Our History
"My father came to England from Saxony, at the end of the last century: most people had a very hard life then in Germany, my father was up at five each morning, and worked until midnight. He served his apprenticeship (in Germany), with a German delicatessen and then worked for a time as a cigar salesman in Hamburg. At that time in Germany, everyone thought the streets of London were paved in gold; so in 1899 my father managed to board a coal barge bound for England. He worked his fare on the barge, and jumped ship once it reached a destination at London Docks. He then looked for work. Eventually he met a man called Mr Merton, who had opened a delicatessen in Finsbury Pavement, and my father went to work for him. Later, my father teamed up with Mr Schrober in a delicatessen near the Middlesex Hospital in Saville Street, which is now called a different name. But, as they did not get on too well, my father decided to find a shop of his own, and in 1900 opened up here, in Marylebone Lane.
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To begin with, he only had half this present shop with three floors above ground level, two rooms on each floor. The other half of the building was occupied on the ground by a gas fitter with a forge in the basement where the gas pipes were bent. It was converted to how you see it now, in about 1910. At that time there were many more shops in this area than now: I can remember Potters, a wet fish shop, the greengrocers and a coffee shop, run by a Swiss family called Kady, where you could buy home-made pies to have with a cup of coffee. Then there was Gullivers, a gents' outfitter, and a crafts button shop.
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Directly opposite us was Jones the diary, Mr Jones was the originator of United Diaries. On this side of the road, next door to Attewells (now Christopher Lane), was a rather expensive antique merchant called Draper who sold vases and so on. Then there was a ladies' hatter who delivered merchandise to customers in a horse-drawn carriage. There was an electrician from whom we bought our wireless batteries, and an antique picture dealer called MaCaskey. Another shop nearby was Hymans café, which was also a family business.
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When my father started here, he sold practically continental delicatessen, but in 1914 when war broke out, we had to survive with English food. I still have cheques paid to firms like Peak Freans and Heinz together with my father's paying-in book covered in ivory leather, with his name in copperplate writing.
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At the outbreak of the Great War, my father who had become naturalized in 1906 (a suggestion from his previous friendship with Mr Merton), was called up to serve in the Middlesex Regiment of the British Army. Ironically, he had done his National Service before - as a musketeer in Germany in the 1890s: now he was sent to fight his own relations.
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Whilst he was away, my mother ran the shop, keeping it open always until midnight. In 1920 my father returned home. In 1940, he died - the same night a bomb fell on the cinema, which stood next to Madame Tussauds in London.
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This building is around 220 years old, and at one time the river Tyburn ran right along here and this Lane was a swamp. In recent years, a brick built conduit has been built below the pavement outside this shop to replace the one carrying the Tyburn."
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By Robert Rothe - son of our founder Paul Rothe
Written in the year 2000.
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"After arriving in London from Saxony, my grandfather worked for Mr Merton, and soon after decided to set up his own business. So on the 2nd of August 1900 my grandfather Paul Rothe opened PAUL ROTHE, DEUTSCHE DELICATESSEN, at 35 Marylebone Lane, St. Marylebone, London, W1.
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By chance, he also met my grandmother, who was also German, in London. She came from a small village on the River Nahe, called Boos (the River Nahe flows into the Rhine.) They married, and they worked together in the shop, both working very long hours.
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For the first few years we only occupied half of this shop and gained access to it via a vestibule type area. By the time of the First World War, we occupied the whole of the current shop premises, and prudently decided to remove the word DEUTSCHE from the shopfront (although by now they were both British citizens).
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In those days the shop was very different regarding the nature of the business as the area here was entirely residential. It was not until some twenty years later that architects, accountants, solicitors, estate agents and other commercial operations began moving into the area. This changed the emphasis of the business completely from retail to catering (an example of this is that my grandparents would be very busy at midnight as people left the local public houses).
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By 1926 my father, Robert Rothe, started working the shop (he was sixteen) and remembers delivering rye bread on his bicycle as far away as Hampstead. Indeed, he likes to tell me that we were only the third delicatessen in the whole of London! Certainly there were a few outlets able to supply the 'continental comestibles' that we had to offer in those days.
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There used to be a parlour at the rear of our shop where the family sat down, and where customers waiting for orders were treated to a cup of coffee. With the aquistion of a table and two chairs at the front of the shop, the first seeds of change were sown.
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My grandfather died in 1939; a sad fact about his life is that in all the years that he worked in the shop, he and his wife only had one holiday together (in Jersey) and then they either lost or had all their money stolen. My father had to send them some money to get home.
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After my grandfather died, my grandmother ran the shop with my father, (although during the Second World War he had to help in the hospitals, since his parents had originally been German). My father has a sister Julie, and she helped a lot during the war, as she and all the family lived above the shop - much as my sister Pauline, the present occupier, helps me now in a crisis.
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After the war, we had regular assistants working in the shop, and added table and chairs (at this time the business was split roughly 50\50 between catering and retail). Then, probably the single most important thing to effect our business happened: restrictive car parking.
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People could no longer pull up in their cars outside the shop and fill up their boot with the week's provisions. The construction of supermarkets with their own car parks was also taking place in the suburbs, and within the space of ten years, and within the space of ten years, people were weaned off coming to the West End to buy their provisions.
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My father realized then that the only way forward was to make the shop as big as possible, thus allowing space for the table and chairs that you see now. The partition wall, which divided the parlour from the shop, was taken down in 1970, the side door and accompanying passageway were incorporated to make space for a refrigerated counter, so now the access for the flat above is through the shop door.
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The result is that we now seat 32 people and know that the main stay of our business lies in catering, with a specialist continental-style deli basis, and as much home-made produce as possible. The extra space also gave us the chance to install the refrigerated counter, coffee machines, ice-cream freezers, modern stainless steel ovens, and all the other equipment required to compete with the growing number of food outlets in our area.
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On the perimeters of our shop, we still have enough space to display many specialist retail items with a continental flavour, that you seldom see in your average supermarket. In Austria and Germany, Christmas is celebrated very enthusiastically with accompanying food produce such as: Stollen (Christmas cake) and Lebkuchen (honey cakes and gingerbreads). We still stock up with a diverse range of these items and have diversified into other countries traditions; for example we sell Italian Christmas Cake Panettone, Pandoro and Panforte. Although many big stores have entered the marketplace for these items, we can usually beat them on price because they no longer represent the main line of our business; many people recognize this and much of our Christmas runs out early December.
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Written by Paul Rothe in the year 2000
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