St James’s Street seems untroubled by modern concerns. It is the elegant slope that runs from flashy Piccadilly to the clear-eyed calm of monied Pall Mall. On it, one might buy medieval jewellery or a Fabergé egg, invest in bullion, buy hunting supplies. But it is also somewhere to smoke. One shop looks more like the bar of a grand ocean liner, with its wood panelling the colour of rum and its hanging brass lights. Inside, the air smells of cedar wood and tobacco leaf, and customers and staff talk in quiet murmurs. This is James J. Fox, a cigar merchant that’s stood here since 1787.
Nobody calls it James J. Fox, though — it’s JJ Fox. Before 1992, however, it was Robert Lewis. The history of JJ Fox takes in two businesses: Lewis, the original shop, and James J Fox, which bought the place out in 1992. The Fox family is no newcomer: their business has been going since it was founded in Dublin in 1881, first opening in London on Old Bond Street in 1947, before taking over the cigar departments in Selfridges and Harrods. This growth was driven by Freddie Fox, who came to head the firm under the shadow of tragedy: in 1926, his brother Stanley was murdered by thieves suspected of having IRA ties. In 1942, his other brother Ronald went missing while on an RAF mission. Freddie’s successes and the network of contacts he’d fostered meant that by 1992, two years after he died, his family name meant more to cigar smokers than the Lewis one. And so the name was changed.
