Jesse Boot
Took over his widowed mother’s herbalist shop at 13 and built Boots the Chemists
Jesse Boot was born in 1850 in Nottingham, where his father John, a former farm labourer, sold herbal remedies from a shop on Goose Gate to families who could not afford a doctor. John died when Jesse was ten, and by thirteen the boy had left school to help his mother behind the counter. He took the business over formally in 1877.
His idea was simple and, in the trade, deeply unpopular: buy in bulk, sell cheaply, and advertise the fact. Established chemists priced medicines high and called him a quack and a price-cutter; he responded with a leaflet headed "Health for a Shilling". On the first Saturday after his advertisement appeared his takings jumped from twenty pounds a week to twenty pounds a day. He worked himself into a breakdown and in 1885 went to Jersey to recover, where he met and married Florence Rowe, a bookseller's daughter who became a partner in every sense, adding books, stationery, gifts and cafés to the shops and taking a close interest in the welfare of the female staff.
By 1900 there were more than 150 branches. Boot pioneered drug manufacture in Britain and hired qualified pharmacists when rivals said a cheap chemist could not be a proper one. He also suffered for decades from rheumatoid arthritis and was eventually confined to a wheelchair, running the firm from it.
In 1920, unwell and with his son unwilling to take charge, he sold to an American company. He then spent the proceeds on Nottingham: parks, housing and, in 1928, the land and buildings for what became the University of Nottingham. He was made Baron Trent in 1929 and died in Jersey in 1931.