Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge

by Lindy Woodhead

  Over the next five years, Tilden lovingly—and expensively—set about drawing Harry’s dream. The two men formed a close friendship, and Tilden later recorded how impressed he had been by “the magnitude of [Selfridge’s] imaginative thoughts.”

  The plan involved a huge castle, with a smaller, private house below. Drawings were made for cloistered gardens, a winter garden, a Galerie des Glaces as at Versailles, dining halls capable of seating hundreds, 250 bedroom suites, and a domed central hall that would be seen from far out at sea. It was intended that artists from all fields would be able to rent space at Hengistbury Head and work there surrounded by beauty. It was a strangely noble idea, but the locals hated it. Some said Selfridge was building a factory on the site, others that he intended to create a theme park with a Wild West show. Selfridge assured Christchurch Town Council that “he would work with archaeologists during construction and he would take steps to prevent erosion of the Head and always allow the public access.” Tilden meanwhile executed hundreds of drawings, admitting that the only way he could cope with the design was to develop it section by section. Whenever Selfridge was asked how, or when, the plan would be executed or what it would cost, he refused to be drawn. Tilden later recalled that he would simply look at his interrogator “with a cold, clear, blue and calculating eye, thrusting out his chin with never a glimmer of a smile.”

  In March 1919 Selfridge’s celebrated its tenth birthday and Harry went on a spending spree. A swath of impressive advertisements marked the anniversary. Lord Northcliffe in particular took note, writing to his managers: “I feel we all owe a great deal to Selfridge for the way in which he woke up the drapers. He should be helped in every possible way.”

  Flush with funds from a new issue of five hundred thousand preference shares, and with postwar building restrictions curtailing the Oxford Street development program, Selfridge expanded into the provinces. He was convinced that the drapery stores presented a unique development opportunity and he bought businesses in Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield, Gloucester, Peterborough, Reading, and Northampton.

  Selfridge was a man in a hurry. When he went to Dublin on June 25 to negotiate a deal to buy the city’s old established draper’s Brown Thomas, he reasoned that the journey by train and ferry would take too long. So he flew. The chartered plane, a De Havilland Airco 9 piloted by Captain Gathergood, winner of the Aerial Derby, took off from Hendon just after lunch, touched down in Chester for refueling and tea, and arrived in Dublin in time for dinner. It was the world’s first commercial flight. Back at Hendon the next afternoon Selfridge told the press: “This only shows what possibilities there are now in high speed aerial transport to the businessman in a hurry.” Reading about it in a rival paper, Lord Northcliffe was furious, shooting a note off to his staff: “Why no reference to Selfridge’s air journey to Dublin? It was the first business flight.” He might also have asked why Selfridge was proposing to buy a business in Dublin at a time when the city was under curfew and Michael Collins and his IRA men were battling it out on the streets with the brutal Black and Tans. Selfridge, however, felt that the city presented a “wonderful opportunity.”

  From that point on, Selfridge became addicted to aviation, and the pioneering commercial airline Aircraft Transport & Travel flew him not just to Highcliffe but also around the country to visit his growing empire. As always, he milked the press potential for all it was worth, putting a Handley Page seventeen-seater passenger plane fuselage on show in the store as the backdrop for a fashion show of the latest leather “flying clothes.” At a time when flying was still a dangerous business and uninsurable, his bankers and his board members might have queried the wisdom of “the Chief”—at the age of sixty-three—gallivanting around the skies. But such exploits were part of the Selfridge magic. He was on a roll, and no one could stop him.

  At home, the loss of Rose had been a crushing blow. At work, the loss of his genial mentor Sir Edward Holden, who died in the summer of 1919, was another. Sir Edward’s portrait joined that of Marshall Field in Harry’s imposing office, where he had a new lady in his life. It had taken two years to find a suitable replacement for the inimitable Cissie Chapman who, having been his personal secretary since 1914, had been promoted to launch the store’s Information Bureau. Indeed, Selfridge—who had got through an entire battalion of temporary staff since her promotion—was beginning to think she was irreplaceable. Then he found Miss Mepham. Calm, organized, efficient, tactful, loyal, and discreet, Hilda Mepham was exactly the right woman to look after Harry Selfridge—and she did so until the day he left the store. She shared the outer office with an urbane young man named Eric Dunstan, who had joined the staff as his social secretary. The well-connected Dunstan had spent two years in Fiji working for a colonial governor and a period in the Conservative Party’s headquarters. He was also discreet, which, given some of the requirements of his job, was probably just as well.

