Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge

by Lindy Woodhead

  Selfridge thought all his staff should be on the shop floor, but it wasn’t beer that was the problem, it was tea. Walking the floor one afternoon with the store director Percy Best, he noted that a department seemed understaffed. “Where are they?” he asked. “At tea,” came the reply. “No more tea breaks,” said Selfridge firmly, whereupon Mr. Best said, “No more staff.” Reluctantly, Selfridge gave in.

  Selfridge himself was often to be found taking tea with Lady Sackville at her bijou house in Green Street. Their friendship had endured, much to the delight of her friends, who benefited from Harry’s largesse in sending lavish food parcels to her London town house when she was entertaining. “Mr. Selfridge sent me some wonderful ice-cream sodas for dessert,” she wrote in her diary, while another entry recorded, “At last I have got Selfridge’s to import peach-fed Virginia hams, there is nothing like them.” The hams in question had made a perilous journey across the Atlantic, part of the huge amount of supplies being sent to war-torn Europe by neutral America.

  America’s continuing neutrality was intensely debated in Britain. Selfridge wrote to Harry Pratt Judson in Chicago, grumbling furiously that the “American Government was trying to please the pro-German party and to assist the astute Jews who are largely in charge of the copper business in America, to dispose of their supplies to Germany.” He went on: “The feeling exists here—unfairly perhaps—that America’s first thought is to chase the dollar.” The press was reporting that American merchants were shipping cotton, foodstuffs, and copper to Germany, a policy he found distasteful, perhaps forgetting that America, being neutral, was free to ship anything anywhere it wanted—including Virginia hams to his store.

  Pratt Judson was quick to retaliate, pointing out that the great majority of Americans sympathized with the Allies “because they believe that Germany and Austria really aim at the mastery of Europe and ultimately of the world.” However, he also pointed out that “American citizens have a perfect right to sell contraband of war to either belligerent and will do so unimpeded by the American government. Of course, they do that subject to the risk of capture and condemnation.” Whether Selfridge liked it or not, there would always be merchants involved in war profiteering. He just hated the thought that anyone might associate him with it.

  There were of course many legitimate merchants who just needed to ship their goods, among them the American Frank Woolworth. By the time war broke out, Woolworth was operating over forty branches in Britain. When the Germans invaded France, Woolworth was trapped in Paris and had to scramble to find a ship to get him home safely. For Woolworth, the war presented serious problems of supply. Much of his merchandise was sourced in Europe—particularly Christmas decorations, toys, confectionery, musical instruments, clocks, watches, and perfumes, variously made in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Russia, Belgium, and France. Woolworth’s had both German and French offices and warehouses, from which goods were sent for consolidation in Liverpool before being shipped to America. Tons of goods were now stranded in the English port, and Woolworth appealed to the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, for permission to take empty hold space in Atlantic convoys. His request was refused: if America wasn’t prepared to support the British Empire in the Great War, then Americans would have to forgo such luxuries. They didn’t have to go without for long. The enterprising Mr. Woolworth simply transferred production of all such things to America, where factory staff were trained to copy the previously imported ranges.

  The Selfridge family, holding American passports, were free to travel wherever and whenever they wanted. Harry’s wife, mother, and children went to Chicago. Harry himself went regularly to Paris and even, on one occasion, to Germany, a trip that caused endless speculation in the media. The visit was made to assess the situation at his German offices, but also in the interests of design. In March 1915, an exhibition of German goods was staged at the Goldsmiths’ Hall, under the banner of “A Proposal for the Foundation of the Design & Industries Association.” The exhibition focused on the aesthetics of goods, hitherto available from Germany, whose manufacturers had long championed industrial design. Earlier attempts by the government to encourage British manufacturers to replicate blockaded goods had failed. Examples presented at Board of Trade exhibitions were frankly shoddy. This project was different. It sought to promote excellence in design and to encourage British manufacturers to be more creative. Among the original patrons and instigators of the scheme were St. John Hornby of W. H. Smith; Fred Burridge, principal of the Central School of Art; Frank Warner, the silk manufacturer; H. G. Wells; Frank Pick of the London Underground; and H. Gordon Selfridge, all of them committed to “a more intelligent demand amongst the public for what is best and soundest in design.” Even The Times approved. “Entirely practical,” they reported, “not vaguely artistic.”

