Barry is the third generation of a family business of picture framing and art restoration. The business was started by his grandfather as a picture framing shop in Norwich. In 1998 Barry closed the shop and made the business a studio focused on conservation, restoration and conservation framing. Barry has also made many contributions to how conservation work is done with the Fine Art Trade Guild.
Beginning of the business
My grandfather was apprenticed in Lithuania as a picture framer. After finishing his apprenticeship at the age of 19, he received papers from Russian administrators proposing enrolling him into the Russian army for 20 years. He didn’t want to do that, so he left Lithuania. We’re not sure why he chose England, perhaps there were friends of the family there, but he ended up in Norwich in 1887.
The Timberhill shop – painted 1983
Beginning of the business
He set up a shop below the pub on the corner of St Andrews Plain, opposite St Andrews Hall. The pub used to be The Festival House. The shop was a picture framing shop, with picture frames made while you wait. This was quite modern and a bit ambitious but let’s hope he managed to make some money out of it. He had living accommodation above.
Running pattern frame maker
In those days there were two types of frame makers. One was ornate frame makers who put mouldings on top of the frames. My grandfather was a running pattern frame maker. Running patterns are mouldings made in 3m lengths which are then mitred and joined to make a rectangular picture frame. The moulding would be bought from Italy, Germany, Holland or Great Britain. The framer would mitre and join them. It was a very skilled operation and it continued like that up until the 1980s, when the assembly of picture frames changed considerably.
He wasn’t involved in carving or anything of that nature. A carver would work for a picture framer and the picture framer would still make the frame. They’re two different skills.
Family life
My grandfather joined the Jewish community in Norwich and had a fairly generous nature. We don’t know how he met my grandmother, but she was a Jewish lady from Birmingham called Fannie. They married around 1894 or 1895 and had four sons. Sidney was the eldest, then my father was born in 1898, then there was Bertie in 1904 or 1905. Eric came along as a surprise many years later.
New premises for the business
My grandmother helped my grandfather with the business. At some point my grandfather left the St Andrews Plain shop and had a shop on St Benedicts Street for a time. They took up a lease on 11 Orford Hill in 1905 and closed the St Benedict’s shop. The Orford Hill shop ended up being in the business for 60 years.
Around 1910 or 1914 they also rented a shop in Magdalen Street. The shop in Magdalen Street was run by my grandmother and my grandfather ran the shop in Orford Hill. No 11 Orford Hill had the workshops in the basement and on the top floor. The shop area was on the ground floor and first floor. It was really a gallery, but we called it the shop area. In 1905, Orford Hill was made the new tram centre, so it was an ideal place to run a business where everybody got on and off trams.
Father’s life before inheriting the business
My father was the brightest of the four boys. He was interested in science and was quite a capable person. He went to City of Norwich School (CNS) in Eaton Road. At the age of 18 or thereabouts he volunteered for the First World War. He joined the Royal Engineers and was an electrician dealing with the telephone lines as a linesman as far as we can work out. He was also behind the lines in Palestine, not fighting but working with supplies, and he was in Egypt at some point. We’ve got some letters he wrote back to my grandmother. My grandfather didn’t read or write English, only Yiddish.
Sidney worked with my grandfather in the business. Bertie also joined it at some point.
Inheriting the business
My grandfather died in 1920 from a heart attack at the age of 54. He left the business to my grandmother who had no skills to run a workshop. My father took over running the business with whatever staff there was. I think like most kids with a family business, my father was in and out of the workshop as a kid. He probably earnt pocket money as a teenager helping out, like many of us do. Therefore, it wasn’t alien to him the way the workshop went, and he had the skills for it. We’re not sure what his life plans were, but it wasn’t to go into the family business. He never went and did anything else though.
My father ran the business with my grandmother until 1926, when she died also at the age of 54. We think it was from the flu, though that’s not certain. A notice for her death was in the Fine Art Trade Guild magazine, though it went by a different name then.
Father closed the Magdalen Street shop, so he only had 11 Orford Hill.
Early family life
My mother was a highly qualified personal secretary, and she was the personal assistant to Lord Melchett until he died in 1930. He was the chairman of the Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI). She was quite an advanced woman because in 1930 she had her own car.
My parents married in 1932. Mother was 32 or 33 and father was 34, so they were mature people and late marriers. My sister was born in 1933. I was born in 1935. We lived on Grove Avenue and went to Notre Dame school. I went to the kindergarten, and my sister went to the main junior school there in Surrey Street. It was just under half a mile from our house so we’d walk.
