bl_flip2

Cut, make and trim I 237

He was electrified by the possibilities to enhance his opera-
tion, and press-ganged every transition in his day into an opportunity
to conduct research. ‘I’d check other businesses, oh yes. Very seldom
would you just drive home. You’d make several stops along the way.
You’d know all the various different shops in different localities who
were worth keeping an eye on, and you’d go there and see what was in
their window. You’d do that continuously.’
He never tired of prowling shopping streets, casing out com-
petitors, the garments on their rails, and their prices, not to mention
monitoring Lewis Separates stores. He also continued to visit West
End suppliers and shops, as much to steal a look at their rails and see
what new styles were coming in as to place orders – and more often
than not, he would commission an outdoor maker to run up even
more, modified according to his own interpretation.
Above all he focused on sales patterns. He would look across
specific ranges of clothes, compare between shops, track seasonal
highs and lows, always seeking better ways to granulate the data, iso-
late trends, and pump them for all they were worth. When confronted
by something puzzling, he applied what was for him the key question:
‘What do I need to know?’ It provided robust insurance against what
he would always see as the greatest risk to his business, lazy thinking.

I like to get my thought processes in order and to understand
the situation. I remember many years ago an estate agent who
we take shops from mentioned that I’d once said to him a
very significant thing. I said, ‘What’s that?’ He said, ‘You said
that sometimes decisions are not difficult, it’s understanding
that’s difficult. If you understand the situation properly the
decision often presents itself as obvious.’
And I think I’ve always recognised that. The thing
is to present the information so that the salient features, the
important factors, are the ones that are identified.

238 I Cut, make and trim

This did not mean he avoided detail. His daughter Caroline
described his incisiveness. ‘He could sit down at a meeting, look at a
pile of figures and literally in minutes he’d get to the crux of the mat-
ter. He took away all the crap and he could get to it and you couldn’t
hide it from him. The annoying thing was, he was always proved right.
What he said – what he found in the figures, how he analysed them –
was always correct.’
And this is how a man who would never darn a sock, sew a
button or take up a hem learned how to achieve the right style at the
right price for several generations of fashion-hungry young women.
He was not entirely hands-off, though. ‘I’ll tell you something, in the
beginning I used to iron the merchandise to go in the window.’

*

Always keen to sharpen his act, Bernard loved to innovate. Briefly he
toyed with creating branded labels to sew onto pricier garments, to
see if this might lend cachet. ‘But it was the wrong approach. What
we were talking was not a brand but a label and a label doesn’t have
value, a brand does. Just putting a label alone on the garment doesn’t
make it worth more.’
Now that Kilburn was ticking over, the most urgent item on the
agenda was to find a suitably large shop for Godfrey. Viable opportu-
nities continued to prove elusive, but the company was still planning
to expand and beefing up their staff in anticipation. Fledgling manag-
ers would be sent to Tooting for an initial four-week stint to learn the
ropes from Rene Spencer, who would report back on whether they
had the mettle for it. The brothers’ patience was rewarded as 1955
drew to a close when the shop hunt finally landed a bumper quarry.

Cut, make and trim I 239

Suddenly they were poised to sign a series of leases that would see the
chain double in size.
‘We had five shops open and then in the four, five weeks lead-
ing up to Christmas we were going to open another four – one shop a
week,’ Bernard remembered. ‘And that was big, because the Christmas
trade is the big one, so the quantity of stock needed for those extra
shops was large. The shops also had to open on time otherwise you’d
have been stuck with the stock after the Christmas rush. So you were
making a big commitment buying the stuff.’ But what, he thought, if
he got it wrong?

I remember taking David out, sitting in the car around the
corner in Kilburn, and telling him what I was doing. I re-
member thinking at the time, this is such a big thing, I’ve got
to take him through it – it was my sense of duty, obligation,
whatever it was. You know, he’s entitled to know what I’m
doing: the commitment in shopfitting and stock and the way
I was working it out, because it had to sell. We were on a knife
edge with our cashflow.
And I remember explaining it to him and I realised
he wasn’t interested! He changed the subject. Obviously, he
had confidence in me. I mean, David’s involvement with the
shops basically was visiting sites with me with a view to tak-
ing them, and of course the financial aspect.

When it came to the mechanics of how the company performed, it
was up to Bernard.
Thankfully the openings went ahead without a hitch. ‘You
could feel a rush in the business,’ remembered Adele. ‘You could feel
it getting bigger and bigger and bigger.’
And how. St Albans and Hammersmith opened on 6 Decem-
ber. Upton Park followed on 17 December, and Adele was drafted
in to manage it. The following Saturday – just in time for Christmas

240 I Cut, make and trim

Eve – another branch launched in North Finchley. To round off the
year they formally exchanged contracts on their lovely new shop in
the Prudential building at the Nag’s Head on 30 December 1955: a
custom-built shop, with no premium to pay, no capital outlay, and
at a very good rent. Within a month they were receiving tempting
offers from other retailers for the lease, but they had no problem re-
sisting. Holloway Road might not be Oxford Street, but at £950 a year
it would always be profitable.
That was not all for 1955. On New Year’s Eve they launched
a long-awaited branch in Brighton, at 80 North Street, in far bet-
ter premises than they bid for previously on Western Road. It was
deemed sufficiently strong to be nominated as Godfrey’s, its takings
on a par with Tooting and Kilburn. A few days later, on 2 January
1956 they took a property in East Ham.
This cascade of deals could not have happened at such speed
without an accompanying waterfall of cash. Although the brothers
knew enough by now to be reasonably confident that each shop could
earn back its set-up costs rapidly, each opening still required them to
put up money up front. To help, when a new shop opened David set
up an individual company to own the lease: Lewis Finchley Limited,
Lewis Wood Green Limited, Lewis East Ham Limited, and so on.
This tactic, which David would repeat for years to come, of-
fered several advantages. First, the fact that each company was new
meant that they could delay their initial tax payment. This loosened
the cash flow, enabling their money to work as hard as possible for the
business for as long as possible, before the requisite tithe in tax was
creamed off by Her Majesty’s Inland Revenue. Second, separating out
the businesses enabled them to keep their master company private
and unlimited. In those days private companies’ accounts were not
publicly available, so this allowed the brothers to mask the scale of
their success, which they were eager to do – just in case a retailing
rival was sufficiently intrigued by their affairs to go and have a rum-

Cut, make and trim I 241

mage through the files of declared accounts at Companies House. An-
other benefit was that each individual shop company could open its
own bank account, availing them of a handy £1,500 overdraft apiece –
useful if they needed extra cash to secure new premises and kit them
out with stock.

These ownership arrangements also offered a defensive shield
if their fortunes should reverse. ‘In those days a shop lease was a li-
ability for twenty-one years. Therefore, if you can’t pay the rent and
are in financial difficulties and need to close the shop and it’s a stand-
alone company, it does not affect the others,’ explained Bernard. In
the meantime the rest of the business could continue to trade.

As things turned out, such issues never arose. Over the years
the byzantine but entirely legal ownership structure that David con-
trived for the business would evolve almost as a portrait of the two
elder brothers: ingenious, and discreet to the point of introversion.
Despite such innovations, they could not stretch their finances
to open shops everywhere that they wanted. Having contracted ahead
for a shop in Croydon, when the day came they could not afford to fit,
stock and staff it. So instead they turned a few extra pennies by selling
the lease for a whopping premium of £6,000.

Around this time David made a surprising intervention. ‘He
came in one day and said, “I’ve met a chap, Mr Prups, and I’ve taken
him on as a shop supervisor.” It was a bit odd, because David wasn’t
involved in that aspect of the business,’ remembered Bernard, still be-
mused.
Mr Prups’ tenure proved short-lived. ‘He presented well but it
turned out that he was just not good enough, so after a while we let
him go.’ This was, Bernard noted, David’s ‘first and only’ recruitment
for the retail operation. Nevertheless, David had a point. They were
growing so large that an overseer was needed if Bernard was to have
the freedom of manoeuvre to keep the business motoring. Once again

242 I Cut, make and trim

he looked to those he trusted most and approached his sister-in-law
Lena Spencer, who was now managing a shop for Martin Ford. But
Bernard, irresistible when he resolved to do something, tempted her
away to become his first area controller. ‘She felt very guilty about
leaving so she went to tell Ford face to face, out of a sense of honour to
him because we were deadly. . . I won’t say deadly, but we were com-
petitors.’ Ford reacted ‘very quietly’ to the news, and would not forget
it in a hurry.
One of the few Lewis Separates senior staff to have first-hand
experience in a similar business, Lena became Bernard’s eyes, ears and
all-purpose quality controller, travelling around the shops, keeping up
standards and geeing up the pace. Bernard also took on a dedicated
stock-checker, Miss Brown, to audit goods and ensure that managers
played fair. Sadly not all of them did: on one occasion it fell to David
to escort a manager to the police station. But most staff proved ded-
icated and their loyalty was repaid. Both Spencer sisters would stick
with the company for the rest of their professional careers, until Lena
succumbed to breast cancer and Rene retired at the age of sixty-five.
Another valued member of staff was about to draw deeper
into the family fold. When Adele turned eighteen, she and Geoffrey
became officially engaged. To mark the occasion Lorna and Bernard
hosted a dinner for the couple at their flat in Sydenham. Adele was
overawed.

It was a wonderful meal. I think there was Lorna, Bernard,
Geoffrey and me. The mother must have been there and
maybe there were more, but it was a little bit daunting. Leon-
ard was wearing his dad’s shoes and his dad’s waistcoat and
bowler hat, he was toddling around the table. And then the
nanny asked, ‘Would you like some potatoes, Miss Adele?’
Then I realised, I was in a different class. I was Miss Adele!

Before long, Miss Adele would be the latest Mrs Lewis.

