John Menzies: From the high street to the skies

John Menzies opened bookstalls at railway stations across the country

One of Scotland's biggest companies John Menzies is on the verge of being taken over by a Kuwait-based rival. Rachel Grant looks back at the history of a firm that began as an innovative bookseller in Edinburgh.

For more than a century, John Menzies was a steadfast high street presence across the UK.

Just over 20 years ago, it vanished from town centres and railway stations. But the business has continued to grow, from a Victorian bookseller in Scotland's capital, into a massive distribution firm, then a global aviation services business.

Its founder, the original John Menzies, was a man with a talent for finding a niche and adapting to a changing society.

He became an apprentice bookseller in Edinburgh after leaving school. When his father died, Menzies left a job in London's Fleet Street and returned home.

Spotting a gap in the market, he opened Scotland's first wholesale bookseller - the first John Menzies shop at 61 Princes Street, Edinburgh in 1833. He was just 25.

Not only did he become the Scottish agent of Dickens' first book - the Pickwick Papers - and the periodical Punch, but he also took the then unusual step of selling The Scotsman over the counter.

By the 1860s he had secured the rights to bookstalls in railway stations across Scotland, gradually expanding his stock to supply items useful to travellers on the burgeoning railways network.

It was his sons, John R and Charles Menzies, who expanded the business further, taking advantage of 20th Century innovation to use motorcars instead of horses and adapting as the World War One created a bigger demand for news distribution.

The first bookshop at 61 Princes Street in Edinburgh city centre, shown here in the mid 20th Century

By 1965, five years after the company was incorporated, John Menzies had 90 wholesale warehouses, 350 railway bookstalls and 161 shops.

The first link to air travel came with the 1948 launch of a bookstall at Edinburgh Turnhouse Airport but by the 1980s John Menzies' daily distribution of 26.5m newspapers put the company in a position to move into overnight and heavy freight.

The retail presence vanished from the high street in the late 1990s as rival WH Smith acquired its shops.

By then the company was a global distribution service with a focus on cargo handling and passenger services.

Menzies later acquired the world's largest plane refuelling business and ditched the distribution side of the company in 2018.

Menzies Aviation, as it is now known, operates on six continents, but retains its base in Edinburgh just five miles from where John Menzies began.