bl_flip2

Boutique or bust I 337

the young who were just coming into their own, and of a moment that
was not meant to last.’

Initially a range of names were used, chiefly Chelsea Girl,
Shades and The In-Scene. ‘In London and Glasgow we had several
shops and as we didn’t think a boutique should be a multiple, so shops
in the same area would have a different name,’ said Bernard. ‘But after
a year or so we realised it didn’t matter. The customers wanted the
clothes and the atmosphere, they weren’t bothered about the name.’ In
1969, they decided to settle on a single commercial identity. ‘The log-
ic of standardisation imposed itself,’ as David put it. This meant that
they could use the same tickets, same bags, same clothes labels, and
get better margins. When the brothers debated what to call the group,
Chelsea Girl won out. ‘Life magazine had a cover story, “Swinging
London is the centre of the world and Chelsea is the centre of Lon-
don”. It became world famous.’

The name encapsulated what the business stood for: they sold
not merely clothes but an identity. ‘People were not used to seeing
clothes sold in such a setting, there was an atmosphere of excitement
and pace. We didn’t look like a clothes shop, and all that rubbed off
on the clothes themselves,’ said Bernard. ‘I frequently got letters from
people saying, “There’s not a Chelsea Girl in my town, when are you
going to open one?” The girls knew about the fashion in the city, but it
was quite exclusive and expensive. We took that concept to the prov-
inces and made it affordable. It was electric. There it was, on their
doorstep.’

Even the canary-yellow plastic Chelsea Girl carrier bag would
become iconic, featuring a black-and-white Pokrassi original of a
young woman with long black hair and downcast eyes – a nod to the
photograph of Susan Bottomly used to publicise Andy Warhol’s film,
The Chelsea Girls. The quintessential Chelsea Girl was portrayed in

338 I Boutique or bust

another Pokrassi poster, a model in a cowboy hat, with aviator sun-
glasses and a cropped T-shirt bearing the new logo, designed by Geof-
frey: ‘CHELSEA’ in small capitals with ‘GIRL’ set out in larger letters
underneath, next to a heart motif tilted on its side.

It took several years to complete the company’s reincarnation,
until 1970, when Lewis Separates (Dalston) Ltd finally retired, to be
replaced by Chelsea Girl Ltd. Just as not one of the Lewises had shed
a tear when they shuttered their fruit shop on Old Street, so there
were no regrets when the last Lewis Separates vanished from the high
street. All eyes were on the future. ‘The more Chelsea Girls opened,
the more we converted, the more money we could take.’

The 1960s ended with over 100 Chelsea Girls across Britain.
Much of the decade had passed in a blur for Bernard – emotional
lows and highs; intensive and often repetitive work; opening ‘shop af-
ter shop after shop’, and every Saturday reviewing potential new sites.
Many locations were wrong for them, but enough were right. ‘Every
single shop that we took, every single one of them, umpteen a year, I
raised the stock, the staff, visited to assess the property, looked at the
takings of every shop, every single week.’

Yet an opening never lost its resonance. ‘Don’t get the impres-
sion that it was mundane. Every single shop was important to me. We
were building things, building a successful and profitable business.
We wanted to be everywhere. And everywhere we went it worked.
There was nowhere it didn’t. Each shop was an emotional peak, a
marker.’

The emotional high would never diminish, not even when
he was in his nineties. ‘When a large successful shop opens, you
stand there and occasionally think, “What would my parents have
thought?” Only about three years ago we opened our largest shop,
it was in Liverpool – a three floor shop. I went for the opening and it

Boutique or bust I 339

was heaving. Absolutely heaving and I had tears in my eyes. I couldn’t
tell you why.’

25

Team building

As Chelsea Girl cemented its position on the high street, David had to
innovate to find new avenues in which to invest the profits. When he
heard about Consolidated Credits and Discounts Ltd (CCD), a bank
incorporated in 1957 to lend deposits and legal fees to help tenants
buy homes, he and Albert Harris had the idea of turning it into a
business to fund property developers, uniting their mutual interests
in property and venture capital. So David acquired CCD and Har-
ris placed his company, UK and European Property Developments,
within it in return for a sixty-six per cent stake, while the Lewis broth-
ers and David’s accountancy partners took the rest of the shares.

‘Banks have the connotation of enormous wealth,’ Bernard ex-
plained. ‘But a bank can be absolutely tiny. It was a vehicle for doing
certain things, attracting money in from depositors to lend to people.’
By far the largest depositor in CCD, however, was the Lewis family,
and in time David’s partners became concerned that this state of af-
fairs was rather ‘topsy-turvy’. ‘So to sort it out, they sold their shares
in the bank to us.’

This was but one of the activities that David became involved
in. The brothers’ investment strategy not only aimed to create a haven
for their money, safe from fashion’s errant currents, but also to work
it harder, creating long-term value at a time when tax was high (by
the mid-1970s top-rate British taxpayers would be compelled to hand
ninety-eight per cent of ‘unearned income’ to the Chancellor of the
Exchequer). There would be many other deals over the years, rang-

Team building I 341

ing from investment in his friend Sigi Faith’s footwear chain to the
acquisition of a large, tax-loss company at a knock-down price.

Bernard was involved in these activities but Godfrey and
Geoffrey were hardly aware of them, and operationally the retail and
the investments were run as separate entities. ‘It was David did the
investments side and my father did the retail,’ said Clive. ‘They talked
but they did not need to co-ordinate what they were doing very much.’

In a Lewis family rite of passage, the next generation were be-
ginning to get in on the act, for the pleasure as much as the pocket
money. After he turned twelve Leonard started working for the busi-
ness during school holidays. He loved being in the shops, spending
some weeks at the Kingston branch, although not always to sparkling
effect. ‘I remember serving behind the handbag counter at the front.
One day I was serving this one customer and she said to me, “Do you
realise every handbag you’ve shown to me you’ve said, ‘It’s a very nice
bag’?” So obviously I wasn’t a very good salesman.’

Maybe so, but he won his father’s confidence and was soon
entrusted – at an age before he was legally entitled to work – with
managing the Hounslow branch. His results were impressive. ‘There’s
always some stuff that sells very well and the shops get their alloca-
tion,’ said Bernard. ‘But Leonard knew what to follow and who to
speak to and he was on the phone all the time to head office, chasing
all the best stock in. So he got more of the good stuff and the shop
took more money. That was Leonard.’

After he turned fifteen, Leonard and a friend – the son of
Tony Harley, who ran Clobber with Jeff Banks – decided to spend the
summer holiday running their own business, flogging clothes from a
market stall. Leonard may have been inspired by Bernard’s bedtime
stories of selling workmen’s dungarees on Rathbone Street market,
but it could hardly have been a more different product or setting. The
stall was tucked away on one of the sepulchral upper floors of the

342 I Team building

byzantine, dimly lit souk that was the legendary indoor market on
Kensington High Street, amid all manner of exotic jewellery, clothes,
music and dubious paraphernalia.

