Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge (36 page)

I wish dear fellow you were well enough to come to America with me this autumn. Albert [Lord Ashfield], as you know, seems much improved after treatment in France. So, of the Three Musketeers, when Albert gets in good shape, two of us will pull you around and we will again be ready for the fray. Your friend, Harry.

Selfridge always attended funerals, wrote kindly letters to widows and sent flowers and fruit to the sick. He even visited an incurably ill retiree every week to play a game of cards. The store and its staff meant everything to him. Walking the vast acreage with Williams a few months earlier, the Chief said poignantly: ‘This is our life, without it we are nothing.’

Children pouring on to the store roof for the arrival of Father Christmas that year were enchanted when he flew into town in his own aeroplane, triumphantly making a low loop-the-loop above them. Just a few minutes later, as if by magic, he appeared in a vast motor sleigh, riding up Oxford Street waving a star-spangled banner, and bringing the traffic to a standstill. By the time he emerged with his sack from a faux chimney built on the roof, the mesmerized youngsters were beside themselves with excitement. The performance, honed to perfection over the years, ran like a well-oiled machine. It was all very charming – not to mention profitable – and was repeated, albeit less elaborately, in all the Selfridge group stores. Usually, the Chief himself attended many of these performances, but this year he was confined to bed after an accident in which a fire-engine crushed his Rolls-Royce. He therefore missed a visit to Jones Brothers in Holloway. It was probably just as well. That year, Father Christmas ran amok, swinging his fists instead of his sack, and started to beat the children over the head.

The panic in the toy department at Jones Brothers was nothing to
that in the display department at Selfridge’s where ornate banners, hand-embroidered in gold thread with the insignia of the new King, had been arriving from specialist workshops charged with the task of producing perfection. The trouble was no one knew what to do with them.

On 3 December Wallis Simpson had awoken to find her photograph emblazoned across the front pages of every newspaper in England. People were aghast. Was
this
the woman their King wanted to marry? The press had worked hard to create an image of a blue-eyed Prince Charming. Now, led by the implacable
Times
Editor Geoffrey Dawson, they set about destroying him. They also set about destroying Wallis Simpson. On 10 December, after weeks of speculation and frenzied press reports, the King abdicated. Angry protestors stoned Wallis’s house in Cumberland Terrace while she frantically packed her suitcases and trunks. That evening, under the cover of darkness, the trunks were transported to Selfridge’s where Ernest Winn supervised their stacking in a corner of the dispatch department. Recalling that curious moment of history in the making, he later said: ‘We were told to keep things quiet and not tell anyone what we had in Despatch … some special people were coming to collect it in a few hours. As we were roping it all up, some of the messenger boys were unhappy. It wasn’t so hard to understand … we didn’t want to lose our King. When we’d finished with Mrs Simpson’s luggage we just stared at each other sadly.’

Harry Selfridge spent a miserable Christmas, comforted only by his faithful pug dogs and attended by his dutiful daughter Rosalie who, along with Serge and Tatiana, was also living in Brook House. Mr Priestley, his favoured barber from the store, came over each morning at 9.00 a.m. to shave him, Rosalie slipping him 5 shillings on his way out. He didn’t even have Marcelle Rogez for company. She had been cast in the British-made musical
Big Fella
and was now busy filming with Paul Robeson.

At the store, the Coronation decorations had to be changed. Out went the insignia of King Edward VIII and in came those of King
George VI and Queen Elizabeth. Carved panels celebrated England’s history since the Roman invasion and the exploits of national heroes such as Drake, Clive and Wolfe. Selfridge believed passionately that the Coronation would be ‘the event of all times’ to lift London out of its gloom, and the decorations took on an almost mystical meaning for him. Supremely confident that hundreds of thousands of people would flock into town, all of them keen to buy new clothes and souvenirs, he restocked the store and hired extra display staff. The resident architect Albert Miller, the sculptor Sir William Reid Dick and Professor Ernest Stern – a Romanian film production designer with a
tendre
for gilded opulence – created the most extraordinary scheme that Oxford Street had ever seen. Selfridge’s became the most decorated building in Britain.

