Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge (20 page)

Gaby Deslys was at the forefront of fashion, and her clothes made headlines. She wore Poiret’s hobble dresses and Doucet’s soft lace
robes. Her extravagant show costumes were designed by Etienne Drian and lovingly made in Paquin’s workshops. Drawn by Erte, photographed by Jacques-Henri Lartigue, endlessly written up by
Tatler
, Gaby was a celebrity before the word was invented. A youthful Cecil Beaton recalled being enchanted by her: ‘She was a successor to the grand Parisian cocottes of the nineties on the one hand and, since she was such a famous theatrical figure, the precursor of a whole school of glamour that was to be exemplified twenty years later by Marlene Dietrich.’

Gaby’s signature was her hats. She did big hats to such extremes – huge feathered and ribboned cartwheel confections – that she needed a second cabin on Atlantic crossings just for her millinery. The more outlandish the hats, the more the public loved them. Gaby’s hats – indeed Gaby herself – so influenced Beaton that years later, when he was working on
My Fair Lady
, Audrey Hepburn’s memorable millinery and the entire black-and-white Ascot scene were inspired by Gaby’s hats.

Gaby’s stage partner was the slick-haired and handsome Harry Pilcer. A superb dancer, Pilcer worked tirelessly on developing Gaby’s skills. Their specialist routine, known as ‘the Gaby Glide’, was so athletic that on one memorable occasion her legs were wrapped round Harry’s waist.

In those heady months before the war, young people were dancing as though their lives depended on it. Whether at smart supper-clubs in New York, in steamy nightclubs in Paris, or at tea dances at Lyons’ Corner House, couples were perfecting their fox trot. The American vaudeville actor Harry Fox had invented what was originally called ‘Fox’s Trot’, although it never made him any money. Poor Harry Fox drifted in and out of stage revues demonstrating his dashing steps, was briefly married to the dancer Jenny Dolly and then stood by while the celebrated international dancers Vernon and Irene Castle made his dance their own.

The Castles were the forerunners of all modern ballroom dancing. The idols of Fred and Adele Astaire, they had an immense influence
on fashion. Irene was the first famous woman to bob her hair, wearing Lucile’s floating dresses
sans corsette
as she whirled around the floor. The famous artists’ agent Bessie Marbury had discovered the pair in Paris in 1914 and moved them to New York that year, establishing the elegant Castle House dancing school where society ladies learned to shed their inhibitions. The couple danced divinely to the new syncopated music that was sweeping New York, where everyone seemed to be humming the young composer Irving Berlin’s ‘Alexander’s Rag-time Band’.

Back in London, the band in Selfridge’s Palm Court Restaurant had to work hard to keep up with the pace, and the phonograph department could hardly meet demand. The store’s latest gadget, their external ‘electric moving news strip’, flashed out details about the latest hits available in the store to the awed public watching from the pavement outside. The news strip also relayed everything from the weather forecast to the latest sports results, while ticker-tape machines inside punched out information on stock-market moves. Meanwhile, boys of all ages hovered around the newly installed seismograph in the hope that an earthquake would strike in some remote part of the world.

Tatler
eagerly reported that Selfridge’s had recruited some aristocratic new staff – albeit just for the day. Lady Sheffield, Lady Albemarle, Viscountess Maidstone and the Duchess of Rutland – helped by her daughter Diana – took up duty behind the sales counters, with all profits from their efforts going to benefit an educational charity for young mothers in Stepney. The ‘divine Diana’ Manners, having sold ribbons all morning, moved to silk stockings in the afternoon, demonstrating how fine they were by pulling them up over her arms, a sight of such fatal charm that one male customer bought a dozen pairs on the spot.

Education of a different sort was on offer when the store presented the latest state-of-the-art technology in what was called ‘A Scientific and Electrical Exhibition – admission free’. Among the wonders on show were an automatic telephone exchange, a vacuum ice-machine,
an X-ray machine and newly invented electric cookers. A complete installation of wireless telegraphy allowed messages to be sent to and received from Paris. Most thrilling of all, the young and eccentric inventor Archibald Low set up his latest gadgetry. Low had already demonstrated his ‘Televista’ at the Institute of Automobile Engineers in May that year, where an enthralled Harry Selfridge had been in the audience. Low’s machinery was crude and underdeveloped, but it was the first demonstration of what would eventually become television.
The Times
reported that ‘if all goes well with this invention, we shall soon be able, it seems, to see people at a distance’. Low never continued his experiments with television. John Logie Baird would have that distinction, and in 1925 the results of his pioneering work were also demonstrated at Selfridge’s.

