Like many businesses, commercial survival meant a string of partnerships, corporate takeovers, and dissolutions. This legal instrument records the amicable severing of the partnership between Thomas Gregory Gutch and Charles Cox which commenced 1 January 1870. Both were talented book workers in their own right, but needed to diversify and periodically realise liquidity given the capital tied up in machinery and plant. Shortly after this agreement was acrioned, Cox teamed up with William Sharland, another player in the crowded Southampton market.
