Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge (22 page)

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.

Harry Selfridge found Highcliffe’s history irresistible, but for the Stuart Wortleys the castle was an expensive headache. Never rich, they were delighted with the offer of £5,000 a year in rent, and even more pleased when Selfridge set about fitting modern bathrooms, installing steam central heating, and building and equipping a decent kitchen. Rosa Lewis, the eccentric owner of the Cavendish Hotel and one of London’s most sought-after private caterers, wouldn’t have recognized the place. When she was in charge of catering for the Kaiser’s three-week stay with the Stuart Wortleys in 1907, she had had to bring in portable cookers.

All in all, it is thought that Harry spent £25,000 (£1 million today) on improvements at Highcliffe in the six years he rented the property, during which time the Stuart Wortleys decamped to a modern Edwardian villa they owned nearby called Cliff House. The Selfridges adored living at Highcliffe where, poignantly for Harry, Mary Leiter Curzon had recuperated from a bout of pneumonia before making her last trip to India. Rose and her elder daughters Rosalie and Violette joined the Red Cross, working initially at Christchurch Hospital. When America joined the war in the spring of 1917, Rose opened a tented retreat, the ‘Mrs Gordon Selfridge Convalescent Camp for American Soldiers’, in the castle grounds. Beatrice meanwhile was sent to St Mary’s Wantage, and Gordon Jr, now in his final year at Winchester, applied to read Economics at Cambridge. When the family travelled to Highcliffe, they did so by train from Waterloo, alighting at Hinton Admiral, a tiny station nearby built on the wealthy landowner Sir George Meyrick’s estate, from which he
had the right to flag down any passing train to board or disembark his guests. Selfridge usually motored down on Friday evenings, his chauffeur Arthur Gardener drawing increasingly scarce petrol from the store supplies before loading the car with provisions.

The bracing sea air was a tonic for Rose, who herself was subject to bouts of pneumonia. But while she grew her favourite Liberty roses at Highcliffe, her husband was seen squiring Gaby Deslys around town, where it was rumoured that he intended to fund the lease of her own theatre. Gaby was helping to raise money for the French Relief Fund and inviting wounded soldiers to tea at her Kensington Gore house, with Fleet Street in attendance. True to form, Gaby wasn’t Harry’s sole companion. Teddy Gerard was wowing audiences at the Vaudeville Theatre in a show called
Cheep
, in which she sang a little ditty that went:

Everybody calls me Teddy
T, E, double-D, Y
Yankee, Swanky, full of hanky-panky,
With the RSVP eye.
All day long my telephone keeps repeating hard,
‘Are you there? Little Teddy Bear?’
Naughty, naughty, One Gerard!

The use of the store’s famous telephone number was not lost on some of the audience, who were aware she was being seen arm-in-arm with Selfridge. Not that Miss Gerard herself came cheap – she had a great fondness for furs and, regrettably, an even greater one for opium, which ultimately played havoc with her career. One scene in the show was called ‘Goodbye Madame Fashion’, with the chorus kitted out in wartime work-wear. Ironically, the shortage of textiles helped launch the career of the woman who would come to dominate fashion for decades to come, when Coco Chanel introduced her simple dresses made up in jersey material sourced from Rodier at her shop in Biarritz in 1915.

Events in Russia, where the Tsar had abdicated, were much in the news and watched by the Selfridge family more keenly than most. Rosalie had become close to a Russian called Serge de Bolotoff, whose family had moved to Paris before the war. Calling himself an ‘aviation engineer’, Bolotoff had been something of a pioneer when in 1908 he designed a large triplane, built at the Les Frères Voisin factory. Serge knew all the players in aviation’s tight-knit world, being advised by Blériot and backed by a consortium of rich individuals, including Admiral Lord Charles Beresford. Before the war, the de Bolotoffs had moved to England, where Serge’s mother (there being no mention of a Mr de Bolotoff) now called herself Princess Marie Wiasemsky and set up home in a series of grand, rented houses, first Kingswood House in Dulwich and later Kippington Court in Sevenoaks. Serge continued with efforts to get his plane off the ground. Trials were held at Brooklands, but the monumental triplane collapsed when the undercarriage disintegrated on take-off. Bolotoff’s machine was moved to a nearby shed where it languished until the start of the war, subsequently vanishing when the army commandeered Brooklands.

Serge went on to advise the German Albatross Biplane Company and in 1912 became their British sales agent, struggling to make headway against the home-grown De Havillands. On the outbreak of war, he hastily resigned, offering his services to Russia instead. The Albatross meanwhile became the aeroplane beloved by Baron von Richthofen and his famous travelling circus. The Red Baron’s planes, manned by his star pilots, were sent to fly across various parts of the line to boost the morale of German troops, who watched in awe from the trenches as their heroes looped the loop in fragile ‘birds’ made of canvas and wood that could barely fly at 100 miles per hour. It was a breathtakingly exciting time to be working in aviation. Developments seemed to happen daily. Initially, planes were only used for observation, but when the French pilot Roland Garros bolted steel deflectors to his propellers, enabling guns to be fired, and the German-employed Dutchman Tony Fokker improved the interrupter gear which made
firing even more reliable, the aeroplane became an offensive weapon, with dashing pilots delighting in notching up aerial ‘kills’.

By the time Serge met Rosalie, the Imperial Russian Government that he had signed up to serve no longer existed. Whether he actually still drew a salary from his desk job at the Russian Government’s Naval Aviation Department in London is impossible to say, but it seems unlikely. Rosalie, a rich man’s daughter, did not worry about the future prospects of the man she loved, but her father was more pragmatic. Clearly keen to put some distance between the young couple and thinking his family would benefit from some travel, in 1917 Selfridge planned an extraordinary journey for them in the middle of a world war. Their intended escort was to be the equally extraordinary man, Joseph Emile Dillon.

Dillon, by now a regular weekend visitor to Highcliffe, was a highly regarded foreign correspondent of the
Daily Telegraph
. He spoke over a dozen languages fluently, had witnessed epic events from the 1900 Boxer Rebellion in China to the 1905 Russo-Japanese War, and was consulted by Allied governments around the world. His particular speciality was Russia, where at one point he had been confidential adviser to the Tsar’s Prime Minister, Count Witte.

By 1917, Selfridge was pushing Dillon to accept payment to take his family travelling: ‘I am extremely anxious if possible to complete plans – a trip to America, say anywhere from the 15th of August. A fortnight or more spent in that country, then sailing from San Francisco for the Hawaiian Islands, a day or two at Honolulu and further sailing to Japan, then to China, then perhaps Singapore and arrival at Calcutta about the 1st January would be roughly what I would like to see done.’ Dillon politely declined the offer, explaining that the situation in Russia made it impossible for him to be out of touch for long. Selfridge tried again. ‘I very much hope that in a week or so you will see your way clear to changing your mind. We are most anxious that you and Mrs Dillon should be the leaders of the party.’ In the event, the trip never materialized. Rose busied herself with her hospital, Rosalie continued her courtship, and Selfridge himself went shopping.

A lover of sculpture, he was an eager bidder against the American newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst at Christie’s ‘sale of the century’ when artefacts, jewels and books belonging to the impoverished aristocrat Lord Francis Pelham Clinton Hope were sold. Lord Hope, the Duke of Newcastle’s brother, had become a bankrupt in 1894 and had steadily been selling off his possessions ever since. First to go was a clutch of Dutch old masters, then in 1902 the famous – and famously cursed – blue Hope diamond, which netted him £120,000. Finally, in July 1917, the contents of his property, Deepdene in Surrey, were put up for sale. They included items from the family’s extensive collection of porcelain and books, and quantities of ancient Greek and Egyptian sculpture and pottery.

All the notable collectors attended the sale. Lord Cowdray acquired a prized statue of Athena for 7,140 guineas. The international dealer Joseph Duveen bought anything he could get his hands on. Sir Alfred Mond, Chairman of Imperial Chemicals, bought four pieces, while Lord Leverhulme bought in bulk, picking up no less than fourteen pieces. Selfridge bid energetically against Henry Wellcome for a Roman statue of Asclepius that was said (probably erroneously) to have come from Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli. Wellcome’s agent withdrew at 1,400 guineas and Selfridge got his prize for 1,700 guineas. In a pleasing tussle against the obsessive collector Mr Hearst (via his London agent), he also bought a statue of Zeus for 650 guineas, while a statue of Apollo Hyacinthus, long thought a favourite of the sculptor Canova, rounded off his shopping list at a cost of £1,000.

At the store, there was an ambitious event to mount a sale of War Bonds, with cash prizes offered to winners whose tickets were entered into a special draw. Selfridge’s ‘Bonds’ were printed, permission from the Postmaster-General obtained, posters designed, advertisements booked and Mrs Lloyd George herself invited to pick the winning tickets. By the day of the draw, 20 December 1917, the response had been so overwhelming that the store had to hire an extra forty cashiers to cope. The promotion, which cost Selfridge around £11,000 to mount, raised the astonishing sum of £3.5 million pounds for the war effort.

Next came a book launch. Craving gravitas for ‘trade and traders’, Selfridge had long planned a book of his own on the topic. Ghostwritten by his old friend Edward Price Bell and published by John Lane, it was entitled
The Romance of Commerce
and covered the history of trading giants from the Fuggers of Augsburg to the Mitsuis of Japan. The book was launched in December at a dinner hosted by John Lane, but it presented Fleet Street with a dilemma. Newspapers were anxious not to offend the country’s most valuable retail advertiser, but it was clear that the book was both wordy and worthy, and getting reviews was going to be tricky. Ralph Blumenfeld, Selfridge’s old friend and ally at the
Daily Express
, having opted out of the dinner on the grounds of ill-health, solved the problem by cleverly inviting Sir Woodman Burbidge, the Chairman of Harrods, to review Harry’s beloved book.

Burbidge had recently inherited both his title and his job on the death of his father, the equally highly regarded Sir Richard, about whom Selfridge had written a glowing obituary. He reviewed the book cautiously, tactfully saying that in it he found ‘something of the vision splendid’. Meanwhile Selfridge’s press office worked overtime organizing interviews with ‘the Chief’, which he gave in his office surrounded by no less than seventy-seven leather-bound ledgers and accounts books from the Medici family archives in Florence, some of which dated back to Cosimo de’ Medici himself and which he had bought at Christie’s. Those on the store ‘gift list’ were usually sent food hampers, perfume or cigars at Christmas, but in 1917, whether they liked it or not, they received a copy of
The Romance of Commerce
painstakingly inscribed by Selfridge.

Early in 1918, at the behest of Lord Northcliffe, head of the British War Mission to the United States, Selfridge crossed the Atlantic. Northcliffe announced that ‘Mr Selfridge has gone, at the urgent request of American business leaders, to explain our problems of supply.’ Northcliffe’s reward for his role was a viscountcy. Selfridge, who had to pay his own expenses, received no reward other than the realization that, as he rather sadly observed on his return, ‘in
America, the captains of business constitute a greater factor in the life of the nation than is the case here’. Still, he continued to do his best for his newly adopted country, offering to pay ‘for all war shrines erected within a mile of us’ and putting up £500 in prize money for a competition run by the store for ‘ploughmen showing the best results using the new farming technology’. The top prizes were won by Titan tractors, made by his old friend Deering’s International Harvester Company, who obligingly lent models to display in the store.

The war was going badly and desperation was in the air. By now there was hardly a family in Britain who had not lost someone they knew or loved, and in May, tragedy struck at Highcliffe. Rose Selfridge contracted pneumonia and died just one week later. Grief-stricken, Harry sought comfort in organizing her funeral at the simple parish church of St Mark’s with military precision. The store’s seamstresses travelled to Highcliffe to sew a blanket of fresh red roses to cover the simple oak coffin, while American soldiers from the convalescent camp formed a guard of honour, their leader carrying a Stars and Stripes flag woven from red carnations, white narcissi and bluebells from the Highcliffe woods.

Less than three months later, Rosalie quietly married Serge de Bolotoff in the chapel of the Russian Embassy in Welbeck Street. Since the family were still in mourning, the wedding was a small affair. The bridegroom however, showing his own flair for publicity, ensured that he and his mother were given ample coverage by handing a note out to the press explaining that they were ‘direct descendants of Prince Rurik, who had founded Russia in the ninth century’. Not that anyone had actually
heard
of Rurik, but a Prince – any Prince – had tangible glamour in the wake of the Russian Revolution.