At which point, Frankau seems to suggest, Harrod suffered a complete breakdown and the directors had to go off and find a new manager. Certainly if he had been in poor health, coming back to rescue the store he loved might well have exhausted him.
During his time back in charge, Charles Digby entrusted Mr Cohen with the task of finding a new general manager. Cohen recommended Richard Burbidge, who had just left Whiteley’s, which was the largest department store in London at the time. Burbidge was then working at West Kensington Stores. Cohen first approached Burbidge on 16 December 1890. Three weeks later, on 6 January 1891, as Burbidge says in his dairy, Cohen has been to see him ‘for about the 5th time on behalf of Mr Newton, chairman of Harrod’s Stores’, but he is still declining the managership of Harrods. The diary explains that Cohen and Newton eventually managed to persuade him, and Burbidge’s resignation from the West Kensington Stores was accepted on 18 February 1891.
On 26 February, Cohen introduced Burbidge to Charles Digby at the National Liberal Club. Burbidge then attended the Harrods board meeting on 2 March 1891, ‘meeting Mr Harrod and other directors who introduced me to different buyers’. On 2 April 1891 Richard Burbidge, having been appointed, started work and was now in charge. It is likely that Charles Digby would have worked in tandem with him for a short time to make the introductions and show him the ropes. Assuming that Frankau’s account is accurate, which may be doubtful, and that the dates of these meetings in Burbidge’s diary are correct, which is very likely, it would seem that Charles Digby returned to work for seven months from September 1890 to March 1891 inclusive, and not the eighteen months mentioned earlier. His health had again played a part.
The only problem with these dates is that the Harrods management did not write to Charles Digby asking him to return until 7 November 1890, so even if he had responded immediately, he could not have been working to the point of collapse through September, October and November as Frankau suggested. The census, taken in early April 1891, and details of which are given later, shows that Charles Digby had already returned to Allerford by this date. So the longest he could have worked back at Harrods was about twenty weeks between early and mid November 1890 and the end of March 1891. Unless you know differently, of course …
Whiteley’s store of the time was bigger than Harrods and, like Harrods, started from humble beginnings. The rise of William Whiteley not only mimics closely that of Charles Henry and later Charles Digby Harrod, but was achieved at some pace.
His father apprenticed him in 1848 to a draper’s shop in Wakefield. He spent seven laborious years learning everything he could about retailing, importing and wholesaling. In 1851, Whiteley, visited the Great Exhibition in London and was inspired by the range of goods all displayed under the same roof. He returned home to finish his apprenticeship and was determined to start a store doing just that.
At the age of 24, he left his home to seek fame and fortune in London. He had only £10 in his pocket but he had a dream in his heart – to create a store such as London had never seen before, a store that could offer the shopping public everything and anything. He worked in London learning the trade and scrimped and saved until he had amassed £700. With that, in 1863 he opened a small shop in a little known and unfashionable part of London called Bayswater. Whiteley’s department store started as a drapery shop at 31 Westbourne Grove, not long after Charles Digby was taking over the shop in Brompton Road. In the next four years Whiteley’s expanded to a row of shops containing seventeen separate departments.
By 1875 he had become an entrepreneur of note – buying up more shops in the area, cutting prices, offering vast ranges of goods and services, from clothes and kitchenware to estate agency work. ‘The Universal Provider’ became one of his slogans; ‘Everything from a pin to an Elephant’ was another.
His competitors, and presumably that included Charles Digby, naturally disliked him as much as his customers loved him, but nothing could stop him. In 1885 he achieved his ultimate dream – the most comprehensive department store of its time, with a staff of 6,000 people by 1890. Most of the employees lived in company-owned male and female dormitories, having to obey 176 rules and working 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., six days a week.
Whiteley bought massive amounts of farmland and erected food-processing factories to provide produce for the store and for staff catering. In 1896 he earned an unsolicited royal warrant from Queen Victoria – an unprecedented achievement. It was 1913 before Harrods received one, from Queen Mary, although many royals shopped there, including the Russian royal family who bought the sailor suits often worn by their children there.