‘We gave him merchandise, sold it to him at cost, and then he
sold it,’ said Bernard. Other than that, the lad needed no help from
his father. Leonard loved it. ‘That’s when the idea of shopkeeping first
appealed to me.’

‘Leonard was always talking business to my father,’ remem-
bered Clive, who also worked in the shops, including a stint behind
the till in Oxford Street at the age of twelve. Although Clive com-
pleted a shop manager’s course in the summer after his O levels at
the mighty age of sixteen, he did not share his elder brother’s zeal
for retail. He recalled the ignominy of one day, when he was barely a
teenager, being left alone to mind Leonard’s Kensington Market stall,
no doubt inhaling all manner of illicit fumes. The atmosphere worked
its somnolent magic and the last Clive could recall was feeling very
bored, only to have a rude awakening when Leonard came back and
found him fast asleep at his post.

At twelve Caroline followed suit and put in her first shifts
at Oxford Street, alongside her cousins Laura and Elaine. ‘That was
great, great, great. You know, proper working.’ Her favourite duty was
to be stationed behind the handbag counter. ‘Once this girl came in
and said, “Do you have any Oxford bags?” and I thought, “What’s an
Oxford bag?” I’d never heard that before. “What do they look like?”
and she said, “No, no, they’re trousers.”’

Her delight in the business stood in painful contrast to her ha-
tred of her secondary school, Overstone in Northamptonshire, where
she boarded on a weekly basis – a dreadful environment, it turned
out, to Bernard’s chagrin. Eventually she simply refused to go back
and transferred to her brothers’ school, Millfield.

Team building I 343

Some Millfield pupils came from wealthy families, but Ber-
nard sought to teach all his children the value of money. Caroline
recalled having to write down exactly what she spent on everything;
they would then talk it through and he would give her what she need-
ed. Until one summer holiday when, exasperated by her demands,
Bernard said she should go out and get a job. ‘So off I went and got
a little job in Molton Brown, the hairdressers, and they said to me,
“When can you start?” I said, “Tomorrow.” I went home that evening
and said, “Well, I’ve got a job.” He looked at me and said, “How could
you have taken that?” So I said, “Because you told me to.” He said,
“But didn’t you tell them you were at school?”’ That was the end of
that caper, although eventually she did get a Saturday job at a hair-
dresser, around the corner from a second-hand clothes shop that Jen-
ny had opened on Gordon Place, off Kensington Church Street.

If sometimes things were tense at home, Caroline got on very
well with her trendy stepmother, and she and her father found more
common ground as she became increasingly fascinated by fashion
and began to shop for her own clothes, and he appreciated the in-
sights of his very first, in-house, teenage clothing expert. ‘I remember
getting a blue Indian maxi, cotton wraparound skirt from Marvels at
the top of Oxford Street, near C&A. I loved this skirt and obviously
showed it to him and he was very interested. And it was a good feel-
ing, you know? So at certain stages when I was growing up he always
wanted my opinion.’

With everything else on his plate, Bernard still found time for
fun. Finally he achieved his childhood ambition to be in a football
team – doing so in classic Bernard style, by forming one himself. It
was called the Rag Trade XI.

‘We used to book pitches in Hyde Park, down by the bottom.
You could only book one week ahead. I had my PA, Mrs Pettifer, on
the phone at 9 a.m. sharp every Monday morning and always man-
aged to get a pitch.’

344 I Team building

The team were all mates from the trade. Tony Harley, a
one- time England schoolboy player, became a Rag Trade XI mainstay.
Another was Bernard’s tailor, Dougie Hayward, a rebellious grammar
school dropout who tried out for Middlesex county football team be-
fore apprenticing himself to a tailor and ending up making suits for
the biggest names of the 1960s, leading him to preside over what one
of his many devoted clients, Michael Parkinson, described as ‘the best
salon in London’. Indeed, Hayward inspired the character of Alfie in
the eponymous film starring Michael Caine (also a client), and even
furnished the model for The Tailor of Panama by John le Carré (yet
another). Richard Caring, who had attended Millfield a few years be-
fore Leonard, also played for the team occasionally (he later moved to
Hong Kong, building up a company as designer, scout and merchant,
before returning to become a kingpin of Britain’s restaurant scene).

Caroline remembered going along with her brothers to watch
her dad play on a Sunday morning during school holidays, and some-
times Clive and Leonard would join in. ‘It was all very light-hearted,’
said Bernard. ‘We played another team one time and they brought
in a guest player and who did it turn out to be? Terry Venables. He
represented England at every single level, from schoolboy all the way
through, under-21, international, England manager. Anyway, the ball
came over and he and I were on it and he was magic. I never got near
it. He just took it and trapped it and moved it.’

In another Sunday ritual Bernard often got together with Da-
vid to lift weights. And when not on holiday over the summer, he
would take the children water-skiing at a club based in an old gravel
pit near Marlow in Buckinghamshire, under the tutelage of a man
from the Chelsea Girl warehouse, who just happened to be a water-
skier of international calibre.

There was no doubt in the children’s minds that their father
was tremendously cool. Jenny was very outgoing and some of the

Team building I 345

glitter rubbed off on Bernard, who was mistaken for the Hollywood-
conquering British comedian Marty Feldman and even the film star
Tony Curtis. The couple often hung out with Tony Harley and Jeff
Banks and his wife Sandie Shaw, the singing star, famous for perform-
ing barefoot and triumphing at the Eurovision Song Contest. Clive
remembered coming back home from a visit to Lorna one Sunday
and finding that Sandie had been over for lunch and left a message on
the blackboard in Caroline’s bedroom.

But nothing could blunt Bernard’s appetite for business. He
continued to take the initiative wherever he could, ‘always,’ as he put
it, ‘trying to stay ahead of the competition’.

If you want to operate you can’t just stick by the rules all the
time. I wouldn’t do anything that was illegal, but you must
have heard the expression, ‘There’s a drink in it for you’?
There was a strong trend for double jersey, like a
double knit. We used to make dresses and trousers from it.
It came from Courtauld’s, one of the biggest factories, and
was in great demand. Now I had a production manager and
I would send him to the warehouse in London, where the
goods would come in from Courtauld’s factories to be sent
out. The warehouse foreman would be in charge of the allo-
cations, a list of people to send the fabric to. I gave my man-
ager cash to go to the warehouse, £10 or something, to help
persuade the foreman to give us the goods first. We needed
to jump the queue.

