Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge

by Lindy Woodhead

  Women’s magazines were settling into their stride. Harper’s Bazaar, Good Housekeeping, Vogue, Queen, The Lady, Tatler and Woman Magazine—the latter edited at one stage by Arnold Bennett—were essential reading and always available at the best hairdressers. Whoever was making or selling something fashionable was starting to advertise it seriously, although full stand-alone pages were still rare. Most stores ran quarter-pages, crammed with copy and cluttered with a multitude of different typefaces, usually accompanied by a deadly dull sketch produced by an art-agency draftsman struggling to show the projected bestseller at Arding & Hobbs or Pontings.

  High-style fashion illustration on the other hand had become recognized as an art in its own right—at its peak exemplified by the Russian émigré Erté’s glorious work for Harper’s Bazaar. Erté, Tamara de Lempicka and George Barbier, whose inspired work for the prewar Journal des Dames et des Modes had helped establish the trend, were at the height of their powers. It didn’t last. The illustrators would soon be eclipsed by photographers, with Baron de Meyer, Edward Steichen, and George Hoyningen-Huene dominating the field.

  Selfridge’s advertising was aimed at the high-circulation daily newspapers, but when the store did place advertisements in magazines, Harry Selfridge made sure the pages were uncluttered and the message was clear. One early page in Vogue typifies the style:

  Vogue is a beautifully-printed Journal and this typographical beauty lies in the excellence of its type and composition … its paper, its every detail. Selfridge’s endeavours to be an admirable Store by striving for excellence in its many departments, by insisting on variety and newness and novelty in its merchandise … on charming courtesy and delightful service … by studying every one of the thousands of details which go to produce the great 20th Century Store.

  The establishment, on the other hand, was rather wary about all this newness. Old habits and grand manners died hard, and the old guard were disconcerted to find their racy daughters borrowing their motorcars, footmen whistling in the corridors and their maids “dressed to the nines” rushing off to Selfridge’s or Swan & Edgar on their afternoon off. That the latter did so was hardly surprising. Maids could now afford to go shopping, for their wages had more than doubled since the war and a good maid could earn £2 10s. a week plus her keep. Chauffeurs, much in demand as the rich changed their carriages for cars, earned £4 10s. a week, their accommodation provided in the stable mews above what were now garages.

  The great landed families were feeling the pinch as death duties and taxation on unearned income took their toll. The profligate Duke of Manchester was declared bankrupt; the Duke of Portland threatened to close up his huge Nottinghamshire mansion, Welbeck Abbey; and even the fabulously rich Duke of Westminster was realizing assets, selling Gainsborough’s exquisite Blue Boy and several other important pieces to Joseph Duveen. The sale, which caused an outcry among art experts and the public alike, netted “Bendor” a useful £200,000 to go toward maintaining his yachts, horses, houses, wives, and Coco Chanel, one of his more famous mistresses. Duveen stated firmly that the painting was not going to America: “I have bought it for myself. It is my wish the picture should remain in this country.” He had in fact presold it to the American railway magnate Henry E. Huntington and his wife Arabella for $620,000, reassuring her that the picture would clean up well when she expressed concern that the subject of the painting “wasn’t quite as blue as she had thought.” The Duke of Devonshire moved from his vast London palace, Devonshire House on Piccadilly—where developers were planning a “super-cinema-restaurant” complex—to a mere mansion in Carlton Gardens, while his father-in-law the fifth Marquis of Lansdowne rented out his magnificent London house, which came with twenty servants, including a night watchman who guarded the private passage that ran through to Berkeley Square. News that Lord Lansdowne’s tenant was none other than Harry Selfridge raised eyebrows among London’s elite. “Think of it,” said Sir Gilbert Parker, “Selfridge in Lansdowne House. It’s appalling.”

  It was certainly intriguing. The cost of renting and maintaining one of London’s largest houses was phenomenal. At a time when an average family could live reasonably well on five hundred pounds a year, Selfridge was paying five thousand pounds to rent his new London home, plus five thousand pounds a year for his lease on Highcliffe. On top of that there were servants’ wages and his high living expenses, covering everything from food to flowers, travel and, last but not least, generous entertaining. All this supposedly came out of the forty thousand pounds that Harry earned each year, but in reality, the store provided a lot more. What wasn’t charged to “the Chief’s” personal account was set against “public relations and entertainment,” which neatly covered food, wines, and the dozens of boxes of Corona cigars, specially imported from Havana for Selfridge and distributed to grateful friends such as Ralph Blumenfeld. Selfridge enjoyed living like a lord. Now he lived in a lord’s mansion.