17

All for one and one for all

Towards the end of his life David would claim proudly that in all their
years of trading, not once did his family’s clothing business make a
loss. However, this did not mean that everything they took on panned
out. Occasionally they were so fashion forward that they landed too
far ahead of the curve. ‘There wasn’t any money in Upton Park,’ re-
membered Adele. ‘They weren’t as trendy as other parts of London,
and our clothes were very trendy.’
They cut their losses and put the lease on the market. But
this was a rare blip. As success bred success, even Bernard with his
deep-seated financial insecurity could not ignore the evidence: the
family were rich, on paper at least, and now commanded the means
to become a great deal richer. Some young men, finding themselves
in this position after drinking so deeply on the bitter dregs of pover-
ty, might have felt a little giddy, or been tempted to lap up the pro-
ceeds. But Bernard did not pause to contemplate the heights they had
reached. He was intent on continuing onwards, upwards, and seeing
how far, and fast, they could go.
All the same, contemplating the sums that the shops had al-
ready generated, then projecting ahead to what might follow, pro-
voked some hard thinking. Not long after opening the Brighton store,
he made a dramatic proposition.

I remember clearly doing it one Sunday morning in David’s
flat, there were just the two of us at that time. We might have
been discussing how to do the accounting, for this shop and
this shop and that shop. I think there were about twelve shops

244 I All for one and one for all

open at that time, we were doing well and expanding. There
was Hackney, the family shop, and Kilburn, Geoffrey’s, and
Brighton, Godfrey’s. And the rest were mine.
But I said, ‘Instead of doing this accounting let’s have
all equal shares.’

Rather than give his mother and each younger brother a shop
to call their own, Bernard unilaterally decided to make all four broth-
ers equal partners.
Over half a century later, this most logical of men still strug-
gled to explain why he decided to give away three-quarters of the
business that he had conceived, built and continued to lead:

Why I decided to do that I don’t know, although I could see that
David’s contribution needed recognising. But it’s odd, isn’t it?
Because there was actually no reason for me to have done
that. I was running the business. David had his accountancy
practice. He was looking after the things like tax, and dealing
with the agents. He wasn’t doing a regular job for the compa-
ny. So I don’t know why I did it.
I think it was a question of family. I just wanted to
look after everybody. And why not? There was enough. I
wasn’t empire building for myself. I just instinctively wanted
to have everyone taken care of. No competition between us,
no conflict. A co-operative, everybody working together, for
each other.
This wasn’t how things played out, but I wanted it to
be the case perhaps.

Perhaps he feared being stranded amid an embarrassment of
riches, while leaving his family behind, which would have cut against
his sense of loyalty. Whatever the deciding factor, it is safe to say that
the intention behind his proposal was not selfish.
How did his brothers react? ‘I remember David saying it’s very
generous. I don’t remember Geoffrey or Godfrey being there at all.’
And how revealing their absence seems. Of course it is possible that
they were in the room but he did not remember it, because as a gen-

All for one and one for all I 245

eral rule they tended not to say a great deal in meetings. ‘David and
I ran things and took the decisions. Remember, they were a fair bit
younger and at that age the difference in our ages was significant. We
were very much the elder brothers.’
Looking back, Bernard wondered if his gift to his brothers,
had it been designed to avoid family tensions, might not in fact have
had the opposite effect. He contrasted his choice with that of an RAF
pal of his, Sydney Samuelson, who went into the film business and
eventually went on to become Sir Sydney, president of BAFTA, the
British Academy of Film and Television Arts.

He was in the same position as me. There were four brothers
and he was the second eldest. Now after the war he went off to
work as a cameraman in a movie. His father had been a film
producer, famous, then lost all his money. And Sydney set
himself up hiring out cameras and equipment to film com-
panies. Suppose somebody from America or Spain wanted
to come across and make a film in Britain, they can hire all
the equipment from him. So he bought a camera, bought an-
other camera, and ended up having the largest business of
its kind in the UK. His three brothers joined the company
and got twenty per cent each. One brother was a barrister. He
attended to the contracts etc.
Now if I’d done something similar with Geoffrey
and Godfrey, things might have turned out very differently.
I think Geoffrey and Godfrey, although partners, they were
doing really what they were told to do. And this – what I’d
call the older brother syndrome – I think this must have
started as soon as the war was over. My father was dead when
I came back and they were being told what to do and how
to do it. They weren’t living their own lives. They were very
good in their own spheres. I just think it was, in a way, a bit
unfortunate that David and I were in the way.

The idea of being told what to do would never sit well with
Bernard. As his future son-in-law Sir Lucian Grainge, chairman and

246 I All for one and one for all

CEO of Universal Music, observed: ‘He’s very liberal. He would never
expect anyone to do anything that he wouldn’t be prepared to do.’
Bernard’s son Clive added, ‘My father doesn’t believe that anybody
should interfere with the individual’s right to do what they want to
do, within limits. He doesn’t believe that there should be rules about
behaviour provided you’re not hurting somebody. He wouldn’t judge
anybody.’
But although controlling his brothers went against Bernard’s
grain, it was hard to avoid if he wished to run a business with them.
This set up a tension that would bend the destiny of the family com-
pany. As the years went by, and Geoffrey and Godfrey grew older, the
gap between them being theoretically equal partners while in practice
having unequal responsibility in the business would become hard to
ignore.
For now, though, these were happy days, everyone pulling
together. As their enterprise grew, so did the family. Godfrey leap-
frogged Geoffrey and Adele to the altar and married Kitty Levy, the
daughter of a machinist in a tailoring factory. Adele and Geoffrey’s
wedding took place soon afterwards, on 29 April. By way of gifts, Da-
vid and Bernard bought each couple a small house, next door to one
another, in a new development in Hendon.
Generous as this was, as Bernard’s son Clive pointed out, ‘It
would be years and years before they took any money out of the busi-
ness, more than twenty years. Our lifestyle was comfortable but not
lavish and it did not change.’

In many ways Bernard and David conducted their private
lives with the discretion of bank robbers who feared being caught
with their loot. Impervious to most secondary benefits of wealth,
such as social status and luxuries, Bernard avoided extravagance. For
instance, he recorded the shops’ growing weekly takings in a dog-
eared Letts desk diary from 1955, eking out its pages until November

All for one and one for all I 247

1958. And however much money he might have at his command, a
small, stubborn kernel of him could never quite accept that he and his
family were finally safe from poverty.
That is not to say that either Bernard or his brothers denied
themselves pleasures or conveniences. It just took them a while to
avail themselves of some of the more enticing things they could now
afford. ‘We had a car and we had a live-in nanny, we had holidays,’
Bernard recalled. ‘But apart from that we didn’t live extravagantly.
None of us had expensive things.’
He still possessed the appetite for adventure that had led him
to throw in his lot with the RAF. Perhaps influenced by the memo-
ry of his father’s physical suffering, he exercised regularly and liked
to exhaust himself – ideally at maximum velocity. When he heard
about skiing, for example, he could not wait to try it out. He hired
anoraks from Moss Bros and commissioned one of his outdoor mak-
ers to knock up some skiing trousers with elastic stirrups for himself
and Lorna, then their little family headed for the Alps. ‘Took Leonard
down, he would have been about two. We went by overnight train and
we put him to sleep on a ledge over the corridor, while we slept sitting
up to save money. We were careful.’

Sailing down the slopes, he and Lorna looked every inch the
part, although unfortunately their smart new trousers proved to be
neither water- nor snow-proof. Undeterred, Bernard was to become a
passionate skier both on snow and on water, as would his children.
David, too, preferred travelling third class, taking package hol-
idays whenever possible. But the skiing bug bit him as hard as it had
his brother, and occasionally the pair treated themselves to a weekend
away, catching a Friday evening plane out to Geneva or Zurich. Then,
to save time and the cost of a hotel, they would sleep overnight on
a bench in the deserted train station, fully kitted out in their gear,

248 I All for one and one for all

ready to hop on the first train out, so they would be hurtling down
the mountainside by ten the following morning. Not a minute, not a
penny, could be lost.
When Lorna discovered that she was expecting another child,
Bernard recognised that the moment to buy them a home was well
overdue and found a place on Christchurch Avenue in Willesden. To
him, the house was delightful: modern, detached, red brick, with its
own garage, four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen, dining room
and reception room. There were even a smart telephone booth and
cloakroom flanking the hallway, reminiscent of an elegant hotel lob-
by. At £8,000, the purchase required him to take out a mortgage; it
represented the first significant sum that he had spent on himself, al-
though arguably it was also a prudent business investment, as not the
least of Christchurch Avenue’s attractions was the five-minute drive to
their Kilburn HQ.
Next Ruth fell pregnant for the second time, and David fol-
lowed suit, purchasing another nice house on Milverton Road, around
the corner from Bernard and Lorna’s new place, for £6,500. Soon
enough their younger brothers would also grow out of their starter
homes, because the family’s blessings kept on multiplying. Later that
year Godfrey and Kitty had their first child, a boy named Leslie, who
was born just three weeks after Bernard and Lorna welcomed their
second son, Clive.

*

It did not matter how discreet the brothers sought to be. No amount
of financial smokescreens could conceal the fact that Lewis Separates
was powering ahead. Intrigued, the rag trade began to sniff around,
hoping to detect what had fuelled this unprecedentedly rapid expan-

All for one and one for all I 249

sion. One day a supplier bearded Bernard and came straight out with
it, demanding where they got the money to open so many shops.
‘He said to me, “There’s a rumour around. Did you win the football
pools?”’
By now their closest competitors were Jax (owned by Sir Isaac
Wolfson, a businessman Bernard admired), Bobby Cousins, Etam,
Dorothy Perkins (whose customers tended to be a little older than
Lewis Separates’) and Martin Ford, which remained the rival that
Bernard watched with the greatest interest.
‘Martin Ford had his family with him in the business, brother
and son, that sort of thing, and they had maybe fifteen shops, Greater
London area only. They were bigger than us and there was a great
deal of rivalry between us. He was good at merchandise, competi-
tively priced, and on the ball, aggressive and keen. The products were
more or less the same as ours and in a number of places our shops
were close to each other.’
Bernard was in Ford’s league now and rather liked the idea
of overtaking him. Finding Ford’s approach rather dated, he saw an
opportunity to gain the advantage.

