Whitcombe & Tombs / Whitcoulls - Wellington

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Pandora Research

Lois Chambers worked as a display artist for Whitcombe & Tombs / Whitcoulls in Wellington from about 1962. She described it as a mentally and physically demanding one-person job. It entailed window and interior displays for the Lambton Quay shop and ticket writing for seven other shops. Whitcombe & Tombs merged with Coull Somerville Wilkie in 1971 and the business was renamed Whitcoulls in 1973. A best attempt has been made to create these images from slides / negatives that have suffered from age.

Evening Post 03 Sep 1981 Shopping Guide with Valerie Scott
Wednesday, last week, Mayor Sir Michael Fowler had a very successful signing session at Whitcoulls on Lambton Quay. To coincide with the launching of "Wellington, Wellington," Whitcoulls had arranged a splendid window with three of the originals from the book including a water colour, one of my favourites, of a small fishing boat 'Marconi' unloading at Queen's wharf. The choppy sea and hills are sombre and you can almost see the boat bobbing up and down in the water. A typical scene to delight any of Wellington's wanderers. The splendid water colour of Parliament Buildings showing the old and new (House of Representatives and the Beehive) and a sketch of the Basin Reserve formed a background to the arrangement of books. Whitcoulls are noted for their topical windows. They go to a great deal of trouble to arrange eye-catching props, as they did for the windows on NZ Craftworks where they showed many pieces of the work of Wellington craftspeople actually illustrated in the book. Another window I enjoyed was the collection of appropriate memorabilia they used to promote Jack Churchouse's splendid book "Glamour Ships of the Union Steam Ship Company" published by Millwood Press. But back to "Wellington, Wellington." It's an excellent book to buy for expatriate Wellingtonians. I think there'll be many copies sent overseas in the Christmas surface mail next month.

The following images are at present undated.