  In 1915, Gaby Deslys moved to London to prepare for her new show, a revue called Rosy Rapture. The besotted Selfridge bought her the lease of a house in Kensington Gore, filling it with expensive ephemera from the store. Hampers packed with delicacies were delivered daily by a Selfridge’s motor van, along with vast baskets of flowers. At Easter that year, he instructed the store florist to make up an Easter egg made from fresh violets—with the added twist that a live chick be put inside. Used to his eccentric requests, on this occasion the florist flatly refused, fearing the chick would die. Selfridge, who loathed confrontation, apparently backed down. Alongside flowers and furniture, Gaby got jewelry—including a sensational necklace of black pearls. When Tatler ran a feature on the star “at home,” they swooned over her “chinchilla fur bed rugs and rooms that were scented with Rigaud.”

  London suited Gaby like no other city, and Londoners adored her. As Rosy Rapture went into rehearsal, it became the talk of the town. It wasn’t just Gaby who attracted attention. The revue had been written for her by J. M. Barrie. The distinguished author of Peter Pan and The Admirable Crichton was fêted wherever he went, but he was shy and lonely. A year earlier he had become entranced by the petite, fluffy, feminine Deslys. To him, she was like a living doll—a blond, beautiful child-woman. Fascinated by the music hall, Barrie offered to write something special just for her. London’s chattering classes were agog.

  That Barrie wanted to experiment with the music hall was not surprising. In the aristocratic venues of the West End such as the Alhambra, the Empire, the Palace Theatre, and the Hippodrome; in the huge bourgeois music halls of the less fashionable boroughs such as the Hackney Empire; even in a rickety venue down a murky alleyway in the East End, the public in their thousands gathered to sing, clap, and laugh at the curious mix of comedy sketches, dancers, and chorus girls who supported the legendary leading ladies—whether Lottie Collins belting out “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay” or Marie Lloyd’s brilliant double entendre that “she’d never had her ticket punched before.” The music halls were not licensed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office and could therefore get away with risqué performances not possible in the regular theater. At the time Barrie was writing Rosy Rapture, they were also acting as recruitment centers for the army. Young lads hearing Marie Lloyd singing “I didn’t like you much before you joined the army, John, but I do like you, cockie, now you’ve got yer khaki on!” enlisted the next morning.

  Barrie’s hopes for his show were dashed. It wasn’t cheerful enough for an audience that craved humor. Despite a couple of songs from Jerome Kern and some innovative use of cinematography by Barrie, the show was a flop. Barrie didn’t attend the opening night, having just heard of his close friend Guy du Maurier’s death in action and the loss of his adopted son, George Llewelyn Davies. But Arnold Bennett was there. He wrote to Hugh Walpole: “Went to the 1st night of Barrie’s eccentricity. It was a frost & most of it extremely poor. Selfridge, the official amant of Gaby Deslys, was in a box with his family.”

  Selfridge’s family may or may not have known about the affair, but his staff most certainly did. Gaby toured the store like the diva she was, helping herself to anyth
ing she wanted, the bills, as always, being charged to “the Chief’s private account.” On one memorable day she lost her tiny pet dog and sat sobbing hysterically in Harry’s office until he sent her home and set about masterminding what his secretary called “Operation Dog.” Missing notices were posted up, the police were informed and a substantial reward was offered. The pampered pooch was eventually found.

  Barrie meanwhile, rattled by the poor reviews, had cabled his friend and mentor Charles Frohman in New York, asking him for help in putting Rosy Rapture to rights. Frohman obligingly booked a passage on the Lusitania. The ship sailed from New York on May 1, loaded with munitions for the war effort. Just off the coast of Ireland, it was torpedoed and sunk with the loss of twelve hundred lives—including that of Charles Frohman. Rosy Rapture closed at the end of the month.

