Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge (14 page)

His competitors were dumbfounded at the amount of space given over to services. Surely the point of a shop was for people to buy things? The Selfridge philosophy, however, was first to get them in, then to keep them there. Thereafter they would buy. As he said in one of his advertisements, the store sold ‘all merchandise that Men, Women and Children wear’ and ‘almost everything that enters into the affairs of daily life’. At that point, he meant more or less everything other than food and wines. Those would come later. Neither did he sell furniture, or at least not beds, wardrobes or dining-tables and chairs. Some thought this was the result of his ‘deal’ with Waring who, after all, was also a furniture retailer. In reality, as Selfridge later said,
it was because margins were better on decorative home furnishings such as lampshades, glass, china, silver, cutlery, lacquer screens and rugs. Waring meanwhile had sent over the impressive desk destined for the Chairman’s impressive fourth-floor corner site office. He also sent a bill, which Selfridge avoided paying for the next three years.

Lord Northcliffe himself visited that week, shopping incognito, and was so pleased with the service he received that he wrote to Selfridge praising the skill of the salesman, saying that the chap in question – a young man by the name of Puttick – ‘was destined to go far’. Selfridge quickly dictated a reply, signing it for the first time with what thereafter became his business name: H. Gordon Selfridge.

Looking at earlier letters, it is evident his signature changed too. It was almost as if he’d been practising a brand-new sweeping flourish of letters. Now he had a new name, new handwriting, a new store and a new life. But old habits remained.

Somehow, in all the frantic months of preparation, Selfridge had found time to become initiated into that select band of brothers, the Freemasons. He joined Columbia Lodge 2397, whose membership was exclusively made up from the American community in London. Among the distinguished list of Columbia Founders was Henry S. Wellcome, the American pharmaceutical millionaire, who cordially received ‘Brother Gordon Selfridge’ to the Lodge. Brotherly love however would soon be irrevocably strained when Wellcome’s wife Syrie and Harry Gordon Selfridge started their tempestuous affair.

‘A store which is used every day should be as fine a thing and, in its own way, as ennobling a thing as a church or a museum.’
H. Gordon Selfridge

O
ver a million people were counted into Selfridge’s during the opening week. From that moment on, both the store and the man became famous. ‘Selfridge’, wrote one columnist, ‘is as much one of the sights of London as Big Ben. With his morning jacket, white vest slip, pearl tie-pin and orchid buttonhole, he is a mobile landmark of the metropolis.’ There was always a small crowd waiting outside to see him arrive at work each morning at 8.30 a.m. An observer recalled that ‘he was received in respectable silence by the bystanders, who always waved at him’. Selfridge would doff his hat and proceed inside. He took his private lift to the fourth floor and walked briskly down the corridor lined with framed press editorials and advertising tear sheets to his north-east corner office suite. There his personal staff – Thomas Aubrey, his private secretary, and two typists – would already be going through the first post.

Harry’s morning unfolded in a series of rituals, each performed with precise timing. Though he usually shaved at home, in the store the American-equipped barber’s shop sent up an assistant to give him a scalp rub and trim and hot towel wrap, and to lightly wax his moustache and eyebrows, while a manicurist buffed and filed his fingernails.

The young salesman from the menswear department who acted as
his in-store valet would bring up several freshly laundered cream silk shirts and hang them in the cedar-wood closets, where a second set of dress clothes was ready in case he wanted to change at work before going out for the evening. His high, Cuban-heeled black patent boots – made to order by Alan McAfee of Duke Street, with in-built ‘lifts’ to give him an extra half-inch – were rubbed with a chamois cloth and, finally, his black silk top hat was carefully brushed.

The restaurant supervisor delivered a pot of weak China tea and a bowl of fruit, pausing to discuss the menu for any guests due for lunch in his private dining-room. A florist arrived from the flower department with a selection of roses and orchids from which Selfridge carefully selected a rose for the crystal vase on his desk and an orchid for his boutonnière. Three times a week, huge vases of flowers were carefully arranged in his inner and outer offices and the dining-room. Selfridge adored highly scented flowers and was fastidious about their care, always checking the water to ensure it was topped up and pausing to snap off a dead bloom.

