bl_flip2

Focus I 287

prep school in Putney. When he hugged her goodbye in her new dor-
mitory, the distance from his children must have seemed enormous.

*

Bernard did what many have done to survive trying circumstances: he
buried himself in work and concentrated on being the very best pro-
vider he could for his family. Never more content than when solving
a problem in the company, he maintained a monastic dedication to
the daily, monthly and yearly rituals that kept the business powering
ahead, grinding away at repetitive tasks that would transcend lesser
mortals’ threshold for tedium. ‘My father would be going around the
shops, talking in a lot of detail with the managers, looking in a lot of
detail at sales and the product that was selling,’ said Clive, noting that
few people would have run it in quite such a close-quartered fashion.

It has become a feeling with business people and the idea of
start- ups that things can happen quickly, you can move from
one thing to the next. The way he has operated is that you can
do what you set out to achieve, but it takes time, a lot of hard
work, some of it mind-numbingly boring. And he could sit
there until it was done.
Leonard asked him the other day what was it like,
having to do the same thing over and over again, summer
season, winter season. He said, ‘Some of the fashion side, it
was for me just drudgery, but we had to grasp this oppor-
tunity.’ He stripped the ego out of it completely. He avoided
going to events, that kind of thing, there was no distraction
by the glitter. That lack of ego has been central to the way the
business has grown up.

Tedious as Bernard found certain aspects of his work, in his
mind he had it easy. Never would he forget Lew, rising in the wintry
dark as bronchitis tore remorselessly at his lungs, lugging fruit and
veg back from the market then trying to flog it to customers before it
rotted.

288 I Focus

Some of the work was tiresome routine, some was an uphill
struggle, but a lot was stimulating and exciting. I can see that
as I usually wanted to improve and change things, it may have
sometimes given the impression that I was hard to please, as
my attitude is that you can always do better. A lot of the work
is not new and interesting, but I am sure I got a good deal of
satisfaction from the feeling that I was building something,
and had a sense of achievement, and when things were going
well, there was contentment as well.
I realised there was this one chance in business.
‘Here I am, I’ve got it. I can allow no distraction.’ Success is
precarious, there is no such thing as stability. You are either
moving up or moving down, improving or slipping. So you
have to dig into it and check that things are going right, they
had a tendency to veer off course. You only relax when your
business is diversified, and you have got enough out to make
you safe.

But he conceded that at no point in his life would he ever feel
truly secure, frequently checking his personal finances for reassur-
ance, well into his tenth decade – even though in reality, he conceded,
‘financial security by a rational perspective was secured a long time
ago’.

It is possible that Bernard would have applied himself to his
work equally doggedly if his private life had been smoother, such
was his resolve to mine the seam for all it was worth. He had always
committed wholeheartedly to goals – whether studying maths text
books in his spare time at college, repeatedly smashing tennis balls
against the wall with a warped racquet, or memorising every car on
the street. To his mind, constant, intense vigilance was essential to his
enterprise’s sustainability. He recalled an episode that illustrated his
single-mindedness:

I was driving along in Regent’s Park and the driv-
er in front must have imagined I cut him up – per-
haps I did. And the chap stopped his car, came out,

Focus I 289

opened my car door, shouted something and then
slammed it shut with all his force. So he’s still stationary,
so I got out, went to his car, opened the door and slammed it
and his window broke.
Anyway, he sent me a solicitor’s letter to claim for the
window. I could have fought it but I thought no, I’m too busy,
I don’t want to take time to think about this, and I paid it.

Whenever drama or conflict beckoned, he took a business-like
view – unlike his brother David, who as Clive observed, not without
admiration, was prone to battle a perceived injustice or silly rule to
the bitter end, losing a lot of time and energy in the process, but al-
most always emerging victorious. ‘He would be more capable of hav-
ing a pointless battle if he thought someone was asking him to do
something that wasn’t right. Bernard is more pragmatic. He wouldn’t
spend a lot of energy on fighting rules.’

Still, Clive felt, this contrast was outweighed by the similari-
ties between his father and uncle.

Both of them had very, very obsessive personalities verging
on the autism spectrum, I suspect. There’s this ability to focus
on detail when other people think a point has been settled or
doesn’t matter.
David could have run a team but he could never have partic-
ipated in teamwork. He would not accept restrictions put on
him by other people. I don’t think my father would willingly
either; they were outsiders in that respect, who didn’t trust
or wouldn’t see a need to conform with a group of people.
It wouldn’t matter for David and it wouldn’t matter for my
father how many people disagreed with them: if they thought
they were right then they would do what they thought was
right, and that’s a source of strength but it’s also an element
of their personality.
You know, it’s a well-known story about David which
happens to be true, that when he was persuaded to get legal
advice on a particular point – David wasn’t a lawyer, he was

290 I Focus

an accountant and tax practitioner, but he used to like doing
his legal work himself – he went through several lawyers to
find one who agreed with him.

Caroline said something similar about Bernard. ‘He knows
who he is. That’s how he lives and I think that is a strength. It’s what
he wants to do and he does it.’ When her father set his mind to some-
thing, be it the answer to a question, or a plum new site for a shop, he
would ‘get this look of absolute determination’ that anyone who knew
him would recognise. ‘And if it was something in business he would
not give up.’

At this point in his life Bernard’s most conspicuous vice was
cars. Indeed, the gradual stages by which he and his brothers tacitly
accepted that they were, officially, well off, is a story that can be told
in motors.

‘We didn’t have expensive cars,’ said Bernard, rather defen-
sively, before outlining the case against him. ‘I had a Ford, then a Jag-
uar, and David used to have an old Vauxhall, a bit of a clapped-out old
car. Then he decided he was going to upgrade it and he went out to
buy a more expensive car. But he didn’t and he came back and worked
out the more expensive car was going to cost £150 a year extra to run,
so instead he gave the £150 a year to charity.’

The following year David’s ascetic stance softened a little and
he decided to buy the costlier car after all. ‘An Armstrong Siddeley,’
recalled Bernard. ‘They used to make aircraft, and they made mar-
vellous cars, very old fashioned, very reliable, very staid. I suppose
he thought it fitted his image. But I knew cars and he didn’t, so I said,
“Look, they’ve stopped car production. You will probably be able to
get spare parts, but there must be a question mark.” And he went out
and came back with a Bentley.’ Bernard’s next car was a black and
sand Rolls-Royce, number plate KPX 154.

Focus I 291

Although they were not a religious family and seldom attend-
ed synagogue, they always visited Lew’s grave in Rainham, Essex, on
Yom Kippur. One day, driving to the cemetery in that hallowed car,
suddenly Bernard uttered a remark that stayed with Clive:

We were in the car, driving towards Queen’s Park from
Brondesbury Park where we lived, and he made the compar-
ison between his father’s struggles and himself.
We always knew his background. We talked a lot
about it and so we knew from my mother and my father
what they had done, what they had grown up with and all the
rest of it, and we knew the sort of hardships. He would have
been in his thirties at the time. We’re talking about 1965. You
know, it had been a pipe dream to be rich. Well, by his late
thirties he had a lovely house and he had his own business.
And that was twenty years from the end of the war.

Bernard would always be haunted by the fact that no matter
what he accomplished, he could never right the wrongs of the past.
Every triumph had its shadow in the regret that Lew was not there to
see it. Still, occasionally he allowed himself another daydream, about
the life that Lew might have led, if only their stars had been kinder.

If his health had permitted it I think he would have, after
the war, made a success. We’d have been off his hands so he’d
have been able to just look after himself and my mother, and
I think things after the war did become a bit more prosper-
ous, so he would have found a way to make a go of it and be-
come comfortable. If he’d lasted another few years David and
I could have been able to send him to a place like Arizona
with pure air and he’d have lived.

*

With difficulties at home and limited time with his children, Bernard’s
remaining pleasures seem to have been carefully chosen to deliver the

292 I Focus

energy, endorphins and information necessary to maintain those in-
tensive hours at work.

Keep fit became his bible long before it was a craze – a legacy
of his service days, and perhaps also the knowledge of the early deaths
that befell his father and maternal grandfather. Caroline remembered
running with him, and her father and David even shared a personal
trainer on Sunday mornings, whose rigorous regime of sit-ups led
one day to Bernard suffering a double hernia. He also loved squash,
playing at least once a week underneath the White House Hotel op-
posite Great Portland Street underground station.

In lieu of a social life, his fixation with newspapers ripened
into a full-blown addiction that would stay with him for life. ‘Even if
our friends are over, he will sit with his newspaper and we will all get
on with it and chit-chat around him,’ said his wife in 2017. ‘He’s quite
obsessed with reading it all. It relaxes him. Even if he’s in a queue
in Starbucks.’ His son Sam described the ritual. ‘When Dad has his
breakfast he eats and on his left-hand side he’s got his newspaper,
shaped to the article he’s reading. He’ll fold the paper in such a way
that he can read the article and the page won’t buckle, it’s all very neat
and a fork goes over the top to weigh it all down.’

Bernard reckoned he glanced at five newspapers – The Times,
the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, occasionally the Guardian and
the Jewish Chronicle on the weekend.

If I don’t read The Times’ take on the important news and
issues I feel as if I have left something not done. I think I’m
just market orientated, I want to know what other people
think. So I look at the Sun because I want to know what
Trevor Kavanagh [the former political editor] and others
are telling people. They will give them what they want to
read – the Sun is never consciously wrong, its success lies
in knowing what its readers are thinking. If you look at the
articles that the Mail and the Sun are featuring, you can see
what interests a lot of people.

Focus I 293

The newspapers’ stock-in-trade, just like his, was their ability
to mirror consumers’ desires and beliefs. Of course, for a shy person,
reading is also an excellent alternative to talking.

He read books voraciously too, and his curiosity knew no
bounds. ‘He was the first person to tell me about Twitter,’ said his
son-in-law, Sir Lucian Grainge, chairman of Universal Music, who
might generally be expected to be up to speed on the latest trends.
‘He’d read about it and he said, “Do you twit? What’s it called, twit or
tweet?” He is so well read. We had dinner with him a few months ago
and he asked me a question about Apple, for example, about the heart
of the issue – the business models, revenue streams, the relationship
between software and hardware. It’s brilliant. How does he get there?’

