SHOPPING, SEDUCTION & MR SELFRIDGE
LINDY WOODHEAD worked in journalism, film and fashion publicity (the latter for Browns of South Molton Street) before establishing her own public relations agency – WPR – in 1974. Joined by her husband Colin as business partner in 1976, they have been pioneering exponents of specialist development of building prestige brand reputation for many years. WPR’s international fashion, fine jewellery and retail clients have included Ferragamo, Cerruti 1881, Wolford, Karl Lagerfeld, Louis Vuitton, Krizia, Rossetti, Yves St Laurent, Brioni, Hermes and Garrard & Co. In the late 1980s, Lindy also took up an external appointment as the first woman on the board of directors at Harvey Nichols.
In 2000, aged 50, Lindy retired to develop her writing career. Her first book, War Paint, was published in 2003 and is the subject of an internationally networked American television documentary.
Currently working on her next book, she also writes consumer-related and lifestyle features for various publications. Lindy and her husband have two sons and divide their time between south-west London and south-west France.
ALSO BY LINDY WOODHEAD
War Paint: Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden –
Their Lives, Their Times, Their Rivalry
This revised edition published in Great Britain in 2012 by
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For Colin, Ollie and Max
Praise for Shopping, Seduction and Mr Selfridge
‘Gripping and excellently researched’ Literary Review
‘More of a social history than a biography, the book is brilliantly researched and the author draws the reader into the fascinating world of the early-twentieth century with skill. The life of Harry Selfridge is described with humour, sensitivity and sympathy … a hugely enjoyable read. I found myself enthralled with the world of Harry Selfridge, nearly falling in love with him myself.’ Sunday Independent, Ireland
‘In this lively and compelling biography, Lindy Woodhead follows the glory years of a charismatic big spender, whose ill-advised expansion would eventually be his downfall. Her pacy narrative takes in his glamorous women, his social set, the sexing up of shopping, and seismic shifts in society.’ Director
‘This dissection of the allure, power and modern-day presence of department stores, via the history of the man behind Selfridges, is a witty and erudite look at the UK’s shopping evolution.’ Easy Living
‘A fascinating look at the life of a man who started a retail revolution’ Birmingham Mail
‘Not only a biography of the man who invented the glamour of the department store and was probably responsible for our national shopping addiction, but also a fascinating look at the cultural and social background of the early-twentieth century.’ Evening Standard
‘Lindy Woodhead shows in this lively and entertaining account it was Selfridge’s love of theatre that informed both his personal and his professional life … (she) adds enormously to this fascinating history by the breadth of her research and by her thorough knowledge of the retail context.’ Sunday Telegraph
‘Perhaps the first English shop owner to identify shopping as thrilling, sexy entertainment. In this energetic and wonderfully detailed biography, Lindy Woodhead tells not only the story of the rise and dramatic fall of Selfridge, the man, but also provides an enthralling description of fashion, politics, music and dance, the arts, the sciences, advertising and the use of the media.’ Juliet Nicolson, Evening Standard
‘Far more than just a profile of one of the world’s great shopkeepers, Lindy Woodhead’s biography of Harry Gordon Selfridge provides a rich social history in a time of great change. However much Woodhead’s book marvels at Selfridge’s many achievements, it is nevertheless a balanced story of two halves: the first dedicated to progress, the second to Selfridge’s demise. He has one great weakness – his own self-destruct button. He was a gambler and a firm believer in success through excess.’ Spectator
‘London, 1909. American whiz-kid Harry Selfridge arrived from Chicago … and shopping for fun had arrived. Selfridge’s became the template for the super-stores and throbbing centres familiar to shoppers today. As Lindy Woodhead explains in her formidably detailed book about the “showman of shopping”, Selfridge’s store was an absolute marvel.’ Daily Mail
‘Lindy Woodhead paints a colourful picture of the American who turned Edwardian England on to shopping, and who transformed shopping into a democratic sport, entertainment for the masses and a truly capitalist endeavour.’ Women’s Wear Daily
