William Pickering

I have been given a bottle of port by a generous friend who found himself unable to walk past Berry Bros & Rudd without making a purchase. It is a twenty-year-old tawny labelled William Pickering – not a port house with which I am familiar.

A rummage around the BBR website provides the explanation.

In 1698, the company now known as Berry Bros. & Rudd was started by a woman. She was a widow and a mother, with at least two daughters, but only her last name is known: Bourne. The Widow Bourne established a grocer’s in the prestigious neighbourhood opposite St. James’s Palace, which in that year became the official principal residence of the monarch.
The Widow’s daughter Elizabeth married William Pickering (d.1734), and their family continued to run the business. As the Pickerings supplied the newly-fashionable Coffee Houses of St James’s, it is unsurprising that the shop chose an image linked to this prestige commodity as the sign of their business. To this day, Berry Bros. & Rudd still trades under the ‘Sign of the Coffee Mill’, an image that has remained outside the shop for centuries.

Good to see that the Pickerings are not forgotten but I wonder why William is honoured and not Elizabeth?  The widow Cliquot (nee Ponsardin) is remembered and her husband, François Cliquot, forgotten. Incidentally the first Berry did not come on the scene until 1803 and the Rudds arrived in the 20th century.

Barbe-Nicole Cliquot was formidable (to be pronounced in French). She ran her husband’s business for thirty-seven years before building herself Château de Boursault in Marne as her retirement home. It was completed in 1850 and there are two curious facts. Three years later an exact replica was built on the seafront at Arcachon to be used as a casino and Madame Cliquot’s heir sold her château to a Canadian branch of the Berry family.