Dow's Pharmacy, Chiltern: the shop left as it was

The chemist shop on Conness Street has not sold anything since 1969. Most days the door is locked. Behind the glass the shelves are still full and the labels are still turned out to face a customer who is not coming. It sits more or less as Hilda Dow left it.

A pharmacy has stood on that site since 1859, which puts it ahead of most of the town around it. The building you are looking at now went up in 1868.

The chemist whose son became prime minister

From 1891 to 1907 the shop was run by David James McEwen, who had come out from Mountnorris in County Armagh. On the 29th of March 1900 a son was born to the family at their home here in Chiltern, and they named him John.

In December 1967 that boy was sworn in as prime minister of Australia. Harold Holt had disappeared, the Liberals needed time to settle on a new leader, and McEwen was commissioned to hold the office while they did it. He had it for twenty-three days and handed it back in January.

Mrs Dow behind the counter

Hilda Dow, née Grey, ran the pharmacy from 1929 until 1969, which is forty years behind the one counter. She married John Dow in 1932. He then became her apprentice, and took his own pharmacy degree in 1936.

What stayed on the shelves

When the doors shut for the last time, very little was cleared out. The medicines stayed in their packaging and the fittings stayed where they had been built to stand. There were photographic supplies in there as well. A country chemist sold you the film and then developed it for you when you brought it back. Some of the stock was already old when Mrs Dow arrived, so what sits in that room now reaches back through the nineteenth century as well as the twentieth.

A shop of a kind that has mostly gone

Shops like this were once ordinary. You went in for a headache powder or a bottle for the baby, and the person behind the counter made it up for you out of the drawers and jars along the wall. The photograph here is a chemist shop at Beamish in the north of England, kept as it would have looked in the 1900s, which is roughly the period David McEwen was working on Conness Street.

The National Trust looks after Dow's now, and opens the door on Fridays and Saturdays, ten in the morning until two in the afternoon. It is not a large room. It does not need to be.

We are further along the same street and we open at seven, which is three hours before the pharmacy does. If you are coming through on a Friday or a Saturday to see it, call in on the way past. Daniel has the oven on by three, so the loaves are out and cooling by the time we unlock the door.