BOOKS

Big Stores and People's Palaces

BY MARGHANITA LASKI To start with a point about which there can be very little disagreement : Reginald Pound has Written a very competent biography of Gordon Selfridge,* dry, often wittily deadpan, full and yet, *here kindness is called for, discreet. It is over the eed to make a proper assessment of his subject that I find myself in considerable confusion. Lord Wootton, I see, reviewing the book in the .1:&IdaY Times, finds it inspirational. He thinks it ,would be a proper book to give as a stimulus to young, regards the press of this country as nsiderably in Selfridge's debt for the stimulus 1:e gave to advertising, and speaks of him as a life adventurer.' But my dwn response to the. die Mr. Pound presents is one of queasy disgust, 40O his principal contribution to the life of this c°11atrY seems to me to have been to assist the current industry of presenting the goods as the Good.

A store, after all, is a store is a store. At its best

it

'‘.can provide a useful and efficient economic ser- thice. It can bring together a wider variety of goods „ the little shop can do. It can—pace retail i' rie e maintenance--buy or commission in such done as to bring prices down. It has—whether 4„Ione or in combination—the power to enforce standards on manufacturers; there are many retail

ores that have nothing to fear from, and are

even enthusiastic supporters of, such measures of 11;4s:diner protection as quality marks and infor,- can labelling. Its often worldwide connections c}fil make it a useful channel for the introduction an,i,lew models in design. It has the organisation

the elbow-room to be a good employer.

° none of these functions, except perhaps the trilt; did Gordon Selfridge make any notable con- an,,liti°n. We do not find in Mr. Pound's book f actions directed towards raising the standards t'aegoods sold or—except spasmodically and spec- /61140Y—towards the lowering of prices. Sel- rathe Y--towards

as Mr. Pound rightly says, a showman

re 'ler than a salesman; but he also seems to have wialarded himself as a Source of Major Good (he insis much addicted to capital letters); and as an his rudient towards this he seems to have regarded 31orsell°P in almost every light but that of a retail ennk,„st,'ore, he said, could be, 'in its own way, as oet.Cng a thing as a church or a museum' and Tribal's, in saying this, he recalled the Chicago \viler comment on Marshall Field's, the store wasse he started his active working life : 'This foo the place of worship of thousands of our Nisy, it It was the only shrine at which they

.thtneir devotions.' •

4r4iiihs is the point at which we have to get things is 4h4.s"otluOterlybe lost in M usical-Bank-Land. There stor no sense in which it is useful to treat rnus,„ e as the same kind of thing as a church or a is h;tirn• The function of churches and museums of St enrich people's spiritual lives. The function lives v Qres is to enrich their social and economic '13nle of the things people buy in stores may ) 4 E1 -5a) rtuonr.. By Reginald Pound. (Heinemann.

perhaps be necessary prerequisites to a good life; few if any can directly contribute to it. A store can never be life-enhancing in the ways that, say, a poem or a prayer can be, and to pretend that it can is a corruption of values.

Selfridge, clearly, had some confused idea that places associated with goodness and no profits were more highly regarded than places associated with profits and goods—and profit, as Mr. Pound points out, was not his primary concern. What he most wanted was to raise the status bf the shop- keeper, to confer on shopkeeping 'an organic dignity comparable to that of the professions and attracting to its service a no less dedicated type of man.' This was, after all, an age in which the Manners and Rules of Good Society could write, 'were a person actually engaged in retail trade to obtain a presentation (at a Levee), his presentation would be cancelled as soon as the Lord Chamber- lain was made aware of the nature of his Occupa- tion.'

But Selfridge seems to have been much confused about the nature of the good with which he wished to associate himself, and when he came to open his store in London in 1909, what he had built was not so much a church as a secular palace. People's palaces were, after all, in the spirit of that age— gin palaces, picture palaces, palatial teashops in marble halls. Some communities build decent homes for people to live in; that one built palaces for them to spend their money in.

But social good was in Selfridge's mind as well. His store, he said, was a social centre, even a com- munity centre, but this is not much easier to wear than the shrine-conception. Women have long met women in markets and local shops', pausing to pass the time of day between purchases. But isn't local the keyword here? The people met on the daily outings are neighbours and friends, people known to each other and about their necessary tasks. This is very different from a trip to the metropolis, where jostling among crowds pro- vides the fact of being with people but only an illusion of living a social life in a community. And aren't community centres, as we commonly use the phrase, places where people of a community meet together for social activities whose only relation to profit is the occasional collection of funds for some worthy cause? A store may pro- vide a convenient meeting place, but this no more makes it a social centre than it makes a social centre of the clock at Victoria Station.

No more is it the proper function of a store to be a focus for patriotism. Even among a nation of shopkeepers there must surely have been some embarrassment at the display of national flags that waved on Selfridge's opening day. (Union Jacks were forgotten and had to be added at the last minute.) It is not the business of a store to celebrate Trafalgar Day or to mourn the death of the monarch in its advertising columns ('In the Shadow of this National Calamity -we and our

whole House stand Silent ') It was Mr. Sel- fridge's advertising consultant who greeted war with the phrase 'business as usual,' and Mr. Sel- fridge himself who believed that 'advertising as usual' was a necessary branch of the war effort, to be bracketed with that of the 'men who fight with risk against the enemy.'

Nobody, said two out of three members of a recent Brains Trust, looks down on retail trade any more, and it may be that Gordon Selfridge achieved his major end. He lived, at any rate, in a society ever more ready to accept the stan- dards he set, and to some extent his confusion of images was a measure of wider social failures. A well-read nation would hardly look to a store for creative writing—but Selfridge's Callisthenes advertisements were quoted in pulpits. People who own or know how to use libraries do not need in- formation bureaux in stores, people with decent homes do not want to waste money in surrogate palaces, people with satisfactory social lives do not look to stores as community centres. If we are ready to accord to a storekeeper the status of a father, a friend, a priest, a poet or even, as Sel- fridge asked, a Medici. the fault is ours. We are all in Musical-Bank-Land now and Selfridge led the company.