by David Long
HM Queen Mary
The wife of George V collected many things, more than a few of them from the homes of friends. Not exactly light-fingered, and far too well mannered to ask for something outright, she would tell her hostess how much she liked something in the knowledge that her reputation would have preceded her and they would almost certainly take the hint.
Bizarrely for such a self-consciously grande dame, Mary learned the words to ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas’ and was another one who had a brief flirtation with speaking mockney. Meeting Stanley Baldwin during Edward VIII’s abdication crisis, she told the Prime Minister, ‘Well, really, Mr Baldwin – this is a pretty kettle of fish!’ In fact, she was appalled by her son’s actions and is thought to have lost 25 lb before the crisis was resolved.
Most unroyal moment: prior to her marriage to the future king, family debts meant Mary and her parents had to live abroad for an extended period as an economy measure.
HM Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother
Unlike her daughter, who learned to strip and service an engine during a spell with the wartime Auxiliary Territorial Service, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother never set out to be the practical sort. She nevertheless amassed a surprising array of skills and, an expert fly-fisher, would routinely land 20-lb fish when staying at her castle on the coast of Caithness.
She could also play the bongos, a skill she demonstrated in 1974, and on a visit to the London Press Club showed herself to be equally adept at billiards. Finally, she proved to be a convincing big-game hunter and once successfully dropped a charging rhino with a single shot from a .275-calibre rifle.
Most unroyal moment: possibly midday. According to a report in the Guardian, the Queen Mother typically drank 70 units of alcohol every week, starting with a daily gin and Dubonnet at noon. She died aged 101.
9
Shopping London
‘The young Japanese, especially, love to wear the latest thing and when they come to London they head for my shops as part of what they want to find in Britain.’
Vivienne Westwood
Respect Where It’s Warranted
It’s not all Crown Jewels, caviar and champagne, but for visitors to London, keen to shop where the top people shop, a Royal Warrant in the window of a shop or business has long been taken as a reliable guide for anyone seeking prestige brands and the most upmarket retailers.
For literally centuries, royal patronage has exercised an understandably powerful influence on a wide variety of trades and craftsmen, and even in an age of celebrity endorsement the favour of official royal recognition – that all-important phrase, ‘By Appointment to’ – is still regarded as a uniquely important honour by those granted permission to use it.
Successful merchants in medieval London already enjoyed formal links with the Crown by means of Royal Charters granted to the various Guilds or Livery Companies.1 The first such was given by Henry II to the Weavers Company in 1155. As trade expanded under the Tudors and Stuarts, so these grants increased, typically in the form of so-called Letters Patent, until the reign of Queen Victoria when the accepted instrument of preferment became the same Royal Warrant of Appointment that is in use today.
As such an obvious privilege and a much sought-after accolade, its use has naturally been carefully governed over that time by a number of strict regulations. These are designed principally to emphasise its value and prestige, but also to ward off fakers and fraudsters and – as a consequence – to ensure that today’s 800 or so Royal Warrant holders fully deserve the status they enjoy as suppliers to one of the three senior Royals.
HARRODS V SELFRIDGES2
Harrods
In 1898 installs the first escalator in England, with attendants dispensing brandy and Epsom Salts to customers traumatised after trying it out for the first time.
Selfridges
In 1910 becomes the first store anywhere in the world to have a ground-floor beauty hall – one that is still the world’s largest, and that has been copied by virtually every department store the world over.
Harrods
Uses 12,000 light bulbs to illuminate the famous façade of the store. Around 300 need replacing every day.
Selfridges
Used 30,000 light bulbs to illuminate its façade as part of its twentieth anniversary celebrations, but perhaps sensibly decides to take them down afterwards.
Harrods
Once sold a skunk intended for the purchaser’s ex-wife, and an elephant for future US president Ronald Reagan.
Selfridges
Employed John Logie Baird to demonstrate his new invention, the ‘televisor’. (Fast forward to today and its Knightsbridge rival has a 152-in. flat-screen Panasonic model on display, yours for an eye-watering £600,000.)
