The rise and sad fall of Harry Selfridge, millionaire friend of Beaverbrook and the Express
Harry Selfridge at his desk
IT WAS free beers all round from Harry Selfridge when Express reporters popped into his Oxford Street store ... with the use of a typewriter thrown in. No wonder he got the publicity he did.
Like so many people, I enjoyed the ITV series drama Mr Selfridge, one of the most colourful characters of Victorian times. The Victorian Press loved him and no more so than Beaverbrook and his newspapers.
But like so many other viewers I was disappointed that a fifth series was not made, partly because of some sexual allegations (not proven) against lead actor Jeremy Piven, who played womanising Mr Selfridge so brilliantly.
I was even sadder when I came across the true story of Harry Selfridge’s downfall and the last pitiful years of his life — an outcast from Victorian High Society. But his newspaper friends stood by him until the end, never kicking him with bad publicity when he was down. Beaverbrook made sure of it.
In his last years, Harry, millionaire friend of Beaverbrook and his editors, who was driven to his office in a Rolls-Royce, and once planned to build the biggest castle in the world, would be seen standing at his local bus stop on Putney High Street, supported by a cane, his rheumy eyes watching for the arrival of the No. 22 bus into the West End.
He was almost deaf, and his words were rambling, people who tried to speak to him said. He looked down and out in his old genteel and worn-out shabby clothes. His patent leather boots were cracked and down-at-heel. His long, white unkempt hair rested on a frayed shirt collar. Once, he fell over and was arrested by police as a vagrant, writes author Lindy Woodhead in her book ‘Shopping, Seduction & Mr Selfridge,’ which I hadn’t read until now.
On the bus, the man who wined, dined and bought diamonds for some of the most beautiful women in the world, would carefully count out the pennies for his fare, buying a ticket to Hyde Park Corner, where he got off to wait for the No. 137 bus, quietly telling the conductor “Selfridge's please.” The store he created had eventually closed its doors to him because he wouldn’t pay his debts or stop turning up after he was fired.

Plans for the £100m dream castle for which Harry craved
When he arrived, he would stand in the street and walk up and down staring up at the top floor windows where his offices once were. He would do this for hours as people watched from the building. Often, he would sneak in and mingle with customers, before being helped to the door.
These were the last days of Harry, an American from Wisconsin, friend of stars, royalty and Prime Ministers, who transformed the face of British shopping.
When the doors of his dream store Selfridges opened at 400 Oxford Street on March 15,1909, Harry understood the value of constant publicity and how to make the best use of it.
He forged relationships with reporters, gossip writers, editors, and newspaper proprietors such as Beaverbrook and Harmsworth. Wined and dined them. One of his closest friends was fellow Wisconsin-born Daily Express Editor Ralph Blumenfeld. And rarely a week went by when they didn’t lunch together or phone.
Even Express and Daily Mail news editors were on his gifts list. He once told his advertising manager: “Never fight with them, never fall out with them if you can possibly avoid it, they will always have the last word.”
Harry hired an ex-journalist as his press officer to set up a special Press Club room for reporters they could use on stories when they were in the West End. Approved hacks had their own keys, and it was equipped with typewriters, telephones, stationery, a fully stocked bar, and the guarantee of a human-interest story for them to phone through to their news desks daily.
Favoured editors were given hampers at Christmas, and flowers at Easter and their wives were always guaranteed the best table in the store’s Palm Court Restaurant. Meanwhile, his unwavering belief in advertising meant the Express also made a lot of money. Not for him were the quarter page ads, he took full pages about his shopping concept, quality for the people.
The millions rolled in for Harry, but the millions also rolled out to pay his gambling debts and strings of pearls for strings of women from high society, stage and screen. The end was coming. As the First World War raged, he feared the Zeppelin raids and decided to rent a castle on the cliffs of Highcliffe as a home to keep his family safe for £5,000 a year fully furnished.
But he mostly stayed in London to continue his affair with French singer and actress Gaby Deslys. As time went on, he became obsessed with owning his own castle and bought a large area of Hengistbury Head from one of the richest landowners in England, Sir George Meyrick.
Then he worked on plans for ‘the biggest castle in the world’ with an enormous 450ft central tower. Beaverbrook, looking at the plans, told him his dream would never happen because of the cost (nearly £100 million) and he gambled too much.