  With commercial construction curtailed, Selfridge turned his hand to residential development. Encouraged by his friend Sir Harry Brittain, the newly appointed Conservative MP for Acton, Harry made his own public-spirited contribution by forming the non-profit-making Victory Construction Company. His plan was to build 300 inexpensive brick and concrete dwellings. Admitting that “they were not very lovely,” they would, he said, “be easy to run and would serve as a temporary resting place for those whose lives have been disrupted until they see better days.” Each of the five-roomed, semidetached houses on Lowfield and Westfield Roads was priced at £310 and offered initially to Acton residents. In the end, only seventy were built before the scheme went awry due to escalating costs, but it was a fine gesture.

  Allied victory, meanwhile, was being discussed at the Paris Peace Conference, held at Versailles. As the protracted negotiations neared completion, Selfridge planned a special celebration. His creative director, Edward Goldsman, was dispatched to Paris where he was given special access to sketch and photograph the famous Hall of Mirrors, using Louis XIV’s marvel as the theme for the store’s “budget no option” décor planned to coincide with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. It wasn’t just about window displays. The store took the decoration right out into the street, laying out a “Court of Honor” in front of the main building, with imposing plaster columns and bas-relief figures holding shields and flags. Even the lampposts were decorated. Selfridge’s was no longer just a part of Oxford Street. To the thousands of people who flocked to see the decorations, it had become Oxford Street.

  11.

  Vices and Virtues

  “A store should be like a song of which one never tires.”

  —H. G. SELFRIDGE

  AS THE NEW DECADE ARRIVED, THE BAND IN THE STORE’S Palm Court played all the latest hits at the daily thés dansants and the place was packed. To some observers, it was astonishing how many people had so much time in the day to dance. Why weren’t they at work? But at a time when jobs were proving increasingly difficult to find, very often dancing was a job. A lot of unemployed ex-officers danced for a living. There were many “gentleman escorts” available to take a turn on the floor with a war widow, while the impresario Albert de Courville used to boast that several of the more talented chorus boys in his revues at the London Hippodrome held either the MC or the DSO. Honors, however, didn’t pay the rent.

  At Selfridge’s there was no cover charge in the Palm Court—Harry reasoned that those who came to dance might do a little shopping in between numbers. At the Piccadilly Hotel or the Café de Paris, the charge was four shillings for “afternoon tea and dancing,” while at the swankier Savoy, it was five shillings. For the lonely, a mere two shillings bought tea and sympathy at the Regent Palace or the Astoria Dance Hall, where girls were rumored to offer more to those who wanted it. The lost and the louche went to Kate “Ma” Meyrick’s Dalton’s Club in Leicester Square, which really was a pickup place and where for the price of two pounds, “Ma’s” girls would offer a lot more than sympathy. When Mrs. Meyrick subsequently appea
red in court on vice charges, part of her defense was that “the West End was a regular hotbed of lawlessness” and that “her girls” were just “bringing cheer to some of the terribly disfigured boys home from the war.”

  The big musical hit of the moment was Ain’t We Got Fun?, but as Mrs. Meyrick had so aptly put it, for a lot of people, life wasn’t much fun. Most young men, regardless of their social background, were struggling to rebuild their shattered lives after the horrors of the war. Demobbed with brutal haste and little if any government support, many of them faced a bleak future. Some were so shell-shocked that nothing but prescribed morphine, cocaine, or the illicit but widely used opium could numb the pain. Others, haunted by the blood and gore of the trenches, simply drank their memories away. Large numbers of young men, without much education other than being trained to kill, joined gangs in London, where there were rich pickings to be had from protection rackets. Petty crime—pickpocketing and bag snatching in Oxford Street, shoplifting in the stores—was on the increase. At Selfridge’s, where the open-plan floors were particularly vulnerable, dozens of extra store superintendents were hired to keep a watchful eye.

