Newtown and district
Royal Welsh Warehouse
  From Newtown to the wide world  
 

Pryce Jones had transferred his mail order business to Part of Pryce Jones leaflet the new Royal Welsh Warehouse in October 1879, and within a year he had around 100,000 customers.
His trade continued to grow rapidly and he soon more than doubled this number with customers in many parts of the world, thanks to the new railway connections. He made much of his delivery service in his publicity material, as shown in this typical example...

  
From a
Pryce Jones
leaflet
of 1879
 Pryce Jones leaflet
Scarlet cloak
"as supplied
to Her Majesty
the Queen"
in 1879
 Pryce Jones advertisement As a mark of his success Pryce Jones was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1887, and became known as Sir Pryce Pryce-Jones.
Even the huge new Royal Welsh Warehouse in the town was not large enough by 1895, so another huge building was built just opposite for use as a factory. This was later known as Agriculture House, and the two buildings were connected by a high level bridge for many years.
In 1901 he added his own post office to the Royal Welsh Warehouse to cope with the huge number of parcel deliveries sent all over the world from Newtown.
 
 

The company continued to do well until the Great War of 1914-18, but suffered from the depressed world trade of the 1920s and 1930s. The business was taken over by a Liverpool firm in 1938.
Pryce Jones died in 1920 at the age of 85.
He had made a huge contribution to Newtown in his lifetime by reviving the local woollen industry and by pioneering new methods of trading which are now taken for granted. He had created large numbers of jobs, arranged sporting and musical activities for his workers, and helped the community in many ways, including service as a Member of Parliament.

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