On 1 August 1914, Germany declared war on Russia and, two days later, on France. On 4 August, Great Britain declared war on Germany and so the long-anticipated war finally began. The British Army, with a reported strength of just over 700,000 trained men, was overwhelmed with new recruits. By the end of September 750,000 men had joined up. At Selfridge’s, where 1,000 of the 3,500 staff were men, over half enlisted at once. Selfridge guaranteed that any male employee ‘serving his country’ would have his job back when he returned.

Those remaining formed a House Corps, drilling with rifles on the roof. Rifle practice was offered to all female staff and they were encouraged to enrol in self-defence classes. The whole store hummed with patriotic activity. The Palm Court Orchestra played ‘Rule Britannia’ twice a day, and war-work charities were given space and offered discounts on knitting wools for blankets, with free afternoon tea provided for the ‘sewing circles’.

Just as elsewhere in the country, the shortfall in staff at Selfridge’s was made up by recruiting women. Over half a million in England fled the servants’ quarters and sweatshops to work in munitions factories, man buses and drive ambulances. Their newfound freedom put money in their pockets. A young female munitions worker earning
£3 a week (£120 today) and often still living at home had serious spending power.

By the autumn, people flocking to the cinema each week were being informed of what was happening on the Front by newsreels. The newsreels were no more accurate than the ‘War Windows’ at Selfridge’s, in which maps of various campaigns were given pride of place. War reporting quickly fell victim to propaganda, and proud mothers had little or no idea what was actually happening to their young sons. They just kept sending food parcels.

Selfridge’s futuristic white marble Food Hall had opened in its own dedicated building opposite the store some months earlier. It looked more like a science laboratory than a grocery supplier and focused heavily on hygiene. Only very limited – albeit artistic – displays of fresh food were on show, the rest being kept in refrigerated cold rooms. Customers ordered from individual booths, marking up printed sheets listing all stocked provisions. Displays of tinned food, as well as the newly popular processed items such as Marmite, Heinz Tomato Ketchup and Fry’s Cocoa, were for show purposes only. Customers carried nothing away – all orders were delivered the same day from warehouse space off-site.

The Food Hall had a consulting service to help hostesses plan menus. There were daily demonstrations on the art of laying a table and arranging flowers. While wives were engrossed in etiquette, their husbands could browse in the wine room or the temperature-controlled cigar room. W. W. Astor’s
Observer
declared it to be ‘yet another achievement of the ceaseless energy and genius which is part of the enterprise of Selfridge’s’. But the concept was so ahead of its time as to be frankly terrifying and the place was practically deserted. Reluctantly accepting defeat, Selfridge installed a more familiar, food-friendly layout which thereafter worked commercially.

Like the ‘Callisthenes’ columns, most of the Chief’s speeches were written for him. He would then amend the copy, often to the despair of his writers, who grumbled that he was too ponderous. But when one of his staff, Herbert Morgan, came up with the phrase ‘Business as
Usual’, nothing was changed. It summed up exactly how Selfridge felt about his business during the war. He used the slogan so often that it became a catchphrase, famously adopted by Winston Churchill who in November 1914 declared: ‘The maxim of the British people is business as usual.’ Selfridge, a great fan of his fellow Freemason, was delighted.

It might have been expected that Selfridge would have been given a job during the war. Though an American and therefore, until America entered the war in 1917, a neutral, he longed to do something useful. But the British Government never asked him. The French Government were more astute. They invited him to act as their purchasing agent in equipping the army with underwear – a contract said to have been worth over a million pounds – which he did gladly, waiving all commission. In an interview with the
Westminster Gazette
he said: ‘War requires two forces; one of men who fight, another to carry on the work of making and providing. The order of the day must also be advertising as usual.’ Fleet Street applauded him, none more so than Horace Imber, in charge of advertising at Lord Northcliffe’s
Evening News,
when Selfridge signed the biggest order ever placed with a British newspaper to run 150 daily half-page advertisements. Imber, a larger-than-life character who sported white spats and a monocle, was called ‘Lord Imber’ by Northcliffe because, he said, ‘he’s better at business than most of us real members of the House of Lords’. Mr Imber already drove a Rolls-Royce, otherwise Northcliffe might have given him one in gratitude for the Selfridge coup. There was a rumour he had won the pages throwing dice with Harry: the deal was certainly a huge gamble and not one in which his store managers had much faith.