He was right. It never got off the drawing board, and Selfridge was to fritter away his fortune. He died in 1947, aged 89, while living with his daughter in a rented, two-bedroom flat on Putney Heath. He left $6,000 in the bank. In 2021 Selfridges was sold for $5 billion.
NO SILVER LINING FOR HARRY
Harry Selfridge did not restrict his betting habits to the casino. In 1917 he had a bet with Sir Woodman Burbridge, Managing Director of Harrods, that six years after the Great War was over, whenever that happened, Selfridges' turnover would exceed Harrods. The bet was called in by Burbridge in 1927 because Harrods was still bigger. The loser had to pay for a cigar box model of Harrods, whoever it was. Not any old model, but one made of solid silver. Harry paid the £400 cost and the silver cigar box went for £86,500 at auction in 2014. Burbridge kept it on his desk for the rest of his life.
INTO THE COCK STRODE TENNYSON
Poet Tennyson loved Fleet Street
POET Laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson loved Fleet Street long before it became the pumping heart of British newspapers. Only The Times; the Morning Post; the Morning Chronicle; and the Morning Herald, along with four-page penny start-ups and a few others, were around in the early days when he drank copious amounts of port from a pewter tankard at the Cock tavern.
According to a biography by his son, he disliked the stuccoed houses and pomp of the West End and said that Fleet Street, a bustling, crowded thoroughfare of shops and professions from Ludgate Circus to The Strand, was the place he most wanted to live. He made a start by living in lodgings in Norfolk Street, dining most nights with friends in the Cock tavern nearby.
His favourite room had a window looking down on Temple Bar and his favourite food was a beef steak, one potato, a cut of cheese and a pint of port, before enjoying his pipe and swapping anecdotes with friends such as novelist William Makepiece Thackeray — “all fine-natured men who knew what was good to eat.”
Outside, horse carriages rattled by animal and human waste was often thrown from upstairs windows. Murders at night were commonplace. But when he came to London on trips, Tennyson would always insist on walking down the Strand and Fleet Street, and then back with his son to take in the atmosphere, a long way from his home by the sea in Mablethorpe, Lincolnshire.
I used to dread reading Tennyson at school. I never really understood him and I found his prose and rhymes were always full of loss, despair and isolation. They seemed to drag on and on. No wonder he was nicknamed the Sad Poet. But what can I say? He was arguably the greatest of them all.
It was at the Cock that he wrote what many people believe was his most humorous poem. Although it left me cold too. It was about the plump head waiter of the tavern, who served him, and his friends. It was called: ‘Will Waterproof’s Lyrical Monologue’.
It began:
O PLUMP head waiter at The Cock,
To which I most resort,
How goes the time? ’Tis five o’clock.
Go fetch a pint of port:
But let it not be such as that
You set before chance-comers,
But such whose father-grape grew fat
On Lusitanian summers.
It goes on … and on. But there was always one poem by Tennyson that gripped me: ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’. Tennyson, at the time, Poet Laureate at Cambridge, was inspired by a report of the battle by Times reporter, William Howard Russell, who used the electric telegraph to send messages from the front line.
The Charge, on October 25, 1854, during the Crimean War, was led by Lord Cardigan, into a valley on the Crimea Peninsular, following a misunderstood order. One hundred and fifty-six men were killed; 122 troopers wounded, and 335 horses slaughtered.
Reporter Russell wrote: “At 11:00 our Light Cavalry Brigade rushed to the front. The Russians opened on them with guns from the redoubts (a line of small forts) on the right, with volleys of musketry and rifles. The Brigade swept proudly past, glittering in the morning sun in all the pride and splendour of armor and war.”
Tennyson wanted to draw attention to the horrors that soldiers faced during the Crimean War and to the futility of glorifying war in general. It was Russell’s words that moved him most.
EXPRESS EDITOR DOES A KELVIN
Beverley Baxter, editor of the Daily Express, cleverly shadow boxed his way around a Royal Commission on the Press in 1949 when newspapers were accused of being leaned on by those in power.
He wasn't having any of it. Our talented old friend Kelvin MacKenzie, not known for his shyness, would have been proud of him.
For just like today the same old claim was the subject at the supper tables of those who hated the Press – that newspapers couldn’t and didn’t police themselves.
It led to the Commission being set up on the control of editors whom it was believed were not free to upset politicians and that was why so many people didn’t believe what they read in the newspapers.