  Like the estate at Highcliffe, Lansdowne House had originally been owned by the Marquis of Bute, though he never actually lived there. In 1765 he sold the partly finished Robert Adam property to the foreign secretary, Lord Shelburne. Shelburne—later the first Marquis of Lansdowne—had battled valiantly to conciliate the American colonists during the War of Independence. Having failed in the task, he resigned from government and consoled himself in the time-honored way by traveling through Italy and, advised by the antiquities dealer Gavin Hamilton, acquiring beautiful things. By 1782, he was back in power as prime minister, and the second Treaty of Paris, which conceded America’s independence, was drawn up for signature by Benjamin Franklin in Robert Adam’s exquisite Round Room at Lansdowne House.

  Thus the Selfridge family, formerly of Ripon, Wisconsin, and Chicago, Illinois, settled into one of the most famous and historically important houses in Great Britain, living surrounded by ceilings and panels painted by John Francis Rigaud and Giovanni Cipriani, entertaining in rooms where Dr. Johnson had dined and where the country of their birth had ceded from Great Britain. Max Beerbohm drew a cartoon of the marquis obsequiously showing Selfridge around Lansdowne House: “Statuary, sir? Majolica, all the latest eighteenth-century books—this way.”

  A highly valued client of the Midland Bank, Selfridge now had the undivided attention of no less than three of their senior general managers. Sometimes collectively, sometimes individually, Mr. Frederick Hyde, Mr. S. B. Murray, and Sir Clarence Sadd would lunch with Selfridge in the store or motor down for meetings at Highcliffe, where in 1920 the quiet little town of Christchurch had acquired an imposing new pillared and porticoed branch building. That same year, the Midland managed a new issue of 1 million 10 percent preferred ordinary shares of £1, which was subscribed seven times over and which brought the company’s share capital to £3.55 million. When Eric Dunstan prepared the Chief’s entry for Who’s Who, he listed him as managing director. Furious, Selfridge scratched it out, shouting: “Damn it, man, I own the place!” The trouble was, he didn’t.

  What impressed the bankers was the breadth of his ideas and the speed with which he put them into action. They liked his expansion into the provinces. They admired his diversification, such as the move into food via the launch of the John Quality grocery chain, with branches in, among other boroughs, Westminster, Kensington, Ealing, and Acton. Above all, they liked his catchphrase, “Best Value in London: Always,” and the fact that he was unafraid to make markdowns. As if foreseeing the financial slump of May 1920, Selfridge had preempted disaster by reducing the store’s stock by 10 percent, advertising price cuts aggressively and adding “spot offers” and “an additional 10 percent off prices on selected items.” This sort of midseason sale was unheard of, and it rattled his competitors. For the first time, Selfridge used the “fear factor” in his copywriting, talking of global trading difficulties and increases in the price of raw materials. Such comments, said his critics, were decidedly “un-public-spirited” and “deliberately designed to encourage stockpiling.” Ignoring them all and det
ermined to clear dead stock, Selfridge relentlessly ran the promotion for five months.

  He also instructed his buyers to cancel anything and everything that was late, and to cut purchasing budgets for the autumn season. “Never talk to suppliers about discounts,” Selfridge told his buyers, “till you have secured rock bottom price—then go for best discounts and dates. Keep a poker face and always preserve freedom to trade hard.” Manufacturers who had enjoyed the store’s bulk-buying policies were distraught as orders were slashed to the bone. Defending his actions in the trade press, Selfridge said: “Retailers cannot be expected to assume the risks of production—all business is more or less speculative.” Arguments raged about “Selfridge’s war on prices” as the local Chamber of Commerce—even the Board of Trade—waded in to complain. Selfridge, who was always impervious to criticism, didn’t care. He had judged the economic situation accurately. The Mutual Communications Society—the retailers’ own forum for monitoring credit and debt—was now meeting weekly, not monthly. The postwar economic boom had been short-lived. By 1921 unemployment had risen to over two million. The only shop a lot of families were visiting was their local pawnshop.