Harry had spent a colossal £50,000 on the pageantry, but not everyone appreciated the result. E. M. Forster wrote scathingly in the
New Statesman
, ‘The decorations reminded me of nothing so much as a vulgar old woman, who has trotted out every scrap of her finery for an unaccustomed airing,’ while
Punch
, playing on the ‘more royal than the royals’ décor, ran a cartoon showing a policeman telling an elderly lady: ‘No Madam, I understand Mr Selfridge will not be appearing on his balcony tonight.’

Hundreds of thousands did visit London and many of them blocked Oxford Street to gaze in awe at the store. But they didn’t spend their money. Takings were nowhere near expectations. Perhaps hurt by the insults hurled at Wallis, the Americans simply didn’t come, and the British weren’t in the mood to buy – it was almost as if they were grieving at having been rejected by the man they had idolized. For a while at least, his brother was simply second-best. It took six weeks to dismantle the finery, which was packed away and stored in the sub-basement. Selfridge himself remained tight-lipped, while Mr Holmes was infuriated by the cost of it all. The two men were now barely speaking to each other.

That same month, Harry Gordon Selfridge became a naturalized British citizen. Some said it was because he hoped for an honour
in the King’s Coronation list; others murmured about new, onerous American taxes imposed on Americans living abroad. Those closest to him knew it was simply because he wanted to become British. He wrote proudly to his friend Blumenfeld: ‘It is 31 years next Sunday since I came to London. Now I will be a true Briton and now I shall have to try to begin to act like a gentleman. As ever, Gordon.’

He had, of course, always behaved as a gentleman – never more so than in 1927 when he had promised a little old lady that Whiteley’s would pay a guaranteed 25 per cent dividend for the next fifteen years. His promise had cost him dear. A decade later, the annual figure had reached £500,000. Profits were down. People were beginning to worry about the prospect of war. As the share price of the Gordon Selfridge Trust and Selfridge Provincial Stores Ltd declined,
The Economist
wrote: ‘Selfridge Group prospects have occasioned special concern.’ Harry went to America, ostensibly to launch the publication of his now famous ‘Callisthenes’ column in the
New York Herald Tribune
but also to see bankers. His old friend Jules Bache was uncharacteristically gloomy about trading prospects, and Elizabeth Arden, with whom he lunched, was visibly moved by his dilemma, writing immediately to her London manager, ‘It’s a shame to see him so worried, we must give him every help possible.’

Back in London, he placed advertisements that declared: ‘There will be no slump. Let us kill the whole depressing idea by laughing it off.’ Yet he knew, better than anyone, that price was a powerful persuader. Throughout the country, customers were flocking to Marks & Spencer who, since they had registered their St Michael trademark in 1928, had moved rapidly to capture the hearts and minds of middle-market shoppers with their ‘quality and value’ offerings. The chain now sold food, and some stores even had cafés. In a move that caused some annoyance at Selfridge’s, Simon Marks attracted a lot of publicity by launching a swathe of ‘staff benefits’ which included subsidized canteens, health and dental services, hairdressing, rest rooms and even camping holidays – all of which Selfridge’s had been offering since the day the store opened, except perhaps the camping:
Selfridge’s staff preferred the company’s skiing holidays. One thing the mighty Marks & Spencer did offer, however, was a staff pension scheme. Selfridge had never believed in compulsory pensions, feeling people should save for themselves. Regrettably, he hadn’t practised what he’d preached.

In the meantime he raised the bar by opening an even bigger bargain business, located in the store’s empty property across the street, calling it ‘John Thrifty’. It offered service with a smile, though customers had to carry their own shopping home. Staff still observed the store’s rules: no customer was called ‘Miss’ or ‘Dear’, and staff themselves were called ‘assistants’. They were told to ‘walk tall’ through the floors, encouraged to attend the long-established courses in ‘Voice Culture and Personal Magnetism’ and, as always, urged to give ‘the utmost attention to the care of hair and hands’. The staff still loved the Chief. While newcomers didn’t quite share the evangelical zeal of their older colleagues, their affection for their mentor was tangible.