‘The story of Harry Gordon Selfridge (or HGS as he drew with his fingers if he found dust on a store showcase) is the tale of a remarkable individual … Lindy Woodhead relates this morality tale with vigour and glorious enthusiasm. She brings to vivid life the cracking open of the social carapace of aristocracy and the frenetic hedonism of the Jazz Age. The social revolution in retailing is described with passion and verve. And even the background of Chicago under construction has an energy that sends the book racing along – she rounds out the character of “Mr Selfridge” by calling him a “jigsaw puzzle” with an essential gambler’s soul.’ Suzy Menkes, International Herald Tribune
‘Lindy Woodhead returns to the glittering Edwardian era and the roaring Twenties with a biography of one of the pioneers of modern retailing. The book is brilliantly researched and the author draws the reader into the fascinating world of the early 20th century with great skill. The life of Harry Selfridge is described with humour, sensitivity and sympathy.’ Susanne O’Leary, Irish Sunday Independent
Woman was what the shops were fighting over when they competed, it was woman whom they ensnared with the constant trap of their bargains, after stunning her with their displays. They had aroused new desires in her flesh, they were a huge temptation to which she must fatally succumb, first of all by giving in to the purchases of a good housewife, then seduced by vanity and finally consumed.
Emile Zola, Au Bonheur des Dames (1881)
When I die I want it said of me, ‘He dignified and ennobled commerce.’
Harry Gordon Selfridge (1856–1947)
Illustrations
Introduction: Consuming Passions
1. The Fortunes of War
2. Giving the Ladies What They Want
3. The Customer is Always Right
4. Full Speed Ahead
5. Going It Alone
6. Building the Dream
7. Take-off
8. Lighting up the Night
9. War Work, War Play
10. Castles in the Air
11. Vices and Virtues
12. Making Waves
13. Tout Va
14. Flights of Fancy
15. Over and Out
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index
1. Harry Gordon Selfridge and Rosalie Selfridge on their honeymoon in Newport, Rhode Island, November 1890
2. Lois Selfridge, Harry’s mother, in 1906 at the age of 71
3. Harry Selfridge, c. 1910
4. Oxford Street at the corner of Duke Street, c. 1907, before the construction of Selfridge’s
5. One of the many exploratory proposals for extensions to Selfridge’s drawn by Sir John Burnet and Frank Atkinson
6. One of the series of advertisements commissioned to launch Selfridge’s in 1909
7. A horse-drawn bus advertising Selfridge’s
8. One of Selfridge’s advertisements created for popular women’s magazines
9. Harry Selfridge, Harley Granville-Barker and Arnold Bennett, 1911
10. An afternoon fashion show on the Selfridge’s roof terrace, c. 1925
11. An interior of Selfridge’s, c. 1910
12. A Selfridge’s window display, c. 1925
13. Harry and his daughter Rosalie Selfridge at Chicago’s Grand Passenger Station, 1911
14. A Selfridge’s delivery van with women drivers during the First World War
15. The French chanteuse Gaby Deslys
16. A fashion show of leather flying suits on the store’s roof-top Observation Tower, 1919
17. Harry Selfridge and his daughter Violette de Sibour, 1928
18. Highcliffe Castle, Christchurch
19. Harry Selfridge playing poker with friends aboard the Conqueror, 1930
20. The Conqueror moored in Southampton Water
21. The Dolly Sisters with Harry and his daughter Beatrice in 1926
22. A striking tennis-themed window display
23. A Surrealist window display promoting bath towels, complete with bathing lady
24. Selfridge’s cosmetics buyer, Nellie Elt, by the Elizabeth Arden counter, c. 1925
25. Otis escalators were installed at Selfridge’s in 1926
26. Harry Selfridge’s last mistress, the actress Marcelle Rogez
27. The film director Frank Capra signing the autograph window at Selfridge’s in 1938
28. Selfridge’s exterior decoration for the Coronation of King George VI in May 1937
The rise of the department store – or what in Paris were more gracefully called les grands magasins – in the second half of the nineteenth century was a phenomenon that encompassed fashion, advertising, entertainment, emergent new technology, architecture and, above all, seduction. These forces evolved to merge into businesses that Emile Zola astutely called ‘the great cathedrals of shopping’, and vast fortunes were made by the men who owned them as they tapped into the female passion for shopping. But arguably no one man grasped the concept of consumption as sensual entertainment better than the maverick American retailer, Harry Gordon Selfridge, who opened his eponymous store on London’s Oxford Street in 1909.