As Beaverbrook looked on from the front rows, Baxter told what appeared to be a Kangaroo Court that he was on the Backbench overseeing the paper’s Empire Crusade with great enthusiasm.
“I had been on duty for 11 hours,” he said. “It was about half-past 11 at night, when one mechanically goes through the functions of editorship, and suddenly the news editor brought me a story which had been telephoned in by our local correspondent in Streatham, or Putney or some such place.
"It read: 'Lord Robert Cecil, at a meeting last night at the local St. Michael's school, announced that the only League of Nations that mattered was the British Empire. It was the only workable league, and I pay tribute to it.'
"Well, at that moment of sheer intellectual fatigue, and because it fitted in with our general policy, I decided that Lord Cecil had seen the light, and I splashed the story across the front page. I then went home very pleased with myself.”
The next morning, he woke up when the newspapers were brought to his bedside.
“Slumber had restored the façade of my shattered judgment,” he said, “and the moment I saw the front page I knew that there was not one possible word of truth in it; it could not be true. How could Lord Cecil, having devoted his life to the League of Nations, decide to renounce it in a school in Streatham?
“Within the hour Cecil was on the telephone; he was very nice about it; we apologised on the front page, and everybody said: ‘What a rotten newspaper the Express is.’
"That is the kind of thing which sometimes happens, and when we hear this petty point about inaccuracies, we must realise it is inevitable that a newspaper, dealing suddenly with the most unexpected of situations, must very often be inaccurate in detail. It is to me an eternal surprise that they are as accurate as they are."
THE STREETS OF DESPAIR
Fleet Street's blind boot-lace seller
A FASCINATING insight into the street life on our patch nearly 200 years ago is revealed in the work of one of history’s first reporters; a man most of us have never heard of — Henry Mayhew, who spent his life traipsing around Fleet Street, Covent Garden, The Strand and our backstreets all the way to Spitalfields, interviewing poor street traders, some with no legs; blind or homeless.
His reports under his headline ‘London Labour and London Poor’, were the first to give ordinary people the chance to speak in their own words and highlighted the struggle to make a living in one of the richest countries in the world.
Mayhew’s interviews and pen portraits appeared in the London Chronicle and were published in two volumes in 1851, eventually reaching five volumes published in 1865. Hundreds of ordinary folk were interviewed.
Here are two of his reports.
The Blind Bootlace Seller. “At five years old, while my mother was still alive, I caught smallpox. I only wish vaccination had been in vogue then as it is now, or I shouldn’t have lost my eyes.
“I didn’t lose both my eyeballs till about 20 years after that, though my sight was gone for all but the shadow of daylight and bright colours. I could tell the daylight, and I could see the light of the moon but never the shape of it.
“I never could see a star. I got to think that a roving life was a fine and pleasant one. I didn’t think the country was half so big and you couldn’t credit the pleasure I got in going about it. I grew pleaseder and pleaseder with the life. You see, I never had no pleasure, and it seemed to me like a whole new world, to be able to get victuals without doing anything. On my way to Romford, I met a blind man who took me in partnership with him, and larnt me my business complete – and that’s just about two or three and twenty year ago.”
The Street Seller of Birds’ Nests. “I am a seller of birds’ nesties, snakes, slow-worms, adders, “effets” – lizards is their common name – hedgehogs (for killing black beetles), frogs (for the French – they eats ’em), and snails (for birds) – that’s all I sell in the Summertime.
‘In the Winter, I get all kinds of wild flowers and roots, primroses, buttercups and daisies, and snowdrops, and bark off trees. The birds’ nesties I get a penny to threepence a piece for. I never have young birds, I can never sell ’em, you see the young things generally die of cramp before you can get rid of them.
“I gets most of my eggs from Witham and Chelmsford in Essex. I know more about them parts than anybody else, being used to go after moss for Mr Butler, of the herb shop in Covent Garden. I go out bird nesting three times a week. I’m away a day and two nights. I start between one or two in the morning and walk all night.
“Oftentimes, I wouldn’t take ’em if it wasn’t for the want of the victuals, it seems such a pity to disturb ’em after they made their little bits of places. Bats I never take myself – I can’t handle ’em. If I has an order of bats, I buys ’em off boys.”
TERRY MANNERS
21 October 2024