  The media took to blaming all the woes facing society on “drink, dancing, and drugs,” especially the latter, which made for better copy. When the young and rather pretty dancer Billie Carleton died in late 1918 of a cocaine overdose, her companion, the fashion designer Reggie de Veulle, was charged with her manslaughter and viciously attacked in the press. In the end, the rather pathetic Mr. de Veulle was found innocent of anything except “having an effeminate face and a mincing little smile,” whereupon he disappeared into obscurity. Meanwhile, the real culprit was found to be a Chinese immigrant, Lau Ping You, a drug dealer who worked for Britain’s biggest supplier, Brilliant Chang. The tabloid press whipped itself into a frenzy over the “yellow peril in Limehouse,” while mothers were warned not to let their daughters “go anywhere near a Chinese laundry or other places where the yellow men congregate.” In 1920, only six years after the army had first handed out tablets containing cocaine to its troops, the Dangerous Drugs Act banned the drug altogether.

  The clergy ranted from the pulpit about the licentiousness of the dancing youth (though Victor Sylvester, the undisputed king of the Black Bottom, was a vicar’s son); organizations such as the London Council for the Promotion of Public Morality warned of the growing influence of the uncensored cinema; and the influential Temperance Movement urged even stricter licensing laws. Most of the young people in question took absolutely no notice. All they wanted to do was dance. But as far as officialdom was concerned, dancing went hand in hand with drinking. While Lloyd George and Nancy Astor, the country’s first woman MP, who both loathed “the demon drink,” would have been delighted to see alcohol banned in Great Britain—as it had been in America to disastrous effect—they had to rely on DORA instead. The wartime law was dusted off and made more stringent still. It became illegal to get a drink anywhere after 10:00 P.M. without food, and anywhere at all after midnight. Such absurdities only succeeded in driving dozens of flourishing nightclubs underground—quite literally, as most of them were in dank cellars.

  Such attempts to enforce a new morality had little effect. Everyone converged on club-land. Rich war profiteers, the jeunesse dorée up from Oxford and Cambridge, the young British royal princes, a clutch of their dispossessed European royal cousins—all sat side by side with newly rich provincials up from the suburbs, dancing and drinking till dawn, their night out all the more thrilling because it might end in a police raid.

  Before the war, apart from the odd glass of sherry or a celebratory glass of champagne, pre-dinner drinking had hardly existed. Wine was drunk with food, never on its own, women would rarely drink spirits, and men passed round the port. Then cocktails arrived. “Cocktail time” seemed to begin anywhere from 12:00 noon to 5:00 P.M., with people giving cocktail parties, eagerly exchanging recipes for the perfect martini, and praising barmen who made a great White Lady.

  Not everyone approved. The distinguished restaurateur Monsieur Boulestin said: “Cocktails are the most romantic expression of modern life, but the cocktail habit as practiced in England is now a vice.” It was a vice to which even the otherwise fairly abstemious Harry Selfridge took. Prewar he would nurse a glass of champagne for an entire evening. During the war, he joined the king, who declared Buckingham Palace a “dry zone” and gave up drinking altogether. But postwar, Harry took to having “a cocktail or two” before dinner. He also took to eating a prodigious amount of food while dining that resulted—as was noticed by one of his inner-sanctum office staff—in him taking to wearing a corset. Selfridge’s meanwhile joined in the craze for cocktails by selling shakers, fancy ice trays, cocktail napkins, recipe books, martini glasses, gold swizzle sticks, olives, and all the paraphernalia of the drinker—right down to the white mess jackets that the barmen wore.

  It wasn’t just the fashion in drink that changed. Clothes were changing too. The influence of the once great Paul Poiret was waning. He was still making sumptuous clothes and was still surrounded by an eccentric coterie—the poet Max Jacob, a gifted amateur astrologer, liked to advise his friend on the colors he should wear so as to be in conjunction with the planets—but his style was about to be eclipsed. When fashion revived in Paris after the war, the look was distinctly less dramatic. Coco Chanel, poised to become the defining leader of style, declared: “I make fashions women can live in, breathe in and look younger in.” The latter effect made her clothes irresistible. Everyone wanted to look younger, including Harry Selfridge. Now 64, he seemed utterly determined to push back time, traveling to Vienna for treatments with Serge Voronoff, whose antiaging experiments with monkey glands were exciting other youth-conscious luminaries such as George Bernard Shaw, Helena Rubinstein, Augustus John, and Winston Churchill.

