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The Sweeny Tale
The first Sweeny salon opened in 1970, it was in an arcade off the moor opposite Cambridge Street. formerly called John Fanthoms, who was a famous Sheffield Wednesday footballer.
Myself and Glynn Rowbotham started Sweeny's originally the Sweeny name was thought up between myself and Glynn, and I remember it was a very windy day and it was blowing a gale down the arcade, we had arranged for a sign writer to come and paint over the John Fanthom name and put the new Sweeey's name above the salon, when the signwriter had finished we decided it needed another coat of paint on to make it stand out better, we waited for the signwriter to arrive but he never turned up.. so we actually got the name for free!
Sweeny's ended up being a very busy Barbershop with big posters on the wall of motorcycle choppers and famous models and we played all the top chart music on our cartridge player.
I think the price of a hair cut was about 8 shillings then...thats about 40p in todays money!
Most of the old fashioned barbers were closing through lack of trade but we were on fire..we were young and had long hair then and thats probably the reason we were soo busy.
After about 3 years we recieved notice from the council that they were going to redevelop the Arcade and we had to find somewhere else to trade, we were understandably very upset but in the end it turned out to be the best thing that had happened to us.
We found a Unisex hairdressers as they were called then, called His Hair in Exchange Street on the Gallery upstairs, owned by John O' Harah a famous Sheffield musician, we bought it at a very reasonable price and changed the name to Sweeny's we were joined by our best friend Aldo Modoni to form a three man partnership,and the shop went from strength to strength, Sweeny's was the place to have your haircut, after a few months we thought we would try our hand at ladies styling and we opened up the upstairs of the salon to show a gallery for our ladies department, which proved to be a good move and the salons atmosphere was very laid back, happy, but professional.
During our time on The Gallery we had quite a few competition success stories, Gary Swales started at Sweeny 1 and within a few months was up to a standard where he beat all to win the the main mens competition in Sheffield!
After a couple of years we found a shop at Intake we bought the property and opened it as Sweeny 2, we used to take turns at running it. It had a self contained flat above which we rented out, so far so good.
Thinking we could do even better we found an empty shop on Ecclesall Road, it took a while to get it decorated to our liking but it looked the business we thought a good name for it would be Sweeny 4 Men, when we finished it, it was decided that I should run it.
With things looking good we thought we shoud look for some more salons to open, we found a couple of empty shops one at Millhouses and one at Hillsborough, we opend them both with a week of each other, first was Bogarts at Hillsborough.We had quite a lot of our famous client friends to the openings, Emlyn Hughes cut the ribbon to Sweeny 5 which was at Millhouses, we had two sports cars deivered during the opening I had a red Mazda RX7, Aldo had a black one
After a couple of years we all had a few personal problems and decided to split the partnership and go our own ways, I kept Sweeny 4 and Sweeny 3 and Bogarts, Aldo had Sweeny 5 and Sweeny 2 and Glynn had Sweeny 1 as it later became known.
Sweeny 3 became less busy so Ithought I would change it into a mens clothes shop! I called JAZZ it went well for a year..we had clothes shows at various nightclubs, but it trade eventually went down, so I turned into a hair salon again and kept the name Jazz, and eventually sold it, its now a sandwich shop called 282!
Thats all folks
P.S. Any person that has worked for us that would like to get in touch please send a picture and your name, lets see if we can ad a bit of interest to the site
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History
