Thomas Spencer(1851–1905)

Thomas Spencer was born at Skipton in the North Riding of Yorkshire on Christmas Day 1851, the eldest child of a Skipton-Methodist family of modest trade. He left school at thirteen, served his apprenticeship in the wholesale haberdashery trade, and by his late twenties had taken a cashier's post at the Leeds firm of Isaac Dewhirst, a substantial textile and haberdashery wholesaler with branches across the West Riding. He worked at Dewhirst's for fifteen years and became, by the early 1890s, the senior cashier of the firm, trusted with the credit ledger and the daily cash.

One of Dewhirst's regular customers was a young Polish-Jewish immigrant named Michael Marks, who had come to Leeds from Slonim in 1882 with no English and no capital and had set up a penny-bazaar stall in Kirkgate Market in 1884. Marks bought his stock from Dewhirst, and Spencer, who managed the credit, came to know him. By the early 1890s Marks's penny-bazaar concept (a market stall with every item priced at one penny, no haggling, the sign reading ‘Don't Ask the Price, It's a Penny') had spread to nine market towns across the north of England and was outgrowing his ability to administer it on his own.

In September 1894 Marks proposed a partnership to Spencer: an equal share of the business in exchange for three hundred pounds and the bookkeeping, buying and administrative work Spencer's training fitted him for. Spencer accepted, put up the three hundred pounds out of fifteen years of cashier's savings, and on the twenty-eighth of September 1894 the firm of Marks and Spencer came into legal existence at a registered office in Cheetham Hill Road, Manchester. He resigned from Dewhirst's, took over the buying and the back-office, and for the next eight years ran the business side of the partnership while Marks ran the stalls.

Through those eight years the partnership opened thirty-six new penny bazaars across the north and Midlands, moved the central buying office to Manchester, set up direct supplier relationships that cut out the wholesalers, and pioneered the practice of branded private-label goods sold under the firm's own name at fixed prices. By 1900 Marks and Spencer was the largest penny-bazaar chain in Britain and was beginning the transition from market stall to high-street shop that would define the firm in the twentieth century. He retired from active management in 1903 on poor health and died at his house at Crumpsall, Manchester, on the twenty-fifth of July 1905, in his fifty-fourth year. Michael Marks died sixteen months later.

The firm Spencer co-founded with his three hundred pounds and his cashier's discipline passed to the second generation, was incorporated as Marks and Spencer plc in 1926, took its modern St Michael own-label brand in 1928, and by the late twentieth century was the largest retailer in Britain and the largest food retailer by quality in Europe. The firm today operates over a thousand stores across thirty-five countries, employs over sixty-five thousand people, and remains one of the foundational institutions of the British high street. The Marks and Spencer name on every product sold under it carries the weight of the partnership deed signed in Manchester on the twenty-eighth of September 1894.