Unlike the fast pace of business, staff turnover was exception-
ally low. The brothers inspired loyalty and returned it. Caroline never
forgot the respect that staff had for her father. ‘Mrs Pettifer was there
how many years – thirty years plus – and it was still “Mr Bernard”.
You wouldn’t step over that line.’ In fact the marvellous Mrs P. re-
mained with him for forty-three years in total.

Bernard strove to nurture talent. Thinking about staff morale

346 I Team building

had come on since the company’s early efforts in the 1950s to boost it
by offering discounts on nylons, and Bernard engaged the Industrial
Welfare Society, a non-profit organisation, to find out what spurred
employees on. ‘I wanted to know what the staff valued. In other words,
the total compensation package, salary, bonus, holiday, sickness pay,
staff discount. Which is more valuable?’ It turned out there were no
simple answers.

You’ve got to give a bit of everything. Say, looking at the staff
clothing discount, instead of giving X per cent you can give a
lower percentage and then give them a higher salary. But staff
don’t really grasp the details. So if you’re not doing one thing
and another company is, then the fact that their total package
with you adds up to more money, they won’t look at it that
way – they will just think they are getting a lower discount.
You could do things in a certain way that leave them better
off, but if they feel another company is doing something else
that you are not, it doesn’t work.

Clive gave his father a lot of credit. ‘He has been phenomenal-
ly good at identifying talent and bringing it on, and put a lot of time
into assessing people fairly and straightforwardly. In the early years
he had a very good core team, people must have liked staying with
him. The respect he gets is tremendous.’

Chelsea Girl became something of a university for skilled
retailers. ‘People have said that our company was the best training
ground in the business,’ said Bernard. Rivals certainly thought so, as
Stuart Peters found out, after he asked Bernard for a £1,000 salary
increase to help secure a mortgage on a house because he was getting
married. Since Peters already earned a decent £2,750 a year, Bernard
was only willing to pay another £500, so Peters took himself off for a
job interview with rival chain Etam. ‘He walked in, there was an in-
terview panel, didn’t seem to know much about him. They said, “Who

Team building I 347

do you work for?” And when he said Chelsea Girl they immediately
looked up and he knew he’d got the job.’

Afterwards Peters told Bernard he had been offered £4,000 a
year. Bernard replied, ‘We’ll get you more. I’m going to give you a let-
ter, which you won’t act upon, saying that I’ll offer you £4,500 a year
to stay with us. And then you show them the letter.’ Etam promptly
offered Peters £5,000.

When asked why he did not hang on to Peters, Bernard re-
plied, ‘Well, the job he was doing I could get someone else to do, but
the main reason was that he was obviously too good for it. You could
see he was capable of more, and wanted something to run on his own.
I would not have been able to hang on to him for long.’ He recalled an
anecdote that Peters told him after arriving at Etam, when he and the
company’s director went to Hong Kong. ‘On the plane out there the
chap asked him what they were going to do with all these people they
were meeting, and Stuart said, “I don’t know, I’ve never been.” He said,
“You’ve never been to Hong Kong? But that’s why we took you on!”’

Plenty of other home-reared talent ascended Chelsea Girl’s
ranks. Pat Burnett, who started off serving behind the till in the Not-
tingham branch, rose to retail director before leaving to join Wallis,
then became managing director of the White Company. Another star
was Farida Kaikobad. ‘She started aged twenty-two and Beverley Wil-
liams, who was her buying director, said to me one day, “She’s the best
on the floor.” Now she’s chief brand officer.’

Staff changes triggered a series of moves, like a game of musi-
cal chairs. In due course Michael Cooklin replaced Peters in knitwear,
before leaving himself to fill Peters’ next post at Etam, after Peters de-
cided to strike out and build his own knitwear business with his wife.
After Cooklin joined Etam, Godfrey assumed control of the knit-
wear department, including jersey dresses and T-shirts. Geoffrey still
ran handbags and visual display, determining what went into shop

348 I Team building

windows as well as running the shopfitting. But Bernard still con-
trolled most of the operation, his responsibilities during this period
consisting of: the rest of the merchandise (i.e. coats, dresses, jackets,
trousers, skirts, jeans), plus the warehouse, transport, people, and re-
tail, in charge of the managers, controllers and retail director. He also
ran the West End buying office, which was in transition because a
year or two earlier he had given it a makeover.

‘Marion Kretish was pretty good, and we worked together very
well, but fashion was getting younger and her eye was not right for
us now – she was better on merchandise that we were moving away
from. I wanted somebody with a different fashion eye,’ he explained.
‘So I said to her, “We need to part. But I want you to find a good job.
I’m not saying you’re leaving now but when you find the right thing,
we’ll part.”’ In due course Kretish found a job at Richards and they
stayed on good terms – a courteously choreographed exit that illus-
trates how Bernard maintained goodwill and sustained momentum
while negotiating fashion’s treacherously shifting sands.

After Kretish left Bernard hired another buyer, and also turned
to his wife for guidance on the more avant-garde styles. Aside from
occasional work as a model for fittings and catalogues, Jenny had no
professional fashion background, but he trusted her fashion sense, so
she went into the West End buying office regularly as an unsalaried
adviser to help keep him in touch. The informality of the arrangement
would come to haunt him.

The first buyer who replaced Kretish cannot have worked out
because in 1970 Bernard started looking for an even fresher pair of
eyes. In walked Vanessa Bracey, a twenty-four-year-old quivering
with talent and ambition. He was about to make his most significant
hire.

26

A professional fashion person

If you were writing a blueprint for the ideal Chelsea Girl employee it
is exceedingly unlikely that you would come up with someone from
Vanessa Bracey’s background. Yet as things turned out, she could not
have been more perfect.
She was brought up in Cobham, Surrey, the youngest of two
children. Outwardly, her parents were very traditional, her father, a
Lloyd’s of London insurance underwriter, and her mother, a bright
woman who loved flower arranging and riding with the county set.
Although professional ambitions were off-limits to a woman of her
class and time, she would prove very supportive of her daughter’s ca-
reer.