Harrods
Supplied A. A. Milne with the toy bear that was to inspire the creation of Winnie the Pooh (see Chapter 10 – Green London – for more on the bear).
Selfridges
Commissioned the world’s longest and largest ever photograph. At nearly 1,000 ft long, Sam Taylor-Wood’s modern interpretation of the Parthenon frieze was used to conceal the scaffolding during work on the store’s façade in 2000.
Harrods
In 2011, the store was offering a ‘diamond manicure’ for £32,000.
Selfridges
After the first cross-Channel flight in 1909, thousands queued all night to see Louis Blériot’s monoplane, which was exhibited in the store.
Harrods
Official motto is omnia omnibus ubique – ‘All things for all people, everywhere’.
Selfridges
Founder Harry Gordon Selfridge coined the phrases ‘The customer is never wrong’ and ‘Only xx shopping days to Christmas’.
As in the Middle Ages, the junior Royals do not enjoy the right to grant such Warrants. Previous grantors have included Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, for example, but not Diana, Princess of Wales. Prince William is similarly not entitled to grant Warrants of his own.3 Instead, only regular suppliers to the Queen, Prince Philip and the Prince of Wales are entitled to display the relevant Royal Arms at their place of business, as well as on company stationery.
While explicitly not intended to give particular manufacturers or retailers what might be considered a right royal advantage, they have always done so. The same strict rules govern the display of the Royal Arms on any products offered for sale, and on the packaging of these products, but even with these restrictions in place a Royal Warrant can serve as the best possible advertisement for any business – and this has long been recognised.
As long ago as 1684, an official history by Edward Chamberlayne, Doctor at Law, conceded that suppliers of goods to St James’s Palace and other royal homes were ‘offices and places of good credit, great profit and enjoyed by Persons of Quality’. Similarly now, more than 300 years later, and presumably in the belief that if it’s good enough for Her Majesty it’s good enough for them, many shoppers from both home and abroad still delight in making a small royal connection whenever they reach for their wallet.
In order to qualify for a Royal Warrant of Appointment, a company must have ‘made a supply or provided a service for a department of the Royal Household in respect of any of the Royal Residences, official or private’. This supply or service should have covered a period of not less than five years and ‘the quantity must be in reasonable proportion to the whole of that type of goods or service used’ by the Royal Household concerned.
Providing these criteria are met, a Warrant is initially granted for a period of ten years, after which time it is reviewed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. Naturally, it can also be cancelled at any time during that period should the rules be flouted. (Or, for that matter, if the grantor changes his mind, as the Duke of Edinburgh decided to do in 2000 when Harrods owner Mohammed Al Fayed made some quite extraordinary accusations against the Prince. Al Fayed’s response was even more bizarre – he called in the press and publicly burned all four of his warrants.)
The regulations state, too, that Her Majesty and the two Royal Dukes can each grant only one Warrant to any single business, but that a company can hold Warrants from more than one Member of the Royal Family. Over the years, a favoured few have held as many as four at a time, although most take greater care of them than Mr Al Fayed. These have included London goldsmith Gerald Benney, the General Trading Company in Chelsea, and the florist Edward Goodyear. Land Rover and Hatchards the Piccadilly booksellers also had the full set for a while, but after losing the patronage of the Queen Mother in a much publicised furore, the last of these relinquished the right to her Arms shortly afterwards.
As the Hatchards and Harrods examples indicate, the granting of a Warrant is very much the personal gift of the Royal in question. Because of this, the nature and business of the Warrant-holders, both past and present, provide an intriguing snapshot of life in the Palace as well as bearing witness to the enormous variety and diversity of goods enjoyed by the monarch and her family – and indeed by her predecessors.
