’I had a terrible struggle.’ In 1976 the beginnings of major expansion in Filofax began to occur. “They all laughed at me, but I was determined to carry on” she said. “I went round and told everyone we were starting again,” she recalled. She rebuilt the company, was rewarded with a shareholding and eventually became chairwoman, a post she held until she retired in 1955. The bomb destroyed the firm’s records and a nearby florist told her: “You’re finished - you’ll never start again.” However Grace had kept the names and addresses of all Norman & Hill’s customers and suppliers in her two Filofaxes of her own.
In 1940, when the firm’s premises were destroyed during he Blitz, Grace set about rescuing the company. By 1930 Filofax was registered as a trade mark. She invented the name “Filofax” as a contraction of the product being a “File of Facts.” At this time Filofax’s main customers turned out to be numerous professions such as the military and clergy (up until the end of the 1980s Filofax still sold “Church Family Records” and “Troop Commander’s Bible” inserts). She could see the potential of the system in Britain and decided to have it manufactured in the UK. The Early Years In 1921 a London-base stationer, Norman & Hill imported the American personal filing systems to the UK at the suggestion of temporary secretary, Grace Scurr.
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A Chronology of Filofax Kevin Hall April 13, 2010Ī Chronology of Filofax by Kevin Hall is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License ( licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/uk/).