The core business of picture framing
The business was a core business of being picture framers. There was also some restoration and a certain amount of renovation. There were a lot of family photographs that wanted to be framed. It was nothing like today, where you can go into nearly any supermarket or superstore and find lots of ready-made frames. Some framing shops had ready-made frames in standard photographic sizes, but they weren’t common. So, if you wanted a picture framed, you went to a framing shop.
Photographers had links to framers. Sometimes we had contracts with photographers to frame their pictures, so we’d serve their customers indirectly.
Norwich was a market city, and back then there was a major cattle market. When I was a child, after the war, Saturday trade was very big because all the farming community would come in to buy and sell cattle on the market place. And then, just after 4pm the auctions would be finished and the farmers would have a pocket full of money. They were very generous about what they spent, particularly at Christmas time.
Competitors
I can only remember the businesses after the war. But other than us, there was Hallam’s Art Gallery in the Royal Arcade which had a small amount of framing business subcontracted out. There was Butchers on Magdalen Street who had a framing shop and they did the framing for Hallam’s Art Gallery. Those two were old established businesses that had been going for many years. There was a shop called Suttons in Magdalen Street as well. Jarrolds did some framing, but Butchers was their trade framer.
We were the biggest. A small shop, but we’d get 30 or 40 jobs per week most weeks. I’d say a third of them were easy jobs, like ready-made sizes for photo frames and things like that. We didn’t go into trade framing to any great extent because we were more upmarket in terms of skill and quality.
Second World War and after
When war broke out in 1939, I was four and my sister was five going on six. My father was too old for the army so he was enlisted on war work in the Royal Observer Corps full time. This involved tracking aeroplanes and the centre for it was in Lime Tree Road, so it was only around a quarter of a mile from our house. He’d cycle there.
My mother then employed a housekeeper for us all and went to run the business. We only had the Orford Hill shop then so she’d run it during the daytime. She’d open it at 9am and be there until 5pm. During the war to run a business that had to buy materials, you had to have a license. We were licensed by the government to run a picture framing shop in the city centre. I think Butchers was the other picture framer to have a license.
Father was on shift work. When he wasn’t on shift. he’d come down to the workshop and do the framing. One of his employees, Walter Blackburn, was also older than conscript age, so he was also put on war work with the police. He was on shift work too and had his own keys, so he’d come in during his free time. Father and Walter did the framing intermittently between them during the week.
The business always seemed to be busy. There was some amount of pride in memorabilia I suppose, photographs of sons who are in the forces. There was a semi-luxury and semi-necessity in the framing. We had country customers and the farming fraternity were very generous. When they came to collect their pictures, they’d bring us extra eggs or a chicken or a rabbit or something like that. It seemed like a genteel business as a child, with nice customers.
In 1940 automatic telephones came into our home. I can remember at the age of four and a half being able to dial my father at work for the first time and talk to him on the telephone. And I can remember using it to dial the shop.
The business developed into a certain amount of giftware and greetings cards. During the war, the Christmas card business was very big. I calculated the other week that in a season in 1946 or thereabouts, just after the war, we sold 40,000 Christmas cards. Which is a fair few, to say the least.
School, college and the Civil Service apprenticeship exam
My father developed tuberculosis (TB) in 1941 and was unwell. This meant there was a lot of pressure on mother, so in 1942 we children were sent to boarding school. We went to a co-educational preparatory boarding school called Sutherland House School that no longer exists. My sister and I were term boarders. My sister left in 1945 to go to Norwich High School. I stayed there until 1946.
I got a common entrance to Norwich School and an 11+ to CNS. My parents decided I should go to Norwich School. I did my O Levels there. I had an eye problem that hadn’t been diagnosed properly, so I had unstable vision and struggled with English and languages. I failed English at O Level, but I got 5 O Levels in science, maths and geography. I decided Norwich School couldn’t cope with my requirements so I went to Norwich City College to redo English and to study physics and maths.
In 1939 the steelwork to build the premises for City College on Ipswich Road had gone up, but the war stopped construction. In 1948 they started on the site again. They’d built the south wing of the building and also many of the low buildings for craft workshops. The wing at the far end away from the city had been built. The library hadn’t been built and the wing towards the city was also in construction.
I did my science, physics and maths at the Ipswich Road premises. I had to do French and English at the premises on Duke Street. A bicycle was very useful, as I’d have half a day at one and half a day at the other.