Tracking the headlines, discerning the currents of people’s in-
terests, would be Bernard’s life’s work.

*

As Lewis Separates grew, so did their suppliers. One such was Richard
Roberts, from whom Stuart Peters used to order sweaters, made on
two knitting machines in a garage in Leicester, in a supersoft acrylic
yarn called Cashmilon. Initially Lewis Separates took 1,000 garments
a week, but this soon rose to 5,000, and Roberts went on to manufac-
ture enormous quantities of clothing for the likes of Marks & Spencer.

Increased scale brought complications as well as savings into
the business. Not only did the company still have to contend with the
venerable old rag trade tradition of cabbage, but there was also an-
other issue over shrinkage – in more ways than one. Literally, in that
during the process of steam-pressing a finished garment the fabric
might contract, and unfortunately, a new bale of a woven fabric might
shrink at a different rate from the previous batch, which could play

294 I Focus

havoc with sizing calculations. But there was also the metaphorical
kind of shrinkage – the retailers’ euphemism for theft. Merchandise
might slide off a delivery lorry during its journey to the shops, or it
could sidle off the shop floor tucked inside a carrier bag, alongside
other, legitimately purchased goods – a bag carried by a friend of the
shop assistant – a practice which was so commonplace that there was
a special term for it, ‘sweethearting’.

In the early days, Bernard ran a very nimble, responsive
operation, his son Sam observed, and was ‘very, very hands on’.
‘Every Monday he would have each buyer with all their products on
a rail and the latest sales figures, working out as quickly as possible
how many of each garment he needed to get back into the shops. Fre-
quently cloth would be at the outdoor makers waiting, and instruc-
tions to cut would be phoned through to them so work could start
immediately. It was labour intensive, but that’s how he got it done so
quickly.’

Another employee learned an immense amount from watch-
ing Bernard in action:

He would negotiate to a very low level, you know, the best
price, but he would be charming with the person he was ne-
gotiating with. Rather than push he would go into the de-
tail about the costs. He never demanded, and – this is the bit
that I really picked up on – he would always end up giving
them something, a face-saving something. You know, maybe,
‘Well, okay, I’ll split it 5p.’

Bernard believed that suppliers liked dealing with
him because his definition of the right price was that it be
both keen and fair. ‘You can’t make silly offers. If you come
across as being too tough they won’t want to deal with you.
So you want to be reasonable –to be somebody that people can do
business with.’ Understanding manufacturers’ circumstances was

Focus I 295

essential in order to understand what they were charging, why and
whether they were the best candidates to deliver what he needed. ‘You
can get two different factories and because they’re equipped different-
ly one person could be charging one price, another person a higher
price, but can’t work any lower because of the way his factory is set
up. He won’t be competitive. So you’ve got to know which garment is
right for what factory.’

His habit of reticence also helped with information gathering.
‘If the only person speaking is yourself, you’re not going to learn very
much, are you?’ he said drily. ‘To understand where they’re coming
from, you’ll get that by them talking to you. You can always glean
something of the other person’s position, even if they say very little.’

He was never afraid to keep his own mouth closed. ‘He ap-
pears to use silence,’ said Lucian Grainge. ‘He’s not tactically using it,
but when you meet someone for the first time, why would you know?’
But Bernard was acutely aware of silence’s tactical properties during
a negotiation and he felt perfectly at his ease, waiting quietly for the
other side to make a concession. ‘Give them a little bit of time, don’t
hurry them.’ These pauses also gave him useful mental space to refine
his thinking. ‘You’re doing a calculation in your mind that if you pay
this, you can sell it for X, then how many you’ll sell. Then you do an-
other calculation: if you pay a bit less, you could sell it at Y price, and
you could buy more.’

His daughter Caroline, destined also to become a fashion buy-
er, discovered some of these lessons for herself. ‘Sometimes you say
your goodbyes and you say, “I can’t get to that.” Then I realised if you
just be quiet and you don’t say a word, in the end they often make a
concession at the last minute.’

Arriving at a good price was important, but to maintain good
relationships with outdoor makers it was imperative to keep them
busy. If orders dropped off they might give Lewis Separates’ produc-

296 I Focus

tion space to somebody else. Also, it was not unheard of for outdoor
makers to go bust on a Friday if they could not pay the tax that they
owed, only to reopen for business the following Monday under a dif-
ferent name, with exactly the same workers in exactly the same prem-
ises. ‘In those days it was that sort of industry,’ said Bernard. ‘Easy to
start up if they can get the work, and easy to fold.’

He guarded against such risks, regularly using outdoor mak-
ers whom he could trust, who in turn grew to be more reliant on
Lewis Separates’ business, and took on quality controllers to check
garments during manufacturing, which helped to discourage facto-
ries from rushing important stages in the process, such as trimming
and pressing. Reluctant to find Lewis Separates garments being sold
elsewhere, Bernard also asked the formidable Miss Mincheo to en-
sure that in-house designers took particular care when preparing the
lays of a pattern on the cloth, to minimise any opportunity for man-
ufacturers to pinch spare inches or to size garments down in order to
make a few extra. To hammer the point home, suppliers had to sign
contracts agreeing that Lewis Separates owned the cloth. If any cab-
bage could be made from it then Lewis Separates would be entitled to
first refusal.

22

Made in Hong Kong

In 1961 Kenneth Leigh, Bernard’s stockings supplier from the Wool
Shop days, moved out of London. His parting gift to Bernard was
priceless: a season ticket for Tottenham Hotspur football club.

‘It was my team because I lived in Tottenham, Stamford Hill,
during the war. And also my favourite comic had been Hotspur.’ It
also just happened that in 1961 Spurs were winning nearly every sin-
gle game. ‘They were top of the league.’

Although the ticket was gold dust, using it required subter-
fuge. ‘I couldn’t get near the waiting list for the season ticket myself,
so I had to renew in his name, K. Leigh.’ For the next three years K.
Leigh attended virtually every home game, once travelling to Rotter-
dam to watch Spurs win the European Cup Winners’ Cup. You might
imagine from this that Bernard’s social life was dilating a little, but
invariably he went alone and the convivial aspect of watching games
never really stuck. (In old age he far preferred watching football at
home on a big screen. ‘Not the same atmosphere perhaps, but a better
view.’)

This new interest coincided with a lull in Lewis Separates’ ex-
pansion. Despite the seemingly unslakeable appetite of British con-
sumers as their wages finally picked up, it remained the case that
few shopping centres were being developed. Any sitting tenant with
a long lease on a decent commercial site at a fixed rent could com-
mand an extremely high premium to be persuaded to relinquish it.
Worse still, most precincts and the few new builds belonged to major
insurance companies and property developers, top-tier commercial

298 I Made in Hong Kong

landlords, who could afford to be choosy about which tenants to let
their properties to. Still relative newcomers to the retail game, the
brothers struggled to gain recognition as serious, long-term players.
Despite the size and profitability of their business, they sometimes
failed to convince landlords that the Lewis covenant could be relied
upon to pay year after year, and that their tenancy would be consid-
ered an asset should the landlord want to sell the freehold to another
party. ‘If other people were offering the same money and they were
bigger than us they would get the lease. It was an uphill battle.’

This brake on growth was doubly unfortunate, because the
demographic tide was tipping in Lewis Separates’ favour. Children
born in the post-war baby boom were growing up into trend-hungry
youngsters with disposable pocket money, the very first generation of
a dangerous new category of human being, the teenager.

Luckily the Lewises heard of a clutch of eight shops that were
about to become vacant because long-established womenswear retail-
er Janus was closing down, one site being in Harrow on 265 Station
Road, just a couple of doors from their parents’ old fruit shop. ‘The
first thing I did when we got it was to go into the flat above, which
was identical to the one we had lived in, a touch of nostalgia.’ Geoffrey
converted the shops to Lewis Separates over the next few months.

In time, David’s clubbable manner helped him to foster rela-
tionships with the corporate landlords, and his property developer
friend Albert Harris opened illustrious portals with his Harris An-
nual Property Lunch. Here David gradually became acquainted with
movers and shakers, politicians, senior City figures and other emi-
nences grises in property. He also beefed up his retail operation by
recruiting the first in-house property manager to Lewis Trusts, and,
quite by chance, the job went to Terence Courtney, the estate agent
who had leased Bernard the bombsite for his greengrocer’s shack at
Nag’s Head.

Made in Hong Kong I 299

For all the challenges presented by property, the greatest ob-
stacle that Bernard faced in the 1960s remained to find good stock.
In general British factories produced goods of decent quality, but no
amount of silver-tongued negotiation on his part could iron away the
fattest wrinkle in the supply chain, courtesy of an increasingly politi-
cised labour force. Bernard believed in fairness, decency, hard work,
speed and consistency, so the influence of trade unions’ rules, restric-
tions and flounces did not always sit well with him.

Dealing with manufacturers in the UK was sometimes very
difficult. You placed an order with a delivery date but that
could not always be relied on. A lot of manufacturers had
trouble with their workers or their own suppliers. It wasn’t
a question of saying, ‘I want 5,000 sweaters from Leicester
or Nottingham, delivery for September 1st.’ It didn’t happen.
Deliveries were often haphazard. An order dribbling in in
dribs and drabs, one colour, one size at a time. You might get
500 in pink, a week later you might get 460 blue. You might
get one size, you might get the other size, but you didn’t get
them together. If you were running a factory it wasn’t always
controllable. There might be walkouts. The unions ran the
show.
We had staffing issues occasionally in our shops too,
although never problems with unions. It was not unheard of
for a new employee to start work on Monday morning and
not come back after lunch.

This problem never affected Lewis Separates’ home produc-
tion. ‘The CMT makers were too small to have union troubles. I’d deal
with the outdoor maker and he would have ten machinists, some-
thing like that.’

When Bernard noticed strikingly cheaper garments, knitwear
in particular, drifting in from Hong Kong, he scented an opportunity.
‘As soon as I found there was business out there, I went out to see what
we could do. We were, I think, one of the first UK fashion retailers to
do so.’

