Our first recorded interaction between the company and British royalty dates back to 1924 when the company (then called John Moorby Limited & William Reed & Sons Limited) exhibited at the Empire Exhibition at Wembley in north London – a venue which later has become world famous as the home of English football. The story goes that Mrs Clifford Reed (Annie Moorby was her maiden name), also known as the ‘Queen of Spades’ because of her obsession with the French card game Bezique, was on the exhibition stand when Queen Mary was visiting the exhibition and stopped at the company’s stand. By all accounts this was a feisty encounter between two Edwardian matriarchs which ended well with mutual respect even though Annie’s staunch Methodist upbringing meant that she was not a natural royalist.

Fifty years later in 1974 the then young Prince of Wales (now King Charles III) visited Nelson and Burnley as part of his tour around the UK and the Lancashire County Palatine. One of our employees at the time was able to hand the bachelor prince a gift of a pair of pillowcases made from our Super Percale sheeting cloth which my father, Peter Reed, was pioneering at the time through his far sighted purchases of Sea Island cotton via his membership of the Barbados Cotton Exchange.