My ambition had been to go and study physics at university, but I failed French and English a second time. I’d passed O Level maths and O Level additional maths and O Level physics, I was perfectly capable of doing university in a science capacity, but without a modern language and English there was no way I could get in. This meant I had to reconsider my plans.
I applied for a Civil Service apprenticeship with Her Majesty’s Government and took the national exam. Of the 370 people who took the same paper as me, I was 70th in the rating. I was offered an apprenticeship in Royal Ordnance, which was manufacturing armaments. That didn’t appeal to me, I would have liked to have got into something like atomic energy but it wasn’t available. I had to stop and rethink what to do.
Frost & Reed
In the end I said to my parents that if I joined the family business, I wasn’t going to join it as the boy, I was going to make a proper career out of it. We came up with the idea that I would be apprenticed to the business, but I’d spend a year away in someone else’s studio. We got an agreement with a firm called Frost & Reed. They had a Bond Street Gallery for international art dealers and sold pictures in America. They also had a branch framing and restoration studio in St Georges, Bristol, and a gallery in Clare Street, Bristol.
I went to Bristol at the age of 17 as an apprentice. I had £5 wages, father gave me £5 allowance so I could live in digs, I had a bicycle and a post office savings book. That’s how I lived. None of this lovely support you get if you go to university nowadays, I was on my own. It was a tough year but I enjoyed it.
I learnt there to use machinery for making picture frame mouldings. I learnt to make a picture frame – glass and mount cutting. I learnt all the intricacies of lining mounts. I also spent some time making ornate frames. As apprentices, we were often called in to help with restoration when many hands were required on a large canvas. So I got a very good taste of all the aspects of picture framing whilst there.
Munnings
While in Bristol, I met Sir Alfred Munnings the artist. He’d painted a horse racing picture for a trainer in Newmarket and the trainer had failed to pay for the painting. Munnings was pushing the trainer with some legal requirements to pay his bill. Frost & Reed knew about this as a company and they thought they could sell this painting quite nicely in America, so they did a deal with the trainer. They paid him over the odds for his picture so he could pay Munnings. The picture came to our studio, we framed it and it was sold in America at a profit.
This was fine as far as Frost & Reed were concerned. Munnings found out the painting had been sold for more money, so he came down to the studio to talk to the directors of Frost & Reed, wanting a share of the profit. As an apprentice, I found him a grumpy man. He wasn’t very friendly.
National Service and joining the family business
Then at age 18 I went to do my National Service.
When I came out of the army at age 20+ and joined the business, I was grown up and no longer the boy. I worked as sort of the middle man who was a junior manager, working in the workshop, the gallery, selling as well. I worked all round the business. After three or four years I was taking quite reasonable responsibility. After six years, I was in charge of running the workshops in the studio.
Maureen and our children
After I came out of the army and began work in the family business, I wanted some sort of Jewish social life. It was quiet in Norwich as it was a small community. I was fortunate to have a friend who went to university in London. His name was Michael and he was studying economics. I would go down at the weekends to join him in student activities and gain all sorts of experience.
At one point I went on holiday with Michael and two of his friends. After that holiday one of those friends invited me to join them for a charity supper dance in November 1956. I went up to London for it and there was a crowd of us at the table. Among the crowd was Maureen who was there with her school friend. It was a fine evening spent as a group but no information was exchanged and there was no discussion about seeing anyone again.
Six months later I was up to see Michael again and I was on Harrow-on-the-Hill station waiting for a train. The train pulls up and Maureen walks out of the carriage I was waiting to go on. We greeted each other as we felt we knew each other and chatted. I got a telephone number and Maureen got on the next train. I had missed the train I wanted but never mind. I phoned about three or four weeks later and invited her out when I was next in London. And the rest is history. We’ve been married 64 years this year. We married in London at the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in Wembley.
Maureen was four years younger than me, so when we started going out she was doing her A Levels. She then went on to do a post A Level advanced secretarial course. She became a legal secretary and worked as a personal secretary to a legal firm in London, Gordon Dadds. When she came to Norwich after we got married, she worked as a solicitor’s secretary for a firm until we had a family.
She never took an active part in the family business. She was very adamant that there were three Levetons running it, my mother, father and myself, and that she was not going to be party to it. She does type my letters now for me but that’s all.
