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Description area
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History
Higgs & Co. (Printers) Ltd., printers, stationers and publishers of the local weekly newspaper, the Henley Standard, was incorporated on 10th May, 1979, although its roots go back a hundred years before that.
A gentleman call Thomas Octavius Higgs started a printing business in Henley in 1877 and built premises at Caxton House, on the corner of Reading Road and Station Road in 1885. At this time he also became the official printer for the Henley Royal Regatta programme.
In 1892 he gained the contract for printing the recently re-named Henley and South Oxfordshire Standard, which had started life as the Henley Free Press in February 1885.
Charles Luker, the grandfather of the current president, joined Mr Higgs’s firm in the autumn of 1894, when he was not quite 18, in order to learn the printing trade, as his father printed the Faringdon Advertiser.
On Thomas Octavius Higgs’s death in 1896, the business passed to his widow Eliza, who sold it to a partnership from the Hobbs family, the local boatbuilders. Charles Luker also became a partner and eventually became sole proprietor in about 1900, from whence the firm was known as Higgs & Co.
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Printers