Phillips Stick-a-sole man at Market Lavington Museum
The Advertising bust, which we call The Stick-a-Sole Man, used to stand in the window Of Ken Mundy’s High Street shop. Ken was a village character who ran his shoe repair and sales business between the Co-op and the newsagents until he retired in about 1980. He is remembered by older inhabitants of the village for his very late adoption of mains water. Even after World War Two, Ken could be seen walking down to Broadwell with his yoke and two buckets to collect his water. Apparently his pigs fared better for mains water was laid on to them, kept in an area off The Clays.
When Ken closed his doors, a local resident bought the Stick-a-Sole Man. Our purchaser had a grandfather who had been a cobbler and people used to ask him if he had been the model for this particular advert (no, he wasn’t). These models were widespread and could be found in cobblers shops up and down the country. Ours, from Market Lavington, spent close on thirty years in Crawley, Sussex before being offered back to the museum at the start of 2009
He’s quite a detailed model, some 22 centimetres tall, standing there, holding a shoe which is fitted with a real, if small, Phillips stick-a-sole.
The Phillips firm was set up by Walter Phillips from Cardiff. It is thought that his stick on soles – to double the life of your shoes, were in use by the 1930s and the advert man, made of a rubberoid material (similar to the soles, perhaps) probably dates from that era as well.