300 I Made in Hong Kong

First this required a little reconnaissance. Not knowing a soul
in that part of the world, he contacted Hong Kong’s commercial at-
taché in London to obtain some useful addresses. Deciding that he
needed a little fanfare to get the word out, he alerted the local news-
paper. ‘That I was coming, boosted it up a bit so we looked a bit bigger
than we were.’

In April 1961, as he boarded his first ever long-haul flight, the
Bay of Pigs crisis was unfolding after US-backed forces invaded Cuba,
raising the horrifying prospect of nuclear confrontation with Russia.
All over the world, people were panicking about World War Three
and atom bombs, but Bernard would not hear a thing about it until
his return.

‘I was met at the airport, can’t remember who by. I went to the
hotel, checked my bags in, then went out with him to the other side of
the island, ended up on a beach. The man sat on the beach as I went
for a swim.’

He did not hesitate to get stuck in, wandering the streets, fas-
cinated. Teeming with escapees from mainland communist China,
desperate to find a foothold in the British-governed island colony,
Hong Kong could not have seemed more alien. ‘It was crowded, peo-
ple everywhere. Blocks of flats, tenements, washing out of windows.
But there were also shiny new buildings starting to go up. In some
places the smell could be indescribable but in others it was appetis-
ing. You would see the Chinese sitting out on the landings with their
chopsticks, having a break, and lots of street restaurants, stalls, in the
open air.’

The advance press publicity paid off and he was inundated
with enquiries from factories bidding for business. Until recently
Hong Kong had exported little more than fancy goods, trinkets and
knick-knacks, so the garment industry was in its infancy, scattered
across small factories and workshops. But what it lacked in Britain’s

Made in Hong Kong I 301

infrastructure it compensated for in flexibility, operating in a low-tax,
free-trade climate with lax employment laws, no import duty, and
quotas easily obtained. ‘The way that the quota system worked was
that the UK decided how many garments they would allow in and it
was administered by the Hong Kong government. The manufacturer
could easily get the quota allocation on production of an order.’ There
were clearly deals to be done.

He spent two weeks on the island, travelling widely each day.
Seldom did he need to organise his own transportation, because pro-
prietors and agents passed him from factory to factory, sweatshop to
sweatshop, like a prized baton in a relay race. ‘If somebody takes you
out first thing in the morning, then the next factory comes and gets
you from the first factory.’

Drowning in information, he hired an English-speaking sec-
retary. ‘I dictated the previous day’s work every morning before I
went out, so that I had a record of every factory I visited, what they
did, what they were capable of doing. I was preparing the ground for
other people. I didn’t want it all to be in my head. If I was run over
by a bus, there was the folder and the work there so that other people
could take it on.’

He visited four or five factories a day, often stepping over peo-
ple eating their lunch to get inside. Sometimes he would find himself
on a cramped floor of fifty people: machinists sitting at a medley of
knitting machines, pressers, quality controllers, bosses, perspiring in
the tropical heat as they transmuted yarn into garments destined for
sale in chilly high streets, thousands of miles away. ‘A hive of industry,
all working all the time, beavering away for ungodly hours.’ He was
impressed. No question, workers’ pay was not great, but as he saw it,
there were benefits in the long run.

‘If you want to get into a market you’ve got to keep your prices
down and one way you can do that is by paying low wages. But that’s

302 I Made in Hong Kong

the start of it. As they got more skilled, as more people buy, as they
then started to take on designers and improved their product, they
built themselves up, and the wages went up. What was once low wage
and rural becomes industrialised with many more good, well-paid
jobs.’

Despite the appetising aromas that swirled about, Bernard
went out of his way to avoid Chinese cuisine, and achieved the scarce-
ly imaginable feat of tasting not a single noodle nor one grain of rice
over the course of the fortnight, dining exclusively on Western food,
usually in the safe confines of a hotel. Occasionally the doors of pri-
vate homes would be thrown open to him of an evening. ‘I remember
being invited to somebody’s house for dinner, a very modern, super
place. They were very Westernised.’

The people he met were keen not only to secure his custom
but also to pump him for information about the British market:

Hong Kong was full of young men trying to get a start, try-
ing to bring business to the factories. They always said it was
their factory, which of course it wasn’t. But if he was able
actually to produce an order, that meant next time he goes
in, it would be, ‘Here’s the chap that produces business.’ And
somebody like that, their knowledge of what merchandise is
wanted comes from the customer, from people like me, so
the more they talk to me, the more they understand what
I want, the more they understand what the English market
needs. They needed contact with their customer, same as I
did with customers in my shops.

They were not purely interested in business. ‘Another Chinese
chap there took me out for lunch and he wanted to tap me about what
English boarding school he should send his child to. As if I knew any-
thing about it!’

He travelled a lot by water. ‘One evening I walked to the edge
of the ferry, and I remember thinking, “I’m right on the other side

Made in Hong Kong I 303

of the world.” I was the first person in my family to travel to the Far
East, and there I was, looking out over the South China Sea towards
Indonesia. Who would have dreamed it? It’s not a big deal today but
in 1961, to me, it was.’

Once he found himself being taken back to a factory he had
visited before, a sure sign that he had fallen into the clutches not of the
owner but yet another young man hoping to become an agent or mid-
dleman. The experience made him worry that if he placed an order,
assuming that it would be made in the factory he had just visited, then
the order might be spirited away and executed by another, inferior
outfit. But he became sufficiently confident in some of the people he
met to make a few leaps of faith. When he liked what he saw, rather
than simply race off to the next factory he would settle down for the
afternoon to agree designs, negotiate and place orders. ‘If it works out
you’re working on product. You’d sit down and try and do deals.’

Factory owners bent over backwards to win his trust. ‘An out-
fit I wanted to do business with, I wanted to know how reliable they
were, so they told me the name of their bank, the Hong Kong and
Shanghai Bank. So I went to ask about them and the lady there, who
was English, brought out their folder and showed it to me, breaking
all the rules. It had some cheques bounced, there was no overdraft
facility, but I did do business with them. And I think I must have been
their first decent account.’

The company concerned was Hong Kong Manufacturers, run
by two brothers, Benny and Charlie Choi. When Bernard returned
to the factory, negotiations were conducted across a table, the beads
on an abacus clicking back and forth as the Chois calculated their
margins while Bernard did the numbers in his head. Several months
later, when the goods arrived at the Avon Trading Estate, they made
the grade, resulting in a succession of ever larger orders. So much so
that the Chois’ business took off. ‘On a much later visit they insisted
on lending me their Rolls-Royce and driver for the day.’

304 I Made in Hong Kong

His first trip was all about knitwear, but as the experiments
paid off gradually Bernard expanded his range of interest. ‘In due
course you then got onto blouses, then onto other things. Cotton
goods, trousers and that sort of thing. I went there twice a year steadi-
ly to do business and buy, developing merchandise.’ Better yet, as oth-
er Western clothing retailers caught on to the bargains available in
Hong Kong, he could also sneak a peek at merchandise being manu-
factured out there, to see upcoming trends.

One great advantage of Hong Kong over UK manufacturing
was reliability. Partly because payment was organised by an unyield-
ing financial instrument called a letter of credit. Put simply, a manu-
facturer had to ensure the contracted goods were inspected, approved
and loaded onto a ship by an agreed date; in order to receive the mon-
ey that Bernard had left the bank on deposit, the manufacturer then
went to the bank with a dated shipping receipt as proof of delivery,
plus their letter of credit. If goods arrived late then the supplier might
not get paid. For Bernard, this was a revelation.

If it says delivery by 10th February, the letter of credit will
expire on 10th February. So if you ordered 10,000, if it was
11th February that they take it to the docks and they get a
shipping receipt for the 11th, then the bank says, ‘Ah no, it’s
the 10th, we can’t pay you.’
The bank would then have to contact me and say, ‘It’s
expired, do you want to pay?’ So I could then cancel the or-
der. Or I could say, ‘Yeah, I’ll pay it, but I want a ten per cent
reduction.’
Whereas if they delivered on time they got their
money straight away. What this meant is that if they’ve got to
work night and day, twenty-four hours, for a few days to get it
to the docks on the 10th, they will. So I could place an order
and I knew it would arrive on time.

Made in Hong Kong I 305

Not surprisingly, working under such time pressure did not
guarantee the finest finish. ‘The idea of quality control came later.
Nowadays it’s no good waiting for the shipment and then finding out
the goods are not right – you have people who inspect garments while
they’re being manufactured.’ But back in 1961 a lower standard would
do and keenly priced knitwear began flowing into Lewis Separates
stores in ever greater quantities, increasing profits and the predict-
ability of stock. None of this was welcome news for British suppliers.
However, the Chinese manufacturers and workers, with their struggle
for a better life and their unwavering work ethic, struck a chord with
Bernard.

I did think about it, but I didn’t feel guilty about taking busi-
ness away from the UK and giving it to Hong Kong. I felt
they deserved it. We’d seen how difficult the relationship with
some British workers was. You just couldn’t always rely on
getting stuff made. And you’d go out there and you’d see them
working like steam, like mad. I remember looking at the tene-
ments, looking at the people working all the time – you know
the living standards were right, right down the bottom, not
as it is now. And you think, these are people, they’re just the
same as UK people, they’re entitled to a living. I suppose in a
way it was not far from the world I had known in childhood,
but I don’t know if I thought about it like that then.

A few years later Bernard attempted to tighten up his Hong
Kong operation. ‘I decided that I ought to have a buying office out
there.’ He recruited an agent, who had been a manager of the Choi
brothers, to run it. ‘I bought him a car and a telex machine and would
send him samples. The idea was that he could go around the factories
and come back and tell me the prices. I would do the deal, he would
just send the samples and various things, because if I’d left him to do
the deal he could have been corrupted and bribed.’ In the event, cor-

306 I Made in Hong Kong

ruption turned out to be the least of Bernard’s worries. ‘A couple of
months later I heard from Benny and Charlie. “Did I know what was
going on?” So I went out there and the man had gone. He’d sold the
car and absconded. I’ve never had a buying office since.’ From that day
on he employed independent quality inspectors to liaise with facto-
ries on Lewis Separates’ behalf.