The many and varied trades listed during the reign of George III, for example, include a Pin Maker (Tho. Trott) and a Mole-Taker (Fr. Dyer). Even the Rat Catcher gets a mention, although a discreet silence descends over the activities of one Andrew Cook of Holborn Hill, London. He publicly claimed to ‘have cured 16,000 beds with great applause’ and to have operated with great success within the precincts of the Royal Palace, but, unsurprisingly perhaps, no Warrant was ever granted to a Bug Exterminator. (That said, it is likely that anyone fulfilling such a role would have been one of the Palace’s busiest functionaries in the pestilential London of the late eighteenth century.)
Much the same polite discretion is still encountered today, and a bar on the professions means that royal bankers, brokers, doctors and lawyers can neither be granted nor hold Warrants. Even so, more than two centuries on, curiosities can still be found in the lists. Among the more recent entries in the roll of royal tradesmen and women one finds a horse milliner and a pyrotechnician, as well as manufacturers of seaside rock, ‘tubular equipment’, paper plates and even lamprey pies. Less surprising, given what we know of royal preferences in this more open age, are the likes of Gibson Saddlers, which supplies colourful racing silks to Her Majesty, James Purdey & Sons and Holland & Holland (both gunsmiths to the Duke of Edinburgh, the one supplying shotguns, the other rifles), and Ainsworth’s Pharmacy just off Harley Street, which has supplied homeopathic medicines to the Prince of Wales.
Lovers of tradition will note, too, that in spite of the aforementioned ten-year rule, many of the very earliest Warrants survived for generations. Garrard & Co. in Regent Street was Crown Jeweller to William IV and still holds a warrant from Prince Charles, and, as a young princess, Victoria drank soda water supplied by J. Schweppe and Company. Similarly, Mr James Swaine was Whip Maker to George III and, today, Swaine Adeney Brigg still supplies whips to the Royal Mews and umbrellas to Prince Charles. Other longstanding suppliers, including Twinings in the Strand, Crosse & Blackwell (late of Soho Square), locksmiths Chubb, and Gieves & Hawkes – the best-known name in Savile Row, if by no means the most exclusive – have all held their Warrants for well over one hundred years and thus through several reigns.
Significantly, and with only very few exceptions, the Warrants are granted to an individual within the company rather than to the company itself. Because of this, one sees that while the Victorian era was very much a man’s world, proximity to Victoria herself lent an altogether different air to the proceedings. In fact, the first Empress of India saw fit to appoint no fewer than two dozen tradeswomen, mostly skilled artisans engaged in work of a feminine or at least delicate nature, such as Anne Maria Dillon, who made bookmarks; Emma Peachey, who created wax flowers; and Mrs Anna Ede, who tailored the royal robes. (A century later, Ede and Ravenscroft is still thriving as a robe-maker, and has a trio of Royal Warrants to prove it.)
More unexpected perhaps was Mrs Marianna Dent, who made chronometers, and the mysterious mineralogist Mrs Mawe – but then suppliers have never been anything but varied. While often assumed to be for luxury goods only, Royal Warrants are regularly granted for supplies of the mundane and everyday, as well as the thoroughly up-to-date. Sony UK, to cite one famous name, has a warrant for supplying Prince Charles with state-of-the-art hi-fi equipment and, for many years, Edwards of Camberwell, located on a busy crossing in the dingy south-east London suburb, was the official provider of mopeds to Her Majesty. Other Royal Warrant holders supply carpets and carpet-cleaning products, dog food, drapery and lampshades.
Admittedly, it is still the more obviously prestigious products that attract the most attention and, even now, for every sauce manufacturer on the list (HP, Lea and Perrins) you’ll find half a dozen purveyors of champagne. Similarly, every animal-feed supplier is balanced by a Berry Bros. or Fortnum’s, and will always be the ones to benefit most from their status as suppliers to the Palace.
How else to explain why John Barbour & Sons, manufacturers of the almost ubiquitous dark-green ‘Thornproof’ jacket, so strongly values its brace of Warrants? It is the Royal Warrants that make perfumers Floris of Jermyn Street and Penhaligon in nearby Covent Garden smell so sweet, and that explain why, if Wilkinson Sword still has the edge over the upstart Gillette, it has more to do with ceremonial blades than disposable ones. When even a retailer as distinguished and exclusive as hatter James Lock – the oldest shop in London (see below) – displays its Warrants so prominently, you know that they believe that, after more than 800 years, royal connections still count.