I think their shop fronts would have been a little older, per-
haps because he was established before us. I can remember
the windows were packed, they had every garment in the
window but in a much more regimented way than us, each
item with a little ticket on. And he had the policy of writing
on the ticket a little description: ‘New fashion. Latest colour.’
Other things like that, which was a throwback. The whole
idea of it was a little bit old fashioned, and I suppose it epito-
mised them. We were younger. But they were also very good
value and very successful.

Adele captured the differences between the shops. ‘[Ford’s]
were just more straight-laced. Ours seemed more fun. We had the co-
lour, the display was done in a more artistic way. Geoffrey was making

250 I All for one and one for all

the window. He’d maybe do it lemon and white with a touch of blue
and they just had their stuff, brown and green. There was no style in
Martin Ford.’
Sometimes the shops’ rivalry led to absurd competition. Ber-
nard could not forget one farce which played out at their shop in East
Ham, directly across the road from a branch of Martin Ford. The bat-
tle began over an innocuous-looking jerkin. ‘It was in a black and
white bubble tweed. The front was two wide straps from the shoulders
with a full back but sleeveless, no sides, and the belt came round the
waist,’ remembered Bernard. ‘I had it in the window, and he had it
exactly the same. Then he lowered the price to be cheaper than me,
so I lowered the price to match. We were getting phone calls back and
forward to the head office.’
Adele was sent out to check the Martin Ford window. ‘Ber-
nard said, “Go and see how much it is now.” And I’d go and I’d say,
“Eighteen shillings.” He’d say, “Okay, put eighteen shillings in the win-
dow.” Then twenty minutes later, “Go down and see how much it is.”
We were running . . .’

Over the course of a single day, the price plummeted from two
pounds seven shillings and sixpence to seven and six. It sounds like
a joke, but it was less so to a man who had seen his parents go out of
business twice thanks to undercutting rivals. ‘You could see Bernard
was serious about it,’ said Adele, ‘although he did see the funny side.’
Bernard understood what set off Ford. ‘We were the upstarts and he
was the established retailer. We would open next door or nearby and
lo and behold we were as good, and we were overtaking him. So he
must have thought, “I could teach these people a lesson.”’ Although
Lewis Separates prevailed in the end, it was not the sort of skirmish
that Bernard cared to fight. ‘You can match the price but there’s no

All for one and one for all I 251

point undercutting, because where does it end? I don’t remember how
it got resolved but the price war never occurred again quite so blatant-
ly.’ The companies seemed to reach a truce, did not poach each other’s
staff, and the tensions faded – at least, they did for Bernard, because
he soon found other pacemakers in the retail race.
‘At one time Martin Ford was bigger than us, he was a rival.
But when you got to be that size or bigger, it didn’t matter any more.
There were other people you had your eye on.’
Bernard was beginning to realise that his drive to expand the
company would never abate. The brothers also winkled out extra val-
ue wherever they could find it. For instance, David asked their Brigh-
ton landlord to reduce the rent when the shop’s basement proved un-
usable. They also sublet the spare rooms above their North Finchley
branch as residential property. Shopfits were constantly reviewed, and
stock and sales systems refined and improved. To speed up the sales
process, David investigated the latest American automatic receipt is-
suing machines, orchestrating a trial comparing two makes, Regna
and National, before placing an order for the former.
An intriguing handwritten note found secreted among Da-
vid’s board meeting minutes, which must date to early 1956, states:
‘Invest only property, no part in management of the business, rely
on individuals, management supervision to be delegated.’ Whether
this statement of intent was a personal note for David or a manifesto
for how the brothers aimed to run the company, it is impossible to
say. But it outlined the basic strategy that would be implemented in
coming decades. After the debacle over employing unsatisfactory Mr
Prups, David would indeed keep out of retail management, until in
time, as profits bubbled over, he began to invest their surplus revenues
in property.
For Bernard, outsourcing the shops’ supervision meant no
slackening of his grip on the reins of the business. Quite the reverse:

252 I All for one and one for all

he devised monitoring mechanisms to ensure that he kept a handle
on the ebbs and flows, ready to pounce on the strongest trends.

It was my job to know what was and what wasn’t selling. So
I would send every shop a stock sheet, listing stuff they’ve
got to count, then post back to me before they go home on
Saturday night. It was just for the merchandise I was interest-
ed in repeating; I didn’t want them to count up stuff I’m not
interested in. It’s a waste of their time and it clutters me up.
And I’d also project ahead, setting a level for the numbers of
garments each shop should have. Then I would see what is
selling and what they need.
To simplify, I grouped different types of merchandise
into different ranges. So if you’re talking blouses, it would be
sorted by are they lacy, are they plain, then there’d be length
of sleeve, and price category. Suppose you open with ten on
the Monday morning and you’re going to deliver them six,
that’s sixteen. And then you close up Saturday night with
nine, so you’ve sold seven. That was my system. Just an il-
lustration of being in control. This is what I ran the business
on, very simple – the simpler the better, so everybody could
understand how to operate it.

But no system could beat the evidence of his eyes. ‘Probably
the most important point was that I was in the shops a lot, especially
on Saturdays, and could talk to the staff and see for myself what was
and was not selling.’

*

It was somebody at Mare Street who raised the alarm. Suddenly, with-
out any warning, Mrs C had disappeared.
The brothers made enquiries and eventually ran her to earth
living with a curious man called Solomon Klapper, in a place off the
Edgware Road in Maida Vale. To their amazement, their mother had
eloped.

All for one and one for all I 253

Adele was already familiar with the couple’s romance. ‘Clara
used to ask me to do her eye make-up in the fitting room in the shop.
She’d say, “Could you do my eyes for me?” She had green eyes and I
used to put a little bit of green on the lids, to look nice for Mr Klapper.’
She understood why Clara fell for the man. Barely fifty years old and
living alone, her life consisted of the shop and long, quiet, solitary
evenings. Having spent all her adult years either with Lew or her boys,
until now there had been very little in the way of flirtation. ‘She hadn’t
had any friendships with men, any attention or anything. This man
made her feel like a woman.’
In this case she had picked a rum one. ‘My father knew of Mr
Klapper and knew that he was an absolute low life,’ said Adele. ‘I must
have told Geoffrey.’

Not only was Klapper divorced, which was still fairly scandal-
ous at the time, but he also went by an alias, Sydney, and had more
than a touch of the Walter Mitty fantasist about him. Once he regaled
Bernard with a ludicrous yarn of leaping out of an aeroplane as it was
coming in to land. ‘I suppose she knew he was unsuitable,’ said Ber-
nard. This would help to explain why Clara – or more likely Mr Klap-
per – decided to keep their plans to marry under wraps and proceed
in secret. Intriguingly, after the wedding ceremony Clara signed her
name as Tauber on the certificate for no reason that can be fathomed,
although it is tempting to speculate that part of her knew that she was
making a mistake, and she preferred not to think of her beloved Lew
at that moment.

When her sons realised what had happened they were deeply
concerned, not just about Clara but also the business. ‘He was a chan-
cer,’ said Bernard, ‘and here was a woman who had a shop. Although it
was the family shop, perhaps he thought there was a way of getting his
hands on some assets. Being kept for life or something.’ Despite the
company’s new ownership structure, the Mare Street lease remained

254 I All for one and one for all

in Clara’s name. David was resolute: Clara and the family’s interests
must be protected. ‘What did we do? I think we got her to sign the
shop over to a company.’
Within six weeks Clara had seen the light and the marriage
was over. ‘Geoffrey had to go in the witness box or something for the
divorce,’ said Adele, ‘to prove that he’d found evidence that the man
was only after her money or something.’
Bernard felt for his mother. ‘She must have lived a very lonely
life since my father died. She was only in her forties. A bit desperate,
wasn’t it? Family growing up and she still had a life to lead.’
Henceforth Clara led that life in a flat that her sons bought
for her in Cricklewood, not far from Bernard and David’s homes in
Willesden. She still ran Mare Street and had regular sums of money
settled on her, and she saw her children and grandchildren each week.
Eventually her romantic life took a sunnier turn. She met and married
Alf Shaw, a widower and former grocer a few years her senior, with
his own family of grown-up children. It was, said Adele, a wonderful-
ly happy union. After Clara retired the pair would take cruises or stay
in hotels in Bournemouth, and she derived great pleasure and pride
from talking about her beloved boys, the Lewises of Lewis Separates
– all four, strong together.

18

Oxford Street

David and Bernard were swimming when they received the call. In
the summer of 1956 they had taken their wives and toddlers to soak
up the sunshine on the glorious beaches of Santa Margherita, a coast-
al resort just east of Monaco in Liguria near Genoa. It was also due
south of Italy’s fashion capital, Milan, although fortunately too far
even for Bernard to make any reconnaissance trips to the shops.
‘We were in the sea and somebody came out from the hotel –
the hotel was on the beach – and called David in to answer the phone.
I carried on swimming. He came back and announced that we’d done
the deal.’
This particular deal was their biggest yet: for 361 Oxford
Street, a retail site very near Bond Street, at the fizzing epicentre of
the rag trade. Lewis Separates had arrived at the frontline of British
fashion.
Splashing around under the cerulean skies, Bernard began
dreaming up the new shopfit. ‘It was only a small shop but it went in
quite deep.’
To mark the opening, the brothers decided to do something
they had never done before and hired rising comedy star Benny Hill,
through Adele’s eldest brother Michael, the talent agent. On a Satur-
day in November 1956, Hill mugged for the assembled cameras and
cut the ribbon before the crowds, who were rewarded for their inter-
est. Every twenty-fifth customer at the till on that first day walked out
with her bag of purchases for free.
Lewis Separates landed on Oxford Street during a period of
transition. ‘Some people were slightly intimidated to go up to the

256 I Oxford Street

West End shopping. There would still be some wealthy customers,
ladies up from the country,’ said Bernard. ‘We weren’t unique pio-
neers, the whole atmosphere would have been changing, but we must
have been amongst the newcomers.’
Although Lewis Separates looked fresh, young and different
compared to many shops along this gilded mile, unlike others, trade
at their new outlet proved significantly less brisk than Bernard had
anticipated once the initial rush of interest had settled. Bemused, Ber-
nard scoped out their store and others to determine what was holding
them back. His conclusion: simply that they were not good enough.
Oxford Street attracted a more demanding shopper, expecting the
very latest trends. ‘It was a bit special. It’s not the same today. A girl
from the suburbs would talk about going “up West”. And you go “up
West” because you want a bigger selection or something a bit differ-
ent. What we had, which was very good for Tooting or Kentish Town,
was not stylish enough.’