  Somerset Maugham meanwhile had high hopes that his new play, completed while he was living in Rome in 1915, would be a success. He had crafted his story about an amoral, lascivious, and depraved group of rich Americans and decadent British aristocrats very carefully, dipping his pen in acid to excellent effect. In Our Betters, Pearl Grayston, a rich American woman married to a British peer, has manipulated herself into becoming London’s leading hostess. Her lover, Arthur Fenwick—who conveniently provides the money for the lavish entertaining—is a snobbish, elderly American war profiteer. Pearl’s girlfriends are drawn from a motley bunch of rich Americans who have acquired themselves British titles and gigolo boyfriends. Maugham’s character Pearl was based on a combination of the society hostess Emerald Cunard and Victoria Sackville, while Arthur Fenwick was very obviously Harry Gordon Selfridge—right down to his soft voice and distinctive mannerisms.

  The Lord Chamberlain was so concerned at the anti-American thrust of the play that he sent it over to the Foreign Office for Sir Edward Grey to read. The response was to ban it, the material being considered so offensive it would be detrimental to the efforts being made to persuade America to join the war. If Selfridge was unaware of the plot then, he certainly heard of it in 1917, when Our Betters opened to rave reviews in New York. When the play finally opened in London in 1923, it was a sellout. Selfridge’s humiliation lasted for months. Maugham had exacted his revenge.

  The business of shopping continued apace, as did the business of publicity. A writer from a distinguished arts and literary magazine, The Academy, was given the store’s “VIP tour” by the Chief himself, who proudly pasted the resulting editorial into one of the huge press-cuttings books that he always maintained personally, right down to writing the captions and dating the pages. The Academy’s report was full of admiration: “Outside all is war sensationalism, stress and danger. Inside the store all is beauty and order … [there is] a pervading sense of well-being and efficiency. It made an impression that lingers … of piles of dainty fabrics, of colour … of capable young women who have replaced our soldiers at the door and in the lift.”

  In fact, the lifts at the store had always been operated by uniformed girls who were as good-looking as those in the best chorus line. The “Selfridge’s Red Cross Corps” were also particularly well kitted out, their uniforms being specially tailored to fit. Women were now driving the motorized delivery vans—many of which had been transformed into ambulances—and, in an effort to save petrol, holding the reins of the store’s horse-drawn carts. Women were on guard as commissionaires, in green woolen greatcoats, braided caps, and huge gauntlet gloves. Wherever there was a job in the store that had been done by a man who had enlisted, a woman took it over—some even stoking the boilers. The shortage of men was affecting most households. Servants—especially footmen—were in short supply, much to the annoyance of Winston Churchill’s mother, who so disliked parlor-maids that she transformed her two into “foot-maids.” The girls wore black skirts with smart swallowtail coats and evening waistcoats, white shirt-fronts, winged collars, and black ties.

  Selfridge’s was always putting on a show of one sort or another. Phil Mead, Hampshire’s star county cricketer, was hired to lead “Cricket Fortnight,” while less cheeringly, a few days after the Germans had used chlorine gas at Ypres, the store’s pharmacist demonstrated its stinking toxicity by mixing spirits of salts with chlorate of potassium in front of a fascinated crowd on the roof terrace. Anxious mothers flocked to the pharmacy to buy supplies of bleached cotton gauze, elastic, and extra-absorbent cotton wool to send out to their sons, along with packets of morphine that were readily sold and always used. The Duchess of Rutland—seemingly a constant presence in the store—opened an Art Exhibition in aid of the War Seal Foundation, one of the endless charities that kept upper-class women busy. The duchess had hoped to open a hospital in France—her daughter Diana had solicited a donation of two thousand pounds from “dear Mr. Selfridge”—but the plan fell through. Diana instead became a nurse, while the duchess confined herself to two rooms of their Arlington Street house, turning the rest into a hospital.

  By 1916, Asquith’s government was in disarray. Having resigned over the disaster at Gallipoli, Churchill had gone to the Western Front. The war was escalating. Zeppelin raids had begun and the U-boat campaign was edging Britain toward the brink of starvation. The country yearned for dynamic leadership. They got it in December when David Lloyd George became prime minister, in part thanks to the machinations of Sir Max Aitken, whose reward was a peerage. Ennobled as Lord Beaverbrook—and by now the owner of the Daily Express—he would soon become Minister of Information, but even his own newspaper couldn’t print the truth about what was really happening. There was still no job for Selfridge, despite his friend Sir Albert Stanley being appointed as head of the Board of Trade. Late that year, Selfridge moved his family to the country, taking a lease on Highcliffe Castle in Christchurch on the Hampshire coast. Officially, their move was due to the threat of the zeppelin raids. Unofficially, it was due to Harry’s heightening affair with Gaby Deslys.