There were other scams. One in particular stood out for Stuart
Peters, although Bernard had no memory of it and struggled to accept
that it might be true. According to Peters’ recollection, the knitwear
department had been doing a lot of business with a company called
Benjamin based in Cavendish Square, selling huge quantities of a cer-
tain cardigan, a three-gauge knit, style 3659B, buying it from Ben-
jamin at nineteen shillings and sixpence and selling it in the stores
for twenty-nine shillings and six. A good profit, or so it seemed until
Bernard received a photograph of the cardigan one day from a com-
pany calling itself the China Engineers, offering the same product
for seven shillings and sixpence and quoting 14–21 days’ delivery by
air. Stuart found the lead time implausible. ‘How are they going to
produce them?’ But Bernard thought they must have them in stock
and suggested they buy 200 dozen. Peters telegrammed the order and
three weeks later they received a call from the warehouse manager
announcing that the delivery had arrived as promised. So Bernard
and Peters walked across the landing from the office to the warehouse
to be confronted by a small cardboard box. It contained 2,400 photo-
graphs of style 3659B.

Bernard’s reaction was phlegmatic, according to Peters. ‘From
now on, when we place an order we will write an order, specifying
the yarn, the weight of the garment, the colour, the size.’ In future,
detailed order forms would be generated, setting out the conditions of

Made in Hong Kong I 307

the manufacturing agreement, and to ensure that the sample matched
the original specifications, factories would have to send a ‘sealing
sample’ for approval before producing the order in full.

As the years passed other countries opened up for business:
Taiwan, South Korea, India. Buyers would prepare design packs,
sending them over a few weeks in advance of a visit, enabling factories
to make up samples ready for inspection and adjustment prior to the
placement of an order. The company formed strong bonds with vari-
ous suppliers, especially owner-drivers like the Chois, and successive
generations of the same families would manufacture for them over
decades to come, as sons and daughters took over where their par-
ents left off. The twenty-first-century information revolution changed
everything again, allowing many tasks to be executed remotely, mak-
ing it possible to play around with styles and fabrics at the click of a
button, at the last minute, radically shortening the delay between a
designer’s first idea and the garment walking out of a store in a happy
shopper’s bag.

The 1960s thus began a steady decline in orders placed with
British manufacturers, unless they brought their own design ideas
into the equation. Nobody could foresee quite how drastically the
landscape would change as global markets opened up. ‘A large part
of the British textile business, cloth-making and garment-making
would go overseas, forced out by price and unreliability.’ Numerous
suppliers fell away, although in 2017 the company still did substantial
business with the UK. The very best operators survived because they
adapted to the new climate, just like the Lewises.

*

1961 ended on a high, with the arrival of Adele and Geoffrey’s first
son Paul, followed the next year by another boy, Simon, for David and

308 I Made in Hong Kong

Ruth. Bigger, better shops joined the group too, including a sizeable
unit in Manchester’s Piccadilly development and others in West Eal-
ing, Leicester and Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow; the latter, their third
shop in the city, proved no less popular than the other two.

As they cemented their position the elder brothers explored
ways to give something back. Although they donated to charity on
an individual, ad hoc basis, David pointed out that this was not terri-
bly efficient and set up the Lewis Charitable Trust. Initially donations
were limited; there was no such thing as surplus cash when there was
scope to open more shops. In any case, charity did not preoccupy
Bernard greatly at this point. ‘I didn’t have priorities. I hadn’t thought
about it in an organised way. It was just a question of allocating a cer-
tain amount of money to charities and then to know which ones to do
and in what sectors.’

At the beginning, they placed small amounts into the Trust,
just a few thousand pounds each year. Many early contributions went
to the nascent state of Israel, and were channelled into schemes for
planting forests, orchards and establishing kindergartens. Over suc-
ceeding decades millions of pounds would fill the Trust’s coffers, help-
ing dozens of causes in Britain, Israel and other parts of the world,
including a donation to a children’s medical centre in Romania in
2008. A plaque in memory of their grandparents, David and Fanny
Tauber, now hangs on its wall.

*

After so long devoted to shop openings and visual display, Geoffrey
was keen to make his first foray into merchandise and announced that
he would like to start selling handbags in the shops. Bernard was all
for it. So Geoffrey placed an advert in a trade magazine, inviting man-
ufacturers, importers and wholesalers to pitch products, then piloted
a small range of bags in the Separates Centre. When the test proved a

Made in Hong Kong I 309

resounding hit, he trialled bags in other branches, seeing what styles
sold best where.

Like knitwear, swimwear and hosiery, leather goods was a
highly specialised area. Rather than commission products in-house,
Geoffrey brought in an agent, Derry Hopkins, to help him source
products from manufacturers. Together they went to Italy to find new
ideas and suppliers, seeking all manner of means to make fashion-
able styles affordable, such as substituting cheaper fabric for luxurious
suede linings. They did so well that soon handbags were available in
all the shops and Bernard was tremendously proud of the department.

Perhaps inspired by his brother, Godfrey decided that he, too,
wanted into merchandise in a bigger way. ‘I suppose, yes, there was
more excitement within the merchandise. So he gave the warehouse
up and I took that back, and then he had the control of blouses. And
after a while he also had knitwear. He bought it, completely under his
own control,’ said Bernard.

His handover of these departments to Godfrey sounds ru-
dimentary at best. ‘The discussion was: “You’ve got blouses.” That’s
it, finished. I didn’t say to him, “Let’s agree how it’s going to run.” I
don’t think it was possible,’ he explained. ‘They were businessmen,
they were partners, they wanted to run their own show.’ Treating his
brothers as equals was uppermost in his mind.

In fact, despite all their years in the company, neither Godfrey
nor Geoffrey ever had a chance to observe close-up how Bernard ran
his departments, or to absorb his techniques or the thinking that lay
behind the processes he had developed. ‘We never really worked to-
gether on the same projects, we had done different things.’

Board meetings would not have been particularly informative
on these points either, since these would focus on the business’s next
course of action, rather than the specifics of day-to-day operations.
On the other hand, Godfrey was taking over an established depart-
ment, inheriting Bernard’s buyers and systems.

310 I Made in Hong Kong

1963 and 1964 saw many new openings in regional towns
and cities, including the Bull Ring in Birmingham, then the largest,
snazziest British shopping centre outside London. The business mod-
el of sharing reduced production costs with customers enabled them
to keep prices low, steadily increasing their market share. To maintain
this strategy Bernard waged a permanent war on complacency.

‘My maxim, for me and for the company – everybody – is that
no matter how good you may be, someone is doing something better.
What you have to do is recognise that: that’s your starting position.
And what you’re searching for always is the better way. The situation
is always changing, so you have to keep moving everything on.’

Never would he permit a whisper of smugness about their
success.

Somebody else can have more knowledge than you. Some-
body could have a bit more skill. But you can’t allow them to
beat you in diligence, effort, work, that is in your control. You
can always do better. I’ve always said to my people, ‘There’s
probably something, just one thing, that the competition is
doing better than us. We could be better than them in fifty
things, but there’s always something. What is it?’ You never
sit back, never give up searching for it, never stop trying to
improve.

Wherever possible he sought to sharpen their hungry edge.
The same fashion buyers that worked with the in-house CMT depart-
ment also dealt with outside suppliers, and so were able to estimate
pretty accurately the suppliers’ cost price and profit margin to see that
it was fair. He also made sure that buyers diligently compared costs
between external suppliers and CMT, to pre-empt any possibility that
CMT become complacent.

The system of both in-house manufacturing and buying from
outside suppliers kept everyone on their toes. The buyers’ job

Made in Hong Kong I 311

was to do what was best for the shops and not to favour our
own CMT. I didn’t want to featherbed our own manufactur-
ing and automatically order everything from them. We’re
retailers, and if buyers can buy a garment better or cheaper
rather than have us make it, then that’s what they should do.

This unstinting quest for improvement had its negative side.
Sustaining such a business culture of doing very well indeed – and
always trying to do even better – without puncturing morale is a bal-
ancing act for any manager. This tension posed a greater dilemma
with regard to Bernard’s younger brothers. Conflict was built into the
situation. His solution was to avoid managing them by giving them
‘total authority’ over their departments. By contrast, there were not
tensions between him and David, as their roles were complementary
rather than overlapping. But however hands-off he attempted to be,
his presence permeated the business. As Stuart Peters said, Bernard
put his ‘word’ into everything.

*

At home, Lorna was not improving. The cycle of breakdowns was
growing shorter with nursing care at home and then the inevitable
journey by ambulance to recuperate to the York Clinic, followed by
her return home for a period of watchful calm. In 1963, her physi-
cians recommended a long-term programme of residential treatment
at the Withymead Centre, a therapeutic clinic that pioneered Jungian
theories of the healing arts, based in a beautiful Georgian house be-
side the River Exe near Exeter in Devon.

Now Lorna was away, her psychiatrist, Kaufman, offered to
take him on because he knew Bernard was interested and he was now
free to work with him. For the next five years analysis would be Ber-
nard’s single forum for open, personal discussion.

He bought a house near the Withymead Centre so that the
family could be together for the school holidays the following sum-

312 I Made in Hong Kong

mer. The first night they were there Lorna came over to eat supper
with them. Caroline, just six at the time, remembered sitting down at
the table. ‘She was not well at all. We started the meal, I can’t remem-
ber any conversation. I don’t remember a row. I don’t have a feeling
of anything like that. Suddenly she got up and just walked out of the
house and that was it. She just couldn’t cope with anything.’ Caroline
did not know what happened after that, although Bernard must have
gone after Lorna while an au pair kept an eye on the children.

When Bernard recounted the same episode, the memory was
as fresh as if it had happened moments earlier. ‘She got up and left
the house. She went back to the Withymead Centre and never came
back to the house, never came back again. It was obviously too much
for her. Today this episode and the other at the Lyons Corner House
would be recognised as a manifestation of anxiety.’

Devastating as this sounds, he and the children salvaged the
summer, accustomed as they all were to Lorna’s absence. For Clive the
holiday was filled with delights, including seeing the Rolling Stones
perform at the Exeter Odeon.

