THOMSON’S Coffee was a Glasgow institution for many decades.
It was established in 1841 when David Thomson, a tea and coffee merchant from Edinburgh, opened his first shop in Glasgow’s St Vincent Street. Its final home in the city centre was at 79 Renfield Street, which continued trading until 2005. The business lives on as Thomson's Coffee Roasters, on the southside.
Back in November 1966, the Glasgow Herald writer William Hunter, noted, in his Samuel Hunter column, the presence of the outsize coffee grinder in the shop window; the grinder itself was a landmark in Renfield Street. In its early days at the start of the 20th century, he wrote, the mill was noisily driven by a gas engine, probably a Kelvin. Later, it switched to electricity, but for the last 30 years it had slept in the window. Now, in 1966, to mark the coffee house’s 125th anniversary, it was working again, even if the only thing it was grinding was fresh air.
Read more: Herald Diary
“Passers-by stand at the window mesmerised,” Hunter continued. “Both William Addison, the proprietor, and his son Robert have gone full circle in their regard for it. Each when he went into the family business as a restless young innovator wanted the mill removed. Each time a wiser father refused. Both fell under its spell.” Addison senior recalled: “I remember as a schoolboy it used to frighten me.”
During the mill’s renovations, a man, believing that the mill was about to be removed, burst into the shop, demanding that it stay where it was. No-one in the shop had seen him before.
And sometimes, William Hunter added, “large men in stetsons arrive to say they emigrated to America as children and the big mill is all they remember about the city.”
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