The Buttercup Dairy Company

This is the tiled entrance to the Buttercup Dairy Company's shop in Innerleithen. The tiles date from around 1900 and were made by Glasgow based James Duncan Ltd, Tile and Marble Contractors (the main firm in Glasgow supplying and fitting encaustic tiles between 1865 and 1965).

The Buttercup Dairy Company was founded in 1904 by a young Scottish entrepreneur Andrew Ewing. At its peak in 1930, the company had 250 shops all over Scotland and the north of England. It went into decline in the late 1940s and the last Buttercup shop closed in Edinburgh in 1965.

The shops were all decorated in the same style -predominantly green and white tiles with ornamental inserts. The centrepiece was a mural located on the wall of the entrance lobby; it showed a little girl in a sunbonnet holding a buttercup under the chin of a cow. The shops also had stained glass above the main display window and, outside, a pair of electric light globes hung from each shop front, emblazoned with the word "Butter".

Its founder would quietly give away a fortune in his desire to die a poor man. This included the donation of 100,000 eggs a week to local hospitals and charities. It is also said that during the depression years of the early 1930s, many a person would also find a small packet slipped into their pocket, containing half a pound of butter or some rashers of bacon.

Good enlarged - you can see more of the detail in the tiles.