John Lewis, left, and his son John Spedan Lewis, who created the partnership in 1929 [NC/PA]On the BBC documentary Inside John Lewis a couple of years ago, everyone from executives to lowly staff on perfumery or hosiery spoke of this man with respectful awe and there is a whole section dedicated to him on the corporate website. Oddly he isn’t the man who established the first store on Oxford Street in London and whose name the chain still bears.
That was the Founder’s father, whom he publicly denounced as a man “with very little education and no friends who found himself in an occupation to which he was in many ways ill-suited”. The company archivists refer to the elder man, with a good deal less reverence, as plain “Mister John Lewis”.
Nevertheless it is this man whom the company is commemorating in its 150th anniversary celebrations this month.
Born in 1836 in the Somerset market town of Shepton Mallet, he was the fifth of six children (and the only son) of a baker, also called John Lewis, and his wife Elizabeth. The children were orphaned when John was seven and he was brought up by an unmarried aunt and educated at the local grammar school.
He was apprenticed at 14 to a draper in Wells, then worked for various firms before joining Peter Robinson of Oxford Street in 1856 as a buyer for silks and dress materials. In 1864 he began his own drapery business at a small leasehold shop on the other side of Oxford Circus.
On his first day takings were 16s 4d – about the same as he earned each day as a buyer – but business picked up when he bought a job lot of silks and sold it at a seductively low price.
“Thus began 20 years of lonely bachelor life, which Lewis did not recollect with any fondness,” writes his biographer business historian Professor Geoffrey Tweedale. “The work was hard and dreary but the location of the shop and Lewis’s simple and honest trading policy, based on an assortment of good-value merchandise, proved successful.”
From silks, woollens and cottons he diversified into dress fabrics and clothing, then furnishing fabrics and household supplies such as china and ironmongery (although not food).
Sales increased from £25,000 in 1870 to about £70,000 a decade later. By 1895 he had rebuilt the original shop as a three-storey department store with retail showrooms, warehouse space and a customers’ restaurant. He employed about 150 people, with 100 female staff housed in a nearby hostel.
An outspoken and colourful character he was determined to make retailing respectable and once had a customer frog-marched off the premises for daring to suggest he was being palmed off with inferior goods. He also engaged in a 23-year battle with his landlord Lord Howard de Walden over the right to erect a shop façade over ex-residential premises.
He lost the case and was fined a symbolic farthing but refused to pay on principle and was sent to Brixton Prison, where he spent three weeks before being persuaded to pay the fine. He was pushing 80 then.
“He employed four of the most distinguished barristers of the day, including the son of prime minister Mr Asquith, and it was widely covered in the press,” says company archivist Judy Faraday. “It was one of his son’s main complaints that the business would have been in much better shape if his father hadn’t spent so much time and money fighting this case.”
Marrying schoolmistress Eliza Baker, John Lewis lived in a large house on Hampstead Heath, drove a pair of horses and later travelled by Rolls-Royce. He was known as a hard employer. A staff member recalled that in the late 1920s “he still came down from Hampstead in the old Rolls-Royce from time to time and would sweep around the place sacking anyone he didn’t like the look of”.
One of his most withering critics was his elder son John Spedan Lewis (always known by his middle name). Spedan wrote: “His aims in life, his ideas and his methods were really quite ordinary but the ideas were held with a vigour and the methods were applied with an energy that was far indeed from being ordinary.”
The John Lewis building on Oxford Street, London, was bombed out in 1941 [REX]His aims in life, his ideas and his methods were really quite ordinary but the ideas were held with a vigour and the methods were applied with an energy that was far indeed from being ordinary
“The profit, even after £10,000 had been set aside as interest at five per cent upon the capital, was equal to the whole of the pay of the staff, of whom there were about 300,” Spedan wrote.
“To his two children my father seemed to have given all that anyone could want. Yet for years he had been spending no more than a small fraction of his income. On the other hand, for nearly all of his staff any saving worth mentioning was impossible. They were getting hardly more than a bare living. The pay-sheet was small even for those days.”
Obsessed with fairness Spedan broke with his father and set out to pioneer a new model of staff relations, even writing a book on the subject which was a kind of communist manifesto for retailing.
He exchanged his profitable partnership in the Oxford Street store for sole control of Peter Jones of Chelsea, which his father had bought for £20,000 in cash but which was struggling under his ownership. Spedan reconstructed the company to distribute preference shares to the staff.
After his father’s death in 1928 he amalgamated the two shops in a single business organised as a workers’ co-operative. In 1929 he set up the John Lewis Partnership of which all staff were members.
Today it remains an employee-owned company operating the John Lewis stores – including rebranded family businesses such as Jessops of Nottingham, Cole Brothers of Sheffield and George Henry Lee of Liverpool – and Waitrose supermarkets.
The 92,000 staff have a say in the running of the business and a share of annual profits.
The Oxford Street store is still the flagship, although the building was destroyed by the Luftwaffe in 1941 and the present premises opened in 1960.
Faraday says John and Spedan were more similar than they would have cared to acknowledge. “They both had very strong views, they both thought they were right at the time and it would have been very difficult to persuade either of them otherwise.
“They were both men of their times. It was perfectly normal when Mr John Lewis was an apprentice for people to sleep under the counter and not be paid during their apprenticeship. It was par for the course in his day so why would he think it was wrong?
“Furthermore he didn’t marry until his 40s and he was very set in his ways by the time his children were born so he saw them as young upstarts telling him how to run his business.
“People with in the business consider the Founder to be the man who set up the partnership because it’s the partnership that makes us so different from everyone else. Spedan Lewis was the visionary that created the style of business we run. But he was able to do that because he was born to extremely wealthy parents and had never had to struggle in the way his father did. If he had been the first generation in the business it might have been a very different matter.”
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