The parallels with Harrods continued. Whiteley’s was devastated in an enormous fire in 1897, one of the largest fires in London’s history. The store was rebuilt and continued trading in Westbourne Grove for a few years.
William Whiteley came to an untimely end. On 24 January 1907, he was shot dead by a young man called Horace Rayner, who claimed to be his illegitimate son by a former shop girl named Louie. Mr Rayner shot Whiteley twice in the head, and then attempted suicide. He failed, but was hanged after a trial that lasted just five hours. Whiteley’s two sons took over, but my impression is that they never had their father’s enthusiasm.
There was a surprise when his will was read. In addition to various small bequests, Whiteley had specified that the (then considerable) sum of £1 million be used to purchase freehold land ‘… as a site for the erection thereon of buildings to be used and occupied as homes for aged poor persons’. The Whiteley Village Foundation was established, and still flourishes in Surrey caring for the elderly.
When the Westbourne Grove lease expired, the Whiteley brothers opened a splendid new shop in Queensway in 1911; the Lord Mayor of London performed the opening ceremony. It was the height of luxury, with a theatre as well as a golf-course on the roof. The store appears in a number of early twentieth-century novels, and Shaw’s 1913 play,Pygmalion, when Eliza Doolittle is sent there ‘to be attired’.
The Whiteley’s store was sold to Gordon Selfridge in 1927, but declined in the decades thereafter, suffering bomb damage in the Second World War. The store closed in 1981, but re-emerged in 1989 when the building became incorporated into a shopping centre on the west side of Queensway. It has not been wonderfully successful. It is no longer unique, containing shops that can found on most high streets. It also has a lot of local competition.
In contrast, under Burbidge, Harrods went from strength to strength. Richard Burbidge was born in 1847 in Bradford upon Avon, Wiltshire, and was the fourth of nine sons of a local farmer. When his father died in 1861 his mother wrote to ask Mr Jonathon Puckeridge, a grocer and wine and provision merchant in Oxford Street, if he would accept 100 guineas to teach her 14-year-old son the retail trade.
He moved to London as an apprentice and worked there for five years. In 1881 he joined the Army & Navy Auxiliary Store, shortly before he moved to Whiteley’s. He left Whiteley’s after having apparently fallen out with them over money. He then worked for two years at the West Kensington Stores before joining Harrods.
Whiteley’s loss was Harrods’ gain. He proved to be a talented administrator and manager, enabling Charles Digby to retire with confidence to the West Country. The new management team soon got on top of things, and as the size of the establishment and the number of employees grew, Harrods developed more and more the ‘family of employees’ attitude. By the between-the-wars period, Harrods, like Whiteley’s, had something like 6,000 employees. They had dozens of different sporting clubs and societies.
The Burbidge family was able to build on the solid base developed by Charles Henry and Charles Digby Harrod, and took Harrods to a new level altogether
To close this part of the story, the end of the era when the Harrods were involved in the store, there is one more quote from the Harrodian Gazette of 1926. William Ball returned to his story in the year 1885:
In 1885 I left the Stores to go cabbing, but in 1891 I resumed work again for Harrod
Stores, being employed to drive a horse and van delivering in the Fulham District, at the same time going to Smithfield Market for the Poultry Department every morning. I held this job for 30 years.
He retired in April 1926, after forty-seven years of service, and ended his article saying, ‘I am sorry I could not say good-bye to everybody, because Harrods Limited is a little bit bigger than it was fifty years ago.’ How very true!
Richard Burbidge took on Harrods with the same enthusiasm that Charles Digby had forty years earlier. As British History Online puts it:
Almost immediately a more forward-looking phase of expansion began. Further new departments opened, adjoining properties were secured, and a depository was acquired at Barnes. Following a further surge in trade the board determined in 1894 on erecting premises of very substantial character.
By the turn of the century Harrods had taken over the title of the largest store from Whiteley’s.
In 1895, another public share offer was made to raise capital for this further development. Premises had been bought, leases acquired, refurbishment undertaken, and the Barnes Depository land was purchased. The advertisement in the Pall Mall Gazette now showed the name of Edgar Cohen in the list of directors.
