Truro sex shop founder Edward Braxton Reynolds dies aged 82

When Truro Magistrates’ court was told by the defendant in a sex shop licensing hearing that he would be unable to make revised court dates because he would be giving evidence as an expert witness in two different trials, District Judge Nigel Cadbury was sceptical.

A letter was duly sent to the Office for Judicial Complaints along with a three-page CV outlining Braxton Reynolds’s expertise as a consulting chemist, past president of the Association of Public Analysts (APA), and former public and agricultural analyst for the Counties of Devon and Cornwall, as well as many other positions of public standing, not normally associated with the world of erotica.

READ NEXT:

• From the archive: Truro sex shop bid angers shopkeepers

It came as no surprise to those who knew the litigant, that the judge never sat on future hearings involving Mrs Palm Limited, the risquély named marital aides emporium which had opened to much furore in the Cornish city nearly three years earlier.

In many ways ownership of Mrs Palm, perfectly demonstrated the contradiction that was Brax, as he was fondly called by friends.

For while on the one hand he was a highly-regarded applied scientist, a fierce defender of public analyst service in the face of cost-cutting measures, one who was regularly called upon to offer expert evidence in both court and parliamentary committees and attend European conferences on matters of additives in foods and consumer goods; on the other he was a mischief-maker who enjoyed nothing more than tweaking the noses of those he regarded as pompous.

Though it must be said that in opening Truro’s first sex shop in semi-retirement he took his unconventional outlook to a new level upsetting Methodists, moral campaigners, city and county councillors, local shopkeepers, as well as the Cornish bench. But convention was never Reynolds’s style, he was a man who revelled in being an outsider and who enjoyed nothing more than cultivating his eccentricities, which grew as he aged.

However, much of this may have been to mask his sadness that he never had a family of his own. Indeed, shortly before his death he lamented: “My greatest disappointment was that I never did my duty to pass on my parents’ genes to the next generation.”

Edward Braxton Reynolds BSc (Hons) Chemistry, MChemA, CChem, MRSC, was born in Exeter, Devon, in 1940, the only son of Phyllis and her husband Dr Cedric Victor Reynolds BSc, PhD, FRIC, a partner in Tickle and Reynolds the public analysts for Exeter and Devon. His parents first met at Exeter public laboratory in 1928, where Phyllis Mary Johnson had been working as a secretary for five years, she left her job when they married in 1933.

Dr Reynolds was not called up to serve during the Second World War, as his position was a reserved occupation. When he was a little over a year old, Phyllis contracted Diphtheria and spent almost a year on an isolation ward. Her infant boy was sent to his maternal grandmother to be looked after.

Edward Braxton Reynolds (Image: Supplied)

READ NEXT:

• Letter: Sex shop go-ahead ignores the wishes of local people

The experience was so traumatic that it left him with deep mental scars that stayed with him for the rest of his life. He later explained that after that time he found intimacy difficult and he did not like to be touched, a condition which meant that relationships in adulthood quickly withered on the vine.

He was educated at Rosary House School in Heavitree before attending the preparatory school and then Exeter School, where he was one of the shooting eight. He read Chemistry at University College in London where his father had studied more than three decades earlier, winning two gold medals in his final year.

By his own admission, Reynolds junior was not the best of students achieving “a very undistinguished degree” having been left unenthused by the lecturers who “wanted the chemistry to be pure and not applied”. Despite this he soon found a junior position with Messrs Moir and Palgrave, a laboratory based in Southwark Street, London. Donald Moir, had been one of Thomas Tickle’s assistants in the early thirties.

The appointment gave him a grounding in the application of chemical analysis in a public analyst laboratory, and three years later Reynolds returned to Exeter to work alongside his father. It was during this time that he was studying for his Mastership in Chemical Analysis (MChemA), which he sat in 1973.

Unusually, he passed at first presentation, and qualified as a public analyst was immediately appointed public analyst, official agricultural analyst and scientific advisor for Devon and later in the same year for Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. His father immediately stepped down as senior partner and became his son’s deputy.

As a member of the APA, he attended British Standards Institution (BSI) meetings on issues of foods, food additives, food packaging, also toys and consumer durables and that meant attending committees of The Food and Agriculture Organisation/World Health Organisation (FAO/WHO) responsible for setting international standards, including the Codex Committee for Methods of Analysis and Sampling, helping to speed up the importation and exportation of perishable foods.

He also led on sweeteners in food, because of concerns about the additives widely used outside of Europe.

In 1998 he was elected APA President, during which time he gave evidence to the House of Commons Committee on Food Standards. Reynolds appeared less bothered about answering the members’ enquiries than ensuring that they asked the right ones, helpfully supplying 66 questions that he thought the committee should be asking.

He believed that this act so infuriated officials at MAFF, that they blocked an appointment for him to chair a working party on chemicals and pharmaceuticals present in meat, a few months later.

It was during these meetings he said that he realised how much science was respected abroad and not in the UK, he complained: “This country in my experience had been badly administered, badly led, and, as a result, disadvantaged.”

In 2010, at the age of 69, Reynolds embarked on a new venture, by opening Cornwall’s only sex shop with business partner Nicola Hewitt in a small parade of shops in Truro city centre. Among his most prominent of opponents was local councillor Armorel Carlyon, and the Christian Institute.

READ NEXT:

• From the archive: The Skipper: Sex? You need it, I need it, many people need it.

Acting as his own counsel, Reynolds deployed years of courtroom experience as an expert witness dealing with difficult barristers to make his case. His arguments were wide-ranging from the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1982, Mary Whitehouse and the permissive society, and Gilbert and Sullivan among other topics.

The vote was unanimous in his favour. Being granted the licence was, however, only half the battle. Protracted efforts by the Christian Institute (which at one stage hired a private detective in an attempt to get them to trade outside of its licensed hours) to get the shop closed down, resulted in years of legal battles, in which Reynolds defending himself through the courts and won every legal argument.

For more than 40 years he was a regular at Exeter’s Sunday morning market, as well as auction houses around the city, and on eBay. He left a collection of 120,000 books, analytical records of private water sources in Devon and Cornwall dating from 1900 to the present day, and many projects half-completed or waiting to be started, among much else. He leaves his beloved Jack Russell, Claude.

Edward Braxton Reynolds was born December 20, 1940. He died from complications from mesothelioma on May 31, 2023, aged 82.

His funeral takes place at 10:30am Heavitree Parish Church, Exeter, on Friday, June 30.