Maureen and I had two children. Neither of them wanted to get involved in the business. They looked at dad and he never said he earned a fortune so they decided to go their own way. I think they have to do what’s right for them. I would have welcomed my son Jeffrey into the business if he’d wanted to, and he would’ve made a success out of it and taken it in a different way than I did no doubt. Instead, he studied engineering and got involved with computers and then systems computing. Now he has a reasonably well-paid job looking after Tesco’s future in computing. Coral has a career in education and nursing.
Timberhill and the normal workday
In 1959 we built a large studio on Timberhill and we transferred all of our workshop there. I was responsible for running the studio workshops. Father did the restoration and I looked after the framing production and managed that side of the business. By that time, my parents were in their fifties and they were a bit more laid back. They didn’t turn up to the business until about 9.30am or 10am most days. I used to open up the business and get its morning started.
The workshop started at 8.30am and finished at 5.30pm. The gallery opened at 9am and finished at 5.30pm, but cashing up and security had to be dealt with so I never used to leave until 6pm. This meant my normal workday was get there about 8.45am, get the gallery opened, then close it down at 5.15pm, start cashing up and closing down, leave at 6pm. My half day was Thursday, work would finish at 1pm and I’d take the afternoon off. That was sort of the regular work pattern.
Taking over Hallam’s
Hallam’s Art Gallery was one of our major competitors. It was run by Miss Hallam who never married. She suffered from cataract, so her vision deteriorated. By 1958 the business was running down and looking very tired. My father and I thought it would be an opportunity to take over the business. As a brash young man in my early 20s, I decided to approach Miss Hallam. I made an appointment to see her, thinking of buying the business from her and giving her money towards her retirement. She took umbrage and verbally threw me out.
We saw the business deteriorate further over the next six months. We employed an agent who we instructed to go to Miss Hallam anonymously and offer to buy her business. She accepted the principle of being bought out, and then we identified to her who we were and what we wanted to do. What we suggested was to run Hallam’s as an independent business from Levetons under a separate brand for at least 15 years from when we purchased it. She was very happy with this.
We took over her business in 1959, just after finishing building the Timberhill workshop. So my next project was to reinvigorate Hallam’s whilst running the workshop. Hallam’s had a temporary wall in between it and the shop next door. We took over the shop next door, opened up that wall, and enlarged the shop by 50 percent. We put in a toilet and a storeroom and turned it into an art gift shop for tourists. We set about being innovative in what giftware we introduced, and introduced lots of giftware to Norwich before other stores got the same idea.
Levetons on Orford Hill had a very large trade in giftware. We had what we called the big window and we kept that full of press metal brassware, which was very fashionable at the time. On the other side, in the window opposite the Bell Hotel, we had pottery. Our biggest sale of pottery was the Beswick animals, and we had the largest Beswick account in eastern England. In the 1970s Beswick was bought out by Royal Doulton and that was a disaster.
In Hallam’s we made a different flavour of art pottery and giftware to Levetons. We had table mats and holiday souvenirs, Norwich memorabilia and trinkets with Norwich shields on them.
Chinese paper lanterns
One of the strangest items we introduced was Chinese paper lanterns. They’re paper over wire folded concertina flat and you open it out and you’ve got a paper lantern. We were going to the annual gift fair in February to do our planning for three days of the seasons trade, and we found these lanterns. We thought they were rather fun so we bought a small amount in what we call trialling. They came in at Easter time and did very well so we put a stock in for the summer season. They did very well then too, so in July I decided I could do a Christmas order for them.
I did a deal with the company that I’d take my stock in early and pay for it on 31st December. Ordering early for Christmas period meant that the stock would be available and it would’ve been shipped. You get an advantage of getting the stock you want, and the importer has the advantage that they get to clear their decks.
I must have gone mad because the carton arrived full of Chinese lanterns and it was about the size of a dining room table. Tucked inside was the invoice for £500. That amounts to thousands of pounds in today’s money. These lanterns were selling for three and six and four shillings, which is around 15-20p in today’s money. I didn’t know what to do, so I felt very embarrassed. I tucked the invoice away in what we call the January file without saying too much. I put a gantry up over all the windows in the Arcade and at the end of the shop and hung dozens of lanterns with prices on. I put some bulbs and electric lighting into them, so they were a very bright display. November came along, we hadn’t started the Christmas trade yet, and I’d sold out. So I went to my father cap in hand and said ‘Can I have permission to spend some more money.’ What was a bad thing turned out to be a good thing.
