To be known to pawn is to confess oneself déclasser. In a class-ridden society like ours that has been something almost too dreadful to contemplate.

In many ways I consider it a pity that the business is diminishing from 4,000 shops in 1911 to 137 in 1990. However, the past years have seen a very large increase in the pawnbroking business. From the point of view of training in business there are few other trades that give you such a wide variety of knowledge of persons, goods and values.

The clothing, kitchenware, tradesman's tools and even dentures and wooden legs which were pawned in the early years of this century have changed to the trappings of today's society. Now there are personal stereos, cameras, computers and even that symbol of the upwardly mobile, the Porsche.

The Furniture room in a London Pawnbroker's Warehouse, 1906.

For an honourable and often misunderstood profession with a long standing pedigree, the future clearly holds many challenges. As pawnbroking shakes itself free from the old association with poverty and returns to something closer to its medieval beginnings lending money to people who are quite well blessed with this world's goods already.

As the past has shown, the pawnbroker will have to meet such challenges to ensure that the familiar and historic sign will itself remain as much a part of our heritage as the Bank of England.

A sense of humour is a necessity, without it we would not survive.

E J Markham and Son was extremely busy during the Second World War, and just after the War there was a great decline in brokery until 1975, so between these years the business was not making a profit, but kept on more or less as an advert just to keep going.

Parker's Middlewood Road, Sheffield, c. 1920.

Best clothes were pawned on Mondays and redeemed on Friday for the weekend. If you could afford an extra penny you would have your suit put on a hanger, otherwise it was wrapped in brown paper and required a jolly good press on redemption.

In 1864, lady pledged 8 shillings for a sixpence, her reasons being that she was going to the workhouse.

The conclusion we must come to is that the universal mother called NECESSITY, had early development of the money of the human family called INVENTION and money lending was one of his earliest works.