In building the West End’s first fully fledged department store, he quite literally changed everything about the way Londoners shopped. His visionary, larger-than-life Edwardian building perfectly reflected the character of its founder – the only modest thing about him being his height. It was Harry Gordon Selfridge who positioned the perfume and cosmetics department immediately inside the main entrance, a move that changed the layout – and turnover – of the sales floor for ever more. Selfridge created window-dressing as an art form, pioneered in-store promotions and fashion shows, and offered customer service and facilities previously unheard of in Britain. Above all, he gave his customers fun. At a time when there was no radio or television, when cinema was in its infancy, Selfridge’s in Oxford Street offered customers entertainment as fascinating as that at a science museum, with as much glamour as on any music-hall stage. In giving his customers a unique ‘day out’, Harry Selfridge proudly boasted that after Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London, his store was ‘the third biggest tourist attraction in town’. The public could buy much of what they needed at Selfridge’s, and much that they never knew they wanted until they were seduced by the tantalizing displays.
Harry Selfridge perfected the art of publicity, spending more money on advertising than any retailer of his era. A consummate showman, he himself became a celebrity at a time when there were few identifiable, exciting personalities that the public could see at close quarters. When he arrived at work, there was invariably a cluster of customers waiting to meet and greet the ‘famous Mr Selfridge’. His ritualistic ‘morning tour’ of the store, where his staff of thousands lined up anxiously by their counters in eager anticipation of a personal nod of approval from their boss, was the curtain-raiser to the daily show at Selfridge’s – the only difference being that for his audience, entrance was free.
There was no shortage of shops or stores in London and many other wealthy provincial cities in Britain when – after twenty-five years working at the celebrated store Marshall Field & Co. in Chicago – Selfridge masterminded his grand plan to open in the imperial capital. The industrial transformation that had occurred in Britain had created a new spending population who were proud to show off their wealth by acquiring consumer goods, and retailers scrambled to cope with an almost insatiable demand. The new rich had large houses to equip, a prodigious number of children – not to mention an army of servants – to dress, and their own position in society to promote. Happily for retailers, conspicuous consumption, always so crucial in defining wealth and status, had found itself a much larger market.
That fashion became big business was because of big dresses. In the 1850s, when both the young Queen Victoria and the French style icon, the Empress Eugénie, both enthusiastically embraced the new caged crinoline, clothes billowed to unprecedented proportions. Women of substance were dressed from head to toe in as much as forty yards of fabric. As well as a muslin shift and cotton or silk underwear – not to mention the ubiquitous corset – the ensemble had hoops underneath, and at least three if not four petticoats, in layers varying from flannel through muslin to white, starched cotton. Add to this a lace fichu, bead-trimmed cape, fur or embroidered muff, hat, gloves, parasol, stockings, button boots and reticule – and consider that the entire paraphernalia was usually changed once a day and often again in the evening – and one can begin to comprehend the costs, not to mention profits, in supplying it all. As if this bonanza wasn’t enough for retailers who stocked all of the above and ran vast workrooms making the finished gowns, there was the ritual of mourning the dead. This meant the whole thing all over again – but this time in black. Many a Victorian linen-draper’s fortune was made merely by operating a successful ‘mourning department’, and one of the first diversifications into ‘added-value customer services’ was to offer funeral facilities – right down to supplying dyed black ostrich feathers for the horses that pulled the hearse.
As dress-reformers railed against ‘the tyranny of women’s fashion’, the redoubtable feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton used dress as a topic of debate: ‘Men say we are frail. But I’d like to see a man who can bear what we do, laced up in steel-ribbed corsets, with hoops, heavy skirts, trains, panniers, chignons and dozens of hairpins sticking in our scalps – cooped up in the house year after year. How would men like that?’