The children spent some days at Withymead with Lorna. ‘It
was a lovely place,’ said Caroline, ‘and there was pottery. I remember
having a conversation with her in her bedroom and saying I wanted
to be called Linda and not Caroline, so she called me Linda.’

Bernard spent a lot of time alone with the children, introduc-
ing them to the joys of the countryside that he had come to love as an
evacuee, enjoying long strolls together, although not always without
incident.

One afternoon, it must have been a Sunday, my father took
Leonard, Clive and me for a walk and we went to these love-
ly woods and there were the four of us playing about. Then
Leonard went up this hill and then Clive followed him and
I’m at the bottom and my father was a few feet away, then
Leonard being as Leonard was said, ‘Oh look!’

Made in Hong Kong I 313

So I turned around and he’d got a big bit of slate,
sharp slate, and he’d rolled it down the hill and it was coming
towards me. I stood there, right. My father obviously turned
and saw it and
all I remember was him whisking me out of the way. He cut
his whole forearm and the next thing I remember is being
in the car with him, seeing all this blood, and thinking he
was very badly hurt, but he got us in the car, all very calmly
as he would and as he drove us to the hospital I remember
thinking, ‘How is he driving?’ You know, with the blood, and
it must be painful.
We all say to this day, it’s a joke, that Leonard tried to
kill his sister.

Curiously, Clive came to believe that it was he who had pushed
the slate.

Between trips to Devon and work in London, Bernard had
plenty of time to reflect on his predicament. He could not shrug off
the feeling that perhaps Lorna’s condition was somehow his fault,
as she had accused him in angrier moments. He could tell this to
Kaufman, although looking back, he was not sure how much therapy
really helped him. But one thing that analysis accomplished was to
concentrate his mind, as he came gradually to accept that his mar-
riage was beyond repair. He remembered the day it happened, leaving
the therapist’s office, parking the car near Regent’s Park, recognising
the intensely painful truth. His wife would never come back home to
be part of the family.

Lorna stayed at Withymead for a year. When she returned to
London everyone accepted that she could not come back to Willes-
den; the pressure, the responsibility, would simply make her sick
again. Initially she moved in with her sister Dinah in Harrow, then on
to a flat on the Edgware Road, finally settling into another flat over-

314 I Made in Hong Kong

looking the Marylebone Road, not far from Madame Tussaud’s fa-
mous waxworks. She still regularly saw Caroline, Leonard and Clive,
but Bernard less so. ‘We remained on good terms but seeing me did
depress her occasionally, so I was careful about visits and I maintained
contact mostly through the children.’

Lorna would never be hospitalised again, but she spent the
rest of her life under the care of doctors.

23

The mini-dress summer

While Bernard’s family were away in Devon, David and Ruth were
having their own adventure. They travelled around Israel without
their children, a trip that culminated in a glorious weekend snor-
kelling over the coral reefs off Eilat, a quiet coastal port in the Negev
desert, on the southernmost tip of the country. This visit would be the
first of many, with significant consequences both for their family and
for Israel. But as the couple took in the sights, David’s mind might
have been more preoccupied with what to do when they got back
home.

The business had reached a tipping point. Even with their
modest prices and constant reinvestment, not to mention the high
levels of taxation, surplus revenues had grown so great that it was
time to diversify. David had been looking into various propositions,
and one now materialised that looked promising.

Back then, no home for your money seemed safer than hous-
es. The family already had a proven success in property after devel-
oping the building for Prudential at the Nag’s Head, as well as their
countless deals over the years, leasing and refitting shops, subletting
spare space, flipping contracts when necessary. When David’s friend
Albert Harris brought in an idea to buy some old houses with gener-
ous gardens near Wembley Stadium, it seemed a good fit. The propos-
al was to demolish then replace them with a small estate of forty-nine
new builds. Just as a pattern cutter would play around with the lay of
the design on cloth to get more from each bale, the architect arranged

316 I The mini-dress summer

the plots to set each house on a diagonal to give more depth, enabling
them to pack in as many as possible.

The Lewises agreed to stump up funds for the development,
using some money of their own and borrowing the rest. They would
not regret it. The build went smoothly, although once again the Brit-
ish supply chain proved sticky. ‘With the bathrooms you could not
say, “We want those in avocado”,’ Bernard recalled. ‘You got what you
could get. One could be white and one could be blue and one could
be pink.’ To complete the work they also laid down a new road, pa-
triotically christened Windsor Crescent. ‘Once the housing develop-
ment was completed the road was going to be adopted by the council,’
he remembered, but until that point it belonged to the Lewises. This
afforded Bernard a peculiar experience when he managed to snag a
ticket to watch an England international football match at Wembley
Stadium. Naturally he parked his car in Windsor Crescent and saun-
tered off to the game. ‘When I came back a policeman was standing
there, about to give me a ticket. It was an awkward moment as I said
you can’t give me a ticket, the road is not the council’s, it’s mine.’ The
policeman was completely nonplussed. ‘But he didn’t give me a ticket.’

From this point on more and more investment ideas crossed
their desk. ‘People started to come to David.’ The brothers were, in
effect, becoming venture capitalists, if cautious ones. Deals could be
investigated for a year or two before they came to fruition, while for
every twenty proposals they considered, Bernard reckoned that only
one would go the distance.

David proved a natural entrepreneur and took the lead in
developing the investment side of the business. Like Bernard,
he had an uncanny capacity for detail, although as Bernard’s son Clive
put it, ‘David liked best when he was broad brush.’ And his canvas
would prove wide indeed, eventually getting involved in hotels, prop-
erty, venture capital and equities, and even starting a bank. None-

The mini-dress summer I 317

theless, he never proceeded on a deal without consulting Bernard.
Godfrey and Geoffrey were seldom involved.

It must have been particularly satisfying for David when he
was able to return a compliment after his old friend Sigi Faith decided
to start up on his own, and the Lewises invested in the Faith footwear
chain. One-third of the company belonged to the Lewis Trust Group.
But as for business mentoring, there was none. ‘They didn’t need us!’
laughed Bernard. Eventually, the Faiths bought out the Lewises’ stake.
When Sigi retired, his son went on to sell the business for £50 million.

*

Lewis Separates was no longer quite the new kid on the block. As Ber-
nard patrolled the shops, watching the first crop of baby boomers, all
grown up and with money spilling from their modish pockets, he saw
a wave of change crest the horizon, poised to wash away the memory
of bombsites and austerity. Youthquake was on its way, triggering a
seismic shift in the arts, fashion and music, and Bernard, still in his
thirties, was young enough to surf it.

The first boutiques mushroomed across Chelsea and along
Soho’s Carnaby Street. Then came the hip new restaurants, as Italian
immigrants who had once staffed stuffy hotel dining rooms as waiters
and major-domos hung up their tailcoats and bow ties to open their
own welcoming trattorias, such as La Trattoria Terrazza, Alvaro’s,
Trattoo and Arethusa. London, once renowned as the world’s worst
place to eat, became a magnet for stars. In 1962 the Daily Sketch ran
a feature entitled ‘Who dines where?’, listing the guests seen twirl-
ing spaghetti over a single evening at La Terrazza, including Ingrid
Bergman, Leslie Caron, David Niven, Gregory Peck, Sammy Davis Jr,
Michael Caine, Julie Christie, Terence Stamp, David Bailey and his
wife Jean ‘the shrimp’ Shrimpton, the first supermodel.

318 I The mini-dress summer

Finally Bernard began to step outside the tunnel of work and
enjoy an active social life, joining clubs, going out with friends. When
the UK’s first discotheque, the Ad Lib club, began pushing out beats
on 13 December 1963 on the top floor of 7 Leicester Place, above
Leicester Square’s distinctly seedy Prince Charles cinema, nobody
could get a membership for begging, ‘it was so elite’. But one of the
four founder partners happened to be an old rag-trade acquaintance
of his and in due course he was invited in.

‘I went there a few times to look at the people, discos were not
really for me. I remember somebody pointing out to me Judy Gar-
land’s daughter Liza Minnelli dancing there when she was about sev-
enteen or eighteen, before she was well known. You could see she had
a magnetic personality, even then, and she was a wonderful mover.’

But business was never far from his mind. He did not hesitate
to invite buyers like Stuart Peters and Marion Kretish along to cast
an eye over what the beautiful people were wearing. Another night
he found himself at a loose end in Glasgow after a day visiting their
shops. ‘There was a Palais there, Palais de Dance, so I went along and
the doorman said to me – I don’t know, I must have been about forty –
he said, “You know this is a teenagers’ evening?” I said, “Yeah.” I went
just to have a walk around and look at what they were wearing and
came out. It was market research.’ He cared not a whit what anyone
might think.

What really captivated his attention – and he was not alone
– was hemlines. Skirts began to rise and rise, soaring halfway up the
thigh. Path-finding designer Mary Quant had led the charge, hav-
ing opened Bazaar as early as 1955 on the King’s Road in Chelsea,
then a distinctly disreputable neck of the woods, with her husband
Alexander Plunket Greene. Their stated ambition was to provide
fashion for the young, by the young. Several years later she invented
the mini-skirt, named after her favourite car – a particularly fetching

The mini-dress summer I 319

look for Bambi-legged girls weaned on a low-fat, low-sugar, post-war,
rationed diet.

Out and about, trawling edgy new shops such as Bus Stop, Top
Gear and Hung On You, Bernard tried to soak up the vibe, the shopfit,
the interplay of customers and merchandise. Of all the boutiques he
admired Biba the most – conveniently, since its main store, opened in
1964 on Kensington Church Street, was a skip away from Olympia.
Founded by the Polish émigré Barbara Hulanicki, Biba pioneered a
sexier style than Quant’s androgynous lines and at an affordable price.
But people did not just head to Biba for the threads. The likes of David
Bowie, Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull hung out there, and jobs
as shop assistants were landed only by truly dedicated fashionistas,
such as the daughter of the editor of London’s Evening Standard news-
paper, a bob-helmeted young Anna Wintour.

