Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge (33 page)

Weekends were spent at the Prince’s newly acquired bolt-hole, Fort Belvedere in Great Windsor Park, where for the first time in his life, he felt truly at home. The Fort was
his
house, not a royal house, and he later admitted to ‘loving it like no other material thing’. Thelma Furness loved it too, helping him decorate and working with her lover in the gardens, hacking down overgrown laurels. She claimed to have ‘introduced him to the proper delights of Christmas’, finding a twelve-foot Christmas tree and shopping at Selfridge’s for the baubles: ‘Being American they had absolutely the best decorations.’ Christmas at Selfridge’s was an opulent and emotional affair. The store was decorated throughout and smelt of cinnamon and spices, choirs sang carols, and the staff usually received a bonus along with an ornate card from the Chief.

Thelma also took charge of the Prince’s Christmas shopping, buying dozens of presents for his servants and senior staff. Many of them were bought at Selfridge’s where the store superintendent, the ever-patient Mr Peters, would escort her around the departments. The ritual went on for several years, the only change being that in due course Lady Furness was replaced by Mrs Simpson. Mr Peters liked Wallis Simpson – ‘I found her a very charming lady’ – and admitted that they became quite friendly. As the efficient and apparently thrifty Wallis spent three days tackling the task, pen in hand, ticking off items from her lists, he certainly had time to get to know her. Since she lived for a time in Bryanston Square, and later in Cumberland Terrace, Selfridge’s was her local shop and Selfridge himself issued instructions that she was to be well looked after.

There was very little the store didn’t sell. If something wasn’t in stock, someone went out that day to source it. Selfridge’s blended tobacco, allocating a special number for repeat orders. In the
cloakrooms, attendants polished shoes, changed laces and sewed on buttons – all free of charge. There was a philatelic department so fine it would have impressed even the King. The travel bureau booked journeys by train, boat and plane, organized hotels and even arranged for luggage to be sent on ahead to await its owner’s arrival. The information centre answered the most obscure of queries. The store stored, shipped, dry-cleaned and mended customer’s clothes, shoes and soft furnishings. Virtually anything could still be made to measure. The switchboard dealt with 40,000 calls a day, and delivery vans covered a million miles a year.

In 1929, invitations went out for the 30 May General Election night party. For the first time, women under 30 were able to vote. Ironically, it was the hated Home Secretary William Joynson-Hicks who had made that possible when, a year or so earlier, in a sparsely attended evening session, he had agreed to a Private Member’s Bill that committed the Conservative Party to enfranchising ‘men and women on the same terms’. His deed came back to haunt him when, through what came to be known as ‘the flapper vote’, the Conservatives lost the election. In fairness to the Home Secretary, bigger political issues than his fixation with nightclubs influenced the public. With high unemployment, recriminations about the General Strike, rising prices and, for the first time, a genuine three-party fight between Lloyd George’s Liberals, Ramsay MacDonald’s Socialists and Stanley Baldwin’s Conservatives, it was a tough election.

The election-night party at the store was a wonderful affair. Arnold Bennett arrived early, stayed late and described it all in a letter to his nephew:

There must have been 2,000 people at that show. There was plenty of room for them, plenty of loudspeakers, two bands and as much Cordon Rouge as the entire 2,000 could drink, besides solid sit-down suppers for all who wanted it. I wanted it. The whole affair was magnificently organised.

Bennett, a socialist, had real cause to celebrate that night. The cartoonist David Low, however, caught glum faces with his pen, and one observer, watching the huge crowds dancing and drinking, reflected as much on the decline in manners as on the loss of Tory seats when he said: ‘It is the end of an age. Our World is going out.’ Propped up by the Liberals, Ramsay MacDonald returned to No. 10, little realizing what he would soon have to face.

Times were changing fast. What had been modern was suddenly becoming obsolete. As always, film and fashion led the way. Hollywood studios fitted sound stages and dozens of panicking movie stars were sent for voice tests. Many failed. You could take a beauty out of Brooklyn, but even MGM’s magic couldn’t take Brooklyn out of her voice. Household names vanished overnight and a whole new generation of mellow-toned movie stars filled the screen. In Paris, women wearing short skirts fidgeted in their seats at Patou’s show when the designer – who among other celebrities dressed the Dollies and Suzanne Lenglen – launched his longer lengths. Madelaine Vionnet had already introduced her stunning, bias-cut evening gowns – deceptively simple slivers of charmeuse – which, eagerly adopted by Hollywood costume designers, became the quintessential look of the decade to come. For the first time ever, couture collections featured
sportif
daywear. Hermès launched its signature headscarf, and along every smart coastal promenade – to the confusion of many a maître d’hôtel struggling to uphold a dress code – women took to wearing beach pyjamas. As the androgynous, cropped-haired girl of the 1920s evolved into the soignée, sophisticated woman of the 1930s, many mourned her passing. The flapper had, after all, been great fun.