The answer is that the men – or at least those who owned stores and factories – liked it very much. Fortunes were made in the textile trade – in cotton, wool, linen and silk, growing it, weaving it, dyeing it, and selling it. Associated businesses making all manner of goods from dye, needles and pins, ribbons and sewing thread to bleach and starch boomed. And as distribution systems improved, merchandise could be moved further and further from its point of production to its point of sale, meaning stores could offer a wider selection of goods than ever before.
The nineteenth-century passion for fashion wasn’t the only factor in the rise of the great department stores. Just as the growth of credit had led to an explosion of shops in the seventeenth century, so the ability to buy in bulk – also on credit – benefited the new breed of retailers. The prosperous middle classes may have wanted quality, but above all, their Victorian ethics demanded value for money. Economies of buying in bulk enabled larger retailers to reduce their prices far below those of smaller, specialist shops. These independent shopkeepers – who had for decades catered to the upper echelons of society – were restricted by their credit systems. The richer the customer, the longer he or she took to pay. It wasn’t unusual for accounts to be settled annually, and many speciality shops went bankrupt as a result. The emergent stores, however, were mainly cash businesses, with perhaps a monthly charge account offered to more select personal customers. Such stores developed awesome buying power – particularly as many of them operated a wholesale division servicing sales outposts in the Empire or throughout rural America – and they didn’t hesitate to use it as a weapon against their suppliers, who were obliged not just to provide goods against a ninety-day payment policy, but often also to store merchandise for phased delivery.
The great stores acted as a catalyst for change in women’s lives. For the first time women were able to ‘cross the line’, venturing out in public to buy goods for themselves, to experience shopping and be observed doing it without in any way jeopardizing their reputations. Not all stores were the size of cathedrals, but certainly fashionable women in London, Manchester and Newcastle, and further afield in Paris, New York, Philadelphia and Chicago, were spending a lot more time shopping than going to church. Small wonder when the stores were light, bright, warm and enticing. Neither did these stores cater exclusively for the carriage trade. The department store was the anchor in a rapidly expanding egalitarian, urban society, drawing its customer base from a mix of old and new money, and able to offer not just fixed prices but also sale bargains. For many people these stores were infinitely more glamorous and comfortable than their own homes. In 1880s Chicago, Harry Selfridge had pioneered the policy of browsing, making Marshall Field’s an ideal location for those who were ‘just looking’, and opened a ‘Bargain Basement’ for those on a budget. He had also introduced a restaurant, a reading-room, a crèche and a ladies’ rest-room complete with nurse, and so could justifiably claim to have helped emancipate women: ‘I came along just at the time when women wanted to step out on their own. They came to the store and realized some of their dreams.’
He made his own dreams come true in turn-of-the-century London where, at the time he arrived, compared to the giant American department stores and grands magasins of Paris, many of London’s ‘stores’ were just rather large shops. In the days before lifts and escalators, and in part due to onerous building restrictions, retail space was restricted to the ground, first and possibly second floors, with stock rooms below and workrooms above. Stores like Swan & Edgar, Dickens & Jones and Debenham & Freebody had in-house catering for their staff who ate breakfast, lunch and dinner on site. More often than not, staff lived in a store-tied hostel or in a grim and cold dormitory tucked away on the upper floor. Young people who had eschewed residential domestic service for jobs in retailing soon realized they had merely swapped the servants’ hall for the staff canteen. Working hours were gruelling. When West End shopkeepers gave evidence before the Parliamentary Select Committee on Shop Hours in 1886, it transpired that average working hours were from 8.15 a.m. to 7.30 p.m. six days a week, with half an hour off for lunch and fifteen minutes for tea. If romance flourished on the shop floor, it was because workers had little time or opportunity to meet elsewhere.