Suits You, Sir
The decidedly masculine enclave centred on Savile Row has often been described as a club, but, in truth, the rag trade’s most favoured address is more of a village – meaning it comes with everything that such a description implies.
For example, one’s first impression of the place is that it has a definite air of self-containment, not to say a certain smugness. Peering out at you through their windows, the locals seem not to welcome visitors particularly – nor any sign of change – and like many small rural communities they clearly value their own way of doing things. Similarly, new arrivals are still regarded as outsiders, and will continue to be described in this way for at least the first three or four decades after their arrival.
The Row’s residents are also not averse to squabbling among themselves, the usual argument being between tradition and change, although one suspects that even the oldest of the old guard privately acknowledge that change will win in the end. (In a street where family connections can survive seven or eight generations, that makes some of them very old indeed, but quite reasonably their concern is mostly to see that any attempts at progress are introduced with sufficient stealth that nobody, and certainly no customers, will realise that anything is changing.)
Most recently, the blue touchpaper was ignited by Messrs. Gieves & Hawkes, by far the best-known name in Savile Row, although by no means the oldest. (As separate entities they clothed both Wellington and Nelson, but the two names were joined together only as recently as the mid-1970s. Contrast that with H. Huntsman, which was already well-established the 1840s, and Henry Poole & Co., which arrived on the scene a good forty years before that.)
It was the company’s decision to go headlong into ready-to-wear clothing that ignited the furore and, to make matters worse, the man striking the match was not just an outsider but someone from the very different world of fashion. He came by way of Calvin Klein and Reiss, but the decision was probably inevitable anyway if only because (as one rival put it) one can’t build a business on old customers who are just about to die. But in a place that frowns on made-to-measure, never mind off-the-peg (as opposed to proper, 24-carat, copper-bottomed bespoke), it was bound to send shockwaves up the street. And it did, even before it emerged that the new collection was to include not just suits but foreign stuff, too – such as leather jackets and Italian-made jeans.
Of course, a measure of conservatism is only to be ex
pected here, as indeed is a certain pride in the English way of doing things. The gentleman’s suit originated in London, after all, as Samuel Pepys noted in his diary for 15 October 1666 after witnessing the arrival in Parliament of Charles II sporting a ‘long cassock close to the body; of black cloth, and pinked in white silk under it, and a coat over it’. And even now Savile Row’s global pre-eminence is such that the word for suit in Japanese is ‘sebiro’, a straightforward transliteration.
That said, the experience of being fitted for a suit can be a little daunting – and not just because of the cost (which typically starts not that far south of £3,000). Everything about the place is designed to impress, and so it does, from your first sniff of its authentically old-fashioned ambience to the staff’s amusingly dusty demeanour as they take you through the myriad choices from Huddersfield worsteds (or mohair worsteds for summer wear) through Scottish tweeds – Lowland, Harris and Shetland – to authentic West of England flannel.
Then there is the quietly assertive way – more dismissive than intentionally rude – in which a customer’s physical peculiarities are noted as the measuring tape passes around his body: ‘Dropped right shoulder . . . legs not quite even . . . is that how Sir normally stands?’ And, of course, the chilling recognition that, as you walked through the door, the staff would unthinkingly have clocked and assessed what you equally unthinkingly decided to wear when getting dressed that morning.
It is at least reassuring to know that, as a customer, you are in good company, but also somewhat humbling in a place such as the aforementioned Henry Poole to know that where you are now, Queen Victoria and her family once went . . . as well as our own Queen, Tsar Alexander II, Churchill, Chaplin, and even the real Buffalo Bill. (Napoleon III and de Gaulle were regulars in Savile Row, too, which must say something for the reputation of French tailoring.)