11-03 Stocktaking

There is nothing magical about stocktaking in a business establishment that sells goods from inventory. You need to count that inventory to determine at the end of the year your “cost of goods sold”. But it was the special memories associated with stocktaking that are worth recounting as part of our father’s legacy.
I started coming down to the store on 734 Bay Street in high school which would be the late 1940s. And Dad always coupled me with his uncle James, his father’s brother. I did the counting, he did the recording. The photo shows Dad and his uncle from that period. Old uncle James, as we called him, was a penman, and his business card read, James Bulloch, Penman. To make a living, he penned the signatures on university graduation certificates in an old English script. I guess technology wiped out that profession.
It is interesting to examine a letter signed by his father John Bulloch in 1872, and notice the flourish in the signature. Bulloch Bros, which included brothers John, James and Alexander wholesaled Irish linen to the English market after cotton supplies were cut off during the American Civil War. They made a fortune. Their story is written up in the Irish Linen Institute in Belfast.
And after every stocktaking, which we tried to complete before 8:00 PM, we all went out for a great meal. I felt so important as a teenager with all my uncles in attendance.
Dad, as he built up the equity in his business, invested in woollens often beyond his day-to-day needs. He used his cash to buy ends of lines direct from large manufacturers and wholesalers. I remember a considerable shipment that had to be stored in the basement of our bungalow in York Mills. Peter got $5 per week to keep the stock properly brushed and free of lint.
One of my favourite memories is counting four bolts of Irish tweed that he had bought directly from an Irish manufacturer. It was an off shade of green that had not sold. I asked him how he was going to sell something in Canada that the Irish would wear, not as a jacket, but as a suit. He created a sense of magic by calling it "Ballygally Tweed" and featured it in a two-column ad in the Globe and Mail. He sold it as a three-piece suit and not as a sports jacket.
I was so excited by what he did because it was not long ago in 1947 that the family had been in Northern Ireland and actually visited Ballygally on the Antrim Coast. The photo is a postcard shot of Ballygally Beach with the town in the background. He sold all this heavy tweed in just four weeks. It would never wear out, that I can tell you. Dad used an end of the material to make me a pair of trousers.
To add to the memories of that big sale, Mary and I went through Ballygally on a trip around Ireland in 1967. They have a famous castle which had become a hotel. But it is not Ballycastle, a separate town not far away. Dad loved this little ditty, “If Ballyalbert had not been so Ballymena with his Ballymoney, he might have bought himself a Ballycastle for his Ballyhome.