As if signalling the financial catastrophe to come, in September 1929 the police arrested Clarence Hatry, whose business empire – reported to have been worth over £10 million – turned out to have been built on shifting sands. News of the financier’s disgrace echoed across the Atlantic, where the Dow Jones – having hit an-all time high – shuddered and fell back. Hatry had been massaging the company books for some time, but now he was caught issuing forged stock
certificates. Remanded in Brixton and refused bail, he was sentenced to fourteen years’ imprisonment. Some financial analysts predicted the end of the great bull market. Others ignored the warnings at their peril. In October 1929, Wall Street was swimming in debt. By the 29th, it had collapsed and $9 billion dollars was wiped off the stock market in a matter of hours. The impact in America and Europe was not felt by consumers for some months, but major retailers and manufacturers, already jittery about reduced spending patterns, were worried, and with reason. Recession would soon turn into the Great Depression.

In London, the hedonistic lifestyle of the young and carelessly rich came to an end. As if a portent of the misery to come, the winter of 1929 was one of the coldest in history. Hundreds of people died and Kate ‘Ma’ Meyrick, incarcerated in a freezing Holloway prison cell, developed chronic pneumonia. Selfridge himself refused to panic. He’d lived through enough recessions in America to know what people wanted in time of crisis – on the one hand a bargain and, on the other, a little luxury. The display manager Leslie le Voi was briefed to make the window themes ever more exotic and exciting, featuring everything from newly installed city traffic lights to the world’s first television set, Baird’s ‘televisor’. In February 1930, the store announced record figures, with pre-tax profits of £480,000. Eternally optimistic, Selfridge told
Business
magazine, ‘Business is still largely what you make it. By reiterating that business is bad, people hypnotize themselves into a state of apathy. We broke all our past records in fifty-nine departments during October, and almost as many in November. New methods of selling, new channels of distribution, new ways of advertising are transforming our performance.’

By now, mark-downs weren’t just on offer in the Bargain Basement but were promoted throughout the store on separate eye-catching ‘Bargain Tables’. The tables – tidied by the hour – were never allowed to get tatty. Goods purchased from them were wrapped and tied with the exclusive ‘Selfridge knot’ just as though they had been bought at full price: those who bought for less were never made to feel cheap. One
manager exclusively controlled the reduced stock offerings, coping with what Selfridge himself called ‘the peculiar problems of merchandising bargains in every department outside of the traditional sale-time’. The store came of age in March with twenty-first birthday celebrations. Decca records pressed a souvenir disc of massed bands playing ‘The March of the Gladiators’, while the Chief’s gift from his loyal troops was an impressive bronze plaque in his honour, set into the pavement in the main entrance loggia. Worn thin by the footfall, rarely noticed by people pushing to enter the great doors, the plaque is still there, its quasi-religious inscription echoing that of Zola’s ‘great cathedrals’:

Laid by members of this store in admiration of him
who conceived and gave it being
1909–1930

The store might be 21, but no one, not even his children, really knew how old Harry Selfridge was. ‘I don’t want to rest,’ he said when asked about retirement, ‘I want to go on – and on – and on!’

Showing a younger man’s enthusiasm for technology – especially aviation – he applauded Amy Johnson at the dinner hosted in her honour by the Hon. Esmond Harmsworth of the
Daily Mail
to celebrate her epic flight to Australia. Selfridge’s was by now inexorably linked with aviation, swiftly negotiating rights to display Amy’s green De Havilland Moth first in Oxford Street and then at their key provincial outpost, Cole Brothers in Sheffield. The store even launched its own aviation department, where keen customers could not merely order a bespoke aeroplane – not to mention the wardrobe to wear when flying it – but take lessons on a flight simulator operated by trained pilots. Studying the feasibility of an autogyro landing-space on the roof, Selfridge commented: ‘This is the way the rich will want to come shopping.’ For sheer glamour, flying was hard to beat. Lady Heath flew from the Cape to Croydon, as did Lady Bailey, while the redoubtable 64-year-old Duchess of Bedford set off for the Cape in her tiny Spider, saying it ‘helped her tinnitus’.