‘Growing up in London in the 60s,’ remarked the future editor
of American Vogue, ‘you’d have to have had Irving Penn’s sack over
your head not to know something extraordinary was happening in
fashion.’ Bernard agreed.

Biba was a revelation. The most inspiring aspect was Hulan-
icki’s clothes – very tight, you could hardly get your arms in
the little puff sleeves, very tight bodice – all quite young. She
did have a distinctive handwriting. And also the look and
the atmosphere of her shop. I used to visit regularly for mer-
chandise information, go in there and look at the clothes and
watch what the girls were looking at and buying.
The girls were all slim, all of the type. Hulanicki was
the first person to invent a communal dressing room, com-
pletely
communal – just an empty room, no curtain to separate
them. That just took off. It was modern. The girls liked it. It
established a totally different, free and easy tempo.
I didn’t panic at how different it was. No, we were
picking up the atmosphere, picking up ideas. What was right
for us, what was wrong, what we’d use, what we wouldn’t.

320 I The mini-dress summer

Fashion began to morph at unprecedented speed. At the be-
ginning of spring 1965, only five or six per cent of Lewis Separates’
merchandise consisted of dresses. But Bernard quickly recognised
that frocks, once so fuddy-duddy, were taking over, preferably as tight
and tiny as could be. ‘Suddenly the fashion was for younger women.
I was not shocked, but surprised, yeah. It was all just new, and very
commercial. Because once you’ve got this new fashion all the girls
wanted to be part of it. The main thing was to shorten the length.’

Simple enough in theory. But Lewis Separates had a way to go
before they would have the means to feed this new fashion. ‘I dealt
with suppliers who did knitwear, fashion T-shirts, that sort of thing
– people based in Leicester, Nottingham and then Hong Kong, who
were not small, agile and quick moving. Dresses at that time became
much more fashion sensitive. You got the right fabric, you turned it
into garments quickly and moved on. You wanted new stuff all the
time.’

Thus dawned what would become the summer of the mini-
dress – ‘one of the most stimulating times of my business life’. They
could not afford to have an off-season. ‘We wanted to do well all the
time. And this was like a major sea change – a once-in-a-blue-moon
change. Suddenly we had to be in the dress business, which had been
a sideline. In a way we were starting from scratch.’

He hoofed it down to Margaret Street and Great Portland
Street, strictly speaking Marion Kretish’s patch, and made new friends.
‘So I had to move in and go around all the different people that were
mushrooming up, visiting places like Clobber, which was run by Tony
Harley and the designer Jeff Banks – lots of places like that; small,
one-person enterprises, manufacturers and also retailers, making and
selling for their own boutiques. I had to be quick – quicker than my
competitors. I remember being very charged up.’

The mini-dress summer I 321

No sooner would he get hold of a decent batch of frocks for
the stores than they were gone. He had to borrow a few moves from
his old adversary Mad Eric’s book, and he was not the only one taking
liberties. In many ways it was a free-for-all. ‘Designs wouldn’t be to-
tally original. There would be a sort of theme going – like a different
shape or a small print fabric. They’d have their own ideas, and they’d
walk up and down Oxford Street, looking at all the shops, knock-
ing each other off continuously and everybody knew what the oth-
ers were doing. It was a very opportunistic business.’ But this spirited
competition went hand in hand with cooperation too, and the rag
trade’s intimate geography, clustered north of Oxford Circus, gave
these small-scale, guerrilla-style operators a major advantage over the
likes of Lewis Separates.

Everybody knew each other, and that was conducive to be-
ing very, very quick. The cloth merchants were based around
there too and if you’re in and out of the cloth merchants all
the time, you could see the new cloth as it came in and buy
it first. Then you could get a designer on to it, deliver the
cloth to the outdoor maker, and the dresses would be back
fast. Whereas someone like me, I wouldn’t see the cloth un-
til maybe the next week and by then the best stuff would be
gone. I couldn’t be in the West End every day – I had the
company to run, retail, manufacturing, the general buying.
These traders could make a small quantity on spec,
maybe 200, 300, and then if somebody like me comes along
wanting some they can say, ‘I’ve got 300 coming in next Tues-
day.’ Now if several people wanted it they’d then go back and
order a bigger quantity but meanwhile they’ve got something
in the pipeline.

Some of these micro-businesses lasted but a year or two be-
fore they folded; either they were hot or they were gone. So the threat
they posed to Lewis Separates as rivals was minuscule. The central is-

322 I The mini-dress summer

sue for the business, Bernard realised, was far graver, because it struck
at the core premise of their offer. Lewis Separates were not mere pur-
veyors of, as Bernard would put it, body covering; their job was to
deliver fashion. Therefore to retain their trade they had to satisfy the
whim of each season. Fall out of step and they risked losing not only
sales but, far more important, their credibility. A familiar shop risked
looking tired and boring to the novelty-obsessed young customers on
whom they depended. It hardly helped Lewis Separates’ cause that, by
definition, separates are not dresses. ‘So I had to crack that. We had to
succeed and that was enormously galvanising, a big challenge.’

He dashed around Oxford Street and Chelsea, looking for new
styles for his CMT department to copy, and purchasing as much edgy
but commercial stock as he could from the new young manufacturers.
On one occasion he returned to the Avon Estate loaded down with
dresses, only to find that he had bought the same garment twice, from
two different manufacturers, in two different fabrics, without realis-
ing it. From that point on he went buying accompanied by an assistant
armed with a bag and a Polaroid camera to photograph every dress.

Back in Olympia, dresses and snapshots would be farmed out
to in-house designers for them to come up with more of the same.
Within very little time, they were well on top of the game, pumping
out new styles week in, week out.

Changing fashion direction was part of it. A swift sales re-
sponse was also essential. ‘The dresses had to be in and out of the
warehouse and into the shops within twenty-four hours. We needed a
quick customer reaction to follow up on and also to be the first in the
town with new fashion.’ The warehouse also had to change drastically,
from dealing with flat goods – sweatshirts, T-shirts, all of which came
folded in sealed polythene bags – to a very different operation, hang-
ing dresses, and this enormous shift had to be executed more or less
instantly if they were to catch the summer season in time. So Bernard

The mini-dress summer I 323

rolled up his sleeves and moved into the warehouse. ‘I had to run it,
reorganise it, clear it out, buy loads of rails. It was make or break.’

Stressful? He was in his element. ‘You know it was like a shot
of adrenalin. You had to be here, there and everywhere, and take de-
cisions quickly, and I was able to do it because I wasn’t consulting
anyone. We just had to succeed, and I knew what had to be done.’

Half a century later he could not say if any of his brothers had
recognised the importance of the changes. But the hard work paid
off. When the summer of 1965 ended mini-dresses brought in half of
Lewis Separates’ income, an increase of 1,000 per cent – a minor rev-
olution that transformed the business, and one that was, in retrospect,
quite unique.

Bernard did not spend all that summer pounding around Ox-
ford Street, dismantling the warehouse, or even visiting nightclubs.
Avid to sniff out the latest fads, he took two buyers, Joan Wiles and
Michael Cooklin, and flew them to the French Riviera. ‘It was all
happening in St Tropez,’ he said. The British newspapers certainly
thought so, their front pages enlivened by images of Brigitte Bardot
frolicking in the Mediterranean surf. ‘We went down to the beach to
have a look at the shops on the various beaches and see what the peo-
ple were wearing – to get the flavour and the feeling.’

At one of the bars, he began chatting with Jenny Meredith, a
thirty-something English model and bilingual French speaker, who
had once translated a hit song for the pop star Françoise Hardy. Jenny
had been scraping by in London on an allowance that barely fed her,
having just emerged from a bad marriage. ‘She wasn’t getting any-
where, but St Tropez was new and hot and very, very whatever it was.
So she got on a boat, with her car, a little Mini, and on the boat she
read about a competition being run by the Daily Sketch to invent a
slogan about St Tropez. So she telegraphed the editor and she won it.
“Yay, Yay, St Tropez.”’

324 I The mini-dress summer

Armed with little more than her competition winnings, Jen-
ny made new friends. ‘But things weren’t working out well, a single
girl on her own. After about a month there she crashed her Mini and
ended up in hospital with a scar on her head.’

It turned out that in London Jenny lived in a basement flat
just off the Portobello Road, which Bernard drove past twice a day on
his commute between Willesden and Olympia. So he took her num-
ber and when they were both back in London, he invited her out for
dinner.

Further fashion destinations lay in Bernard’s sights. He ac-
companied teams to Paris and Milan, and to fashion trade fairs held
in great exhibition halls, where hundreds of manufacturers congre-
gated to parade their wares. Some locations’ styles resonated more
with his customers than others. In the 1980s and 1990s, for instance,
clothes shops in Tokyo became a particularly good source of inspi-
ration, then into the next century the south of France and Florence
would take over. It was as if his customers’ fashion sensibility were a
climate system, periodically shifting over the globe.

Trendspotting was just the starting point in the search for
clothes that would march smartly out of the stores. ‘You can see all the
sketches and the samples hanging on a hanger, but an abstract, sterile
situation like a sketch or garment in a warehouse just doesn’t convey
to me what’s going to really hit the spot.’ He used every research op-
portunity at his disposal, and in the mid-1960s realised one of these
was at his buying meetings.

I had these meetings with designers and buyers, sometimes
there’d be six or eight people around the table, and I wanted
stuff tried on. So we had a fitting room on the side and we
used to hire a fit model or ask one of the girls in the office.
Now, as I know nothing much about fashion, I watched the
reaction of the people at the meeting, the clerks and assis-
tants, not just the buyers. And I noticed if the model came
out and she felt great in it, or if she’s creeping out, as if, what
monstrosity is she wearing.

The mini-dress summer I 325

In Jenny, Bernard had found his very own model and taste tes-
ter, and their relationship soon turned serious. Caroline in particular
became very attached to her, and the family holidayed in Mallorca,
sometimes meeting up with Godfrey, Kitty and their children, who
kept a boat out there. The couple also travelled to Barbados, diving
over coral reefs.

