Introduction

Imagine a time when life was so certain that when you built a building for your business you were confident enough in the future that you put the name of the business into the very fabric of the building.

This is not a time of mergers and takeovers of globalisation and restructure, this is when life was more local and certain.

There are a number of such buildings around and so this blog is an attempt to record some of them and more importantly a bit of the history of the business which by and large are no longer with us.

If you know something about any of these business please add a comment. You can do this without having to sign up for anything and can be anonomous if you prefer.



Monday, August 16, 2010

Milne Bremner Ltd

This is 23 Vogel St as viewed from the back on Crawford St

This is 23 Vogel St from Vogel St

It is obvious which way around the current owners see the building, probably because the traffic loading is on the Crawford Street side of the building, although given that the building is now turned into apartments and the bright red sign advertises a company no longer operating it is all a bit curious.

Merchant firm Milne Bremner Ltd was in business at 23 Vogel Street from 1914 until the company closed in 1965 when it was sold to F. Meenan & Co. Ltd. The company specialised in hotel supplies, wine and spirits and wholesale grocery items. It also supplied mortgage funding to some of its customers and in later years it owned the Raes Junction, Waitaki and Duntroon hotels. It may have been one of the first companies in Dunedin to appoint women directors, as in 1918 Diana Bremner and Barbara Milne (wives of the managing directors) were appointed directors and in 1919 the company minutes ‘thanked the ladies on the board for the interest they have taken in the work of the company’. There were only Milne family members from 1920, but there were women directors on the board right to the end of the company.


1 comment:

  1. Not 100% sure, but I've a feeling Milne Bremner Ltd owned the grocery shop A Horn & Son in Middlemarch, in which they employed a manager. It would have been about 1965 that this store closed, which is consistent with Milne & Bremner having been sold to liquor company F Meenan $ Co in that year.

    ReplyDelete