Refreshed, he would then deal with the early morning post, the first of five enormous batches that arrived daily from the Remittance Office, which handled all the store mail. He would go through important letters with Mr Aubrey and then, at 9.15 a.m., run through the day’s engagement diary with his Social Secretary. At precisely 9.30 a.m. he would don his hat and walk the store’s six acres, the monarch of all he surveyed.

Department managers frantically telephoned ahead to alert staff, who would instinctively straighten up and smooth their clothes, trying not to look self-conscious. Harry would stop and have a word here, ask a question there. He never asked anyone how they were, loathing any mention of even the mildest ill-health. ‘Tell me… ’ was always his opening question, ‘how is this selling?’ or ‘has this gone well?’ He knew
exactly
how it had been going, for the previous day’s sales reports were on his desk first thing each morning, but he wanted to hear it from them. On his instruction, staff always called him ‘Mr Selfridge’ to his face, never ‘Sir’. He actively disliked that formality.
Any letters signed ‘I remain, sir, your most obedient servant’, in the manner of the time, made him wince. For the most part, his staff referred to him as ‘the Chief’.

As he made his rounds, he would scribble notes about things that annoyed him or queries to be followed up on his shirt cuff in pencil: not for nothing were there spares in the office. He never criticized anyone in public – and rarely praised them either – but he would nod and smile faintly when he heard good news. Then, looking at his watch – always set five minutes fast ‘so I’ve got five minutes longer to live’ – he would move on to the next department. Nothing escaped his eagle eye, from a stain on the carpet to a blunt pencil. If he found dust he simply paused and wrote HGS with his fingertip, just as he had always done at Marshall Field. It wouldn’t be there for long.

His presence, however, lingered long after he’d left and the staff would talk about his ‘walk’ for the rest of the day. Sometimes they would get a reminder, by way of a yellow telegram envelope that arrived at their work station. Originally, Selfridge had reasoned that they would jump to open the envelope thinking they had been sent a telegram. Once the staff had figured out the system they were even quicker to open it, never knowing if it was good news or bad but aware that it was a personal message from ‘the Chief’ exclusively for them.

Harry’s tour took more than an hour. By the time he got back to his office he had seen over a thousand people. Within a decade that number had grown to well over three thousand and ultimately it would rise to over five. He engaged with them all. For a lot of them, it was the highlight of their day. The man himself – imbued with a glamour lacking in any other retailing chief – was why they worked at Selfridge’s. The store was a theatre, with the curtain going up at nine o’clock every morning. Like every impresario before or since, Harry Selfridge was checking that his cast was in order, with the stage set for the next performance.

The rest of the morning was spent studying buyers’ reports and stock inventories, meeting the advertising department staff, planning
window displays or on the telephone. The store had 120 lines to the Mayfair Exchange and 600 internal extensions. Selfridge regarded all embryonic telecommunications systems as an essential business tool. He had offered the National Telephone Company the opportunity to open a branch exchange in the store, but they turned him down, instead giving the store the distinctive telephone number ‘Gerrard One’ by way of compensation. As telephones spread through London, Selfridge’s was the first store to sell the equipment and also the first to advertise on the cover of the telephone directory – no one else had thought of it.

Harry’s office door was – in theory – always open for people who wanted to see him. In reality, Thomas Aubrey carefully guarded the inner sanctum. Generally affable, Selfridge could at times be tetchy. Executives called to meetings would get a signal from Mr Aubrey, who used a coded system – ‘North Wind’, ‘North East Wind’ or ‘Gale Force Wind’ – so that they knew what to expect. They also soon learned that he hated, absolutely hated, long meetings. In a move designed as much to unnerve people as to structure his time, he would place a large hour-glass upside down the minute someone entered his office. Turning towards them with his vivid blue eyes fixed in a penetrating gaze, he would ask ‘What can I do for you?’ Fifteen minutes, he reasoned, was long enough for most issues. It wasn’t so much that ‘time is money’, more that ‘time is precious’. He was fixated by it. He was 53. He wanted to be 30 again.