Most leading drapery stores had, for the main part, evolved from a background in haberdashery, often expanding their floor space by buying sites to the left and right, knocking them through into a rabbitwarren of levels rather than rebuilding from scratch. From the main street entrance, customers entered a showroom space literally stuffed full with everything from garter elastic and dress pins to embroidery silks and bootlaces. The amount of time spent by a sales assistant in selling a shilling’s worth of such goods – haberdashery being the training ground for all apprentices – was totally disproportionate to the return. The mindset of the day, however, was that ladies who bought their buttons would move further on in – or up to the first floor – to buy silks, satins, laces and lingerie.
Selfridge himself had already seen London’s retailers and those of Manchester, Berlin, Vienna and Paris when he first toured Europe in 1888. Though admiring the William Morris fabrics in Liberty’s and impressed by Whiteley’s in Bayswater, in general he found the rest of the city’s shops and stores disappointing. He particularly disliked floorwalkers. ‘Is Sir intending to buy something?’ asked one supercilious man. ‘No, I’m just looking,’ replied Selfridge, at which the floorwalker dropped his pseudo-smart voice and snarled, ‘Then ’op it mate!’ Selfridge never forgot the incident and refused to hire ‘walkers’ when he opened in Oxford Street two decades later. Instead he employed knowledgeable, well-informed sales assistants who loved where they worked and who idolized their boss, whom they called ‘the Chief’.
The time Selfridge spent time studying Au Bon Marché in Paris was crucial to his development as a retailing revolutionary. When he first saw the store in 1888, the final phase of rebuilding and expansion, orchestrated by the architect Louis-Charles Boileau and the brilliant engineer Gustave Eiffel, had been completed. What had started as a minor magasin de nouveauté opened by the Videau brothers on the fashionable rue de Bac in 1825, had grown to a massive enterprise under the direction of their ex-employee Aristide Boucicaut. Au Bon Marché was a masterpiece, and it set the standard for fine shopping throughout Europe. Monsieur Boucicaut was a great innovator, imposing fixed pricing, annual sales, an ‘exchange’ or ‘money back’ guarantee and entre libre (no obligation to buy) as well as running the first French retailing establishment to sell a huge variety of merchandise ranging from homewares, toys and perfume to sports equipment and children’s clothes. Indeed, the bourgeois, taciturn Aristide Boucicaut, ably assisted by his thrifty wife Marguerite, took the Paris emporium to such majestic heights that it became the inspiration for Emile Zola’s seminal novel Au Bonheur des Dames, a book so popular with business historians that it has tended to give the impression that innovation in retailing was the exclusive preserve of the French.
Across the Atlantic, however, another retailing pioneer was making his mark in establishing one of the world’s first true department stores. In New York, an Irish immigrant called Alexander Turney Stewart established a sumptuous store so famous it had no name over the door but was simply known as ‘The Marble Palace’. Among Stewart’s many master-strokes in seducing shoppers was his decision to hire only the best-looking and most charming male sales assistants. He also introduced the first in-store fashion shows and live music, fitted the first plate-glass windows in America, and imported the country’s first full-length mirrors, having spotted them first at Au Bon Marché. By the time the American Civil War ended in 1865, he had taken luxury shopping in New York to such heights that simply going to Stewart’s was described by the press as ‘being notoriously fatal to the female nerves’. Harper’s considered this growing shopping mania ‘a disease peculiar to women’, even claiming it to be ‘a species of insanity’. In the case of the assassinated President Lincoln’s wife Mary, they were right. Poor Mary never got over the shock of her husband’s death. Her already extravagant shopping habits became so bad that she ran up a bill of $48,000 (nearly a million dollars today) at Alexander Stewart’s whereupon her family had her declared insane, insisting they weren’t responsible for her debts.
Whatever the dangers of shopping, both Stewart and Boucicaut were men with an innate understanding of the powers of salesmanship, marketing, service and quality. It was their legacy, along with the enduring influence of Marshall Field, that inspired Harry Gordon Selfridge.