Although the Oxford Street shop mattered to the business, any
trepidation he may have felt during these first faltering months was
offset by confidence in their broader base. ‘Oxford Street was import-
ant, but if it hadn’t worked it wouldn’t have broken us.’ Determined
to prevail, he soon realised that not only was this the premier high
street in the land, but behind the gleaming fascias and the smiling as-
sistants, a ferocious Darwinian competition was afoot to acquire the
best stock. A few multiples, including Richards and C&A, spangled
the street, as well as large fashion stores such as Penberthy’s, but the
chains had not yet completely colonised and very good family-run
shops were still there. And each man – or madam – running them
was out for him or herself.
To succeed, Lewis Separates would need ‘the latest, newest
thing and lots of it’. This not only required a change of merchandise,
but a shift in gear. ‘It’s in and out quickly. So when it’s hot you’ve got

Oxford Street I 257

to have it. It’s no good, say, running out, and getting it in four weeks
later and thinking you’re probably still okay. Oxford Street could sell
large quantities but you’ve got to be first.’ Strike gold and a hit would
sprint out of the store; however, anything pedestrian would move far
slower. So the company’s objective was clear: find the right styles, get
them in pronto, and watch them fly.
In the New Year of 1957 the brothers launched four new stores.
They had barely caught their breath after this little glut of openings
when David received a call from one of his regular estate agents, Mor-
ris Poate of Edward Erdman & Co. ‘Would you be interested in a shop
that has just come on the market on Oxford Street?’ he said. ‘But you’ll
have to move fast to secure it.’

As luck would have it, it is a quick stroll from 13 Harley Street
to 283 Oxford Street, and within minutes he and Mr Poate were side-
by-side, admiring a two-storey shop close to Oxford Circus, directly
opposite their namesake, the massive department store John Lewis.
A crackerjack position, as Bernard put it, the best on Oxford Street.
That David was among the first to be approached about this tremen-
dous site is a measure of the brothers’ standing with the city’s retail
property agents, who enjoyed dealing with them. ‘An advantage was
that because we were owner-drivers, we could give an immediate de-
cision,’ said Bernard.

When David called to tell him about the shop, he went along
to see it and was immediately hit by a wave of nostalgia. This building
had housed an ABC café, the same chain in which he had drunk tea
with Lew as a boy, then again during lunch breaks at the drawing of-
fice in Hendon. More important, it was far larger than their premises
down the road. It had a twenty-five-foot frontage over the ground
floor, plus a basement and mezzanine floor, and an office building at
its rear, on 11 Princes Street, was thrown in with the package. There
were concerns: it would take a bit of work to bring up the shopfit to

258 I Oxford Street

the requisite standard, and they had already struggled to keep up with
the Oxford Street pace. The price for the freehold was also a colossal
£250,000 – but it was a fair figure, David and Bernard felt.
Fortune favours the bold. So they said yes. Now they had to
find a way to pay for it. Undaunted, David returned to his contacts at
the Prudential with a proposition: the brothers would buy the build-
ing then simultaneously sell it on to the Pru in return for a thirty-year
lease on the shop, at a rent of £13,000 a year fixed for the duration of
the lease, giving the Pru a return of more than five per cent on the
investment. Just as with the building project at Nag’s Head, contracts
would be exchanged back to back, permitting not a shade of a doubt
that another operator could swoop in and grab the lease. Everyone
was happy – until the £25,000 deposit fell due, when suddenly the
men at the Pru argued that Lewis Separates should cover it, on the
grounds that ‘We’re the Prudential – we don’t pay deposits.’ But David
insisted, and with a little persuasion the Pru caved in. It was not a deal
that they would regret. Before very long £250,000 amounted to less
than one year’s rent at prevailing market value.
The new store would be called the Separates Centre. The in-
tention was not only to distinguish it from their other Oxford Street
branch, which for now they would run concurrently, but also to make
the Separates Centre a beacon for the best of everything Lewis Sep-
arates had to offer. More than that, Bernard envisaged it playing a
critical secondary role for the group as a fashion laboratory.
He had discerned an extremely valuable pattern in the sales
flowing through Oxford Street. Although the taste of customers there
was undeniably in a different league, it was not entirely alien to what
prevailed on other high streets, simply a trend or two ahead of the rest
of the country. In other words, where these fashion-savvy customers
led, then others in slightly less modish parts of the United Kingdom
would likely follow. Any garment that sailed off the rails in Oxford

Oxford Street I 259

Street could sell well elsewhere. The Separates Centre would be more
than a money maker; with its larger scale, it could also serve as the
fashion scout for their burgeoning empire, allowing Bernard to stock
a broader range of garments, testing trends, helping to forecast which
styles to copy and roll out across the group.
In those days the idea of copyright scarcely existed. Once a
style hit the rails, it was fair game for anyone sharp enough to swipe
it. ‘If there was something, like a colour or a length or a sleeve or any-
thing that took off, I’d know about it and I’d say, “This is interesting,
let’s do something like that.” It wasn’t just trying to guess. You could
see what’s happening. And then knock it off.’
As well as a distinctive name to set it apart from their other
stores, Bernard realised that the Separates Centre would also benefit
from a slightly different identity. To that end he designed the interi-
or to be as upscale and modern as he could conceive: open, unclut-
tered, with half of the windows given over to blouses and skirts, the
staples of Lewis Separates’ manufacturing operation. As customers
entered the store, immediately their eyes would be drawn upwards
to the mezzanine floor, home to the skirt department, with blouses,
knitwear and beachwear set further back on the ground floor near the
fitting rooms. A hosiery counter would stand sentry by the entrance,
rather like sweets by a supermarket checkout, to tempt in impulse
buyers or women dashing in to replace a laddered stocking. Once
again the shopfitters descended to W1, and on 13 April 1957 the new
flagship opened.

That was just the start. The merchandise also required a re-
think. Fully occupied as he was with sixteen other branches, Ber-
nard began to recognise the benefit of an additional pair of eyes to
help him take care of Oxford Street’s buying operation. Ideally, these
eyes would come attached to a fast-moving pair of feet. ‘I realised
the range needed augmenting. We were running a multiple therefore

260 I Oxford Street

you’re slower. So if you wanted the latest stuff you wanted somebody
who was around the rag trade all the time, every day, finding it. And
then we would see if it sold. If it did it would give us a window into the
future.’
At least the Separates Centre was ideally placed to find the
right gear, since the latest fashions were still being churned out of
the dozens of wholesalers and manufacturers dotted around Great
Portland Street. ‘The rag trade area was different then, it was a bit
Wild Westy. There were more small people in the business,’ Bernard
explained, smiling at the memory.
Fortunately, Bernard had recently recruited exactly the right
person to fulfil the brief: Marion Kretish, a slim, self-possessed young
woman recently brought in as Lewis Separates’ first fashion buyer. Ini-
tially she worked with Bernard in Kilburn; when the Separates Centre
opened, she moved over to launch a West End buying department.
‘It was run separately, therefore not under my day-to-day control,’ he
said. ‘I was in charge of it, but she didn’t have to say, “What do you
think of this?” She’d do it.’
Kretish’s independence provided a tactical advantage too,
since it helped to allay suppliers’ fears. ‘The trouble was that as the
trade knew that I manufactured as well, they were a bit wary of show-
ing me their latest styles. But with Marion Kretish they could per-
suade themselves that they were just showing it to her.’ He had long
been aware that this vital information flow would dry up if Lewis
Separates did not bring suppliers enough business – that was another
reason why he hired Kretish in the first place. ‘You can’t just look at
everything, you’ve got to buy occasionally. You have to buy your entry
ticket.’
Kretish offered far more than a means to prise open doors that
might otherwise remain closed. She also came armed with loyal con-
tacts, which was just as well, since she was in competition with nu-

Oxford Street I 261

merous buyers. She extended the company’s stylistic reach too, trav-
elling twice a year to Italy, a good source for high-end garments that
could bring a different flavour to the range. ‘She was her own person.
In other words, it’s a different taste. I didn’t want everything to be my
handwriting.’
From this point on, Kretish bought at least ten per cent of the
stock to be sold exclusively in the Separates Centre – exclusively, at
least, until Bernard found out how well it sold. Then came the tricky
part, involving those fast-moving legs on the ground, because there
was always a lag between knowing which garment to bet on and hav-
ing enough in stock to make serious money. ‘It’s impossible to project
the quantity you’re going to sell. So once it starts selling, you’ve got to
go and get more, one way or another.’
Retailers had to be super-responsive to snaffle manufactur-
ers’ deliveries of the latest trend. And however whiskery the madam
shops might have been in their appearance, when it came to nabbing
good stock, some were damned quick. One shop in particular stood
out. Near Selfridge’s, it was run by its owner’s son, a character known
on the street as Mad Eric. ‘About thirty, slimmish sort of chap, he was
a live wire,’ recalled Bernard. ‘His main job was to get the gear.’ Essen-
tially an owner-driver like Bernard, Mad Eric was utterly relentless
as he zipped about manufacturers, unencumbered by any respect for
niceties.

If something was hot, he’d go around Great Portland Street
trying to get it. Now if something’s hot, everybody wants it
and it’s gone, it’s all already allocated by the manufacturers
and you can’t get your hands on it. Unless you’re him and you
have the cheek of the devil.
He would always be hanging around, watching deliv-
eries, and if he saw stuff he liked in the showroom – it could
have come in from an outdoor maker, they get delivered to
the West End, could be about 500 dresses and they’re already

262 I Oxford Street

reserved for other people – he’d go and grab some of them off
the rail. They’d say, ‘You can’t do that, that’s for so and so.’ But
he would not listen. And it was very difficult to say to him,
‘Well you can’t have any, they’re all allocated’ – he was sort
of a friend. So he would get away with it. Well, they can only
sell them once, can’t they? So instead of this person getting
twenty and this person getting fifteen, that person would get
eighteen and this person would get ten.
That illustrates what Oxford Street needed. He was a
good operator. This is what you had to do in those days. You
don’t take no for an answer. If Oxford Street needs it, Oxford
Street needs it. And you go and get it.