Vanessa was very fond of her older brother but the siblings
were not close and an uneasy childhood left her extremely shy as well
as observant and self-controlled, not dissimilar to Bernard as a little
boy. At thirteen – the same age at which he had been evacuated – she
left her family home, in her case to attend a third-rate girls’ boarding
school called the Warren. Soon she was itching to be free to go out to
work, and her parents agreed that she could leave school at sixteen on
the condition that she passed six O levels, which she knuckled down
and did.
Back in Cobham, Vanessa yearned to become a bilingual sec-
retary. ‘I wanted to travel.’ When this dream was vetoed, she asked to
go to art school, but this option was deemed too bohemian for a nice
sixteen-year-old young lady like her. At this point her mother stepped
in and suggested that as a compromise Vanessa could take the City &

350 I A professional fashion person

Guilds qualification in pattern cutting at the local technical college.
It was not a subject with which the girl was familiar, but she loved
making clothes, and her mother argued that it would be a useful skill
to fall back on, just as Lew once persuaded Bernard to arm himself
with a trade. Doubtless it also entered Mrs Bracey’s calculations that
her husband would not object to their daughter acquiring such un-
threateningly feminine expertise (in common with most of his peers,
Vanessa’s father believed that women were made for babies and too
much education could scupper their marriage prospects).
Brooklands Technical College near Weybridge might not have
been the Slade, but the course hit the spot. ‘I have to say, it was one
of the most useful things I did. Then my mother organised, because
she knew I wanted to go abroad, for me to go to Paris and I went to
the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, which is the school
where all the couturier houses used to send their apprentices.’
Vanessa arrived in Paris in 1964, eighteen years old, unchap-
eroned and not knowing a soul. Sadly, few kindred spirits awaited
her at the Chambre Syndicale. While her fellow students confected
flowing silken gowns, she ‘would just do Mary Quant’. This was some
time before Quant became a global icon, and still considered rather
a recondite taste – one that Vanessa had acquired from her mother,
who used to buy her daughter fashionable clothes from Surrey bou-
tiques and ‘loved me in very contemporary stuff ’.
Vanessa’s yen for the new cut no ice with her tutors. ‘I wasn’t
considered exciting. They considered me high street.’ She was also less
than receptive to haute couture, yet nonetheless she acquired valu-
able skills like the art of draping cloth on the model – a very differ-
ent approach from pattern cutting. But it was outside college that she
learned the most, discovering allies in an unlikely quarter: the English
church on the Rue Saint-Honoré where, queuing up one morning to

A professional fashion person I 351

take Sunday communion, she met a girl with a bottle of whisky in her
bag. ‘She offered me a nip and we started a friendship.’
Grace of this new friend, Carolyn, Vanessa soon found herself
attending parties with the likes of the poet Allen Ginsberg and the
sculptor Alberto Giacometti. By her own estimation, she ‘went quite
mad’, doing ‘a lot of finding out’ about how to be a grown-up at a mo-
ment when Paris seemed the centre of everything that was wonderful,
new and strange in the world.
Once this year of wonders was up, Vanessa returned to Brit-
ain, immediately moving to London – a timely switch, because it was
about to take over from Paris as the global capital of cool. ‘I drifted
with all the trendy places,’ she said. Now she shared digs with Car-
olyn, who resurfaced as a bookseller in Hatchard’s, Piccadilly, each
girl taking a room under the none too watchful eye of a landlady in a
mansion flat in Marylebone for £4 a week. Vanessa now dreamed of
becoming a children’s designer – not out of any particular attachment
to children, but, she claimed, because she was not that good at draw-
ing. ‘What I hadn’t realised then was that I’ve got very good intuition.
I can see what’s good. I can’t necessarily create it myself, but I can see
something and then make it very good.’

With no immediate path into the children’s clothing business,
she decided to find a job, applying in response to an ad for a buyer’s
clerk at Woollands, a high-end ladies’ clothing department store that
stood cheek by jowl with Harvey Nichols in Knightsbridge, and was
much the posher of the two shops at that.
Woollands had just opened the 21 Shop on the ground floor,
one of the city’s first high-end boutiques. ‘All very trendy but I couldn’t
get into that.’ Instead, she found her opening in another department
upstairs as the factotum to the mysterious Mrs Minchin, whose foi-
bles were less the stuff of fashion than farce.

‘She used to potter in with a basket with a tea towel over the
top.’ Underneath were stowed a bottle of gin and two glasses, which

352 I A professional fashion person

Mrs Minchin took into one of the fitting rooms. There she made her
little camp and would drink gin all day. ‘Some of the other buyers
used to come along and sit with her.’
That was about all Mrs Minchin did. Despite which, her de-
partment flourished, selling ‘masses and masses of Pucci’, the swirly,
twirly, sexy Italian clothes from a company that began in 1947, when
an Italian marquess started making colourful skiwear for his friends
in an innovative stretch fabric, before turning out rumple-proof silk
dresses that would be adored by everyone from Marilyn Monroe to
Jacqueline Kennedy.
Big names drifted in and out of their little corner, including
the famous and delectable television presenter Michael Aspel. But if
film stars strolled by, she remained oblivious. Celebrities held little in-
terest for her; what gripped her attention was business, and, left large-
ly to her own devices, she set about imposing order on the outdated
jumble of cards that did service as Mrs Minchin’s stock records. ‘I
completely redid all her bookwork, I did a beautiful job on it. I think
I had an alert system if we wanted to re-buy something.’ How did she
know what to do? ‘I don’t know. Common sense?’ It was exactly what
Bernard would have done.

After eight months, her walk-on role in the muddle of Mrs
Minchin had lost its allure and the job had grown repetitive, so she
headed off to Jaeger around the corner on Sloane Street – an intro-
duction engineered once again by her resourceful mother, who knew
the chairman through her family. Vanessa found herself back at the
bottom of the ladder, polishing and organising hangers, but swiftly
graduated to managing stock and selling garments on the shop floor,
where she fell in with some ‘very, very cool people’. One fellow assis-
tant would be driven to work by chauffeur every day, while her moth-
er socialised with a prominent member of the royal family.
After hours, when not out and about, socialising with the Jae-

A professional fashion person I 353

ger girls, Vanessa occasionally visited the Playboy nightclub with her
elder brother and his friends, or popped to the house that he had
bought in Earls Court with a legacy from their grandparents. She too
had inherited a sizeable sum, but swore not to touch a penny and
lived instead solely on what she could earn for herself, her resolve
hardening when her maternal grandmother told her that she need
never work, she just had to find someone to look after her.
The fun did not stop Vanessa taking her job very seriously
indeed. Sure enough, she caught the eye of a senior manager, Jean
Cameron, who was conducting a clandestine relationship with Mi-
chael Moriarty, the managing director. Still just twenty, Vanessa was
airlifted out of Sloane Street, packing her bags to begin a gypsy life as
the peripatetic manager of a new department, Young Jaeger.
Touring provincial towns up and down Britain, Vanessa now
spent her days imposing her taste on significantly older Jaeger shop
managers, attempting to infuse their youth range with an authentical-
ly frisky flavour of London as she went about rearranging their dis-
plays. Meanwhile her home life consisted of living in bed and break-
fasts, usually as the sole female guest and two decades younger than
any other lodger, spending her evenings with whiskery landladies and
whisky-steeped travelling salesmen as they solemnly listened to The
Archers on the radio over high tea.