London’s established retailers, although anxious to cultivate women customers, had some serious anomalies. Whiteley’s was one of the rare retailers offering any sort of in-store catering, having opened a ‘refreshment room’ in 1872. However, when Mr Whiteley applied for a liquor licence – thinking that ladies who lunched might enjoy a glass of wine – Paddington’s magistrates rejected his application in the ‘interests of morality’, saying that ‘ladies, or females dressed to represent them, might make licensed premises a place of assignation’.
Even drinking tea or lemonade, however, necessitated a ladies’ room, but there was no such provision for London’s lady shoppers. Nor could respectable Victorian women be seen using one of the rare public conveniences. The only solution was to visit a hotel for afternoon tea.
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
In 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.
Harry soon left the bank and moved to Gilbert, Ransom & Knapp, a local furniture factory, where he became a book-keeper. Unfortunately, the business was already waning and went into liquidation a few months later. Being unemployed wasn’t an option, so he took work at a dollar a day in an insurance business in Big Rapids, a small town several hundred miles away.
Whatever influences inspired Harry Selfridge in his quest to create a seductive shopping experience, he certainly didn’t find them in Big Rapids. He was never a fan of country pursuits, and fishing and furtrapping were pretty much all Big Rapids offered by way of recreation in those days. Neither did he drink much. What Harry enjoyed was playing cards – especially poker – and Big Rapids was almost certainly where he honed his game. At one point, boredom is rumoured to have prompted him to study law – via a correspondence course – but he subsequently admitted that it was a ‘complete disaster’. In one thing, however, he remained constant. In the office he was always impeccably dressed. Years later, when Selfridge had become famous and the American press serialized his life story, an old acquaintance from Big Rapids recalled that Harry has always looked ‘as if he had just come out of a bandbox’.
Harry Selfridge returned to Jackson late in 1876 with $500 he had ‘saved from his earnings’, although given his predilection for poker it was more likely to have been the winnings from a few lucky hands at cards. He then drifted from one dreary job to another, culminating in eighteen months at a local grocery store. By the time he was 22, he was desperate to move on. But how – and to where? Salvation came through his ex-employer, Leonard Field, who was persuaded to write a letter of introduction to Marshall Field in Chicago. Marshall was the senior partner in Field, Leiter & Co., one of the biggest and most successful stores in the city. Young Harry would ultimately help make it one of the most famous in America.
Selfridge used to say that his interview with Mr Field lasted a matter of minutes and that the man was ‘so cold it made him shiver’. Terms were discussed, with Harry claiming he agreed a weekly wage of $10 as a stock boy in the wholesale department basement – but the pay at the very bottom of the ladder he determined to climb was certainly less than that.
Variously described as ‘dignified and quiet’, and so taciturn he was nicknamed ‘silent Marsh’, Field had little time for anything other than work. How a man so devoid of personality could have been so successful in the business of sales, where the ability to communicate and motivate is crucial, is a mystery. Field cared little for what he called ‘frivolous methods’, running his business the way he lived his life. Dry, humourless and puritanical, albeit always courteous, he was the antithesis of Harry Selfridge. They complemented one another, but although Selfridge worked for Field for over twenty-five years, they were never friends.
To call Marshall Field merely ‘successful’ is an understatement. By 1900, his recorded annual income was $40 million a year (nearly $800 million today) and when he died in 1906, he left an estate worth $118 million (over $2 billion today). A large part of his fortune came from real estate and his early investment in railroad stocks. He was also an original and significant investor in the Pullman Company, backing George Pullman’s imaginative concept of luxurious comfort while travelling by train. Given that the journey from Chicago to New York alone took twenty hours, it is small wonder that Pullman’s deluxe dining-car, called ‘The Delmonico’ after New York’s swell restaurant, was so successful. Only the rich could travel in his cars, while the really rich bought and customized their own private Pullman carriages – the private jets of their day – fitting marble bathtubs, over-stuffed velvet sofas, piped organ music and, the height of one-upmanship, taking along an English butler to ensure the service was smooth.