The decision to expand substantially involved rebuilding on the whole of the quadrilateral area now occupied by Harrods. Back to British History Online:
… the main site of Harrods lay on the freehold estate of John Goddard and William Watkins, whose long-delayed rebuilding plans for the whole of their Brompton Road frontage were afoot by 1892. Behind this, the equally decrepit south end of Queen’s Gardens and the whole of North Street came in 1892 into the hands of the Belgravia Estate Limited, which co-operated with Goddard and Watkins on a mutual plan of reconstruction. One of the directors of this syndicate, Herbert Bennett of Marler and Bennett, estate agents in Sloane Street, was also a director of Harrods. This connection enabled Harrods to negotiate an arrangement whereby the Belgravia Estate Limited rebuilt this portion of North Street (subsequently Basil Street) on a line further south and Harrods took most of the new street’s northern frontage, thus extending its premises southwards into Chelsea and stopping up the old south end of Queen’s Gardens.
As yet, however, the company does not seem to have thought generally of expanding west of Queen’s Gardens, where they held no leases. The presence here of a small but quite recent London board school, erected in 1874 … constituted one difficulty. This school never proved popular, … but despite rumours of its demolition as early as 1892, Harrods did not secure the promise of a sale until 1897 and entered into possession only in 1902, when the school was finally amalgamated with another … A graver problem was that from 1893, under the rebuilding plans of Watkins and Goddard, good new houses were being erected all along the east side of Hans Road.
The architect chosen for the reconstruction of Harrods was C.W. Stephens, and his reputation was wholly local. He had been involved in the redevelopment of Hans Place.
… His buildings here and elsewhere in the district were of a banal Queen Anne character, but presumably he was a competent businessman and an effective planner … In 1892 he designed a new chimney shaft for Harrods, having also worked recently for the store’s nearby rival, Harvey Nichols of Lowndes Terrace, Knightsbridge. But 1894 was the annus mirabilis for Stephens, bringing him not only the prospect of reconstructing Harrods but also the huge and fashionable commission of Claridge’s in Mayfair … But Harrods, bulging expansively out of its rich casing of Doulton’s terracotta, is unique among them.
The transformation of Harrods into the vast department store known today was a piecemeal business, since sites were acquired only gradually, business had to be kept going, and building regulations required that such large undertakings had to be divided into several structurally separate entities. Generally speaking, the rebuilding proceeded anti-clockwise from 1894 until 1912, from Basil Street and Hans Crescent round into the Brompton Road and so finally into Hans Road. Throughout, it was Stephens’ arduous task to combine the requirements of each individual sector with a semblance of unity.
A notable publicity coup was that in 1898, Harrods introduced the first ‘moving staircase’ to an amazed public, a notable event. This was not an escalator in the modern sense of a moving staircase, but literally a moving slope. Attendants were stationed at either end to help the anxious public on and off this new-fangled mechanical invention.
The meteoric growth continued and over the period of a couple of decades the Harrods we know today emerged, with the purchase of surrounding premises to produce the present building footprint. The rebuilding of the frontage awaited purchase of all the relevant sites in 1897. The general lines were agreed with the LCC in 1901 and it was built in stages, being completed in 1905.
At this point, the floors above the ground-floor shop were given to storage showrooms and flats, the most elegant facing the Brompton Road, and:
… had at least fifteen rooms and a superficial footage of over 5,000 square feet each, and rented at £400–500 per annum. They enjoyed ample space for circulation and were arranged around large light-wells, which descended to illumine skylights over the first-floor showrooms. Beneath these skylights were well-holes allowing light to the ground floor … For the gentry, access to the flats [which were named Hans Mansions] was from lifts or staircases within entrances in Hans Road and Hans Crescent, but by a makeshift device the service staircases rose from a dingy sub-basement through the store itself, from which they were entirely enclosed. The original finishing of the shop interiors was very lavish, too greatly so for Joseph Appel, who in 1906 caught himself ‘admiring the fixtures and really not seeing the goods … Mr Burbidge says they get the land so cheap – ground rent – that they can afford to spend money on luxurious fittings. But really it is because they are among such elaborate surroundings in London, beautiful public buildings, elaborate castles and private homes, and so on, that they have to decorate more luxuriously than we do.’