She adored every minute of her nomadic new existence. ‘I
would spend two or three weeks in Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow,
then another two weeks in Manchester, wherever there was a Jaeger,
sorting out the department and making sure it was all visually nice. I
used to have to talk to the people about the stock, what it was like. Gee
them up. I loved it, because as far as I was concerned I was having a
career, I was getting on.’

Two years passed like this until 1967 when, her mission
deemed complete, she was appointed to a permanent post at the

354 I A professional fashion person

Cambridge branch. She spent eighteen months gently stagnating in
the university town’s tranquil medieval beauty until finally it dawned
on her that Jean Cameron and Michael Moriarty had left and that, her
mentors gone, nobody in Jaeger management had a clue whom she
was, let alone any notion that she was a talent worth nurturing. When
she requested a transfer back to London the new regime said no. So
she quit and took the first job she found, peddling adverts for the Eve-
ning Standard, sharing a flat with Carolyn from Paris once more, this
time in Hyde Park Mansions near Marble Arch.
After six dull weeks in telesales she received an unexpected
call. Her old mentor, the now respectably married Mrs Jean Moriar-
ty called on behalf of her husband Michael, who had been hired to
revamp Debenhams and Freebody, a fusty department store on Wig-
more Street. The place badly needed a facelift. Would Vanessa come
along and help them identify where to nip and tuck?
‘The first year I was a spy, in charge of going around all the
departments and finding out who was working well and who wasn’t.
Then they gave me a boutique to run, Phase One.’
Run is something of an understatement. In fact Vanessa invent-
ed it. ‘It was absolutely my baby, my own staff.’ Her brief was to bring an
edge into the building, so she took the company cheque book and be-
gan stalking the rag trade area around Great Portland Street, buying in
upmarket young brands such as Hildebrand, Marlborough and David
Silverman. ‘In fact, Bernard would have been going around the same
places at the same time – I’d just be going in more expensive places.’
She caused enough of a stir to feature in an article in the Dai-
ly Telegraph, snapped in a hat that made her look twice her age (she
was still only twenty-two). By then she was earning £1,500 – a lot of
money as far as her delighted mother was concerned, although little
more than half what Stuart Peters had been on as a buying assistant at
Chelsea Girl, several years earlier.

A professional fashion person I 355

By the close of 1969 Vanessa was ready to move on. ‘At that
time I thought you did two years here, two years there, and you’d go
on doing two years.’ It was a familiar rhythm, already well established
after she put in just over two years at boarding school, followed by
two at technical college, and a good two years’ worth of riotous living
packed into her twelve wild months in Paris. So she approached the
Star Agency, explaining what sort of position she was after, and her
curriculum vitae landed on Bernard’s desk at the Avon Trading Es-
tate, Olympia.
Vanessa had never stepped inside a Chelsea Girl before. When
she trotted off to carry out her due diligence at Oxford Street’s flagship
store she was stunned. ‘There were lots of handbags going down one
side, and all sorts of pipes and stuff and garments hanging down and
nice music. And it was full of young people, pushing and shoving
and queuing.’ If the crowd was like nothing she had seen before, the
stock was also considerably trendier than she was used to, catering for
moneyed twenty-somethings at Phase One. ‘This was more for fifteen
year olds. I thought it was absolutely great.’
When she arrived for her interview at the significantly less
cool Avon Trading Estate, she felt no nerves. ‘I wasn’t that bothered
about the job. I’d set in my head that I wanted to earn £2,000 and if I
could earn £2,000 I’d take it.’ But as she and Bernard talked, some of
his questions took her by surprise. ‘He asked me what my father did,
which I thought was really strange but of course it’s not at all.’
She feared that the answer might put him off her – too home
counties, too conventional – but as their conversation went on she
felt herself being expertly sifted by him, which seemed a good sign.
‘I remember saying to my mother afterwards that I thought he was a
really nice chap. He was very charming.’
It was not all small talk. ‘He asked me a question on percent-
ages, which I got right. Then he offered me I think £1,700. And I said,

356 I A professional fashion person

“I was looking for £2,000.” He said, “Okay.” And that was it. I agreed
to start in January 1970.’
When she handed in her notice at Freebody’s, Mr Moriarty
was livid. ‘I was walking away and he turned around and he said, “You
think you can work with those Jew boys in Oxford Street?”’
His bitter words stunned her. She did not look back.
As West End buyer, superficially her task was straightforward:
to buy enticing stuff for Chelsea Girl’s edgiest King’s Road and Oxford
Street branches, with licence to take up to twelve units of any garment
she fancied – a laboratory role, in short, which allowed her to dance
on the cutting edge of cool. Vanessa was not just working with Ber-
nard, however, but partly under his wife’s supervision. ‘Once a week
Jenny would come in and we would both go out around the suppliers
together.’
The arrangement started promisingly. ‘I was one of these real-
ly eager beavers, you know. My ambition was to be at the top of what-
ever I do. I remember Jenny and Bernard were going off to Barbados
and phoning her up at home, saying, “Don’t worry, everything will be
all right. I shall be there.”’ But she was no Pollyanna. As Bernard put
it, ‘Vanessa was a professional fashion person. Previously I had buyers
but not of her calibre.’
Initially Vanessa worked out of a back office, but he soon rede-
ployed her. She ended up as another fascinating prop in the theatrical
Oxford Street store, working out of a tiny, Perspex-walled mezzanine
office fashioned from scaffolding poles erected in the middle of the
shop floor, rather like a crow’s nest overlooking the scene below. For-
tunately she relished the view. Because by that point in time, if Chel-
sea Girl had been a person, she would have been a pop star. ‘There
would be queues outside the shops waiting for the next delivery, liter-
ally. They would know when the deliveries were coming and they’d be
there.’
Everything in the shop was geared to generate excitement,

A professional fashion person I 357

with incredibly sexy images plastered on the walls, many featuring
model subjects who had been fished up by Geoffrey off one or other
of their shop floors. Yet despite her bird’s-eye view, Vanessa seldom
saw either Geoffrey or Godfrey, who later moved his buying office
into the floor above Geoffrey’s on Princes Street. ‘My office was at the
front of Oxford Street, Geoffrey and Godfrey were at the back, we had
separate entrances. You really didn’t have any cause to have regular
interactions.’
The scene could be intoxicating, and very occasionally
Vanessa might smoke a cheeky marijuana joint in her office with a
supplier, but her work took precedence and the sales figures must
have impressed. Within little time, Bernard broadened her remit to
acquiring stock for the top twelve branches of Chelsea Girl, adding
the likes of Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester to her roster
– these northern outposts being the most important to the group.
‘They’ve always been the heart of the business,’ said Vanessa. Soon she
began doing her own warehousing too, employing a manager, Mau-
reen, who would remain her personal assistant four decades later.
Asked why her work impressed so much, Vanessa squirmed
with embarrassment, but reluctantly conceded, ‘Well, really one has
to sort of say the strength of the buy. The buys got bigger and bigger
and they got better and better.’ As Bernard would put it, she had the
handwriting and the confidence to supply the hits. Yet it would be a
while before her talents could find full expression.
Bernard stopped by at the West End buying office most weeks,
either on his way to a supplier or before a trawl of other shops along
Oxford Street in his indefatigable search for ideas. ‘The most import-
ant thing was to stay in touch with my customer and keep concen-
trating on the merchandise,’ he explained, ‘never allowing anything
to get between me and the product.’ Back at Olympia he would pass
interesting garments to Miss Mincheo, the chief designer, or Janice

