CELEBRATING 90 YEARS

CELEBRATING 90 YEARS

You may or may not know that JRW CA was formed from the merger of two long established local accountancy firms, The James Rosie Partnership and Welch & Co.

In fact Welch & Co were established exactly ninety years ago last month (October 2014), the first office was in Hawick’s Sandbed before moving to the High Street then to the Buccleuch Street premises in Hawick where JRW still operate one of their offices from today.

Founding Partner John J Welch who started Welch & Co here in Hawick back in 1924 must have been amazed at the amount of change he saw over the years. To put this into context, in the year that the business was first established Ramsay Macdonald was the first ever Labour Prime Minister, British runners Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell were winning  gold medals at the Olympic Games in Paris and John Logie Baird from Helensburgh was sending rudimentary television pictures!

No stranger to technology himself, John Welch was the first owner in Hawick of a Sinclair C5 electric car and he could be seen travelling around Hawick in the mid 80’s in this novel mode of transport. But if you look at how the world has changed even in the last twenty years, Mr Welch couldn’t have possibly imagined the changes that lay ahead.

While the 1990s saw computers and the internet, the last decade has seen the rise and rise of social networking sites, wifi, smartphones, Bluetooth, high speed internet, the iCloud and televisions that are thinner and more intelligent than ever. Of course the growth of business technology has changed almost every aspect of our working lives too – who knows what changes our grandchildren will see in another 90 years?

Pictured alongside Partner Kevin Crowford is Ian Welch, son of founding Partner John J Welch, who started Welch & Co here in Hawick back in 1924.