  Meanwhile, Selfridge’s staff continued to receive bonus payments if they met targets and to enjoy “benefits in kind” that were the envy of their friends. The store director Percy Best escorted fifty personnel on an eight-day junket to Paris; five thousand employees danced the night away at what the press called “A Selfridge Revel” at the Albert Hall; and over forty-five thousand shares were set aside for an employee purchase scheme. If some noticed an increase in the Chief’s yellow envelopes hitting their desks, they didn’t mind, though some of the messages in them were becoming a little odd—one blouse buyer was asked: “What great thought have you had today?” Selfridge was a great believer in the value of surprise and was quick to defend his shock tactics: “It’s important to give people new angles, it jerks them out of a rut.” They didn’t always work. When he sent a tin of spinach to senior buyers before the spring sale, with a note saying “Let us see if the result is as beneficial as it always is to Popeye,” very few appreciated the gesture.

  To those who knew him well, Selfridge seemed to be becoming markedly more frenetic. Like the “mile-a-minute” Harry of earlier years, he was bursting with ideas but would set staff on to a project only to drop it at the last minute. His insomnia was becoming worse and he took up “yoga breathing,” extolling the virtues of deep inhaling and exhaling as being “completely invigorating especially when tired.” Not that Harry ever seemed tired. His midafternoon catnap seemed to set him up for the rest of the day, and he partied late into the night as though he dreaded the thought of sleep or of being alone. How he missed Rose. Plans for Hengistbury Head were a diversion and visitors to his office would be shown drawings of the proposed castle, which jostled for space with schemes for the new store extension.

  Friends were bemused by his grand plans for the castle. Lord Beaverbrook, on being given the “virtual tour,” said: “No one has yet discovered this castle, for it exists only on paper. When Selfridge requires mental relaxation, he may be found poring over the plans which are to be the basis of this fairy edifice—moat and parapet, tower, dungeon and drawbridge, are all there, only awaiting the Mason of the future to translate them into actuality.” Ralph Blumenfeld was worried. “He plans to build a wonderful castellated palace which shall be the most beautiful architectural effort of modern history,” he wrote in his diary, “yet I feel it will remain in the region of dreams.”

  When at Highcliffe for the weekend, Harry would write letters at the study table that had once belonged to Napoleon, paste up his scrapbooks and put flowers on Rose’s grave. Dinners were hosted by his mother, who at the age of eighty-six still enjoyed a party. Philip Tilden later wrote: “Old Madam Selfridge was an ideal for us all. A hostess of the rare old school of American propriety, all lavender, lace and an exquisite link with bygone standards. It was a privilege to know her. She was the soul in all the world that her son loved best.” Although mother and son were very close, shared literary pastimes and talked about business and investments, she wasn’t privy to his innermost thoughts. He was an intensely private and inhibited man and would never have had the courage to open up to her about the extent of his gambling or his escalating expenses. She would have known of his strange sex life—mothers and wives almost always know when the men they love are behaving badly. But he was a grown man—indeed almost an old man. She couldn’t change him. So she continued to do what she did best. She dined with him at Lansdowne House, putting a shawl around Canova’s Venus not because the bare breasts offended her, but because “it made her feel chilly.” She was at his side at the Highcliffe fête at which a reveling crowd of five thousand people enjoyed brass bands, a jazz dance competition, fortunes told by an Indian mystic, and even a beauty contest—won by Miss Phyllis Palmer of Bournemouth, who proudly collected her prize of ten pounds from Mr. Selfridge. He himself impressed guests with his unerring eye in judging the weight of a giant cheese to the nearest ounce. Mother and son went to Wimbledon each season, never missing the matches of the French tennis star Suzanne Lenglen, who had won the ladies’ singles championship every year since 1919. She astounded the audience with her athleticism and, with her short hair, short plissé jersey tennis dresses, short white ermine warm-up coat and, most exciting of all, her glorious suntan, she had an equally electric effect on fashion.