They needn’t have worried. Business at the store was, in real terms, rather good. A particular effort was made to dress the windows, which dazzled during the day. At night, thanks to the Defence of the Realm Act, they went dark. DORA had been passed in 1914, creating emergency powers for all sorts of measures that the Government felt necessary in a time of war. The Act allowed for the requisition
of property, applied censorship, controlled labour, commandeered economic resources ‘for the war effort’, shut off street lighting, darkened shop windows at night – and closed public houses for all but five and a half hours a day. The working man, reasoned the Prime Minister, if he wasn’t already fighting for King and Country, should be working on the factory floor, and preferably be sober at the time.

Selfridge thought all his staff should be on the shop floor, but it wasn’t beer that was the problem, it was tea. Walking the floor one afternoon with the store director Percy Best, he noted that a department seemed understaffed. ‘Where are they?’ he asked. ‘At tea,’ came the reply. ‘No more tea breaks,’ said Selfridge firmly, whereupon Mr Best said, ‘No more staff.’ Reluctantly, Selfridge gave in.

Selfridge himself was often to be found taking tea with Lady Sackville at her bijou house in Green Street. Their friendship had endured, much to the delight of her friends who benefited from Harry’s largesse in sending lavish food parcels to her London town house when she was entertaining. ‘Mr Selfridge sent me some wonderful ice-cream sodas for dessert,’ she wrote in her diary, while another entry recorded, ‘At
last
I have got Selfridge’s to import peach-fed Virginia hams, there is nothing like them.’ The hams in question had made a perilous journey across the Atlantic, part of the huge amount of supplies being sent to war-torn Europe by neutral America.

America’s continuing neutrality was intensely debated in Britain. Selfridge wrote to Harry Pratt Judson in Chicago, grumbling furiously that the ‘American Government was trying to please the pro-German party and to assist the astute Jews who are largely in charge of the copper business in America, to dispose of their supplies to Germany’. He went on: ‘The feeling exists here – unfairly perhaps – that America’s first thought is to chase the dollar.’ The press was reporting that American merchants were shipping cotton, foodstuffs and copper to Germany, a policy he found distasteful, perhaps forgetting that America, being neutral, was free to ship anything anywhere it wanted – including Virginia hams to his store.

Pratt Judson was quick to retaliate, pointing out that the great
majority of Americans sympathized with the Allies ‘because they believe that Germany and Austria really aim at the mastery of Europe and ultimately of the world’. However, he also pointed out that ‘American citizens have a perfect right to sell contraband of war to either belligerent and will do so unimpeded by the American Government. Of course, they do that subject to the risk of capture and condemnation.’ Whether Selfridge liked it or not, there would always be merchants involved in war profiteering. He just hated the thought that anyone might associate him with it.

There were of course many legitimate merchants who just needed to ship their goods, among them the American Frank Woolworth. By the time war broke out, Woolworth was operating over forty branches in Britain. When the Germans invaded France, Woolworth was trapped in Paris and had to scramble to find a ship to get him home safely. For Woolworth, the war presented serious problems of supply. Much of his merchandise was sourced in Europe – particularly Christmas decorations, toys, confectionery, musical instruments, clocks, watches and perfumes, variously made in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Russia, Belgium and France. Woolworth’s had both German and French offices and warehouses, from which goods were sent for consolidation in Liverpool before being shipped to America. Tons of goods were now stranded in the English port, and Woolworth appealed to the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, for permission to take empty hold space in Atlantic convoys. His request was refused: if America wasn’t prepared to support the British Empire in the Great War, then Americans would have to forgo such luxuries. They didn’t have to go without for long. The enterprising Mr Woolworth simply transferred production of all such things to America, where factory staff were trained to copy the previously imported ranges.