Flight, whether solo or piloted, wasn’t without very real danger. In July 1930, an air taxi carrying the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava, the society hostess Lady Ednam and three others returning from a weekend at Le Touquet, crashed. Broken bits of fuselage – not to mention broken bodies – scattered over a Kent cherry orchard. Reporting the accident, the media showed especial interest in jewels worth £65,000 that were lost in the crash. In October, the giant R101 airship came down, killing Lord Thomson, the Government’s Minister for Air, along with forty-five other passengers. Four years later, the by then seasoned pilot, the ‘Flying Duchess’ of Bedford, took off from Norfolk and was lost at sea.

Harry’s daughter Violette and her air-ace husband had flown from Stag Lane aerodrome in 1928 on an adventure to hunt big game, circumnavigating the world in their Moth,
Safari II
. Ignoring the challenges of such an epic journey, the
Daily Mail
excitedly reported that ‘Violette Selfridge will fly wearing trousers’. She also packed a lace evening gown and twelve pairs of silk stockings in her luggage – hunting guns and fishing tackle being conveniently shipped ahead by the store.

Violette and her husband returned safely, but her brother Gordon Jr was less fortunate, crashing his Moth into a tree. Apart from a few bruises, only his pride was hurt, but his father insisted he get rid of the plane, putting it up for sale in the store aviation department where it was snapped up for £450 by a young man called Oscar Garden. After just twenty hours of tuition, Mr Garden headed for home – in New Zealand. Selfridge devoted a ‘Callisthenes’ column to the very modest Mr Garden’s amazing achievement, telling awed readers that after a hair-raising journey via Syria and India, he landed safely in Western Australia before crossing to Sydney, thereafter shipping his rather bruised and battered Moth home to Christchurch. By the middle of the decade, however, the adventures of the lone aviator were coming to a close. The rickety, reckless charm of the ‘string and sticks’ light aeroplane had had its day. In 1936, Selfridge’s advertised their aviation department was selling: ‘
The Jubilee Monospar’ – Britain’s first complete
aeroplane and priced at £1,750.00
.’ This erstwhile rich man’s toy was a five-seater, twin-engine aircraft, the model of which would soon be developed to play its part in the war.

Retailing of a different kind was preoccupying Harry Selfridge. Jenny Dolly had opened a lingerie shop on the Champs-Elysées in Paris. This was no ordinary boutique but rather an astonishing blend of boudoir brash, glitz and glamour. Pink-gilt bedroom furniture created by the designer and artist Jean-Gabriel Domergue included a mirrored bed considered glamorous enough even for Jenny who, according to
Variety,
‘knew a thing or two about beds’. Exquisitely embroidered bed-linen was said to have ‘kept a couple of convents working for months’, while the display of intimate apparel – wispy pieces of black chiffon, silk stockings and a fine selection of jewelled garter belts – was ‘enough to make you think sinful thoughts’. Harry was seen beaming broadly at the opening night party, while the guests sipped gin slings and dunked salt crackers in caviar, and Selfridge’s star mannequin, Gloria, wafted through in silks, satin and lace, a chinchilla coat casually flung over her shoulders, and Jenny’s fabled black pearls, once owned by Gaby Deslys, round her neck.

‘Glorious Gloria’, as the press called her, had been under contract to Selfridge’s for four years. The most successful commercial model of her era and the original catwalk star, she was the first ‘Ovaltine Girl’, and her image was printed on posters and postcards throughout the country. When Gloria appeared in the Palm Court fashion shows, she caused a sensation, not least because when she posed, smothered in jewels and furs, the press office would hire bodyguards for her photo-calls – as much to protect her as what she was wearing. Among the staff it was rumoured that she had an affair with the Chief. They were certainly close, and as ‘the face of the store’ she accompanied him at dozens of events, everything from air-shows to premieres. Whatever their earlier relationship, however, in the early 1930s they were simply good friends. Besotted by Jenny Dolly, however cruel, casual or calculating she might be, Harry always came back begging for more.