The furniture store of Solomon (Liskeard) Ltd has been trading on the Moorswater Industrial Estate for some time now, but 60 years ago their various home furnishing departments were in numbers 8, 9, 12 and 14 Fore Street, as well as a showroom in Well Lane. The founder of the business was Frederick Solomon, who grew up with his sister Ethel in Melbourne Terrace. Before branching out on his own, Frederick was a Cabinet Maker and partner with his father in Solomon & Son of Dean Street. By 1939 Frederick had married and was living above one his shops, 8 Fore Street, with a young family.

Ethel Solomon, meanwhile, was unmarried and living with her widowed mother at 12 Dean Street, her occupation was recorded as ‘Driver of Car for Private Hire’. When her mother died in 1949 aged 84, Ethel had found herself in need of a home. She had been parking her hire-car behind the former miners’ cottages in Westbourne Lane for 18 years and decided to apply for planning permission to park a caravan alongside it and live there temporarily.

Ethel’s application was reported in the Cornish Guardian as it was ‘the first of its kind in East Cornwall to use a caravan as a temporary dwelling’. The Planning Committee had not recommended her application ‘on grounds of detriment to existing dwellings in the surrounding built-up area’. Alderman Maddever took a different view as ‘there was a housing shortage and caravans properly sited could be an adequate form of temporary accommodation’. Ethel application was agreed for a period of 12 months and extended the following year for a further two years, as ‘the site had been made as attractive as possible’.

By Brian Oldham, Liskeard Museum volunteer and Bard of the Gorsedh Kernow