The house Hugh built
HARRODS USED to have a splendid banking hall, with acres of green leather benches where the better class of customer could rest from her exertions. Punch once drew two of them in anxious conversation: 'I do hope that this Mr Fraser is not going to fill the shop with merchandise.' This Mr Fraser was Hugh, a Glasgow draper with a taste for pink champagne and, in his youth, for lobbing buns at waitresses. (It lent zest to his mid-morning tea-breaks.) He had built the House of Fraser by takeovers and he wanted Harrods for his house's coping stone. Harrods' chairman turned him down: 'No, sir. Not to you.' A rival bidder in the three-cornered auction likened him to Jonah swallowing the whale. He wanted it the most, and he won it, but he never seemed to know w hat he wanted to do with it beyond owning it. To others, Harrods remained a lure. When the house that Hugh built had to pass to his son, Young Hugh, Tiny Rowland summed him up as a very nice chap and a born loser. It became a bone to be picked and worried between Mr Rowland and his occasional friends, the brothers Fayed. Somewhere along the way, the bank changed hands and merchandise got into the hall. Now they are floating off the House of Fraser, minus the coping- stone. For myself, influenced as I am by the Department of Trade and Industry's report, I would not buy a used shop from these vendors.
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