Marion Kretish may not have plucked goods from the whole-
salers with quite Mad Eric’s raptor tenacity, but she was no less reso-
lute than he. The Separates Centre flourished and Oxford Street duly
fulfilled Bernard’s expectations, proving a reliable weathervane for
future fashion trends.
Soon Adele began working there. ‘Just doing what I did best:
serving, keeping an eye on everybody, making sure nobody was steal-
ing, working the floor.’ Unlike at Upton Park, Adele was not running
the shop, but helping out a redoubtable older manager. ‘She was very,
very strict. We had a lot of staff there, it was a big shop and she kept
those girls all in order.’ But as far as Adele was concerned it was fun.
‘You felt you’d arrived because all the others were little shops, here
and there and around, but to go to Oxford Street was major and it was
very, very busy – yeah, it was a gold mine.’
All the same, the two Oxford Street shops were too close, Ber-
nard felt, and risked cannibalising each other’s trade. In April 1958
the brothers closed their momentous first Oxford Street outpost. By
no means did this signal a retreat in the business. As the months went
by they opened other shops in the home counties, pushing out as far
south as the naval city of Portsmouth on the coast and west to Staines

Oxford Street I 263

in Middlesex. Then they made a big leap, breaching their comfort
zone in the south to head north, where they opened their eighteenth
branch on Glasgow’s Argyle Street in Scotland in 1957.
Shop nineteen arrived in Hull, at Whitefriargate, soon after.
‘And that established that what we did in London could travel,’ said
Bernard. ‘That was a major milestone, a turning point. It meant that
we now had the whole country to expand into.’ This is putting it mild-
ly. Both northern branches were absolute sensations.
The Glasgow shop was very small but in a marvellous posi-
tion, and such were the crowds every Saturday that from very early
days the brothers decided that they could stretch its profits further.
They began charging between five and ten per cent more for garments
here than in other branches, the sales assistants changing the price
tags in the stock room downstairs. In the 1950s Glasgow was by no
means millionaires’ row, but there was no fashionable competition,
and the modest price uplift did not dent sales. It was also a way of
extracting more profit from the shop until they could get hold of a
bigger one, although they soon relocated the stock room and opened
the basement as a secondary sales floor, to cram in as much merchan-
dise as they could.

The Hull branch came with an additional advantage, since
to take over the shop’s lease the Lewises had been required to buy
Woods, the company that owned it. The business also came with a
handy tax loss which they could offset against the shop’s profits –
another shrewd idea of David’s, although they had to call the shop
Woods Separates in order to do so. Soon afterwards they championed
a new style of display. This time there were no flying busts or wire-
framed torsos in the window; instead a lively congregation of leggy,
life-sized mannequins struck poses – an innovation that indicates
how swiftly their sales approach evolved, an elegant step ahead of the
competition. ‘It means you’re not getting every single garment in the

264 I Oxford Street

window. Once you are using mannequins you’re changing the whole
nature of the trend of selection. Customers come into the shop and
look around as opposed to standing outside and then deciding “I’ll
have that one”.’
David was in touch with the estate agents all the time, as shop
details flooded in. ‘He and I would go out, usually on a Saturday, in-
specting sites. I don’t remember Geoffrey and Godfrey ever doing it.’
The brothers had to become savvy, quickly, about unfamiliar parts of
the country. Checking out a new location, Bernard and David would
eye the clothes women wore on the streets, but of course often this
only revealed the limited opportunities to buy; it could not confirm
that crucial element: whether there was a potential market, ready to
be tapped by a well-targeted fashion offer. ‘The question was: Is this
going to be right for us? I knew the merchandise, I knew who I was
selling it to. David’s job was to find the properties and secure the shop,
sometimes against competition, negotiate the deal.’
Wanting, as always, to get down to fundamentals before he felt
competent to reach a decision, Bernard distilled a checklist for profil-
ing a potential customer base.‘You have got to understand the town.
As you are coming into it, you say, “What is this town like?” You need
to know the population, the economic statistics, the flavour of the
place. You imagine: what is it like being a young person, living here?
Leaving school – where do you go? You are looking at the houses,
the factories, considering who are my potential customers? And what
about the competition? What are they stocking? Are they busy?’
Something about Lewis Separates’ clothes struck a nerve in
the north. As their operation spread, major cities like Liverpool and
Manchester would become what Bernard called ‘our towns’. Far-flung
as these branches were, he paid them his usual care. Once a month he
would set off for Hull at five in the morning, an extremely long jour-
ney in the days before there was a north–south motorway. He would

Oxford Street I 265

arrive at nine o’clock for the window dresser, then together they would
decide what to put in the display. Despite the myriad demands on his
time and mind, Bernard never left London the night before to enjoy a
restful night in a hotel, or hired a driver, which would have freed him
to attend to his mounds of paperwork. ‘No, it didn’t occur to me to do
anything except in the most economical way.’
Another joy of these early starts was it allowed him to put his
children to bed in the evening before he left the next day. Although
Lorna and the boys remained his top priority, such were the demands
of business that Sunday would be the family’s only full day together.
On Saturday he would be out in the shops, seeing what competitors
were doing, and how busy they were in comparison to Lewis Sepa-
rates. These were not sweeping flypasts; roaming around at a consid-
ered pace, Bernard would zoom in, seizing on telling details – noting
how long customers tarried at certain displays, or how many units of
a garment left the rails over a busy afternoon. He always went alone.
Lorna ceased to take an active part in the business after their shop on
Lordship Lane closed, and in any case, somebody needed to watch the
boys, although this changed when Leonard turned five and began to
come along too.
In some respects Bernard savoured these epic trips north, as
they afforded him the rare peace to think uninterruptedly, as well as
a chance to indulge his love of driving. ‘I remember the drive, going
through Grantham by breakfast time, and there’s a road that is dead
straight for miles as you come up to the Humber, then Hull is the
other side. One morning Sputnik was announced on the radio. They
broadcast the beep-beep it transmitted.’
This would have been 4 October 1957, when the USSR
launched the first satellite to orbit the earth, the opening salvo of the
space age. But if the future was rushing towards the Lewis brothers,
they were racing to meet it. No sooner had one goal been reached

266 I Oxford Street

than they pegged their course to a higher target. After their triumph
in the north, their path ahead was clear. ‘We’d go anywhere. There was
no plan to do it by region. There was nobody else doing what we were
doing. We were faster, we were cheaper, we did manufacturing and we
were into design.’
Their Kilburn HQ now bursting at the seams, David’s next
task was to find somewhere that would allow the back-office oper-
ation to expand as rapidly as the stores. In the late 1950s he found a
promising spot on Avonmore Road in Olympia, west Kensington.
6/8 Avon Trading Estate was a huge shift in gear from a few rooms
above a shop. Two tall blocks built in dirty yellow London stock
bricks, it stood on a terrace that had once housed William Whiteley’s
gargantuan Furniture Depository, a bastion of the British Empire. ‘In
the years of the Raj, British India, people used to go out and had to
store their furniture there.’ The Empire a fading memory, the deposi-
tory had lost its purpose, leaving behind acres of space. Although the
buildings were on the right scale for Lewis Separates’ purposes, their
location was questionable; neither trendy nor particularly well con-
nected, Olympia hardly screamed fashion, and it had feeble transport
links and parking. However, it was near to the brothers’ homes and
also to their suppliers, many of whom now delivered stock twice or
more a week.
Each block consisted of five floors, 3,000 square foot apiece,
connected by a central lift. Totalling 30,000 square feet, initially this
was far too large, so David sublet block 6 to another company, but on
a very short lease – a statement of intent if ever there was one. Then
the business moved into block 8: one floor for their office and design
team, two for the warehouse, and a fourth to store cloth. This set-up
facilitated tight lines of communication between all key departments,
an insuperable advantage to Lewis Separates’ vertically integrated,
cloth-to-store, owner-driver retail machine.

Oxford Street I 267

One floor, the fifth, remained. This did not stand idle, but was
rented to their uncle, Ike Tauber. Ike had managed a tailoring factory
until he went into business as an outdoor maker, running a cut, make
and trim business with his brother Lou, the machinist. Unfortunate-
ly, Lou’s wife Hettie wasn’t happy. ‘The money was irregular and she
wanted wages coming in every week,’ said Bernard. So Lou went back
to being a machinist. How he and Hettie must have come to regret
this decision: they missed out on the bonanza when Ike began work-
ing for the most loyal of clients, Lewis Separates, for whom he would
manufacture skirts until he retired.
Within a year of moving into Avonmore Road, enough new
stores had opened for their empire to outgrow block 8 and David ac-
tivated the break clause on block 6, reclaiming it from their tenants.
The warehouse moved across, absorbing fully five floors of that build-
ing, and the design studio took over an entire floor of block 8. As the
months went by Bernard recruited new area controllers, adopted new
trading protocols, accounting systems, buying controls – all refined
continuously, adapting in line with the business’s changing needs. Be-
fore long the Lewises would acquire a third block in the complex.
Forty-five thousand square feet were now devoted to running and
supplying the business, not including the numerous outside manu-
facturers bringing in goods.
In September 1955, when Bernard began recording their
weekly takings in his old Letts desk diary, there had been five branch-
es of Lewis Separates. Three years later, in November 1958, when he
recorded the final entry, there were twenty-three. Not bad for a com-
pany born just a decade earlier, on a bombsite, under a corrugated
iron shack. Tellingly, Bernard’s abiding memory of running the busi-
ness during these early years, not to mention his growing family re-
sponsibility, was neither of exhaustion nor panic, just a sense of focus,
purpose, determination and achievement.

