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He was a strict employer, walking the store every
morning and checking for items of personal hygiene
and dress. Unlike William Whiteley, he was admired
and often loved by his loyal staff. His private life
was colourful to say the least. He enjoyed the
company of beautiful and exotic women and spent
huge amounts of money on them. He was also an
extravagant gambler, playing the tables at Monte
Carlo. Stories regarding Selfridge are endless.
The opening of Selfridges was handled like a
theatrical presentation, with velvet curtains covering
the windows. He spent £36,000 on advertising –
equivalent to £2.35million today. 90,000 people
visited in day one and over a million visited in the
first week. Grandly, Gordon Selfridge announced:
‘Our invitation is to the whole of the British public
and to visitors from Overseas’,
On opening day he gave every visitor a calendar and
a booklet about the store with the request that they
‘Come and spend the day at Selfridges’.
Perhaps his first big publicity stunt came in 1909
when Louis Bleriot flew across the Channel in the
first ‘
heavier than air machine’
, an airplane to us.
Selfridge was waiting to buy the plane and bring
it back to his store to be displayed. The day after
the flight, it was on show in Oxford Street and over
400,000 people came to see it.
Sadly, for all of his success he carried on spending
right to the end and treated the Selfridge Empire as
his own. Unfortunately, he had shareholders to
consider and when one of the biggest shareholders,
the Prudential Insurance Company, put their own
man on the Board the end was in sight. Eventually
Mr Selfridge was banned from even coming into the
building – a building where he’d had his own private
lift to take him up to his executive floor and office.
The grand houses and the glamorous lifestyle went and
Selfridge ended his days living in a small flat in Putney
where he died in May 1947, at a very impressive 91.
Perhaps one of London’s most treasured lost stores is
Gamages
of Holborn. Ah, Gamages. It closed in 1972,
fighting all the way against the modern system of shop
lay-out - it managed to retain its rather ‘higgledy
piggledy’ set up to the bitter end. It was founded in
1878 by Arthur Walter Gamage, a farmer’s son who
was apprenticed to a draper in St Paul’s Churchyard.
He began by leasing a small watch repair shop in
Holborn but was persuaded to extend into the drapery
store next door and was able to hang a sign with his
motto over the door.
‘Tall Oaks From Acorns Grow’
.
Even though the area in Holborn was unfashionable,
Gamage drew lots of customers by insisting that they
sell everything cheaper than anywhere else. The shop
extended all around Leather Lane and Hatton Garden
and became a maze of rooms, steps and passages.
A true ‘Aladdin’s Cave’, it became known as the
‘People’s Popular Emporium’. It had the added
advantage of being east of the City – so East Enders
could get to the shop easily by bus and at Christmas,
Gamages wasn’t just a Toy Shop – it was
THE
Toy
Shop for thousands of Eastenders. Gamage extended
his range until he had a zoological department, a motor
department and a large cycle department. The store
advertised by issuing the extensive and much loved
Gamages Catalogue. By 1911 it was 900 pages thick.
The store was always a boys own sort of place
(generations of boys came here for goldfish alone)
so it is perhaps unsurprising that it became the official
suppliers of uniforms to the Boy Scouts. Legend has it
that when Mr Gammage died in 1930 he lay in state in
at Holborn in the bicycle department with a guard of
honour made up of loyal staff.