358 I A professional fashion person

Dilly, the skirt designer, to draw up their own interpretation. Then the
in-house team would mock up a sample in an appropriately fashion-
able cloth.
‘Bernard used to have a meeting every week with the produc-
tion manager and he used to have a little folder with all of the cloth
that we owned in it, and then Miss Mincheo would come along with
her designs and they’d say we want three more dresses or whatever it
is. And so she’d show the dresses, then they’d choose which ones they
wanted to make with what cloth.’
Small and bustling, Miss Mincheo reminded Vanessa of a
chain-smoking Mrs Tiggywinkle, the hedgehog laundress in the Be-
atrix Potter story. ‘I remember the smoke used to go up her nostrils
and back down again, and up and down.’ Although Vanessa got on
well with her, she learned to be wary because Miss Mincheo could be
quite prickly: the attitude was that ‘everyone was rubbish except for
her’. Miss Mincheo was eager to preserve her status as Bernard’s de-
signing right-hand, perhaps the more so having seen Marion Kretish
come and go.

Whatever the office politics of the CMT department, it made a
tight little team, firing out new designs at a cracking rate. ‘It was very
quick production, we got everything made in ten to fourteen days,’
said Leonard, a huge improvement on the six or at best four week
turnaround times available from outside suppliers. The only swift-
er route to getting merchandise into the shops was to nab whatever
wholesalers had in stock. But in terms of control and profit, CMT
proved unbeatable.
Extraordinary as it seems, Chelsea Girl was the only retailer
in Britain using such a system, originated and devised in its entirety
by Bernard. It was an article of faith with him that if you want to do
something, work out the best way to get started. ‘Then improve it as
you go. Don’t wait for perfection before you start.’

A professional fashion person I 359

Vanessa explained what made CMT a success.

No one else did CMT. I’d never known anything like it. And it
is unique here now. But you could never start it from scratch.
Loads of the groups around have tried CMT and it has not
worked, whereas it is absolutely entrenched in the spirit of
this company.
The big obstacle to setting up is cloth. You buy cloth
and you make stuff from it. So if that thing doesn’t sell and
you’ve bought too much cloth you’re lumbered. There was a
company called Bamber Stores, I remember, and they liter-
ally folded in a mass of cloth. They just had this cloth moun-
tain. You can get one very quickly if you buy the wrong stuff.

Although Chelsea Girl took risks on fashionable fabrics, they
would be informed risks, and always at a keen level. ‘You could do
great deals because you’d deal with all the cloth merchants, go for the
best price, and you’d wheel and deal on that so that you’d get a good
margin,’ said Vanessa. The quality and clarity of information flowing
from the tills – augmented by relentless shop visiting, experimenting
and trend hunting – fed into a system that Bernard devised to keep
stocks of cloth under control, forecasting sales for different types of
material, ensuring that Lewis Separates never found themselves stuck
with unusable drifts of unwanted pink bouclé.
In future years the CMT operation would grow even more so-
phisticated, relying less on cheaper textiles and concentrating more
on developing their own. ‘Now in a way it’s more skilled,’ said Vanes-
sa. ‘You have to have the fashion cloths. And we are better and quicker
than we used to be, and do all our prints in-house now. We don’t buy
in, because the good prints get grabbed very quickly. Designing our
own is a way of controlling exclusivity, and actually our prints, we’ve
got such a good graphics department, they are amazing.’
But in these early years, as Vanessa bedded in at Oxford Street

360 I A professional fashion person

and her confidence grew, inevitably Jenny’s weekly visits to her buy-
ing office began to chafe. ‘We would go out around the suppliers to-
gether. She used to talk about her personal life, or bring along her
model friends in their fur coats to buying meetings, asking me for
cups of tea, which I had to make while trying to buy stuff. It was em-
barrassing. I didn’t want suppliers to see me like that.’
Good manners and perhaps shyness prevented Vanessa from
murmuring a word of complaint, but eighteen months into the job,
after a particularly dire meeting with Jenny and a friend at the King’s
Road shop, she had had enough. She quietly found a new job at a rival
group, Irvine Sellers. ‘Not quite as big as Chelsea Girl, not as good, but
I’d made sure that it was an independent job where I was going to be
doing the buying on my own.’
She handed in her notice to Bernard. Without a beat he asked,
‘Is it because of Jenny?’ It was a shrewd guess, given that he had never
witnessed the dynamic between the two women first hand. Somewhat
mortified, she agreed. His next question flabbergasted her. ‘If Jenny
doesn’t come in any more, would you stay on?’
‘I was not expecting that.’ But she said yes. And true to Ber-
nard’s word, Jenny did not visit her office again.

27

Rifts

On 30 August 1971 Clara, buoyant with happiness, with her husband
Alf and her merry tribe of grandchildren always streaming in and out
of their flat, was suddenly laid low by a stroke. She was only sixty-five
years old, but she did not recover.
Her sons and widower laid her to rest at Rainham Jewish
Cemetery, in plot AI, row 37, grave number 1, only yards from her
beloved Lew’s final resting place in row 36, grave number 10. They
were saying goodbye not just to a wife, mother and grandmother, but
the fulcrum of the family. It seems more than a coincidence that this
loss preceded significant alterations in the relationships between the
brothers – who more than ever resembled two pairs of brothers – as if
a vital filament holding them together had been severed.
Other pressures began to bite. Bernard’s relationship with Jen-
ny became difficult. After they accepted that the marriage could not
stagger on, Jenny moved into a mews house near her clothes shop
off Kensington Church Street, but they remained on friendly terms
and Caroline helped out at the shop in the school holidays, frequently
staying the night with her.