19

Growth and retreat

Never could Lew have dreamed of such prosperity, but in terms of
sheer toil, his sons’ working week remained little less demanding than
his had been. It was all done for the family, but at a cost to family life.
Even on Sunday there might be a directors’ meeting, had there not
been one on the preceding Tuesday evening. Family gatherings were
limited to children’s birthday parties and Jewish religious holidays,
plus the occasional dinner hosted by David, the de facto patriarch.
You might imagine that the brothers saw quite enough of
each other without socialising, but in fact at the Avon Estate they led
largely separate lives, and David remained in Harley Street. Yet their
families were poised to become even closer. First Godfrey and Kitty
bought a large house on Willesden Lane, not far from the elder broth-
ers’. Then Geoffrey and Adele moved next door to Bernard and Lorna
at Christchurch Avenue. Pure coincidence, said Bernard, although for
Adele, having Lorna as her neighbour was a bonus.
Adele was expecting her first baby, but managed the Kilburn
shop throughout the pregnancy, retreating to a little Z-bed that Geof-
frey had secreted in a back office for when exhaustion overtook her in
the afternoon. And she was not alone. By some strange twist of fate,
in 1958 all four Lewis sisters-in-law were pregnant.
‘Lorna desperately wanted a girl, she had two boys,’ remem-
bered Adele. ‘Then I had a girl and I got a card from her saying, well,
you can be sure mine will be a boy. But she had Caroline. And we all
had girls. So they were like quads because they were born just months
apart. Laura, Caroline, Debbie and Elaine.’

Growth and retreat I 269

The four cousins, arriving within a year of each other, living
within a mile of each other, would become firm friends, although they
saw slightly less of Debbie, David and Ruth’s daughter. ‘Ruth had a
much quieter life,’ explained Adele, ‘but Lorna and Kitty and me were
very close. Lorna and I would see each other every day. We saw Kitty
and Elaine four times a week.’
With their four armfuls of blossom, seemingly the wives had
every ingredient for happiness. But almost immediately Lorna pitched
headlong into post-natal depression.
Bernard sought medical advice but found it hard to get a diag-
nosis that seemed accurate, or treatment that seemed sensible. ‘Four
psychiatrists were called in before I found one I could trust – some
were quite odd. Then Dr David Stafford-Clark, the head of psychia-
try at Guy’s Hospital, took her on personally.’ From this point Lorna
spent numerous periods of several weeks in the York Clinic, the pri-
vate psychiatric wing attached to Guy’s – a godsend, said Bernard.
‘They knew her well. Stafford-Clark would always take her in.’
Free of family responsibilities, Lorna would be fragile but
comparatively well. Once she seemed strong enough she came home
and would be okay for a few months, until inexorably the depression
dragged her back down. The pattern was constant. Initially she would
have twenty-four-hour nursing at home, before things grew unman-
ageable and she went back to the York Clinic.
‘I don’t remember my mother, Lorna, living with us,’ said Car-
oline. ‘I’ve got this snippet of going up to the bedroom, and it was
dark and there was a nurse in there. That’s all I remember. I must have
been pretty young then. I don’t remember her being in the house at
all, nothing, nothing.’

Bernard doted on the children, providing them with as se-
cure and loving an environment as he could muster, their days
pegged together by steady routines and sedulous attention. Caroline

270 I Growth and retreat

remembered how her father kept up his trusty old RAF habits and
sought to instil them in the children. ‘After breakfast the shoe clean-
ing box with the two flat brushes came out and he’d shine his shoes
and the boys would shine theirs.’
Reflecting on the accomplishments and challenges facing his
father during this period, Clive was struck by the dedication that Ber-
nard brought to all spheres. ‘He was not what people would imagine
– the image people would have of a driven businessman. He was very
attentive. We always had dinner together at seven-thirty every night.’
By this stage Bernard estimated that Lorna spent a third of her time
in nursing homes. ‘I’d work, visit her, I’d come home, be with the chil-
dren and go to bed and that was it. Did that for years. The office was
reasonably close so I was always home, every night, at a reasonable
time, about seven or six-thirty, something like that.’
He made sure there were always familiar faces around when
he could not be – the aunts, a nanny, eventually a housekeeper – but
these helpers were very much second fiddle.

I put the children first. I would take them to school. I remem-
ber taking Caroline when she was little and helping her off
with her coat and hanging it on the hook, and the headmis-
tress came up to me and said, ‘You know, you’ve got to stop
doing this. She’ll never learn.’
I used to wash their hair, bathe them. Every Sun-
day night when they were ready for bed in their pyjamas, we
would all get on to my big bed and I would make up a story
for them.

None of his children forgot these tales. ‘I remember the three
of us, it would be on Sunday evenings, lying on his bed. I seem to re-
member he must have been on his own on those evenings, I think he
used to make sure we’d had our baths and everything,’ said Caroline.

Growth and retreat I 271

‘The story was about a creature called a Migrey, a mixture of a mon-
key and a tiger. They loved pickled onions but if they ate a pickled
onion it was very bad for them and I think they would die. But they
would get up to all sorts of adventures and be quite naughty and we
loved it. It was brilliant, absolutely brilliant.’

*

Even as Bernard’s private world narrowed, his commercial horizon
continued to expand. Over the course of 1959 Lewis Separates plant-
ed their flag in nine new towns, from Blackburn to Bradford. Amid all
the action it came as a shock when Fanny Tauber died of peritonitis,
closing another chapter in the family story. She was seventy-nine, the
last survivor of her generation, and the only one to witness her family
achieve the security that she and David had fled Romania to seek.
Come 1960 and the arrival of the new decade saw no let-up,
with more shop openings. A large store at 90 Church Street, Liver-
pool, brought the group to over forty – doubling their size in under
two years.
The manufacturing side of the business grew in lockstep with
the shops. Roll upon roll of cloth piled up at the Avon Trading Estate,
like forests of felled trees, ready to be transformed. Key fabrics, such
as black gabardine for skirts and white cotton for shirts, were bought
in bulk to reduce the price, with racier fashion cloths bought in more
cautious quantities.
By now the company organised the manufacture of the major-
ity of its stock, and owned a growing fleet of lorries to ferry it about;
the logistical advantage of controlling stock deliveries was found to
outweigh any superficial cost benefit to be gleaned from outsourcing
to a haulage company. Before long the sides of Lewis lorries would
proclaim in bold lettering: ‘Over 100 shops throughout the United
Kingdom’. It was more a statement of ambition than of fact.

272 I Growth and retreat

Avid as Bernard was to control Lewis Separates’ supply chain,
he never aspired to own a factory. ‘For me it was about being nimble,
agile. And if you’re set up to produce a certain sort of thing in a cer-
tain way, if fashion changes then you’ve got a factory you don’t want.
Using outside factories, they also had to be competitive to get work.
Whereas if you owned your own machines and your own factory, the
factory manager can feel he is guaranteed work and get a bit relaxed.’
As the company matured, the younger Lewis brothers began
to carve their own niches. Geoffrey, the art student who never had a
chance to complete his studies, put his tremendous visual sense to
good use, running window dressing and helping to co-ordinate shop-
fitting, gradually assuming responsibility for other aspects of visual
display, although Bernard controlled what featured in the windows
until Geoffrey came fully into his own and took over in the mid-1960s.
Meanwhile Godfrey continued to run the warehouse and transport,
ensuring that the jugular vein of the business kept pumping out stock
where it was needed.
Despite Bernard’s octopus hold on the many strands of the
business, more hands were required to keep its wheels turning. One
conspicuously capable pair belonged to twenty-two-year-old South
African Stuart Peters. The son of successful milliners, Peters came to
the UK originally for a six-week Christmas break from his job as a
buyer for the OK Bazaar, a big department store in Cape Town. But
he loved London so much that he stayed on. Washing up at Lewis
Separates’ head office, he started to work for Godfrey in distribution.
To Peters, the division of labour in the family was clear. ‘The four
brothers were very dedicated, a great team. Bernard was buy-
ing but he put his word into everything. David was the head of fi-
nance, Geoffrey was doing windows and running the look of the

Growth and retreat I 273

shops. Godfrey was looking after warehousing. Bernard and David
were brilliant and Geoffrey and Godfrey did their jobs very, very well.’
Initially Peters allocated stock, laboriously totting up sales
tickets by style and shop on a Monday morning to see what garments
had sold where the week before. Each shop would have its target stock
figure for a particular style, a number set by Bernard. So if, come
Monday, only ten pleated grey skirts remained in the Hammersmith
branch and the target stock figure was twenty, then out went ten more.
Peters soon wised up to the political dynamics within the business.
‘We had to make sure that Bernard’s sister-in-law in Tooting, Rene,
had all the merchandise before everybody else. She was very efficient,
bloody good worker.’
The painstaking stock allocation process grew a little less
so after David went to the United States on a special mission to in-
vestigate data processing systems and came back with a Kimball
tag machine. Today, this would be nobody’s idea of a revolutionary
innovation. The tags consisted of small cardboard tickets with pre-
punched holes, each pattern unique to a particular style, colour and
size combination. These were detached at point of sale, sent back to
the office and fed into an enormous central computer that sorted and
counted them. These unassuming little chits were the precursor to
bar codes, relieving the business of a particularly dreary swathe of
work, although the process remained somewhat labour intensive.
‘They had to be the right way up,’ said Bernard, ‘and photo-electric
cells operated through the holes and sorted them.’ The machine then
printed merchandise reports. Yet compared with the laborious task
of hand-sorting, this clunky procedure dramatically accelerated the
company’s ability to see what had sold where.
Forecasting sales remained less a science than an informed
guesstimate. ‘Your allocators will decide what to send where. It’s called
profiling a shop or a town.’ But with this level of data available, target

274 I Growth and retreat

figures could be adjusted up or down fairly quickly in line with sales,
according to the latest sales trends and the profile of each particular
shop.
Stuart Peters’ efforts stood out. ‘He must have had something
about him,’ said Bernard. Because one day he called the lad into his
office and said, ‘I need you to help me buy knitwear.’ Peters was about
to become Lewis Separates’ first dedicated knitwear buyer. ‘Officially,’
he clarified. ‘But really, I was an assistant. Bernard was involved in
every aspect of buying.’
It proved a perspicacious choice. ‘He’s a very nice chap,’ said
Bernard, ‘considered, careful and obviously enterprising. He went on
to establish a very successful knitwear company in his own right, to-
gether with his wife, and he supplies most multiple stores.’ By 2015
Peters’ family company would be selling 16 million garments to Brit-
ish retailers every year, sixty per cent of them manufactured in Ban-
gladesh – quite a contrast to the context in which he began, when
Lewis Separates’ suppliers could be working out of a garage in the
Midlands. Peters credited Bernard as his inspiration:

He was my mentor. Quite honestly, when he asked me to
join him and work on knitwear I had not a clue how it was
produced. I used to go to Leicester every week, talk to fac-
tories. It was sink or swim. He gave me the opportunities to
learn and he pushed me. I learned how a garment was made,
learned about fashion, what was right or not right – the gar-
ment or colour. Everything I learned working with Bernard
I have used in my own business. Without the experience of
working with him, I wouldn’t have my own company.