As the business became increasingly fashion forward, so did
Bernard, styling his locks longer and using hairspray, with sideboards
curling over his ears, and – encouraged by Jenny – not hesitating to
don flares when they came in. You might say that with each passing
decade he grew a little younger, just as British fashion did. Having
favoured a tweed jacket, cords and pipe when he first went to work as
a diligent teenaged draughtsman in the 1940s, in the 1950s he moved
on to a bowler hat and camel coat, when he needed to project the im-
age of a solid, reliable businessman. Come 1970 he would scandalise
his children by descending for the New Year party in a smart Zermatt
hotel wearing a kaftan.

Neither was he deaf to the siren attractions of pop music, par-
ticularly Motown and, best of all, the Beatles, who, like him, effec-
tively worked eight days a week. ‘If they brought a new record out,
everybody knew, everybody listened to it on the day.’

In London, he and Jenny often went out to Arethusa on the
King’s Road, another fancy trattoria with a nightclub in its basement,
dining among the likes of Marlon Brando and Peter Sellers. Everyone
who was anyone would be there, because the cultural mood had shift-
ed gear. Forget the toffs, the establishment, the Savoy, the Ritz and the
erstwhile pillars of high society: the kings of swinging London were
the rag trade, hairdressers, photographers – especially if you were
Jewish, working class and hailed from the East End.

‘Hairdressers were fawned over by the lady clients,’ remem-
bered Bernard, who had his barnet tended by one of the trendiest, in

326 I The mini-dress summer

a salon called Leonard, affording him a ringside seat on the new social
pecking order. ‘The women, when they’d finished they’d give the hair
stylist a kiss. They wanted to be friends.’ If you got pally with your
hairdresser or the head waiter at your favourite tratt, you were far
likelier to get an appointment when you wanted, or to be seated near
somebody you would like to know better. It was all so ineffably cool
that Warren Beatty later made a film, Shampoo, on the theme starring
himself, Goldie Hawn and Julie Christie.

Even more than Bernard, Geoffrey and Adele plunged into the
scene, leaving behind Willesden’s suburbs for a fabulous modernist
house designed by Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus move-
ment, on Old Church Street, yards from the Chelsea Arts Club and
the King’s Road. Both embraced the new counter-cultural lifestyle,
said Adele. ‘We didn’t do the drugs thing, didn’t do anything like that.
But I was lucky. By the time I was twenty-five I had three children so
that was done, that was another thing not to worry about.’ They were
still young enough to live a different kind of life, and their daughter
Laura remembered them as being terribly glamorous.

In 1968, Bernard’s divorce from Lorna finalised, Jenny con-
verted to Judaism and they became engaged. They were so unalike
that David expressed surprise. Why not just live together? Not at all
offended, Bernard replied, ‘You have to have a go, nothing is for ever.’

Years later, out of the blue, David reminded Bernard of this
comment. ‘You know what?’ he said. ‘You were absolutely right.’

24

Boutique or bust

Bernard was not the only cool hunter in the family. Immersing himself
in the clubs and boutiques, Geoffrey too glutted his visual imagina-
tion on London’s fabulous florescence of cool. Although orchestrating
the shops’ window displays and buying handbags was great, he longed
to take a more creative part in this rapidly evolving cultural moment.

Inspired by his iconic house, he began to learn about architec-
ture, modernism and design, and set about training himself as a pho-
tographer, ostensibly in order to produce images to use in the shops.
Often his models were ordinary girls recruited along the King’s Road.
Either he photographed them on the street or in rooms that he requi-
sitioned in the office building on Princes Street, behind the Separates
Centre. Next he told his brothers that he wanted to open a boutique.
‘There was absolutely no objection from me,’ recalled Bernard. ‘I said,
“Yeah, do one.”’

So Geoffrey took over the tiny basement beneath the Sepa-
rates Centre and decked it out in black and white, illuminating it with
tinted film lights set at jaunty angles to evoke a nightclub mood. As
at Biba, the changing room was communal. ‘Completely open, that
was the thing to do. Girls would strip off, that was the lifestyle,’ said
Bernard. Geoffrey called the shop Take 5, after the Dave Brubeck jazz
smash hit – despite which, the music pouring from the loudspeakers
was creamy earfuls of box-fresh pop. But fabulous though it all was,
the shop did not take off. Perhaps the place was too small, too dis-
creet, or simply in the wrong location for the type of customer Geof-
frey hoped to attract. The fact that it sold more or less the same stock
as the Separates Centre upstairs cannot have helped.

328 I Boutique or bust

The following year, his handbags department now well estab-
lished, Geoffrey wanted to expand into footwear. This time Bernard
had reservations. ‘I had a theory that a clothing retailer did not have
enough credibility with the customer for footwear,’ he remembered.
His rationale for this prejudice was based on the logic that if a button
comes off a shirt that is not quite the same as a heel breaking – shoes
are a more serious purchase, so surely customers would prefer to buy
shoes from a specialist. Still, he also believed that theories should not
stand in the way of market-tested fact, and had noticed that shoppers
seemed increasingly relaxed about what they bought where. ‘Biba had
boots, they were walking out as soon as they went on show, and that
was just boots, suede boots. So you could see that there was potential.’

So Geoffrey followed his hunch. His first line was in knee-
high, kinky boots like Biba’s, and out of the shop they raced. More
shoes were ordered, followed by other accessories, stimulating fur-
ther change to the shopfit and setting a new tone.

The shops’ expansion programme jumped ahead once again
after they heard – thanks to an introduction from Stuart Peters, who
received a £250 bonus for his pains – that another mini-chain, Levans
Separates, was up for sale. Levans consisted of nine shops owned by
two brothers, one of whom was married to Martin Ford’s daughter,
which is how they got their start in the rag trade. Interesting to note
that they launched their company after the Lewises, and stylistically
fell somewhere halfway between Ford and Lewis Separates, so per-
haps Ford had been encouraging his son-in-law to take on his rival.
But after one of the Levans brothers fell ill with incurable leukaemia,
they wanted to cash out of the business.

Bernard and David visited the sick brother in Swiss Cottage
to seal the deal and agreed to pay £350,000 for all nine shops, includ-
ing some freeholds as well as leaseholds. Although none of Levans’
branches had a particularly prosperous track record, their locations

Boutique or bust I 329

suited Lewis Separates admirably, set on high streets that pullulated
with penny- and fashion-conscious young women. One or two shops
also accepted tally vouchers, part of a scheme that allowed hard-up
customers to buy on credit, saving up a few shillings each week to put
into vouchers with the Provident Clothing Company. ‘I remember us
saying, “We’ll drop that,” and the man said, “Don’t. In certain shops
this is useful.” So we kept it going and it was extra business. These
people didn’t have cash. You either dealt with their vouchers or they’d
go to somebody else who takes them.’

With Levans, Lewis Separates now consisted of about a hun-
dred shops. But Geoffrey now had the bit between his teeth and want-
ed to have another go at a boutique.

David put out feelers with estate agents and found what looked
like the ideal spot on Chelsea’s King’s Road, between Susan Handbags
and a boutique called Just Looking. Geoffrey set about transforming
it and just before Christmas 1966, four enormous shiny metal letters
set over an arched metal entrance announced the arrival of his first
standalone shop, Girl.

Although the sylph-like young ladies of Chelsea came to Girl
and they looked, not nearly enough of them lingered to buy. The
shopfit was gorgeous and the vibe very different from Lewis Sepa-
rates, yet once again the goods were essentially the same. It was exact-
ly the problem that had dogged the early months of trading in their
first Oxford Street branch: their stock lacked the piquancy to entice
an unusually sophisticated clientele.

‘It was specialised, the King’s Road, a different customer,’ said
Bernard. ‘They didn’t want something they can buy from their local
high street or even Oxford Street. I thought it beforehand but Geof-
frey wanted to try and I didn’t object because, who knows? I mean,
you’ve got to try. But then it opened and you could see. We didn’t have
enough edgy and original stuff.’

But Geoffrey loved the look of the place and was not ready

330 I Boutique or bust

to quit. With several branches of Levans Separates still remaining to
be converted, he settled on a small shop on Boar Lane, a less than
prominent parade in Leeds, to repeat the boutique experiment. When
the brothers tried to register the shop’s name as Girl, they could not
because it was deemed too generic. However, head office had taken to
referring to the King’s Road outlet as the Chelsea Girl shop. Pushed
for time, they decided that it had a certain ring to it.

Geoffrey drove up to Leeds and, without any plans, schedules
or outside input, set about injecting a shot of swinging London into
this unsuspecting northern thoroughfare. His vision was intuitive,
off-the-cuff and entirely his own.

‘You couldn’t see drawings and discuss anything beforehand,’
said Bernard. ‘The way he did it, he went into the shop and stood
there with the shopfitter and said, “We’ll do this and that and the oth-
er.” Very creative, he was, and very talented. What he did, it was ad-
vanced, it was great.’

The interior looked as spontaneous as the manner in which it
was designed. The walls were stripped to bare brick, the ceiling paint-
ed black, and the clothes dangled off old-fashioned bentwood coat
stands and lengths of tubular steel, rather like scaffolding poles, and
garden chain link. Large black speakers blasted out music, and low
ambient lighting with random spotlights cast a glow over big, sexy,
black-and-white photographs that plastered the walls, all credited to
an unknown photographer named Pokrassi – that is to say, one Geof-
frey Lewis. As a finishing touch, the words ‘CHELSEA GIRL’ stood in
large letters above the entrance.

On 13 May 1967, three days after Ruth gave birth to twins, Ben-
jamin and Rachel, Geoffrey presided over the company’s most daring
launch event yet, a fashion show that began with a short film, The Spec-
trum, which had been filmed by the mysterious Pokrassi on west Lon-
don’s Portobello Road.

Leeds had seen nothing like it. It was like the beginning at

Boutique or bust I 331

Mare Street all over again, only more so, the lines of waiting custom-
ers lengthening from one weekend to the next as word spread. It was
not just that Geoffrey had created a brilliant boutique; it was that
there were no other boutiques. Chelsea Girl offered the young wom-
en of Leeds an affordable, instant fix of youthquake and after one hit
they were hooked, clamouring to buy exactly the same merchandise,
at exactly the same prices, as at their Leeds branch of Lewis Separates.

