Thomas Brunkard 🇮🇪🇪🇺

Switzers on Grafton Street was an institution for generations. John Wright Switzer started out flogging cloth from a wheelbarrow around the Liberties. Born in Tipperary in 1806 to a small farmer descended from Palatine German settlers, Switzer worked the Corn Market before setting up as a military tailor at Cork Hill in 1832. By 1838 he'd moved to 91 Grafton Street, he`d his cloth downstairs and tailoring upstairs. A partnership with draper John Beatty let the business move into Wicklow Street, and by 1880 it covered five buildings between them two streets. In 1890, aged 84, Switzer bought the last plot, incorporated the business, and made himself chairman. He died the following year and is buried in Mount Jerome. Those buildings were finished between 1911 and 1913, when architects Donnelly and Moore gave it the grand Edwardian face Dubliners would grow up with. Across the street sat its natural enemy Brown Thomas founded in 1848 by Hugh Brown and expanded a year later with James Thomas. Incidentally despite the DTM visiting the furthest gutters of Irish spacetime from the Mount Sandal Switzers played the sturdy, democratic favourite of the old Dublin families, less glamorous, no less proud. Its Birdcage café let women meet for tea unchaperoned, a small freedom that mattered more than it sounds now. And the Christmas windows, animated fairy tale scenes drawing families from around the country, were theatre, not advertising. Brown Thomas knew better than to drop the tradition once they inherited the building. Ownership drifted from Irish hands as the century wore on. Waterford Glass and House of Fraser took joint control in 1971, and House of Fraser had full ownership by 1985, the same year the Al Fayed family bought House of Fraser itself for £615 million, briefly making Switzers a distant cousin of Harrods. By then the Switzer Group had swallowed Cash's of Cork, Todd's of Limerick, and Moon's of Galway, a proper national chain. The end arrived in November 1990. Brown Thomas, under Galen Weston, bought the Switzer Group from the Fayeds for under £10 million, inheriting debts north of £20 million. The two stores ran on separately for a few years until Brown Thomas sold its own premises to Marks & Spencer for £20 million and, on the 14th of February 1995, crossed the road into the old Switzers building. The name was gone. Much of the structure was later demolished and rebuilt as today's Brown Thomas flagship. It's a protected structure now, Brown Thomas on the façade, but on the Wicklow Street side the ghost sign Switzer is still cast into the metalwork above a side door, still pressed into the pavement lights underfoot.