Bernard repeated this experiment in delegation, hiring young
Michael Cooklin to focus on swimwear and hosiery, followed by an-
other assistant, Alan Kramer. He wanted buyers in these areas be-
cause such products are highly specialised, involving numerous yarns

Growth and retreat I 275

and processes, something their home production could never take
on. Nevertheless, he remained resolutely in charge of his Men Friday.
‘Stuart would always be in touch with the manufacturers and whole-
salers, and fetch in anything he thought of interest for me to see.’
Peters found Bernard’s approach painstaking at times. ‘I like
to make quick decisions. Bernard was more circumspect. Sometimes
I would go into his office to have a discussion about what to buy and
I’d be pushing to move on, but there would be a long silence as he
ruminated on a selection of garments, minutes at a time.’ When Ber-
nard finally offered his view he might say, ‘I agree, let’s take a hundred
dozen of that, but I want you to buy two hundred and fifty dozen of
this one because I fancy it and we’ll go and see if we can get the price
down.’
Dedication was expected of his buyers and it was given. Theirs
was a six-day role, with shop visits on a Saturday a must. Usually Pe-
ters drifted towards Kilburn, the branch nearest the Finchley Road
where he lived, but he saw the value in the exercise. He was to be
shocked, several years later, at the end of his first week working for
another retailer, when he asked which shop he should visit that week-
end. His boss looked at him aghast. ‘Don’t go on a Saturday! That’s
when they’re busy.’
Looking for manufacturing opportunities beyond Britain,
Bernard was happy to discover that there was more to Stuart Peters
than a quick study. The lad also came armed with contacts and nous
from his time buying for OK Bazaar. Since the most stylish and cost-
liest cloth and knits were invariably produced in Italy, Bernard dis-
patched his protégé to a knitwear show in Turin, assigning him two
additional errands: to tour the local fabric factories, and to winkle out
a fabric agent who could represent Lewis Separates on the ground.
His rationale was that if they could buy in Italian knits and cloth di-
rect, not only would they bypass British importers, editing the mid-

276 I Growth and retreat

dleman’s cut from their profit margin, but also gain another window
offering a sneak preview of coming trends and types of merchandise.

Peters headed for Turin with a £50 travel allowance, the max-
imum that Her Majesty’s Treasury then permitted anyone to carry
abroad. As soon as he landed he dialled up Hans Krieger, a Jewish
Austrian who served as OK Bazaar’s Italian agent. The knitwear show
over, Krieger escorted Peters south-east to Carpi, a town near Flor-
ence in Tuscany and home to top knitwear factories. Peters loaded his
suitcase with samples and took them back to Avonmore Road.
Impressed by what he saw, the following month Bernard
joined Peters on a second trip. This time Krieger escorted them to
Prato, the manufacturing hub for most Italian woven fabrics, where
cloth cost up to twenty per cent less than it would via a British whole-
saler. Krieger signed on as Lewis Separates’ agent, sourcing textiles
and knitwear, and brokering deals. Although agents would take a
commission from their client and possibly from the factory as well, it
still worked out cheaper. Henceforth Lewis Separates’ cut, make and
trim outfit could make fancier garments, and their buyers acquire fin-
er Italian knitwear, all at a more affordable price.
From then on Peters travelled to Italy four times a year, vis-
iting Milan and Florence in particular. Bernard used to accompany
him fairly often too, picking up interesting styles from the local shops
to inspire his designers.
‘We were buying sweaters mainly, but you could get whatever
you wanted there.’ Some Italian products came in at the upper end of
Lewis Separates’ price range, but that added a certain value, lifting the
tone of the shops.

Our range couldn’t be too expensive, but we could stretch
it a little. We never bought big volumes, it was a question of
spicing things up and seeing as much as you could of the new
stuff, getting ideas so you don’t rely upon just the stuff you’re

Growth and retreat I 277

devising on your own. You’ve got to have a lot of input, a lot
of ideas. The more you see the better. And Italy had more
advanced styling and their own designers.

You can picture him on an Italian factory floor, notebook and
pen discreetly tucked in his jacket pocket, ready to sketch the most
piquant designs that he had seen the instant he left the building. His
draughtsmanship continued to serve him well.

20

Island of success

If the early 1960s marked the end of post-war British austerity, it was
also the period when the brothers finally settled into lifestyles that
reflected their personal prosperity.
Godfrey and Kitty welcomed their third child, Shelley, and
Bernard and Lorna moved to a bigger house at 45 Manor House Drive,
Willesden, built in the style that estate agents describe as ambassa-
dorial. Much to Ruth’s dismay, David also bought a holiday flat in a
block developed by Henry Harris, the brother of his friend and client
Albert, at High Ridge in Sandbanks. The up-and-coming coastal re-
sort in Dorset between Bournemouth and Poole is now renowned for
its multi-million pound houses.
Immediately David took up sailing, swiftly progressing from a
catamaran to a speedboat, and then to a thirty-foot yacht, Firedrake.
His impatience sometimes got the better of him, however, never more
so than on one evening when, keen to be home after a day cruising
around the Isle of Wight on a becalmed Solent, he decided to drop
anchor off the beach directly opposite their flat and swim ashore
rather than waste time sailing into the safe harbour at Poole. That
night a storm blew up and he watched on helplessly as Firedrake was
smashed to pieces on the treacherous sand bars for which the resort
had been named.
Bernard and the children often joined them for a holiday.
Caroline remembered these trips as unbroken days of sunshine
and endless blue skies, and always busy. ‘You’d be water skiing ear-

Island of success I 279

ly morning, water skiing evening as the sun was setting, because
the water was much calmer, or be in the boat with all the kids.’
Bernard also bought himself a sailing boat, which he called
Super Car, in honour of his children’s favourite television cartoon.
But far from a Rolls-Royce of the waters, this was a dinghy in the
notoriously capsize-prone ‘Solo’ sailing class. He never raced it com-
petitively; it was just for fun as he broached the Dorset currents fear-
lessly, frequently entertaining the people on the sands with his antics.
‘I remember sitting on the beach,’ said Clive, ‘and it seemed to me
that everybody on the beach was looking at him because he capsized.’
A boat pootled out to rescue Bernard but he sent it away and sorted
himself out. Bernard denied there was any drama. ‘As it went over you
climbed out over the side and stood on the keel and righted it. You
didn’t even need to get wet.’
Although David subsequently graduated to yachts, Bernard
did not. ‘My father was never interested in owning things,’ said Clive.
‘The idea of owning a yacht or even a second home never interested
him at all.’ All of his brothers owned a holiday home, but the idea of
running it and looking after it and having one more thing to do just
didn’t appeal to him.
There was little let-up in Bernard’s industriousness when they
were at home. Often he passed his evening rooted in an armchair,
milling away at mounds of paperwork. Relaxation consisted of exer-
cise and catching up with the news, most especially about politics or
the doings of businessmen he admired.

‘I remember my father at night sitting in front of the televi-
sion and reading the business papers,’ said Leonard. ‘I just assumed
families were like this.’ Family business permeated the children’s lives,
yet it would be years before they understood that the documents that
preoccupied Bernard so greatly were sales figures, let alone that the
shops amounted to a significant accomplishment. ‘I remember one

280 I Island of success

conversation with a friend in the playground,’ recalled Leonard. ‘And
I said, “Look, you can see our house.” And he was surprised that we
lived there.’ Surprised because it was so big.
Remarkably, the children did not resent the business playing
such a large part in their lives. On the contrary, amid the upheaval
of Lorna’s absences, ‘the constant was the shops’, said Leonard. And
Bernard ministered to the shops with a paternal tenderness.
‘From extremely young,’ said Leonard, ‘I was used to the prin-
ciples of business. The family culture was to talk business all the time.
It wasn’t money, it was the shops. Every Saturday we would go to
shops up the M1.’ These outings were not compulsory, but the child
wanted to go whenever he could. ‘I can’t remember when I didn’t go
to the shops. They were very much the heart of the family.’
Clive concurred. ‘Saturday, we would always be getting into a
car, going to shops, then he would be in the shop and I would often be
left to wander around a town. We were not just visiting Lewis Sepa-
rates but other shops as well. I loved that.’ It was another way to spend
time with Dad too, just as going to the wholesale markets had bought
Bernard special time with Lew.

Asked when she first realised that the business was a big deal,
Caroline said, ‘I never didn’t know. It wasn’t like, “When do I remem-
ber?” I was indoctrinated in it, because when you have a business like
this and it’s a family business you live and breathe it, especially some-
body like him and especially if the children are interested.’ For her this
was entirely positive. ‘There was no negativity there at all, believe me,
it was an amazing thing. He was an incredible role model, especially
for my brothers.’