*
The Oxford Street buying office had become increasingly useful in
picking out new fashion trends. Every week Bernard and Vanessa met
in the West End to do the shops together, and after visiting the big
new Miss Selfridge in Selfridges sometimes they would have lunch in
St Christopher’s Place nearby.
‘We did the shops in a completely different way,’ she remem-

362 I Rifts

bered. ‘He was so thorough, you know, he’d be analysing, forensically.
“Why are they buying that? There’s three of this left and four of that
left.” Whereas I’d just look at a rail of clothes, think, “Oh, I like that,”
and buy what I fancied. He probably thought I was a bit scatty.’ Ber-
nard never took notes. His Holmesian memory sufficed.
During a business trip to Manchester at the tail end of Decem-
ber 1971 she received an unexpected telephone call. ‘I’m just coming
up,’ said Bernard, ‘so hold on and we’ll go out for dinner.’ They went
out to a little Italian restaurant and it was clear that their relationship
had shifted a gear.
In some respects the couple were worlds apart. Vanessa’s
friends went out to pubs, hardly Bernard’s natural milieu. But they
also got on tremendously, each profoundly respecting the other’s
judgement, her passion for work a match for his commitment. When
her parents learned of the relationship they were appalled, particular-
ly when she moved in with him – understandably, said Bernard, given
that he was twenty years older, had three teenage children, and they
were not married.
‘My mother said, “You’ll be lucky if you get ten years with
him.” So I said, “Well I’d rather have ten great years than twenty me-
dium years.” Now I look back on it and I laugh because we’ve had
forty-four brilliant years.’
Business would prove a sturdy common interest, destined to
fund a lifelong conversation. It was not simply clothes that gripped his
attention, Vanessa learned. ‘He is interested in everything, reads lots
of newspapers. He knows about everything. But he’d be surprised if
anyone thought he was a fashion expert.’ She saw it differently. ‘When
he says he’s no good at fashion, that’s bollocks. He has a good feel for
our market. If he came in to a meeting here now and he said some-

Rifts I 363

thing about the fashion I would listen and reckon he’d probably got it
right.’
What of their differences? ‘She’s not as driven as me,’ Bernard
replied. But what if she had been? ‘It would have been terrible.’

*

There is a strong whiff of midlife crisis about Chelsea Girl in the ear-
ly 1970s, in terms both of the company and the lives of each Lewis
brother but David.
Their HQ had outgrown its Olympia base. So in 1972 David
found a site off Westgate, near Hanger Lane, west London. The plot,
recently vacated by a water softener manufacturer, Permatip, was
extensive enough to house both a warehouse and a new head office.
When the property came up at a sealed bids auction he and Bernard
were determined to land it and made an audacious offer.
‘We put in a tender that was as follows: “£20,000 more than
the highest bid, with a limit of £1 million.” David’s idea, that was, very
original. I don’t think it would be accepted now. And I remember our
agent took it along, it went into the office. All the other agents were
sitting outside and the people came out and took him in and there
was a bit of consternation. Nobody had ever come across it before.
But we won and that was that.’
Bernard immediately donned his metaphorical hard hat to
involve himself closely in the design of the new building, naming it
Chelsea House. It was another significant peak in his career. ‘I built
this,’ he said proudly. ‘I remember when they were building the ware-
house, which was gigantic for us at the time. Standing there, looking
as they were equipping it with the rails and everything, I remember
that being a bit emotional. I suppose it was physical evidence as to
how far we had come.’

364 I Rifts

After Britain joined the European Economic Community on
1 January 1973, David and Bernard travelled the continent with a
view to expanding the business abroad. ‘We toured a few cities and
looked at the shops and the people. There was definitely potential,
but in other ways it would also mean effectively starting from scratch.’
Bernard hesitated.

What I didn’t want us to do was dissipate our energies. We
had a good thing going and what we needed was more shops,
bigger shops, and to carry on doing what we were doing and
keep trying to improve. There was money to be made. I didn’t
want us to start saying to our design and buying people, con-
sider a different market – and I could see that it was a bit
different – that would confuse them. I just wanted them to
do what they knew worked for us. What we don’t want to
do is say to our development team go over there and study
Hamburg, and study Cologne. My feeling was no and David
agreed.

Neither Geoffrey nor Godfrey had a voice in the decision. But
by this point consulting them would have been difficult. Geoffrey in
particular had become increasingly elusive – ‘travelling and doing his
own thing a lot of the time’, according to Adele. He appeared in Olym-
pia less and less, then stopped turning up altogether.
Bernard remembered the surprise of it. ‘Geoffrey, Godfrey
and I had three offices in the back at the Avon Trading Estate. All the
same size, all in a row, and the PAs, his one and my one were just in
front of us. Then I realised he was never there. And then Godfrey did
the same thing. There was nothing announced. They kept their office
on. Godfrey left his desk there, they both left things behind, but they
didn’t come back.’
Like his brother, Godfrey began to direct his departments,
knitwear and blouses, from Princes Street, although his executive

Rifts I 365

teams stayed on at Avonmore Road, a curiously disjointed arrange-
ment. Yet at no point did either David or Bernard ask their brothers
why they had quit Olympia. Perhaps they felt unable to, in case it
sounded like a challenge – they were, after all, equal partners. As a
result, Bernard could only speculate as to what caused them to leave.
‘I think it’s probably the simplest reason. To be away from me and, to
a lesser extent, David.’

On the surface it is hard to comprehend why Godfrey and
Geoffrey might have found life at head office oppressive. The business
was far from formal. David still ran his accountancy practice in Har-
ley Street, coming to Olympia one day a week at most. Board meet-
ings were less and less frequent, with no minutes taken – they only got
together when things needed to be discussed. But a deeper sense of
frustration lay at the root of it.
‘They felt constricted, perhaps that’s the right word,’ said Ber-
nard. ‘All the important decisions were taken by David and me. Ev-
erybody else at Avon worked for me. They wanted to get away, to be
free spirits. I didn’t realise it then but I think Geoffrey was artistic and
he would have liked to have had an artistic occupation.’
Essentially, each pair of brothers hailed from a different gen-
eration and their interests were as different as their temperaments.
‘David and I were pretty straight-laced. If David was one ex-
treme, Geoffrey was the other and I suppose I was in the middle. But
we never socialised together. I learned later that Geoffrey was really
into the scene in London. I don’t think David knew what was going
on. But maybe the feeling of somebody looking at them with approval
or disapproval, they didn’t need that and didn’t want it. Without us
they could do what they wanted.’
The brothers’ relationship was doubly complicated by the fact
of being both family and colleagues, and rather intimidating col-
leagues at that, according to Clive.

366 I Rifts

‘By the 1970s David and Bernard were really getting serious-
ly involved. They were completely driven, top-level businessmen. It
would take astonishing energy and determination to keep up with
them. They could finish at 10 p.m. David would go on and on and on.
It was all detail, detail, carrying on until they had the right answer.
Both shared that intensity of focus and absolute trust in each other.’
‘We didn’t criticise each other,’ Bernard emphasised. ‘There
was a bit of friction on occasion between Geoffrey and me on shop-
fitting. But there wouldn’t be friction over the merchandise. Either it
did sell or it didn’t sell, and it was obvious when a mistake had been
made. To criticise was unnecessary, too personal and to be avoided.’
Nevertheless Bernard’s mode of advice and questioning could be di-
rect, and he may have been oblivious to how his approach affected his
younger brothers.
In later years he reproached himself for missing the signs of
their disenchantment, but when faced with a problem – or, indeed
anything that interested him – it was typical for him to react by lock-
ing into the details. And when he zoned in, possibly he lost sight of
social considerations. Despite being blessed with a tremendous sense
of fairness, he could also, Clive agreed, sometimes have a bit of a blind
spot with people.