The nucleus of Field’s wealth, however, came from shopping. The towering department store on State Street was a Mecca for Chicago residents, but as with all the early nineteenth-century ‘great store’ successes, it was the wholesale department that laid the foundations of the Field fortune, supplying people in small townships all over the Midwest with whatever they needed, from dress fabric to carpets, petticoats to parasols.
Marshall Field was a farmer’s son who grew up in Conway, Massachusetts, where the whole family had to help on the land. As neither he nor his elder brother Joseph had any feel for farming, both took what was virtually the only route out of rural life – working as salesmen in a dry-goods store. Marshall’s first job was in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, but in 1856 he headed west to join his brother Joseph in Chicago – though it’s doubtful whether the neat and tidy, churchgoing young man of 21 realized what was going to hit him when he got there. Reminders that Chicago was a frontier town were everywhere in the sprawling mass of timber buildings that stretched along the shore of Lake Michigan. Mud was the main topic of conversation – it was so deep that it oozed over the boardwalks, clogged wagon wheels and ruined ladies’ clothes. Not that there were too many ladies in Chicago. Local men searching for a bride would ‘go East’ and, having found a suitable partner, return to Chicago, placing a notice in the local newspapers with the address of the new marital home. Enterprising local dressmakers would often be among their first callers. Having examined the bride’s trousseau, the dressmaker would then go from door to door presenting her compliments – along with her newly discovered knowledge of the ‘latest fashions from the East’.
For those prepared to take risks, business opportunities were spectacular. William Butler Ogden – who became Chicago’s first Mayor – bought a tract of land in 1844 for $8,000, selling it six years later for $3 million. Mr Ogden was nothing if not enterprising. When financing for the Illinois and Michigan Canal dried up he ensured bonds were issued to raise the necessary cash. Always a step ahead, in the same year the canal was opened, he built Chicago’s first railroad.
In 1856, Marshall Field had no money with which to buy land or open a store. Instead he took a job at the wholesaler’s Farwell, Cooley & Wadsworth, one of the many firms busy shipping dry goods out via Chicago’s burgeoning railroads to where the tracks ended in emergent new townships – where women were desperate for everything from cottons and calico to sewing threads and buttons. Field went ‘on the road’, meeting local merchants, sizing up the business potential and diligently doing his duty by Mr Cooley, whose efficient book-keeper, Levi Z. Leiter, was also busy in the back office, entering their profits in the ledgers. When Potter Palmer, arguably Chicago’s most successful merchant, gave up wholesaling to concentrate entirely on his retail division, the polite Mr Field picked up most of his clients – at the same time keenly observing the progress of Mr Palmer’s impressive new store on Lake Street.
Chicago’s ladies were determined shoppers. In the pre-war financial slump they bought at discount, so much so that Harper’s caustically advised husbands to ‘observe your wife shopping if you would know her. She may be sweet in the parlor, but she is like a ghoul at the counter.’ In fact there was very little else for women to do in Chicago other than shop. There were no beauty parlours, no restaurants – or certainly none where women could eat – and only one theatre. Servants took care of the housework and the kitchen. The only thing that ladies could do outside their home – other than attend activities organized by their local church – was to shop for clothes and household materials. Feminists have long raged about the consumer culture, but the early women’s champion Elizabeth Cady Stanton was quite clear on the subject. While she deplored the excesses of wealthy women ‘who only lived for fashion’, she also implored women to seek independence through masterminding the family budget: ‘go out and buy’ she would shout from the platform at conventions and meetings, urging women to seize the initiative in equipping their household and clothing themselves – whether or not they were paying the bills.
Marshall Field was a man with a searing ambition to make money. All his life he judged opportunity strictly by prospective returns – and when the elderly Mr Wadsworth retired, the chance of buying into a partnership was irresistible. When the Civil War began, Mr Farwell, the sole remaining original founder, welcomed Marshall Field as a full partner. Three years later, in another management shuffle, the business was taken over completely by Field and Levi Leiter, who became partners. Somehow – despite working an average sixteen-hour day – Marshall Field found the time to meet and marry Nannie Scott, and their son, also named Marshall, was born in 1868. By this time, the Field fortunes were firmly established.