Most of all, Leonard remembered visiting the shops in Hollo-
way Road and Kilburn, which were under the watch of his aunt, Lena
Spencer. He would be fascinated by the spectacle of ‘Mr Bernard’ at
work. ‘There was no ceremony. When we were in the shop he made

Island of success I 281

things happen. He used to get stuck in, very busy. I remember him
rearranging Kilburn, moving things around.’ And then after they had
gone, Leonard learned subsequently, Lena or perhaps Adele would
put things back to how they were before.
Throughout this period Clive remembers seeing his cousins
fairly often, particularly Godfrey’s son Leslie, to whom he would re-
main close. Their uncles usually came over on Tuesday nights to meet
in the downstairs study. ‘The meetings were always at our house be-
cause my father was looking after us,’ said Leonard.
Aside from these meetings and the holidays, Bernard seldom
saw his brothers. Everybody knew about Lorna’s difficulties, but as far
as he could recall, nobody on his side of the family ever asked how he
was bearing up or what they could do to help. Then again, each had
their own consuming lives to attend, with tiny children underfoot.
He may also have underestimated the extent to which his brothers
and sisters-in-law were helping out, discreetly, whether opening their
doors to his children or sharing holidays away. Certainly, Caroline
remembered seeing the other Lewises a great deal. ‘Clive and I were
in and out of their houses all the time. Everybody got on and it was all
close.’ But she knew her aunts and cousins better than her uncles.

David was a very kind man but I was always slightly fright-
ened of him – obviously not as an adult, but I remember an
occasion where he had to bring me down to Sandbanks for
a holiday and we got the train early evening and I sat next
to him in the train. I was excited as well because I knew we
were going to have dinner on the train. That was all good. I
remember thinking he was very clever and a family man.
Geoffrey, when I used to stay on holiday with them,
he used to have a temper, he’d be shouting and slamming
doors. But when you went into their home, apart from that,
Adele was so wonderful, and her cooking and the way she
made the home and everything, it was a nice place to be.
With Godfrey, because he was the youngest, I remember him

282 I Island of success

being quite fun. He bought the first colour TV set and I was
like, ‘Oh my God, that’s absolutely amazing.’ We’d go to God-
frey for things like fireworks night. He was very gregarious,
he’d ask you questions and get straight to the point and he
was the one that said what he thought, I think, rather than
maybe thinking it through. His wife Kitty, I remember her
being quite serious but I might have got that wrong.

Adele offered a contrasting perspective on how things were
between Bernard and his brothers. ‘When Lorna was ill, and before
anyone knew what to do or how to help her, Bernard did not go out.
He worked and he came home and looked after the children. Never
seen a man so committed.’
As he made sense of how to run his little family without Lorna
at his side, he reverted to his usual method: monitoring. ‘He used to
come and he’d say, “Can I come in to the house? Can I have a look
around?” I think he wanted to know how we did things. But he was
quite solitary. I mean, we were next door but he never . . . he didn’t
come in and have a drink or . . . So one respected that but always had
the door open for him when he wanted it.’
Bernard might have welcomed more coaxing, but it is under-
standable if the others assumed otherwise. After all, he was not simply
family to his younger brothers; he was their boss in all but name. And
in many ways he must have appeared less shy than forbidding; hardly
the sort to invite intimacy, let alone offers of help. ‘Perhaps I didn’t en-
courage it. Perhaps I’m a bit . . .’ he conceded, failing to complete the
thought. Although intellectually close in so many ways to David, he
never sought personal counsel or succour from him. ‘I didn’t confide
in anybody.’ He spent most of his time in the business not with his
brothers but with the staff, which can only have added to his sense of
being a man apart – Mr Bernard, the person who made things hap-
pen.

Island of success I 283

The Spencer sisters, especially the younger two, became heav-
ily involved during these painful years. It helped that Rene and Lena,
as Lewis Separates employees, did not have to beg a reluctant boss
for time off. ‘Lena could be pulled out of visiting a shop to look after
the children at home in a case of emergency. That was marvellous,’
remembered Bernard.

Some Sundays he took the children to visit Lorna’s parents in
Wembley, said Caroline. ‘Bubba and Papa. They were quite foreign,
from Russia. She used to sit there with her foot up.’ There were jollier
trips to his mother Clara. ‘When I used to take them to see her, Leon-
ard and Clive were just so relaxed in her presence, they were different.
Just loll on the chair. They were . . . Yeah, they were much more re-
laxed than with me.’
‘She lived in a flat nearby which we could walk to and we used
to go there and she made us sardines on toast, we used to fiddle about
in the kitchen with her and have lots of food. All the cousins used to
go over,’ said Caroline. Were she and her brothers more relaxed with
Clara than their father? ‘Probably. He could pick up things like that.’
Bernard felt that his personality was the issue. ‘I’m not much good at
relaxed conversation, just chatting away. I’m too task-oriented. I’m
more comfortable discussing something.’ But Clive said, ‘It’s well un-
derstood that he doesn’t do chitchat and he is not one of those people
who has deep conversations about feelings. But these conversations
have happened in his own way, and meant a great deal. There have
been all sorts of discussions over the years. He has given far more
guidance on that stuff, on feelings, than he thinks.’
‘He often used the expression of a man being his own island
and providing for your family,’ said his youngest son, Jake. ‘It sounds
like a very lonely place. I have an image of him standing on an island
and a big sign saying “No trespassers” … I’ve only really started to
get a grip on how big that sense of duty was.’ But on the rare occasion
when he and Bernard discussed personal issues, Jake found his words

284 I Island of success

uncommonly wise. Similarly, Caroline described how conversation
with her father could sometimes stutter along, because often he want-
ed to sift the minutiae, but with big issues he homed in to the heart
of the matter. ‘When you need to talk to him about something that’s
more emotional and it’s going to affect your life or whatever, he’s bril-
liant. You’ll say what worries you and he will understand and advise
you how to handle it. There is that wonderful side to him.’
All the children started their schooling at the local kinder-
garten, with the boys attending a primary school just across the road
from the house, before moving onto St Anthony’s, a fee-paying prepa-
ratory establishment in Hampstead, then on to Millfield, a boarding
school in Somerset.
Caroline recalled the day that her brothers left home. ‘It might
have been around the time they first landed on the moon, I remember
being allowed up to watch that with my father. Yes, the morning Leon-
ard and Clive went off to boarding school they had eggs and steak for
breakfast, because it was in the newspapers that the astronauts before
they took off in their rocket they had steak and eggs for breakfast, a
real American breakfast. I’m sure it would have been my father’s idea.
He would have liked that.’ (In fact the moon landing did not happen
until 1969. She may have been thinking of a later date, when the boys
were at senior school.)
First they attended Edgarley Hall, the prep school that fed into
Millfield. Bernard could see them once every three weeks for exeats,
doing so without fail, staying overnight on Saturday in order to spend
the whole weekend together, and taking them home during half-term.
As painful as their absence was for him, for the boys the benefits were
unarguable. ‘That’s when suddenly I stopped—’ said Leonard. ‘I used
to be bad at school. I was good at school then.’
‘Leonard ended up as second head of school, head of house,
got into the LSE,’ said Bernard. ‘And Clive went to Warwick, got his
degree, went on and qualified as a barrister.’

21

Focus

The last child at home, Caroline felt closer to her father than ever. ‘I
remember being ill in bed, I really wasn’t very well, and waking up in
the middle of the night and he was there with me, to make sure I was
okay.’

Like Clive before her, she spent a lot of time at the Avon Trad-
ing Estate. To her, it was very heaven to be picked up by a driver and
go to her father’s office. Bernard’s secretary of many years, Mrs Petti-
fer, sat outside in a glass-walled pod with Geoffrey’s secretary. ‘I’d go
and say hello to her and she was always wonderful and welcoming
and gorgeous, she knew all the background about what was going on.
I remember outside the office, the corridor, with this pine cladding,
similar to a sauna, and as you opened the door it was a big office, with
a big window that looked onto the railway tracks, then to the right of
that was his large desk.’

There was also a sofa and coffee table, but any hint of relaxation
was offset by the huge numbers of fabric swatches and files along the
shelves behind Bernard’s desk. Caroline would take up residence on
one of the mandatory black revolving chairs on the other side of the
desk, swivelling round and round while her father carried on a meet-
ing, munching on treats from the plate of KitKats and Jammie Dodg-
ers left by Mrs Pettifer. ‘Probably interrupting the whole time, stuffing
my face,’ she remembered. ‘I loved it. My father would be asking lots
of questions, it would have been pretty jovial – talking, deciding. You
know, quite happy with the whole thing and getting something done.
I don’t think I knew what was going on. But as I got older I realised
this was fashion. Then I was very interested.’

286 I Focus

When her attention waned and the sugar rush took hold, the
little girl would go walkabout, hoping to be made a fuss of elsewhere.
‘I think Geoffrey was next door to my father. Don’t remember where
Godfrey was.’ Yet she rarely went to see her uncles. ‘My little area was
Mrs Pettifer, my father, the design room and this other place where
there were a lot of women, manually counting all the ticket sales.’

The design department, on the floor above her father’s office,
made the greatest impression. Designers, machinists and pattern cut-
ters beavered away, but Caroline had eyes only for the head designer
Miss Mincheo, a petite, olive-skinned woman with brown hair cut in
a severe bob. ‘She used to have little glasses on the end of her nose
and always had a cigarette – she’d talk with it hanging out her mouth
– and I seem to remember she had a mole on her chin. I was a little
bit frightened of her because she was quite straightforward and every-
thing, but you know, I would have been on my best behaviour.’

Caroline’s finest hour came when she stood by Miss Mincheo’s
big work table to be measured for dresses for a birthday present. ‘I
think one of them was like a pinafore dress. And I loved them. Just
the best in the world.’

Other than Mrs Pettifer and no-nonsense Miss Mincheo, Car-
oline also got to know Cyril Kraines, the head of retail and who al-
ways liked a chat and had a smile for the ladies. ‘He probably was a
very good balance for my father. You know, being more open and
talkative, and got on with all the staff, against my father, who was
obviously quieter and not that good in social situations. He ran the
stores and all the area controllers.’

Caroline’s halcyon days as a free-range tot patrolling the Avon
Trading Estate came to an end when she turned seven or eight, and
it was decided it would be in her best interests to leave behind the
unsettling scenes at home to become a weekly boarder at Hurlingham