Left Prior’s shop can be seen in the middle of this group of houses, just the other side of Holyoake (then called Western) Road. This detail is taken from a postcard of about 1907.

George Henry Williams was put in charge of the retail side of the business, and lived over the shop. On 16 February 1907 at St Frideswide's Church in Oxford he married he married Florence Ellen Cantell of Osney, and is described on the marriage certificate as a cycle maker. The 1911 census shows him aged 28 living at the “Cycle Works, London Road” with his wife Florence Ellen (27) and their eldest child Edith Patricia (3).

In 1912 he bought Prior's shop. He renamed it G.H. Williams Cycle Maker & Repairer, and began to sell toys, confectionery and tobacco, as well as petrol. The advertisement on the right is from Kelly’s Directory of 1936.

The 1939 Register shows G. H. Williams living at 138–140 London Road with his wife Florence and their son Reginald: father and son each describe themselves as “Cycle Maker & Repairer”.

Here in his reminiscences about life in Headington in the 1930s, John Bolt recalls the shop when it was on this site:

On our way to school each day we passed our ‘tuck shop’ – not that we’d ever heard that description. This was Williams’, whose premises occupied the corner of London Road and Western (now Holyoake) Road…. As the Williams’ premises it was two shops; the right-hand part, on the actual corner, was the ‘mechanical’ side, where Mr Williams built and repaired bicycles, sold parts and associated accessories, re-charged accumulators and sold paraffin and petrol. The latter was dispensed from a hand-operated pump on the pavement; a handle was turned one way to bring up and deliver some petrol, then turned the other way ready for another lift.

But it was the left-hand side of the building which concerned us. This was a sweet-shop, normally run by Mrs Williams, and it was there that we spent our pennies, halfpennies (pronounced ’haypnies’), or even farthings. In other ‘words’ 1d, ½d, or ¼d. There was a great variety of sweets to choose from but we were restricted financially to a few favourites. ‘Gob-Stoppers’ were popular but you could only afford one or perhaps two; ‘Traffic Lights’ which changed colour as you sucked them; ‘Rifle Shots’, like little coloured ball-bearings, because you got a lot for your money; ‘Sherbet Dabs’, small triangular paper bags of sherbet with a sort of small lolly on a stick to dip into the sherbet; ‘Sherbet Fountains’, a little cardboard tube containing the sherbet, with a liquorice tube sticking out of the top through which you sucked the sherbet; rolls of liquorice tape with a little sugar ball in the middle; liquorice tubes with a little wire basket on the end to hold a small, light ball (possibly made of pith) which could be made to hover by blowing through the tube.

Most of these could be afforded once in a while, but stuff like the flavoured toffee on show in the window normally had to wait until we were older and had more pocket money. The flavour was in a layer through the middle – pink for raspberry, yellow for banana, etc. – and the toffee was in slabs which had to be broken by Mrs Williams with a little hammer and weighed. Some of the pieces were big enough to make pretty good gob-stoppers!

Of the variety of sweets on display in boxes or glass jars very few were wrapped, let alone double-wrapped as today. Small items like ‘Rifle Shots’ were poured from the jar into the brass pan of the scales to be weighed, then poured into a little triangular paper bag which became conical when filled.

As well as sweets, Williams’s sold soft drinks, mainly Tizer. However, for our money there were ‘Penny Monsters’ – which we slanderously reckoned were made up from the dregs of the more expensive Tizers!

John Bolt also mentions taking the accumulator around to this G. H. Williams shop during the Second World War so that it could be recharged.

The firm of G. H. Williams & Son remained at 138 & 140 London Road until the mid-1950s, when it moved to smaller premises across the road.