Harry still gambled, but his days as casino king were over. In the spring of 1938, he went back to Deauville with Marcelle, only to find he wasn’t welcome. In refusing him credit, Nicolas Zographos was in fact doing his one-time high-roller a huge favour. Harry could no longer afford to lose. He never went back, confining his gaming to poker, playing with his monogrammed cards and mother-of-pearl chips. He was visibly moved by the news of Suzanne Lenglen’s death in July from pernicious anaemia at the age of only 39. That summer, he rented the Duke of Devonshire’s seaside villa, Compton Place at Eastbourne, and summoned his children and grandchildren for what would, in effect, be their last luxury holiday spent together. Gordon Jr’s four children were not among the house party, and neither was his wife. Selfridge still refused to acknowledge them and Gordon Jr was still happy to hide them away. Tatiana Wiasemsky was now 18, Violette’s son Blaise was 15 and her daughter Jacqueline 5. It was the last family holiday Violette and Jacques de Sibour would spend together. Their already fractured marriage broke apart soon
after, leading to divorce. Beatrice fared no better in her marriage to Jacques’s brother Louis. Two years later, they too divorced. At the end of the year, Harry’s Christmas card showed a picture of his cherished ‘celebrity window’, the latest diamond-tipped signature being that of the Oscar-winning film director Frank Capra, who had visited the store while in London to promote his latest movie
You Can’t Take It with You.

In 1939, with his unerring eye for a brilliant idea, Selfridge launched a ground-breaking television department with a major in-store exhibition. Convinced of the power of television, for years he had enthused about the latest technology: ‘Television is here – You can’t shut your eyes to it!’ ran his advertisements in the London and national press. The store offered the most comprehensive range ever put together in the new business of broadcasting, showing many models two months before they were exhibited at the New York World Fair, including those by Pye, Cossor, G. E. C. Ferranti, Marconiphone, Baird, His Master’s Voice and Ekco. The seductive sets were priced from 23 guineas and, for those on a budget but who couldn’t resist temptation, Selfridge’s offered their own hire purchase terms.

As always with Selfridge’s, it wasn’t just about selling television sets but also about education and in-store entertainment. The store invested £20,000 in setting up a fully operational studio in the Palm Court which, in conjunction with the BBC, ran a live studio facility where visitors could see celebrities being filmed and, most appealing of all, where they could enter competitions to appear on screen themselves. Dancers, singers and comedians were encouraged to apply for a screen test, while eager mothers queued up to enter their daughters for children’s dance contests. Fashion shows introduced by Gordon Jr were screened on fifty television receivers strategically placed throughout the store that broadcast at 11.00 a.m. each day. There were even make-up demonstrations to show how to eliminate shine before facing the camera. The Chief had thought of everything.

Selfridge’s had earned a unique place in retail history in championing television ever since Baird’s pioneering demonstration in 1925,
but nothing could have prepared the public for the excitement of seeing themselves on screen. Thousands of visitors poured into the Palm Court, scrambling to be part of the excitement. Yet curiously the media coverage was lacklustre. Only
The Times
got the point of it all, but even then merely reported that ‘the Exhibition was an interesting and, indeed, exciting occasion’. Sadly for Harry Selfridge, the excitement was short-lived. On the outbreak of war in September, the BBC ceased transmission. Manufacturers’ skills were redirected towards weapons of war, and broadcasting wouldn’t resume until June 1946.

Selfridge was among the many who knew war was inevitable. On his frequent trips to Germany where the store had long maintained a buying office, he witnessed at first hand Germany’s ruthless persecution of the Jews. Sensitive towards their plight, and with many Jewish friends of his own as well as customers who used the Kosher food department and the Hebrew section of the book department, he wanted to do something to help. Throughout the spring of 1939, he devoted dozens of ‘Callisthenes’ columns to the topic of ‘What Refugees Can Do for England’, being particularly supportive of German Jews seeking a safe haven.

At Brighton Technical College, in a hall so crowded that loudspeakers had to be rigged up outside for the overflow, he gave a talk to students, explaining that ‘much intelligent work is being done under the dictators Hitler and Mussolini and unless we of the democracies are going to do the same amount of work and use the same effort and intelligence, we are going to be beaten’. The young students were enthralled, the local
Argus
reporting that ‘they cheered and applauded until it echoed around the hall’.

Selfridge received another remarkable ovation at the shareholders’ meeting, despite the fact that he owed the store over £100,000 and the board’s announcement that no dividend would be paid on ordinary shares. One colleague said he ‘positively glowed with faith in the future’, while a reporter remarked that ‘he didn’t look a day over sixty’ – cheering news for a man who was now 83. Having finally
been invited to Hollywood, Marcelle Rogez left London that year. Now Harry was, and would remain, alone.