  Thousands of women had found war work and the utility clothing that went with it a liberating experience. The watchwords in fashion were “simplicity,” “modernity,” and “freedom.” Many women now widowed or without much prospect of marriage were having to become self-supporting through need as much as choice. They wanted clothes for work rather than for leisure, but above all they needed clothes that worked for them—less ornate, less contrived, and certainly less expensive. Mechanical methods originally devised to cut material for military uniforms were quickly adapted to produce ready-to-wear clothing—chiefly coats and suits—which transformed not just the clothing industry but also the jobs of many women working in it, as unskilled and semiskilled machinists took over what had previously been made by hand.

  The lean, short shift dress of the quintessential twenties flapper was actually a mid-decade innovation. Its precursor was a low-waisted combination of droop and drape in soft fabrics such as lamé, panne velvet and crêpe de Chine, often tied with a deep sash at the hip. All those lush, Edwardian curves were now out, and as corset sales slumped by two-thirds, the underpinnings industry had hastily to reinvent itself. Although Dorothy Parker famously quipped “that brevity is the soul of lingerie,” there was still quite a lot going on underneath. To flatten the bosom, women bought Symington’s side-lacer camisole-style bra, wore a straight-cut camisole or, in an emergency, simply taped their bosom down with a crêpe bandage. The more mature, used to some support and still priding themselves in standing up straight, wore the longer-line corset pioneered for the prewar straighter skirts, while the young and more athletic favored a lighter-weight “corselette” and even took to wearing garter belts. The cotton industry was in disarray as layers of servant-starched petticoats were discarded in favor of a simple petticoat shift—usually in satin or silk. Then, in 1924, there arrived the working girl’s greatest savior, rayon.

  At the beginning of the twenties hemlines moved up by about eight inches, revealing gleaming silk stockings, colored kid-leather shoes, the hitherto unseen shape of a lady’s leg and, in the case of Lady Londonderry, the grand political hostess of the day, the surprising fact that she had a snak
e tattoo from her ankle to her knee.

  Stockings were no longer just black or white. With the introduction of synthetics, artificial silk stockings also came in skin tones of flesh and beige. They weren’t as nice to wear as silk, but they were less than half the price and very practical. Selfridge’s was actually prosecuted for falsely selling synthetic stockings as “real silk.” The store vigorously protested that it was the fault of the supplier but agreed to refund disgruntled customers nevertheless. This incident was one of the rare occasions when anyone in the office saw “the Chief” lose his temper. He loathed confrontation and hated arguments, thinking them a waste of energy, but any misrepresentation of goods ran against his entire business philosophy. He prided himself on accuracy and his copywriters were never allowed to put a false spin on store promotions or use misleading price promotion tricks.

  Selfridge himself may have been an early adopter of ethical advertising in respect of price and value, but his creative team was part of the swelling army of copywriters and image engineers who helped to build an ideology of consumerism. The seductive hum of shopping was in the air. Women were wearing makeup (no more lipsticks under the counter), flashing their powder compacts in public, using moisturizer and worrying about wrinkles, smoking cigarettes and gargling with Listerine, listening to all the latest records at home instead of playing the piano, and going out un-chaperoned. They still wore hats—everyone still wore hats—but the hats were getting much, much smaller, and the hair underneath them was changing.

  Long hair was out. Short waved hair, as pioneered by the film star Gloria Swanson, was in. At Selfridge’s, the hairdressing department (now seating fifty clients at a time) was busy all day using the latest waving machines—price three guineas for shingled hair, four guineas for long. Hairdressing had by now become big business. Most of the original stylists from Selfridge’s early, innovative department had left to open their own salons, “color, cut and curl” then as now being a profitable business. But even in a smaller salon, marcel waving cost at least two guineas, so anyone who couldn’t afford a week’s wages to wave their hair did it at home with tongs heated on a tiny spirit stove.