Disappearing department stores

The lyrics of Joni Mitchell’s “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone?” may be a truism, but also apt. Particularly in the case of High Street Department Stores. Certainly journalist and author Tessa Boase thinks so and has celebrated some of the disappeared in a new book London’s Lost Department Stores – a Vanished World of Dazzle and Dreams. HOT’s Lauris Morgan-Griffiths was fascinated to read her book, packed full of those overlarge shops, stories and gossip.

I imagine that most people remember their visits to department stores – either to see Father Christmas, buy school uniform, presents or meet friends for coffee.

I was brought up in Oxford where we had Elliston & Cavell as well as Boswells, but they never seemed, to me, to be the height of glamour, they were, well, a little bit fusty. I suppose because never having been much of a shopper I really wanted to visit small boutique-style shops. However, having read Boase’s book, I can see that in their heyday the early 20th century stores were the height of  mystique and romance.

Going, going, gone

Reading the book there are department stores I’ve never heard of – Swears & Wells, Drages, Shoolbreds, Stagg & Mantle, Bodgers  – all of which, in their day, had their place on the high street. Long gone and now forgotten, however, it was a shock to learn that 83% of stores have closed their doors since 2016. And it has just been announced that after 130 years, Fenwick is to close its flagship Bond Street store in 2024.

Some of the shops boasted that they stocked everything – furs, cars, animals (anything from armadillos to elephants) – exotica, dreams and luxury goods, though what I loved most in the book were the stories. Things I didn’t know like the fact that the staff lived in and not in the same degree of luxury as the perceived idea of the store; six to 20 men and women sharing dormitories. They worked long days, 13-17 hours a day, six days a week, and could be fined for minor mistakes. However, some of the store owners were paternalistic.

Although Boase never shopped there, she loved the idea that Pratts of Streatham was a central part of the community with people proud to work there. There was a staff garden, staff outings to Paris and Amsterdam – one staff member even described her time working there as the “best years of my life”. When Pratts closed in 1990 and was demolished six years later, it felt “as if the heart had been torn out of the (Streatham) High Road.”

Theatre

The entrepreneurs behind these great emporia had a sense of theatre and place. To draw crowds in the 1930s, Selfridges in the 20s and 30s displayed Amy Johnson’s biplane, Gypsy Moth, and Malcolm Campbell’s speedboat Blue Bird. Kennard’s of Croydon presented tightrope, stunt cycle chimpanzees, and Bentalls of Kingston twice a day for a fortnight staged a high diving stunt – a tiny Swedish woman would climb high to just under the glass dome and dive into a 10 foot wide, five foot deep pool to customers’ trepidation and relief when she emerged safely from the pool.

Scandals

I had never thought of scandals associated with these large stores, although with the amount of people employed there must be some juicy stories. There are a few that Boase has unearthed: William Whitely, the owner of Whitelys (at that time in Westbourne Grove) was gunned down at point blank range  in January 1907 by a man claiming to be his illegitimate son – a claim never proved. Whitely was evidently not a popular man: in the late 1990s the store was burned to the ground, and  torched six times in five years.

My favourite was Father Christmas at Bearmans of Leytonstone being caught short –  and caught in the act – peeing into an ornamental fountain just as excited children were entering the grotto to visit. He was duly sacked. On the spot.   

Toys were a big draw – not only to children, it seems, but also Arthur Gamage of  Gamages in Holborn. He would search high and low, sometimes in very inhospitable conditions, getting frostbite on the way to a Novelties Fair in Chicago to find unusual toys. Children would approach the store in high excitement at Christmas, to view the toy train track and locomotives, the Steiff teddybears or the unrivalled regiments of toy lead soldiers. Or perhaps clutching a broken toy that could be mended in the toy repair shop.

Christmas – time for the inner child to come out to play

Christmas is always a big time for department stores. J R Roberts Stores in Stratford, East London featured the first Santa’s Grotto to open in a department store. Some 170,000 children visited the Grotto in 1888, accompanied by an adult, each paying a penny, the proceeds donated to West Ham Hospital. Roberts must have been well regarded by his staff – when he died in 1930 at the age of 74, he was laid out in state in the store’s Motoring Department with members of staff guarding him day and night. 

But it was Arthur Gamage that I was rather touched by. Evidently, he was still a child at heart. One Christmas Eve, he received a tearful telephone call from a distraught mother telling him that her son’s rocking horse had not been delivered. Gamage got up the next morning, dressed as Santa Claus and personally delivered the rocking horse. How to make a child’s Christmas, that was service. 

Department stores have not died completely, but they are fighting for their lives. Some stores have been demolished, others redesigned to be more user-friendly by turning them into smaller concessions; others into studios, shops and hotels. It is sad to see their demise, but nothing stays the same. Boase has memorialised their existence, their histories, which will  keep their presence alive in people’s memories.

There are many more stories in the book – which all makes for a fascinating read.

London’s Lost Department Stores – a Vanished World of Dazzle and Dreams by Tessa Boase is out now and available on her website, locally at Hare & Hawthorn and  other bookshops. 

 

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