CAPEL HISTORY TRAIL
No. 16 - Meadhurst General Stores
The Meadhurst General Stores at 40 Whetsted Road opened in 1895 and for many years rivalled Marks and Spencers and Sainsburys as the leading retail outlet in the area. The store was the first in the UK to offer online click and collect and deliveries but, by the start of the Second World War, a suspicious series of punctures on the shop's large fleet of bicycles caused the service to end.
The property was requisitioned in 1941 by the Ministry of Defence and little was known of its usage during that period. However, the subsequent discovery of quantities of extra large size khaki boiler suits, empty whisky bottles, panama hats and cigar stubs has led historians to believe that this was a training centre for so-called 'Churchill Doubles'. Still shrouded in mystery, this branch of the armed forces provided doubles of the wartime leader whenever it was felt an assassination risk existed.
The property was returned to a more modest general store after the war and was converted to a domestic property during the 1990s when both the shop and attached house were joined together. A special feature is the gardens with later additions to the rear garden in particular by Capability Brown working in partnership with Alan Titchmarsh.
The rare photograph below shows an experiment being conducted in the store in 1958 by Professor Ernest Knight of King's College Cambridge concerning the ability of humans to stare blankly into a camera.
