CHRIS KOENIG enters the world of one of Oxford's oldest shops, Ducker's, for some curious tales about shoes

Could such a dreadful thing as change ever set in at Oxford's oldest shoe shop, the venerable Ducker & Son in Turl Street, which this year celebrates its 108th birthday?

"Well, yes," admitted Bob Avery, the long-serving craftsman who the public do not usually meet since his workshop is in the basement, a place redolent of 19th-century quality, with its shelves of shoes from floor to ceiling and strong smell of old leather.

He confided that there had even been recent talk of the shop closing in the wake of a rent review from landlord Lincoln College, and itchy feet on the part of one of the Purves brothers who has worked at the shop for 50 years all his working life.

"But I can assure you that, despite the talk, the shop is not closing down," he added.

The shop has a curious history. The last member of the Ducker family to work there suddenly took it into his head to revisit India, where he had been posted during the war, and left the shop in the hands of the Purves family a father and two sons. He stayed away for more than 20 years.

One of those sons, Steven, said: "Derwent Palmer Ducker had been in the British India service, in ships up and down the India coast, and he wasn't really a lot of bottle in the shop.

"One day, in 1950, he set out for Cochin in south India, via Karachi, on a Lambretta. We had to look after his house and business affairs until he reappeared 20 years later. He died suddenly in Cornmarket, having just left the cinema where he had watched the film Ghandi."

The business was founded by Edward Ducker who died in 1947. He left it to his wife who died 14 days later. Thanks to death duties, its future looked in doubt so a limited company was formed, the directors and shareholders of which now include the Purves brothers and descendants of Edward Ducker through the female line.

Many customers reckon that although Duckers shoes cost more to buy than most, they last longer and are therefore a better investment.

Perhaps undergraduate Baron von Richthofen (cousin of the air ace) thought that when he bought a pair of shoes at the shop and then failed to pay the bill as he had to hurry back to Germany to fight in the the First World War. The bad debt rankled with Duckers, so when another von Richthofen was made German ambassador to Britain in the 1990s staff sent him the bill for 13s 6d (sixty seven and a half pence in new money). The ambassador turned up at the shop to pay the bill.

So what are the changes we can expect? Mr Avery explained that customers would soon be able to order on the web. Ancient and modern combines well in Oxford.

I well remember the first time I saw a laptop computer on a counter in the Bodleian Library next to a medieval chained book.