The real Mr Selfridge by Lindy Woodhead

As the fourth and final series of ITV's Mr Selfridge draws to a close, Lindy Woodhead, author of Shopping, Seduction & Mr Selfridge, talks about the real Harry Selfridge and his family, and the television drama series based on her book.

Why did I write about Harry Selfridge? That’s easy to answer – his story is a biographer’s dream. His was a life of ‘rags to riches’ and then virtually back to rags again. A life so full of hubris, that following his death in 1947 he was only remembered for his shortcomings, rather than his spectacular successes. When I started writing his real life story in 2004, Londoners and tourists alike were totally familiar with the glorious, imposing building on Oxford Street, but knew little or nothing about the man who built it, giving me a perfect opportunity to shine a light on one of the greatest retailing geniuses of the 20th century. 

My interest in him started while researching my first book War Paint which traced the life and times of Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein. Between them these two formidable women created the international beauty business. Harry Selfridge – who himself created the first ever ground floor perfumery department back in 1910 – was a close friend of Miss Arden’s, who launched her first London cosmetics concession counter at the store in 1922.

Fans of the series will have seen ‘Miss Arden’ in this final season, and seen Kitty leave the store to go to work for her in New York. In reality, it was never the store cosmetics buyer (a formidable lady called Mrs Nellie Elt) who went to work in New York  – it was Harry’s daughter Violette who, post her divorce from Jacques de Sibour and needing a job, found one at Elizabeth Arden.

This is the essence of the conundrum about dramatizing and combining retail and social history. How much is true and how much truth needs to be told to entertain an audience? In bringing Harry’s story to the screen, the decades were compacted (he left the store in 1940 not in 1929) and much  detail about the nuts and bolts of running a store had to be excluded. The writers who have been working so hard on the scripts for Mr Selfridge for the past five years have often  merged reality with fantasy – not least with the lead characters who work in the store – many of whom were invented and named by Andrew Davies, who originally created the series. 

Of course the main elements of Harry’s family were all ‘real’:  his wife Rose, his mother Lois, his son Gordon Jr; his daughters and even his Butler, Fraser – although some of the story-lines attached to them have involved lot of artistic licence!  But in the real store there was no Agnes, Kitty or Doris. No Mr Crabb, nor Mr Grove, or Miss Mardle and no George Towler. All their jobs existed but sadly the staff records did not – and other than describing  some of the very senior directors, the story I wrote was about Harry himself and how he created the dynamics of contemporary retailing over a hundred years ago.

The television series has showcased some of the ways in which Harry Selfridge entertained customers in his store: exhibiting Bleriot’s aeroplane, entertaining Miss Anna Pavlova (she didn’t dance in the store but had a window created in her honour); introduced some of the famous authors and performers who regularly made personal appearances – all these unique to Selfridge’s in the era and which helped him turn it into one of London’s major tourist attractions.

It also showed the viewers something of the lavish lifestyle of the man himself – rather edited for television so regrettably no sight of the magnificent mansion Lansdowne House where he lived, nor of his yacht that slept 20, kept fully crewed and ready on his whim to sail across the channel to gamble in the French casinos where he was a celebrity high-stakes player, sitting side-by-side to the baccarat-and jewel-addicted Dolly Sisters from whom he was inseparable during the 1920’s. Their mutual extravagances contributed to his downfall when, in 1939 at the age of 83 he was forced into a bleak retirement by the store’s major shareholder, the Prudential Assurance Society. 

But despite these frailties he was adored by his staff and admired by his colleagues in the retail industry. A man light years ahead of his time, the pioneering talent of Harry Selfridge deserves to be remembered for modernizing British retailing, putting fun on to the shop floor and sex appeal into shopping. Thanks to ITV Studios and the television series they made, he will be.

Don't miss the final episode of Mr Selfridge: Friday 11 March on ITV.

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