890’s, with a young family, and went into partnership to
open “Moody’s Limited” at 63 Great Charlotte Street.
But Edward saw that Birkenhead, across the river Mersey, was growing with its
ship building industry, and moved over there in 1902 to start Moody’s Wines.
The family all moved over, and lived above the shop, a three story terrace building at 76
Argyle Street. His sons Percy and Arthur, were 16 and 15 respectively and they left home very soon
after this, Percy to sail to Canada to seek his fortune in
the timber industry and railroad building, and Arthur, to join the merchant navy as a boy apprentice. Edward developed “Moody’s
Wines” in Birkenhead, and started selling a range of French Spanish and Australian wines, as
well as Whisky, Brandy and Rum.
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Edward died in 1908, and my great
grand-mother had to cable Percy in Canada,
to ask him to return and help her run the shop. This my grand-father did, and apart from a break between 1915 and 1919, when
he served in the artillery, he ran the shop business until he sold it and retired in 1956. Percy was a careful businessman,
and he built up Moody’s Wines to a chain of 16 wine and spirit shops in Birkenhead and the neighbouring
suburbs of Bromborough, Bebington and Rock Ferry.
Percy bought most of the wine
he sold by the barrel, from vineyards in Bordeaux, Burgundy and Jerez, whence it was shipped to Liverpool docks, where he,
and later, my father, would pick up the barrels with the company truck, and bring it back to the Argyle Street shop where
it was bottled in the cellars and labelled as a Moody’s Wine from such and such a vineyard, and distributed around the
shops for retail.
As Percy had become a very good
friend with a French sailor during WW1 he would sometimes travel to France himself, to visit the vineyards and choose the
wine that the shops would sell.
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Arthur bottling wine in the shop's cellar |
My father, Arthur, went to work
with his father Percy on his return from service with the RAF during WW2, and during the post war years the shops’ business
increased and Moody, father and son, gained a good reputation for quality wines in NW England. However, the shops became a
good enough business for them to be attractive to one of the larger local breweries, which, like other brewers in England
at the time, was looking for an opportunity to horizontally integrate the business of selling beer, with selling other drinks.
When Bent’s Brewery bought Moody’s in 1956, Arthur went to work for Feurheerd Wearne, importers of good
French wines and Madeira,
and many good wines passed through our household after tastings, when we could enjoy the left-overs!
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So, Moody’s Wines went
into hibernation for 44 years, until I arrived in Orange and planted the Fontenay vineyard with Shiraz,
after 30 years working in Africa and other places, with all sorts of crops other than vines, and could
delight in reviving the family company, this time as a producer.
Edward, Percy and Arthur would
all be smiling but Percy in particular would be most intrigued. Whilst he would offer other wines to visitors at his home,
there was always a constant large bottle of Australian wine that he kept for himself, that was never sold in the shop, and
of which we never discovered the provenance. But he reckoned it was the best!
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