J H Wand Group

The group's main retail premises and headquarters in North Street, Bourne

The J H Wand Group that prospered from its headquarters in Bourne was one of those successful family companies that owed its existence to one man, in this case Jack Wand.

Despite contracting polio as a child and a medical diagnosis that he would not live past the age of 20, he saw his business grow from a one man venture with a capital of £15, to a small but effective multi-million pound concern trading world-wide in electronic equipment and employing around 60 people.

John Holliday Wand was born at Rippingale, near Bourne, in 1925 and left school when he was 13 to work in a bakery. By 1941 he had graduated to an apprenticeship in the radio trade for a Bourne shopkeeper where he learned to repair wireless sets and charge accumulators. But other responsibilities came his way and in 1948, seeing the advantages of television which he had seen demonstrated during a visit to the Radio Olympia exhibition in London, and realising that his employer did not agree, he left to set up on his own, using his meagre capital to build his first premises with wood and zinc bought from the Saturday market.

It was little more than a shed but the business soon expanded, opening his first shop at Billingborough in 1960 and in 1971 he took over the business of Burton & Waltham, ironmongers, in North Street, Bourne, and turned it into a successful electrical and hardware store together with the Billingborough shop and another shop in the High Street at Stamford. The firm soon become a small but effective rural empire with a respectful customer base in South Lincolnshire, selling and servicing the entire range of electrical and electronic appliances as well as hardware and household goods. 

Jack died in 2013, aged 88, and one of his sons, Trevor, continued running the business but the early success was not to last. The shops at Stamford and Billingborough had already closed and Bourne followed suit in June 2015 after 67 years of trading as a direct result of the increasing level of the business rate which was making times difficult for all local traders coupled with the rising popularity of Internet shopping.

Trevor said that negotiations were proceeding for the entire site and added: “This is a sad moment for us all but times change and we must change with them no matter how hard a decision that is to make.”

REVISED JUNE 2015

See also Jack Wand MBE