Given the
froideur
with which London’s established retail businesses had reacted to Selfridge’s grand opening, it is curious how many of them swiftly recalled anniversaries of their own to celebrate that year. Peter Robinson, D. H. Evans, John Barker, Swan & Edgar and Maples all staged events that enabled them to send out elaborate cards and entertain their customers. Even the mighty Harrods succumbed, deciding they couldn’t wait a minute longer to celebrate their 75th Jubilee by hosting a series of grand concerts led by the London Symphony Orchestra. Selfridge was hugely amused at their arithmetic, for though their founder Henry Harrod had opened his
original small shop in Stepney in 1835, he hadn’t acquired ownership of the Knightsbridge site until 1853. Sir Alfred Newton, the Chairman of Harrods, visited Selfridge to pay his compliments. Their meeting, seemingly friendly, ended with Sir Alfred saying: ‘You’ll lose your money.’

Selfridge may have remembered that remark some weeks later when the store was deserted for days at a time and takings were meagre. A reporter from the
Evening News
, who found himself virtually alone on an upper floor, bumped into Selfridge himself who, full of bravura, simply said: ‘We’ve not provided half enough lifts – it doesn’t do to keep people waiting.’ While the
Evening News
remarked on ‘his unconquerable optimism’, there were other, less appealing, press notices. The
Anglo-Continental Magazine
puritanically observed: ‘Selfridge’s employs every art to lure the feminine element into those extravagances which work ruin and misery at home.’

In some respects the magazine had a point. In an era when the average household rarely had access to credit, many families still only bought what they could afford. Selfridge’s, more than any other store in England, spearheaded the revolution that changed people’s perception of shopping, perhaps most significantly by involving his customers less in ‘ruin and misery’ than in the real pleasure of purchasing something, however modest, and being made to feel special while doing it. When the store opened, all visitors (as he preferred to call customers) received miniature silver keys as a gift ‘so they would feel at home’. ‘I want to serve the public courteously, efficiently, expeditiously and with absolute fairness,’ he told the respected American journalist, Edward Price Bell. As a consequence, his customers lacked for nothing. Lord Beaverbrook, not an easy man to impress, would later remark that ‘Gordon Selfridge pioneered the art of pampering.’ He was right. People went to Selfridge’s to buy something they wanted rather than something they needed.

What Harry Selfridge himself needed at this point was money. He had an annual payroll bill of over £120,000 to meet, interest to pay on his £350,000 loan from John Musker, an annual ground rent of
£10,000 and increasing National Insurance costs, not to mention a huge promotional budget to underwrite. It was hardly surprising that his finances were precarious. Discussions were under way with interested parties about a stock issue, but it was proving hard to finalize. Frank Woolworth, the American ‘dime store’ multi-millionaire, was in London at the time, exploring his own planned expansion in England. He wrote to colleagues back in America:

Stores here are too small and shallow. Customers do most of their shopping from the windows. The moment you go in, you are expected to buy and to have made your choice from the window. They give you an icy stare if you follow the American custom of just going in to look around. Selfridge’s is the only department store that looks like an American establishment. He has spent an enormous amount of money and may make a success in time. He has been trying to float some stock in his corporation but without much success. Most Englishmen think he will fail. There seems to be a prejudice against him – in fact against all foreigners invading this territory. We will have no walkover here.

Selfridge himself was saddened by what he felt was ‘a certain hostility, originating with our competitors’. It was said that several senior staff had specifically applied for jobs at the behest of rivals and were reporting back on new systems and turnover figures. Certainly, some members of staff were fired abruptly within a matter of months. Selfridge hotly denied that this was due to commercial espionage, explaining that those let go hadn’t ‘responded to our training methods or house rules’. These were carved in stone: no gratuities or suppliers’ kick-backs were to be taken, punctuality and presentation were of paramount importance, and staff were expected to adhere to a strict dress code.

There were no second chances at Selfridge’s. One mistake meant instant dismissal. The staff didn’t seem to mind. There were five applicants for every available job, wages were a little higher than
elsewhere, staff facilities were unique for the time and – significantly – there were no fines. An early employee, who worked there for over thirty years, recalled: ‘There was a feeling of kindness pervading the store right from the start – it was always a happy place.’