Harry Shorrocks' Choices

My Shorrocks' family's Brush Manufacturing business in Salford in the 19th Century puts me in mind of the British film 'Hobson's Choice'.

I suspect that some of the family feuding, bullying and class conflict that it portrays lies at the heart of my grandfather Harry's decision to throw off his Shorrocks surname and start a new life in London around 1905.

SYNOPSIS

Hobson's Choice is a 1954 film directed by David Lean, based on the play of the same name by Harold Brighouse. It stars Charles Laughton in the title role of Victorian bootmaker Henry Hobson, Brenda De Banzie as his eldest daughter Maggie and John Mills as a timid employee. The film also features Prunella Scales, in one of her first roles, as daughter Vicky Hobson.

Hobson's Choice won the British Academy Film Award for Best British Film 1954. Willie Mossop (John Mills) is a gifted, but unappreciated shoemaker employed by the tyrannical Henry Horatio Hobson (Charles Laughton) in his moderately upscale shop in 1880s Salford. Widower Hobson has three daughters.

Maggie (Brenda De Banzie) and her younger sisters Alice (Daphne Anderson) and Vicky (Prunella Scales) have worked in their father's establishment without wages and are eager to be married and free of the shop. Alice has been seeing Albert Prosser (Richard Wattis), a young up-and-coming solicitor, while Vicky prefers Freddy Beenstock (Derek Blomfield), the son of a respectable corn merchant.

Hobson doesn't object to losing Alice and Vickey, but Maggie is far too useful to part with. To his friends, he mocks her as a spinster "a bit on the ripe side" at 30 years of age. Her pride injured, she bullies the contented, unambitious Will Mossop into an engagement.

When Hobson objects to her choice of husband and refuses to start paying her, Maggie decides that she and Willie will set up in a shop of their own. For capital, they turn to a very satisfied customer for a loan. With money in hand, they get married and, between her business sense and his shoemaking genius, the enterprise is very successful.

Within a year, they have taken away nearly all of Hobson's clientele. Finally, at Maggie's urging, Mossop goes into partnership with Hobson, now an almost-bankrupt alcoholic, on condition that Hobson take no further part in the business.

Hobson's Choice (1954 film) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia