Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge (3 page)

Steeped in tradition, the city’s retailers were alarmed by the idea of change. It was, however, long overdue. When Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish-American philanthropist millionaire, visited London in 1900 he was appalled. ‘Just look at the jumble in the store windows – so much stuff you cannot take it in,’ he said. ‘When you go into a shop they treat you most indifferently. You are scowled at if you ask for goods out of the ordinary, and you are made to feel uncomfortable if you do not buy. These shop people drive away more customers than they attract. What London needs is a good shaking up.’

Nothing excited Harry Gordon Selfridge more than the idea of ‘shaking up London’, and the spirit of the age was on his side. The concept of selling to ‘all classes of trade’ was totally alien to existing British retailers. Stores were up-market or they were middle-market – and occasionally they catered to the better end of the lower market – but they never, ever did all three. Selfridge would change all that, just as he changed the traditional merchandise mix. When the trade press reported that he was going to sell everything from photographic equipment to glass and gloves, his drapery competitors derided such diversification, Marshall & Snelgrove stiffly announcing that ‘We know what we are and mean to stick to it.’

Thanks to his commercial success, Selfridge enjoyed the lavish lifestyle of an impresario, having a penchant for large houses, fast women and regrettably slow horses. His greatest addiction other than work was gambling, which in one form or another dominated his life, from the risk he took in sinking all his money into a site arguably at ‘the wrong end’ of Oxford Street, to the hours he spent in casinos where he and one of his famous mistresses, the baccarat-addicted Jenny Dolly, won – and lost – hundreds of thousands of pounds. No one knows exactly how much Selfridge squandered over the three decades he lived in London, but it’s reliably estimated at well over £3 million, or nearly £65 million today. The money vanished in a haze of extravagance, frittered away on jewels and furs for his mistresses, a fully crewed yacht that slept twenty, the maintenance of his three daughters’ well-born but largely unemployed husbands and on his insatiable thirst for gambling.

None of these pastimes mattered when Selfridge and his store were making money. Indeed, his glamorous reputation added to the attraction of shopping there. Yet for a businessman involved in dealing with millions of pounds, Selfridge was curiously naïve, and his complex personal and social life and tumultuous business expansion ultimately brought about his downfall. In the late 1920s, advice from one of London’s most flawed financiers trigged acquisitions of staggering proportions. Company revenues were drained and Selfridge was woefully unprepared when the Great Depression took hold. By the late 1930s, his personal lifestyle had left him deeply in debt to the store – and to the taxman.

In 1939, at the age of 83, thirty years after building Selfridge’s, revolutionizing London’s retailing and arguably creating what for years to come would be known as the greatest shopping street in the world, Harry Selfridge was ousted from what he had always thought of as ‘his’ store. The most celebrated retailer of his era, who had lived like a lord in Lansdowne House, was reduced to penury, dying in a small flat in Putney.

His legacy isn’t just his gloriously iconic building in Oxford Street
– although the towering columns of Selfridges are an awesome monument for any man – it is that he modernized British retailing, bringing to it his belief in ‘the power of experience’. A man light years ahead of his time, a true accelerator of change, he deserves to be remembered as the man who put fun on to the shop floor and sex appeal into shopping.

‘Fashion is the mirror of history. It reflects political, social and economic changes, rather than mere whimsy.’
Louis XIV

I
n 1860, as America braced itself for civil war, businessmen began to stockpile goods. No one knew better than the store owners what would happen when fabric became scarce. It wasn’t silks and satins that worried them, it was cotton – and they fretted more about the lack of it than the picking of it. In April 1861, when war was declared and President Lincoln issued his Proclamation of Blockade, speculation in cotton became rife, and panicking Northern mill owners were only too glad to forge associations with men who promised to continue the smooth flow of supplies from South to North.

When Union forces captured New Orleans in 1862, trade through the Mississippi Valley became particularly brisk. Cotton was also moved out via Memphis and Vicksburg, all of which kept the mills working – so much so that during the first two years of the war manufacturers still made a healthy profit. By 1863, however, supplies were dwindling and there was a shortage of men to run the machines. American spinning mills went on half-time production. As cotton goods became increasingly scarce, those who had filled a warehouse or two could name their price.

In New York, President Lincoln’s friend Alexander Stewart, the acknowledged ‘merchant prince’ of the day, made enormous sums of money, having astutely cornered the market in domestic linen
as well as cotton. Given that Mary Lincoln, a woman who clearly sought security through her possessions and for whom shopping was an addiction, spent thousands of dollars at Stewart’s Marble Palace – on one memorable visit she ordered eighty-four pairs of coloured kid gloves – it is not surprising that Mr Stewart was also rewarded with lucrative contracts to supply clothing to the Union army. Indeed, the war seemed to have no effect on the shopping habits of New York’s rich. The media criticized their ‘hedonistic approach during the daily slaughter wrought by the war’, but the pursuit of fashion carried on regardless.

Chicago too enjoyed a profitable war. The small town that had emerged out of the swampy Fort Dearborn just three decades earlier – and where some could still remember Chief Black Hawk and his warriors swooping in to attack – was now the hub of America’s biggest railroad network and the collecting point for food to supply both the East and the army. Awash with opportunity and swimming in cash, sprawling, still muddy, ‘rough and ready’ Chicago became a boom town. As the farm boys joined the army, production of Cyrus McCormick’s reaping machines increased – as did his fortune. He wasn’t alone. Whether it was pork, which Philip Armour bought at $18 a barrel and sold for $40, or luxury Pullman Cars developed by the railwayman George Pullman, Chicago tycoons were making millions of dollars – and their wives were helping them spend it.

The destination of choice for Chicago’s shoppers was Potter Palmer’s store on Lake Street. Palmer, who went on to become a property developer of immense skill, had started his career in Chicago in 1839 as a small-time dry-goods retailer. There was nothing small about his ambitions, however, nor his ability to judge women’s desire to shop. He sold goods at fixed and fair prices, let his ladies take clothes home to try on, and left copies of
Godey’s Ladies Book
(the fashion magazine of the time) in the store for browsing. Better yet, he read it himself. His maxim was ‘You’ve got to think big’, and by the time war came, he had done so, stocking up on cotton goods, filling vast warehouses with everything from petticoats and pantalettes to
sheets and tea towels, and advertising his stock with a ‘money-back guarantee’ – a revolutionary idea at the time.

Among the men who enlisted all over the North in 1861 was Robert Oliver Selfridge. At the age of 38 he left his home in Ripon, a hamlet in Wisconsin 170 miles north of Chicago, where he ran a general store, to go to war. Reputed to be a sober, hard-working man and described as ‘a stalwart of local activity’, he was also Master of the Ripon Freemasons’ Lodge. Robert Selfridge and his wife Lois had three young sons – Charles Johnston, Robert Oliver Jr and Henry Gordon (known as Harry). Though there has always been uncertainty in the Selfridge family over precise dates of birth, it seems likely that Harry was born on 11 January 1856. He was just 5 when his father went to war – and never returned.

Not that Major Selfridge died in battle. He was honourably discharged in 1865, whereupon he simply vanished. No one ever knew why. Perhaps, having witnessed the carnage, he had a nervous breakdown. Perhaps he simply wanted to be free of responsibilities. Whatever the case, he left his wife to bring up her family on her own, on the meagre earnings of a teacher. Harry later described Lois as ‘brave, upstanding and with indomitable courage’. She was indeed brave, and she needed to be. Not long after the war her eldest son Charles died, and then her middle son Robert. She was now left alone with young Harry.

Moving with her son to Jackson, Michigan, Lois found work as a primary school teacher, earning around $30 a month. Making ends meet was a constant struggle, so she supplemented her salary by painting Valentine and other novelty cards. Still with no word from her husband, she was left to assume that he was ‘missing, presumed dead’. Only years later did she learn that he had been killed in a railway accident in Minnesota in 1873 and that she was – finally – a widow. Harry was shielded from the truth, growing up believing that his father had been ‘killed in battle’, a story he would often repeat to the media. It would be years before he discovered the truth.

Hardly surprisingly, all the love Lois had left to give was centred
on her young son. The two of them found genuine pleasure in each other’s company and became such great friends that they continued to live together until the day she died. When things got bleak, they played a game called ‘Suppose’, which involved imaginary plots about success through endeavour. ‘Suppose’ they could afford a cottage with a bay window? Even ‘suppose’ they were able to live in a castle with lots of servants? Though a pious woman who attended church regularly and abhorred alcohol, Lois was always happy to go to a new play or concert and was an avid reader, a pleasure she imbued in her son.

Mrs Selfridge continued her career as a teacher, becoming the headmistress of Jackson High School, where the education of the town’s young was entrusted to her capable care. The most important thing she taught Harry was never to fear failure. She was fond of saying, ‘Why should you worry about failing? There’s always something else to try and you can excel in that instead.’ She taught Harry to be gracious. She taught him impeccable manners. Finally, she taught him the importance of appearance. She would check his fingernails in the morning and again before supper – not that he needed much checking. From an early age Harry was fastidious, and he loved nothing better than wearing a clean shirt to school and polishing his boots until they gleamed.

When Harry wasn’t dreaming about castles or maintaining his modest wardrobe, he had his head in a book, devouring stories by James Fenimore Cooper and Nathaniel Hawthorne, along with his favourite,
Struggles and Triumphs
, the well-thumbed autobiography of the great circus showman Phineas T. Barnum. The rags-to-riches story of Barnum inspired Harry to dream of a future far away from Jackson. In many respects the two were very similar. Barnum had a rare gift for publicity. His spectacular museum in New York drew the public in their thousands and he became rich by entertaining them. Like Barnum, Selfridge had the ability to suspend disbelief. His tricks – entertaining people in a great store that was, in a way, just like a circus tent – created such confidence among his friends, family
and financial backers that for years they refused to accept that his extravagant, destructive side was gradually eroding his ability to run his business empire.

All that lay ahead. At the age of 10, Harry started to earn cash in the time-honoured way, by delivering newspapers. Next he took over a bread round, and finally he took a holiday job at Leonard Field’s dry-goods store where he stocked shelves and carried parcels for $1.50 a week – cash he promptly handed over to his mother. When he was 13, he and a school friend, Peter Loomis, produced a boy’s monthly magazine called
Will o’ the Wisp
. Harry threw himself into the magazine, hustling for advertising from local tradesmen and promising them a ‘guaranteed circulation from all the boys at school’. Years later, Loomis recalled that ‘Harry sold space to a local dentist who owed us 75 cents. When he didn’t pay up, Harry got him to extract a troublesome tooth for free to square the debt.’ His experience of publishing
Wisp
not only gave Harry a life-long passion for the business of publicity and promotion, it also introduced him to the power of the press – something he never forgot and which he played to his advantage throughout his career.

Loomis’s father ran a small bank in Jackson, and when Harry left school at 14, he got a job there as a junior book-keeper, earning $20 a month. A tough taskmaster called Mr Potter taught him to write a neat ledger, as Harry later recalled in a letter to Loomis: ‘He didn’t exactly inspire or encourage, but he did rub things in so hard that you could never forget them.’ Jotting down figures became an engrained habit, and Harry’s lists make fascinating reading. In just one of his silver-clasped, cream vellum private ledgers dated 1921, he noted in an immaculate hand that on 3 June he lost £1,198 playing poker and gave ‘the Hon. Angela Manners £5.5/-’ (presumably a charity donation), while in July – somewhat mysteriously for a man who owned his own department store – he spent £476 17s. 6d. at the Irish Linen Company in the Burlington Arcade.

It has been said that at around this time Harry studied for the entrance examinations to the Naval Academy in Annapolis,
Maryland, but failed his physical test because he was too short. Harry was always sensitive about his height – he was a shade under 5 foot 8 inches and wore lifts in his custom-made boots to give him an extra half inch – but that fact alone wouldn’t have prevented him joining the Navy, for they required only that candidates ‘be not less than 5 feet’. It is more likely that he would have failed because of his eyesight. He was notoriously short-sighted, and as a consequence wore glasses for all reading and writing, initially a metal-rimmed pince-nez and later thin gold frames. He had the most brilliant, clear blue eyes and would fix people with a beguiling stare that could be disconcerting to those who didn’t realize that he could hardly see them otherwise.