While Chelsea Girl perfectly evoked the anything-goes aes-
thetic of back-street boutiques in Chelsea, Lewis Separates had a com-
pletely different atmosphere: a straightforward, logical layout, with
smartly attired mannequins in the window and garments organised
by type – blouses together, sweaters together – all hung neatly on rails
and brightly lit by pelmeted fluorescent tubes. But clothes sold much
faster from chain link than off Lewis Separates’ orderly rails; Bernard
estimated that the turnover came in ‘maybe a third higher’. Everyone
agreed it was high time for another of Geoffrey’s boutiques, and soon.

*

The following month the Six-Day War broke out in Israel. Bernard
devoured the headlines as events unfolded, and he was not alone. ‘Ev-
ery Jewish person was very preoccupied with Israel. Its survival was
at stake.’ No sooner had Israeli forces prevailed than he and David
took themselves off to see what was happening on the ground, part
of a mission of fifty or so Brits who shared an interest in the nascent
nation’s future. It was Bernard’s first journey to Israel and it would not
be his last.

As they waited for the plane in a private room at London
Airport, one of their party held forth. The Right Honourable Manny
Shinwell MP was another self-made son of eastern European immi-

332 I Boutique or bust

grants and a former Labour Minister of Defence. ‘We were talking
about the fact that during the six-day war the British Foreign Of-
fice had stopped the British manufacturers from sending Israel the
spare parts for the Centurion tanks we had sold them. He was saying,
“The Foreign Office are solidly Arabist.” We suspected it and this was
confirmation,’ remembered Bernard. ‘It was the first time that I had
heard words like that from what you might call the inside, an authen-
tic source.’

In Israel the legacy of conflict came sharply into focus. ‘When
we landed I remember seeing the wreck of a tank at the side of the
road. There were meetings, talks with generals in the Israeli army,
briefing us about what was going on. We heard Golda Meir [the fu-
ture Israeli Prime Minister] speak. We went to hospitals. I remember
talking to a soldier who had lost an arm.’

Disturbing as many sights were, it was both exciting and mov-
ing to be on the inside and in a powerful position to help. In future
years David in particular would grow extremely active in Israeli af-
fairs; he shepherded into being the Lewis National Prosthetic Center,
based in the Tel Hashomer Hospital, a facility dedicated to improving
the availability and quality of artificial limbs for soldiers and civilians
alike. ‘David got lots of things going,’ said Bernard. ‘We established a
scholarship whereby every year we brought over I think six or eight
doctors in the prosthetics field to be trained at Stoke Mandeville.’

When he and David returned to England, Lewis Separates’ bou-
tique revolution was in full swing. Next to be converted was a shop on
Renfield Street in Glasgow, which Geoffrey christened The In-Scene,
doing it up in zany psychedelic style. Rather than display garments in
shop windows, he blanked out the panes with an enormous orange-
and-white graphic decal of a face wearing spectacles – a bold invitation
to step closer and come inside if you dared. Glasgow loved it.

When not transforming Levans shops, Geoffrey was spending

Boutique or bust I 333

increasing amounts of time in his studio on Princes Street, leading
an existence not unlike that of the photographer protagonist in Blow
Up, Michelangelo Antonioni’s classic movie of the previous year. The
provocative Pokrassi images that he produced of girls posing in short
dresses offered his boutiques’ customers a tantalising glimpse of the
liberal counter-cultural lifestyle that beckoned in the city.

When the Southampton Levans Separates reopened as Shades,
Geoffrey pasted the shop’s name across the windows, with a large, an-
drogynous face in sunglasses above the door. Next, Swindon’s branch
was reincarnated as another In-Scene, with swirly graphics similar to
those in Glasgow. The windows flanking the entrance were filled by a
close-up of a frizzy-haired woman, gazing out forlornly. A psychedel-
ic ‘No Smoking’ sign inside the shop dropped a heavy hint as to how
she might have acquired the vacant expression in her eyes.

Time and again, customers lapped it up, although the clothes
were no different to those stocked in Lewis Separates. But the new
mood in these stores was transformative. ‘It appealed much more to
the young,’ said Bernard. ‘They could identify with it.’

The brothers needed no more persuasion. Chelsea Girl may
not have been go-ahead enough for Chelsea’s King’s Road, but ev-
erywhere else the formula was dynamite. Bernard wanted to roll out
the concept and convert every last Lewis Separates into a boutique.
‘Earlier we had recognised we needed to move the product on – be
younger, cooler. We did it. And now we had the shopfit to match. And
I thought, “Right, we’ve got a winner here, let’s do more. Let’s gallop
into it.”’

But galloping was not Geoffrey’s style. ‘There was a bit of an
altercation because Geoffrey wasn’t organised to go faster, he wanted
to go at his own pace, about one every two or three weeks because of
the way he worked. He got furious with me, more furious than I re-
alised at the time, when I said to him, “Let’s go quicker.” He also had
reservations about making the boutiques into a multiple.’

334 I Boutique or bust

But Bernard would not budge. ‘This was important. And I
said, “One way or another we’ve got to do it. If you don’t do it, we’ve
got to move in to get it organised.”’ Years later he learned from their
brother Godfrey that this conversation had upset Geoffrey so deeply
that he went home and took to his bed.

It is entirely typical that Bernard, his mind as always on the
good of the business, underestimated how wounded his brother felt.
That said, Geoffrey’s fury seems disproportionate. On the one hand,
he had a valid point – in theory boutiques were standalone rather
than chain stores – but on the other, his shopfits followed a stylis-
tic formula. ‘They were all similar inside, although each successive
one moved the concept on a little more,’ said Bernard. ‘It was just the
name that was different.’

Surely the true key to Geoffrey’s distress was that to him,
emotionally at least, the boutiques were his: his concept, his territo-
ry, something that he had gone out and done on his own. And now
somebody was threatening to take them from him. Bernard picked up
on none of this.

I don’t know if I took too much notice. He was always sep-
arate, doing his thing – the shops and footwear and hand-
bags – so you didn’t see much of him. But although I tried to
push it, you had to be careful the way you handled Geoffrey.
Everybody was very careful in the way they handled him –
David and I certainly were. I was always conscious of the fact
that the most important thing was the relationship between
the four of us. That was in front of the business – that had
to work. Number one because of family, and number two it
was a way of all staying together and building the company
and doing everything by staying together. I mean, we were
together and that was it. And okay, Geoffrey was difficult. But
perhaps he thought I was difficult.

Boutique or bust I 335

Doubtless he did. Adele described the darkening tenor of her
husband’s emotional state over these years. ‘Seeing Geoffrey misera-
ble, frustrated, wanting to do a lot of things, feeling he had to ask for
permission. I remember he came home from a meeting during this
early time and said, “I want a red wall and they don’t want me to put
a red wall up.” No, he didn’t feel that he had autonomy at all. He prob-
ably felt like the young brother.’ Adele did not say it, but the implica-
tion was clear: while Geoffrey felt that his brothers could veto what
he did, when it came to their activities, he had no say at all. But, riled
as he was, he managed to speed up. ‘In the end I didn’t take over from
him,’ said Bernard, ‘he carried on doing it.’ The massive programme of
converting all Lewis Separates stores into boutiques pressed on.

Fashion fluctuated faster than ever but the designers and buy-
ers kept up. They didn’t break their stride when skirts dropped to
mid-calf almost overnight after the hit movie Bonnie & Clyde, star-
ring Faye Dunaway, reignited 1930s style, although the mini contin-
ued riding high with the less trend-conscious clothes shopper for a
while yet.

Gradually Geoffrey evolved the new shopfit to be more prac-
tical. Perhaps after a little persuasion (‘It would have been discussed,’
said Bernard tactfully), display windows were now left clear so that
people could see what was going on in the store. The dim lighting that
Geoffrey favoured had proven to be a boon to shoplifters and they
lost a greater than usual portion of their margin to shrinkage, until he
dreamed up another brilliant wheeze. ‘He got a stepladder, quite high,
and a girl perched on top of it. She probably deterred a lot.’ This as-
sistant, who rather resembled a lifeguard on a beach, became another
prop, kitted out like the rest of the staff in the highest fashions. It all
added to the madcap atmosphere, hooking customers in.

Every single store was given the same type of treatment, and
received the same rapturous response. ‘In every town it was the first

336 I Boutique or bust

boutique,’ said Bernard. ‘Everywhere. There was nothing like it at all.’
When Liverpool reopened as Shades and they put up an ad for new
shop assistants, applicants lined the streets like pilgrims.

These were golden days for the business. Competition re-
mained thin on the ground, coming chiefly from the likes of Etam
and Dorothy Perkins. Miss Selfridge barely registered a ripple yet,
while Top Shop was just a department in the Peter Robinson store in
Sheffield, not breaking out on its own until 1974.

When the family visited the shops on a Saturday, Leonard, now
approaching his teens, was struck by the change that they wrought in
places where London seemed a distant dream. ‘You’d drive into town
and everything would be grey and suddenly you’d see this shop with a
distinctive outside and lots of young people inside.’ They always cased
out the other local stores – Dorothy Perkins, Richards, Martin Ford
– and found them dreary by comparison: no music, old-fashioned
counters, few customers. ‘But ours would be jam-packed.’ Once Ber-
nard travelled to a tiny branch in Small Heath, a Birmingham suburb.
‘When I got there I found out that the shop was too busy for the man-
ager to keep control so she had locked the door to stop more people
coming in.’

Geoffrey continued to develop the shopfit. There were illu-
minated letters against a white fascia in Kingston, while a sweep of
arched windows framed by neon-lit rainbows formed the stainless
steel fascia of Chelsea Girl Manchester. Sometimes walls were paint-
ed navy, with a felt carpet and merchandise hung from steel tubes
interspersed with decorative red plastic tubes. ‘He had many original
design ideas and all went to make up the successful formula: dark,
unexpected, moody photographs, latest pop music with the buzz of a
discotheque, all to be “way out”. His themes were not intended to be
polished,’ explained Bernard. ‘They had to be different and edgy in a
way that was the opposite of expensive and considered. They were for