  In June 1921 the family celebrated the marriage of Violette to the French Vicomte Jacques de Sibour in a ceremony at the Brompton Oratory attended by twelve hundred guests. In truth, Harry wasn’t keen on his daughter’s choice of husband. De Sibour had caught Violette’s eye a year earlier in the store, where he was working rather than doing his shopping. De Sibour’s father and stepmother lived on the Isle of Wight, where they had met Sir Thomas Lipton and had thereby moved into the Selfridge family orbit. Jacques was dashing, attractive, and brave—during the war he had flown with the French Air Force. He was also unemployed. His father, perhaps hoping retail management was a career with prospects, asked Selfridge to give him a job. Less than three months later, when Jacques got engaged to the boss’s daughter, he promptly resigned, saying he preferred to pursue “prospects in aviation.” Violette and Jacques rented a flat in London and another in Paris. They also invested heavily in a coffee farm in the White Highlands of Kenya, later notorious as “Happy Valley.” Selfridge, of course, paid for it all.

  When Harry was interviewed, he was always happy to talk about his work, the store, his son, his eldest daughter, even his mother, but he rarely discussed his two younger daughters. In the extensive archives there are dozens of photographs of him with Rosalie, her husband Serge, and their daughter Tatiana. There are a handful of him with Violette, mainly taken when she and her husband set off to fly around the world in their Gipsy Moth plane called “Safari.” There are few photographs of Gordon Jr. and even fewer of his youngest daughter Beatrice, who later married Jacques de Sibour’s elder brother Louis, a man even more attractive than his brother, also beautifully dressed—and also with little visible means of support.

  In truth, Harry was not close to his children. He gave them money of course—he was always more than generous—and he gave their husbands money too. He also gave Rosalie and Serge a home, albeit not one of their own. Serge, always experimenting in the hope of patenting some potentially profitable piece of motoring gadgetry but never quite succeeding, gladly accepted the hospitality. In reality, he and his mother Marie happily sponged off Selfridge. Serge and Rosalie’s grandson Simon Wheaton-Smith is also convinced that “the entire family, certainly my Uncle Gordon, and almost anyone else, would have been afraid of him. He always got things his way—and he paid all their bills.”

  The entire family lived a curious life partying together, and often traveling together—but seemingly not talking much. Certainly Gordon Jr.’s affair with a very pretty girl from the toy department was never discussed. Not even w
hen she had their first child in 1925, and then a second, third, and fourth. Gordon Jr. continued to live the high life as a bachelor in a Mayfair apartment with cowhide-covered banquettes and soft lighting, while Charlotte Dennis, the mother of his children, looked after them in a house in Hampstead. Selfridge refused to acknowledge the relationship. As far as he was concerned, it simply didn’t exist. Whatever hopes and dreams he had cherished for his only son, they hadn’t included marriage to a girl who worked in the toy department.

  Having left Trinity College, Cambridge, with a third-class degree in Economics, Gordon Jr. had joined the store in 1921. Working there was always his destiny. Arnold Bennett vividly recalled an early visit to the inner sanctum during the war:

  There is a small closed roll-top desk in his room. It is his son’s aged 16. Boy now home for holidays from Winchester. He was upstairs learning accountancy. He takes a boxing lesson every day at 12.30. His father showed us photos of him at his desk in various attitudes, including the attitude of dictating to a girl-clerk. I continue to like Selfridge.

  Gordon was moved through the business at breakneck speed. He spent a few months learning the ropes in packing and delivery, then a year working for the highly regarded merchandise manager, Thomas Anthony. By 1923, he was managing the menswear department and by 1924, at the age of just twenty-three, he had a seat on the main board. By the time he was twenty-five he was managing director. Mr. Anthony meanwhile had moved to Harrods.

  Whatever his son’s responsibilities, Harry still controlled promotion, advertising, and publicity. No one ever came between Selfridge and the media. His zeal for booking space continued unabated—although to some observers it seemed he was more concerned with the number of pages appearing rather than what he put in them. In 1922, he went a step further, seriously considering becoming a newspaper owner himself, when he apparently attempted to buy The Times. Lord Northcliffe had died in extraordinary circumstances in August that year, with even his foes showing discretion about his sad final weeks. Northcliffe had lost his mind. Convinced he was in danger of being poisoned by a German gang, he had taken refuge in a hut on the roof of the Duke of Devonshire’s house in Carlton Gardens, where he kept a gun under his pillow.