I ordered more. I wouldn’t have got a full selection then, but I did get more.
Taking over the business
In 1972 my father was seriously ill and couldn’t cope with the responsibility of running the business. However, he was very reluctant to resign. My mother and I had to persuade him to stand down and pass the work to me so he could carry on without the responsibility. He did concede eventually, and my mother and I ran the business. Father carried on working part-time until his early 80s. Mother carried on until she was about 81. They both retired, and then they died in their early 90s.
When I took over the business I had around 25 staff, with two galleries and a workshop. Not all of these staff were full time. We trained up our own shop assistants, who tended to be female. The workshop staff tended to be male, but we did have one part time lady working in the workshop with us. She was very good.
I had two full time apprentices. The first that trained with me we were thinking of making day manager because Walter was getting past being able to run the workshop. Roy had other ideas. He got on one of those sponsor schemes and emigrated to Australia to set up his own business there. Another apprentice also left us in the end, so it ended up that I managed the workshop without another senior manager.
Appreciators of art, but not art dealers
We sold a small amount of original art, but our main business was in reproductions, prints and that sort of thing. This had gone right the way back to the 1920s, when we joined the Fine Art Trade Guild, though it was called something else then. We’ve been members for coming up to a hundred years.
Our appreciation of art comes from the restoration side, not on dealing. Art dealership requires a lot of gambling and risk taking and that wasn’t in our nature. My father and I were more cautious people and we didn’t want to buy or sell in that way. We had a good core business with framing, restoration, and selling art and craft products.
Levetons had a very strong picture framing trade and through that brand we took on contracts like conservation work for the Norwich Castle Museum. In the late 1960s and early 1970s we were mounting watercolours and drawings at conservation level for them. We glazed the whole Castle Museum collection then too. We also glazed all the pictures in St Andrews and Blackfriars Hall. The money ran out for conservation work around 1995, but until then we had very good contracts. Our records show that we conservation mounted over 2,600 watercolours and drawings at the Castle Museum and did probably around 400 glazed paintings. I also had a contract to glaze the Gainsboroughs and Constables at the museum in Ipswich.
I developed my conservation skills via research and development as conservation became the new approach to restoration. When we ran into trouble with the Norwich Castle Museum over quality, we were able to talk to a British Museum department on the development side of conservation. We developed our information through that. From there I worked in the industry for conservation.
In 1973 we set our own standards for conservation materials for mounting watercolours and drawings. In 1976 we were able to buy materials imported from America that gave us the quality we wanted, and from there we worked at Castle Museum to those standards.
Conservation standards
I was invited to join the Fine Art Trade Guild National Council and I developed with them a framing committee. In 1988 with the Institute of Paper Conservation we set up the first national standards on materials for mounting watercolours and drawings. This was followed in 1998 by the international symposium for mount board standards, which was gently approved and came into operation by 2005. In 2002 I was invited to develop the standards for tapes and adhesives for conservation framing and that became a consulted document in 2009. In 2018 it became a national standard. So I’ve done an awful lot towards conservation.
Move from front line retail to home studio
The recession hit in 1976. We closed Hallam’s Art Gallery because we couldn’t make it seem financially viable. We amalgamated the business and expanded the shop on Orford Hill to be three floors of trading. The difficulty of trading on three floors was that you had to have a minimum of four staff at any one time in order to cope.
In 1979 I made the decision that we’d close the Orford Hill shop. On 31 Timberhill we had the workshop studio and we let out the shop in front of it. We rebuilt that front shop into a gallery and put a small gallery on the first floor. We moved everything up to Timberhill so we could run one building rather than two. A minimum of six staff was needed.
This worked well for about three years and then they started to build Castle Mall. We ran adrift with the contractors closing Timberhill whilst they constructed it, making access to both the shop and the Museum difficult. We struggled like mad. And then in the late 1990s I started suffering from angina. I decided I was in no fit state to struggle on running the business in its current form, so in 1996 I decided to close down the retail organisation and just run a studio.
It took two years to sell up and in 1998 we moved to New Costessey where I have a studio in the house and concentrate on restoration, conservation, and conservation framing. I work four days a week, Tuesday to Friday, and have a long weekend.
The idea was to do this for 12 years and then retire. I’ve now run it for what’s turning 25 years and I’m not thinking about retiring yet.
Barry Leveton (b.1935) talking to WISEArchive in Costessey on 27th February 2024.
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