Pryce Pryce-Jones and the Royal Welsh Warehouse

Pryce Pryce-Jones was born on 16 October 1834 in Llanllwchaiarn, the parish immediately across the River Severn from Newtown, in the old county of Montgomeryshire (today part of Powys). Some accounts give his birthplace as Llanidloes, a little further up the Severn; the parish records of Llanllwchaiarn are the more commonly cited source and are followed here.

Newtown lay at the heart of the Welsh flannel and woollen trade, and it was in this trade that the young Pryce-Jones learned his craft. He was apprenticed to a Newtown draper, John Davies, and in 1856 he took over the business — the modest shop from which everything else would grow.

Newtown's position mattered. The town sat on the River Severn and, from the 1860s, on the expanding railway network — and it was the railway, together with the postal service, that would turn a local draper's shop into a business of worldwide reach.

In 1859 Pryce-Jones opened his own drapery on Broad Street in Newtown, and it was from there, on 3 October 1859, that he began sending samples of Welsh flannel to customers by post. Instead of waiting for customers to come to the shop, he brought the shop to them.

Two years later, in 1861, he issued a printed catalogue of his goods. That 1861 catalogue is recognised as the first mail-order catalogue in the world. Customers chose what they wanted, sent their order by post, and received their flannel and other goods by post and rail.

As the business grew, Pryce-Jones needed far larger premises. The great Royal Welsh Warehouse building, beside Newtown's railway station, opened on 3 October 1879 — exactly twenty years after his first flannel samples went out by post.

It is worth keeping the dates apart, because they are often confused: mail order began in 1859, the first catalogue appeared in 1861, and the landmark warehouse building opened in 1879. The building still stands by the railway line, a visible monument to the trade Pryce-Jones created.

The Royal Welsh Warehouse is widely recognised as the first mail-order business in the world. Several conditions came together to make it possible, and Pryce-Jones built his business on all of them at once:

• a reliable postal service that could carry both the order and, for smaller goods, the delivery;
• the railway, which could move larger consignments quickly and cheaply;
• printed catalogues and lists that brought the shop's stock to the customer's own home;
• a single, recognisable product with a wide appeal — Welsh flannel.

At its height the business served, by reckoning of the Dictionary of Welsh Biography, more than 300,000 customers. Among them were Queen Victoria and Florence Nightingale, and orders reached the royal households of Europe. Pryce-Jones showed his goods at international exhibitions in Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Vienna, Melbourne and Philadelphia, carrying the name of Newtown across the world.

Pryce-Jones was an inventor as well as a merchant. In 1876 he patented the Euklisia Rug, a woollen rug fitted with an inflatable pillow and a flap that wrapped around the sleeper — widely described as an early forerunner of the sleeping bag. It was supplied for use in the Franco-Prussian War, and a large order — said to be around 60,000 rugs — was placed by the Russian army.

Pryce-Jones's whole business depended on the post, and he argued publicly for its improvement. In 1882 he put a proposal to the Postmaster General for a Parcel Post — a postal service for parcels, not only letters. The Parcel Post was introduced in Britain the following year, in 1883.

In 1887 Pryce Pryce-Jones was knighted by Queen Victoria for his services to commerce, becoming Sir Pryce Pryce-Jones. It was around this time that the family name took the hyphen it has carried since: before the knighthood the name was generally written Pryce Jones, and afterwards Pryce-Jones.

He was active in public life as well as in trade. He sat as a Conservative Member of Parliament for the Montgomery Boroughs in 1885–1886 and again in 1892, and he served as High Sheriff of Montgomeryshire in 1891.

Sir Pryce Pryce-Jones lived at Dolerw, a house in Newtown, and he died there on 11 January 1920. He had helped to finance the building of All Saints Church in Newtown.

The particular idea at the centre of his business — that a customer could browse, choose and buy from home, and have the goods brought to them — has long outlived him. The Royal Welsh Warehouse stands at the beginning of a commercial story that runs all the way to the mail-order catalogues of the twentieth century and the online shopping of our own day.

Sir Pryce married Eleanor Rowley Morris, and the couple had several children, among them Mary Eleanor, Edward, Elizabeth Anne, William Ernest, Albert Westhead and Katharine Pryce-Jones. They are named here only as the documented historical family of Sir Pryce.