During the rebuilding of Harrods, trade was continually expanding. The cost of the works doubtless exceeded a million pounds … but this was amply justified by returns. Between 1890 and 1910 yearly profits rose steadily from £13,500 to just over £210,000, and turnover in 1906 was put at £2,100,000. So many new departments were opened that before reconstruction was complete there was already pressure for further expansion.
All this building and expansion paid off. Harrods, under Burbidge and later his son’s care, gained international renown and became the most famous department store in the world. The Boer War, and later the First World War, provided enormous stimulus to the growth. The store received the royal warrant in 1913. At the time of Burbidge’s death in 1917 Harrods had 6,000 employees. He was succeeded by his son, Woodman Burbidge.
Over the ensuing decades, Harrods has held many celebrations of the anniversary of the beginning of the store, always using the date for the start of the shop as 1849, the year that Charles Henry Harrod was thought, erroneously, to have moved to Brompton Road. The Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 1909 were contrived to maximise publicity. It is interesting to note that whilst Harrods were celebrating their Diamond Jubilee in 1909, in the same year Harry Selfridge opened his London store on Oxford Street.
Harrods’ celebrations concentrated on the store’s support for the Territorials. They were trying to emphasise its Britishness and patriotism, in contrast to the American-style store which Selfridge had launched. The store frontage is recorded in a photograph from about this time, probably in 1901. The narrow entrance to Queens Gardens can be seen between the last blind on the store window and the lamp post across the alley, in front of the Buttercup public house. The adjacent shops look as though they are empty and will be incorporated into the extending building, an event which occurred by 1902.
I am grateful to the Harrods Limited Company Archive for access to the anniversary records. There is a lavishly produced guest list and seating plan for the 1909 luncheon, together with
the menu. Harrods has a copy of the guest list which belonged to Lloyd Chandos, who was one of the singers who performed in the free concerts that Harrods laid on that week for the jubilee celebrations. He was a sober tenor, in marked contrast to the ‘Dolly Sisters’ of Selfridges fame. It can be seen that despite only twenty years having elapsed since Charles Digby retired and sold out, the only representative of the Harrod family present was his son Henry Herbert Harrod.
The event was reported in the national newspapers of the day, including the Times and Daily Express. According to the Times, the celebrations lasted a week, from 15–19 March, and included the luncheon and a concert. A morning meeting was held to promote interest in the Territorial Force. The concert hall held 1,500 people and Harrods had received 50,000 applications for tickets. There were about 500 guests at the luncheon. The concert featured the London Symphony Orchestra and many individual artists, including Miss Margaret Cooper, a well-known pianist and singer who married one of my great-uncles the following year.
The Daily Express commented, ‘The whole commemoration week will be arranged on the most lavish scale, no expense being spared to make it into a phenomenal success.’ In a later edition the Daily Express eulogises about the store at some length:
The ordinary conjuring trick of producing tables of food is done daily at Harrod’s. Its restaurant is one of the largest and most elegant in London, with reading and retiring rooms for ladies, and a smoke room and lounge for men. Many London women might find it hard to realise that Harrod’s never existed, or to imagine how they would shop if Harrod’s ceased to be. But few people who shop at Harrod’s know that the business, which now ranks among the world’s leading stores, was growing gradually out of obscurity for forty years until it burst into bloom as ‘Harrod’s Stores Limited’ and became one of the wonders of the shopping world … Harrod’s can house you (in one of the comfortable flats over the stores), feed you, clothe you, furnish you, fit you out for an Arctic voyage (it equipped the Discovery for the Antarctic exploration), or for a military expedition, book you to anywhere, sell your stocks and shares, bank your money on the premises, dress your hair in the latest fashion, supply you with books, put your advertisements in any paper, dress a theatrical company for you (as it recently dressed ‘Our Miss Gibbs’ at the Gaiety), provide your children with cradles, take you out in motor cars, keep your jewels in strong rooms and your firs in a cold-air chamber, and when you have exhausted every other pleasure, provide you with a comfortable coffin!
The Jewel of Knightsbridge Page 18