"The other day Mr. Geo. Martin, the draper, having an ugly barricade before his door, placed up a sort of decoy notice to ladies, that it was "safe to enter." The ladies would not take his word for it, but kept on the public side of the barricade.
"Now Mr. Martin has removed the ugly barrier, and displayed to the public eye a most handsome shop front, lighted with magnificent plate glass. This gives to the goods a very enticing lustre of light, and now it is so unsafe to enter that ladies who get inside have great difficulty in keeping a single shilling within their purses.
"The husbands should to hold a meeting, to have the shop "put down," for its bold front does not give the weaker vessels half a chance of escape."
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George Martin, was, in 1845, an enterprising Exeter draper with a shop at 233, High Street. He was, in his own words, Linen and Woollen Draper, Mercer and Haberdasher, Silk Mercer, Hosier and Hatter and he held the largest, cheapest and best assorted stock of bonnets out of London. His plate-glass window amazed the city.
"Safe to enter": a more considerate version of "Business as usual"! " I liked this piece because it envisages an ordered world (it never existed!) of charming lady wives, too timid to enter Mr. Martin's shop, whose business in life was to spend on finery the shillings their kind husbands put into their purses. I find ideas like this a soothing antidote to the realities of life in contemporary Exeter.
Weaker vessels: " Likewise, ye husbands, dwell with them according to knowledge, giving honour unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life." (1 Peter 3.7.)
Source: The Western Times, 4th October, 1845.
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