England’s favourite department store

 

 

Britain’s favourite retail emporium,  from a modest shopkeeper to the top of the business world and onto changing the British high street forever,

Born into poverty, John Lewis was orphaned at the age of seven when his father died in a Somerset workhouse, he as a draper’s apprentice, dreaming of a better life, travelled to London  and opened Lewis’s first pokey little business on Oxford Street in 1864, and expanded as an emerging middle class embraced the department store as a recreational experience, at the start of what would become a retail revolution.

Lewis and his two sons, Spedan and Oswald, as they collided over the future of their retail empire – their worst moments including emotional blackmail, face slapping and a kidnapping – and much litigation between miserly father and both sons. Most strikingly of all he gave his business away, to the recipients in 1990 were “The Partners”,  a group of employees including many shopfloor staff as Victoria Glendinning relates in her entertaining Lewis family biography.. The Partnership prospered for another 70 years under the system Spedan established, which combines elements of a workers’ collective,  a parish council, and a conventional limited liability company. Partners receive an annual dividend and elect representative to a council that holds the executive chairman- currently Sharon White – a former Ofcom boss- to account. They can raise their concerns anonymously in the Gazette an in-house publication.

John Lewis is now closing stores and restructuring under the dual onslaught of the pandemic and Amazon,- modern ruthless capitalism.

The founder’s watch words, a self-made man from Somerset were “value” and “Assortment”. He was never knowingly undersold.  He was also extremely mean especially in the pay and conditions allotted to staff. John was a misanthropic miser, Spedan was kind and gregarious, but only within his family and his business. Socially awkward bosses have a special weakness for adopting favoured employees as surrogate friends,  From his mid-twenties, Spedan was close to his nurse and housekeeper Eleanor McElroy, a distinguished Liverpudian some 15 years his senior. She may have been his lover. The pair remained friends after Spedan married Beatrice Hunter, an Oxford educated buyer at Peter Jones, the store he was running at the time. She was a more suitable spouse for a businessman from a nouveau riche family and became closely involved in the partnership project.

“Clogs to clogs in three generations” was the adage applied to family businesses in the days when sabots were symbols of poverty rather than utilitarian chic. Spedan spared John Lewis from that by handing its ownership to its staff and  its management to outsiders, rather than to his unimpressive son Ted. Business needs communitarian counterweights.

Victoria believes the 1950 handover was Spedan’s “final moral riposte tohis father”, who was dead by then.

Family Business: An intimate History of John Lewis and the Partnership  by Victoria Glendinning, William Collins £20, 338 pages