  10.

  Castles in the Air

  “Business carried on as usual during

  alterations on the map of Europe.”

  —WINSTON CHURCHILL

  THE STORE PUBLISHED RECORD YEAR-END FIGURES FOR 1917, with profits of £258,000 (over £10 million today) mainly achieved, said Selfridge on announcing the results, “by an increase in household goods and cheaper clothing while luxury goods and expensive women’s wear has fallen off.” A year earlier, Condé Nast, the owner of American Vogue, had taken the view that even if women weren’t buying luxuries, they would still enjoy looking at them. He launched a British edition at the price of one shilling a copy, perhaps not understanding that the women with the most disposable income were working in munitions and reading Tit-Bits. With the upper classes showing their customary thrift and the middle classes strapped for cash, launching the glossy magazine hadn’t been easy. Vogue’s fashion editors responded with features explaining “how it is possible to have a smart wardrobe even with the handicap of a limited income.” Shortages meant higher prices everywhere—the cost of food had risen by 65 percent and clothing by 55 percent. The Government Food Controller had imposed fixed prices on basics such as bread and jam, which Selfridge delighted in undercutting, using his “Callisthenes” column to hammer the point home. There were, however, no discernible cuts in his own household budget—he was living in customary style at 30 Portman Square and spending prodigiously on renovating Highcliffe Castle.

  The Highcliffe estate had originally been acquired by King George III’s young prime minister, the Earl of Bute, who, having the advantage of a very rich wife and a taste for beautiful buildings, commissioned Robert Adam to design several for him. These included Luton Hoo, Lansdowne House, and Kenwood in London, and a seaside mansion, then called High Cliff, where in 1773 he laid out exotic botanical gardens. High Cliff was left to Lord Bute’s youngest and favorite son, General Sir Charles Stuart, but sadly for Sir Charles, without the money to maintain it. He sold the contents, demolished the property, and also parted with most of the land.

 
; His son in turn, also named Charles and a distinguished diplomat, vigorously set about restoring his inheritance, gradually re-acquiring the land his father had sold. While en poste in St. Petersburg he ordered timber; in Spain he commissioned bricks; as British Minister in Lisbon during the Peninsular War he sent instructions about the purchase of the remnants of the original mansion, by now a notorious smuggler’s den. When he was dispatched to Paris to choose a house for Lord Wellington’s anticipated sojourn as ambassador, his unerring eye settled on Princess Pauline Borghese’s hôtel in the rue du Faubourg St. Honoré—still the British embassy today. On his own subsequent appointment as ambassador, he delighted in attending the auctions taking place in the capital after the fall of Napoleon’s regime. Among other treasures, he bought furniture and carpets from the estate of the gallant Marshal Ney, stonework from the Norman Benedictine abbey of St. Peter at Jumièges, and a complete window of sixteenth-century stained glass from the church of St. Vigor in Rouen. His pièce de résistance was a gloriously carved oriel window from the Grande Maison des Andelys, where Henri IV had sat with his dying father. Twelve huge barges were needed to ship his acquisitions back to England, and it took him another five years to build the impossibly romantic Highcliffe Castle, completed in 1830. Now ennobled as Lord Stuart de Rothesay, he divided his life between Highcliffe and his London town house in Carlton House Terrace, where he installed the bed on which allegedly the Empress Josephine had died.

  At the time Harry Selfridge took the lease, Highcliffe had passed to a Rothesay cousin, Major-General Edward Stuart Wortley, who had fought with distinction in Sudan, Egypt, and Afghanistan. Major-General Wortley had been sent back to England after the first day of the Somme for the simple reason that his regiment hadn’t lost enough men, the inference being that he had shown “a lack of offensive spirit” in somehow keeping his men back. Eddy Wortley subsequently spent the rest of the war training troops in an Irish backwater.