I think people like his directness. There is no sense of [him
being motivated by] anything other than the good of the
business, and the good of the people if he can do that as well.
But he wouldn’t necessarily pick up on what is going on in
somebody’s life.

It was not a lack of sympathy so much as a layer of empathy.
In later years the family doctor suggested that Bernard might have an
extremely mild and functional form of Asperger’s or autistic spectrum
disorder. Vanessa agreed. ‘Oh, definitely. I think that it’s one of the rea-
sons that he has been so successful. He can direct his mind to some-

Rifts I 367

thing and it doesn’t matter what’s in the way, he will still get there.’
But their son Jake dismissed the Asperger’s label, joking that
his father might bandy about this notion as an excuse to duck out
of certain types of social occasion. Nevertheless, he conceded that
his father’s manner could be off-putting. ‘Some business people that
I know are reluctant to go into meetings with him because he has
such a sharp mind. If someone has got a fairly built-up ego they don’t
like to be around someone like my father because he would just drill
straight into it and that can put a dent in some people.’
Certainly, Bernard’s forensic approach could sometimes hin-
der communication. If ever you felt insecure or frustrated, this inquis-
itorial tendency must have been aggravating. A case in point occurred
during one of the increasingly rare board meetings, when Geoffrey
announced that he wanted to introduce a line of cosmetics.
‘David and I tried to talk to him about it. I wanted to know
what it was all about, what sort of department. What size, what area,
how much would it take? Geoffrey didn’t want to discuss any of that.
It was, “I don’t know. I want to do cosmetics.” There was absolutely no
information he could give us about it.’
After their younger brothers left, Bernard and David ex-
changed a look. ‘You know we thought, what do you do with this?
We’ve got a business to run. You can’t not talk about it, you can’t just
go, “I want to do cosmetics, leave it all to me.” It seemed he hadn’t
thought it through. Same as the shops. I think he couldn’t marshal his
thoughts and arguments.’
Mutual incomprehension was central to this conflict over the
cosmetics department, and it is one that throws their divergent talents
into sharp relief. Geoffrey, primarily a visionary and creative charac-
ter, had an inspiration and he wanted to share it, but his elder brothers
responded to his idea as if it were a fully baked business proposition.
He could not turn to them and say, ‘Let me go away and think about it’

368 I Rifts

– he was too busy feeling angry and under attack, as younger siblings
tend to feel when they find themselves at the sharp end of their older
siblings’ pointed questions.
Only years later did Bernard learn that the cosmetics episode
caused Geoffrey ‘a lot of angst’.
‘It seems to me now that I should have tried to handle the
discussions differently. He had an idea and I didn’t get to understand
it.’ But the damage was done. From this moment on, Geoffrey became
‘very distant and would not join in things’.
It is worth remembering that when Godfrey and Geoffrey de-
cided to relocate offices to the West End, they were not simply run-
ning away from their older brothers. They were also running towards
something. Oxford Street was the heart of the rag trade: it had the
buzz, the people, the shops and the manufacturers.
‘I think they moved there because that was the happening
place,’ said Adele. ‘That was Geoffrey’s whole thing; to get the feeling,
to soak up the atmosphere – which you don’t get in an office in Olym-
pia. I think Geoffrey would have felt freer. I mean he would, wouldn’t
he? You would.’

*

Just as Bernard strove to respect his brothers’ independence, so he
conscientiously avoided steering his children towards a particular
professional path. ‘I was at great pains not to influence any of them. I
never ever said to any of them, “Would you like to come in the busi-
ness?” I was well aware that if I did it would put a lot on their back. If
they didn’t want to, how would they deal with it?’
In this instance his habitual reticence proved wise. His chil-
dren absorbed their father’s philosophy without any prodding. ‘Every-
thing for the family: that’s always been my motivation,’ said Clive. ‘It
was not that there was any expectation – there wasn’t.’ But he had his
doubts about retail, lacking Caroline and Leonard’s zest for fashion.

Rifts I 369

‘My feeling was, did I have anything that I could usefully do to bring to
the table?’
His elder brother inspired him to try a different route. ‘Leon-
ard put the idea of being a lawyer in my mind. I was at the end of the
first year of sixth form, before the UCAS applications, and he said, “It
could be useful for the family if you were a lawyer.”’
In due course, after his A levels, Clive matriculated to War-
wick University to study law, which he found suited his character ad-
mirably. ‘Neither my father nor Leonard likes rules very much. I like
rules.’
Meanwhile, Leonard had gone to the London School of Eco-
nomics (LSE) to study economics, but after so many years’ seasoning
in the retail trade the degree course disappointed him, lacking as it did
the authentic tang of real business. ‘Fashion retailing is a fast-moving
industry. But at the LSE each group discussion was dominated by left-
wing Trotskyites.’

After one term he had had enough of university. ‘I was not
getting the training in the management skills that I was interested in,
so I decided to leave,’ he said. ‘In retrospect, I am not sure I made the
right choice.’
The vacuum that Godfrey and Geoffrey had left behind at the
Avon Estate was filled in part when Leonard brought his formidable
energy into the business, officially starting in the New Year.
‘There was this empty office that had been Godfrey’s so I said
Leonard could borrow it,’ recalled Bernard – an eminently practical
decision, although perhaps not the most sensitive. But he can be for-
given for overlooking his brother’s finer feelings; there was so much
else afoot.
The new warehouse began operating in the spring of 1974, in
the midst of the oil crisis, when members of the Organisation of Arab
Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) imposed an oil embargo on
the countries – including the United Kingdom and United States –

370 I Rifts

that they perceived to have supported Israel during the Yom Kippur
War. In response the government brought in the three-day week, lim-
iting commercial consumers of electricity to just three, consecutive
days of power. This curfew lasted from 1 January until 7 March, but
Chelsea Girl managed to trade for the full six days out of seven. ‘We
had little gas lights three days a week,’ said Vanessa. ‘It was pretty dark,
even with them, but we were determined to keep the shops open.’
Watching his father in action at the weekly production meet-
ings, Leonard learned far more than he had at the LSE. ‘He was very
figures orientated, very level headed, very organised. So we would
look at for instance skirts and then we would look at the sales and
stock figures of every style and what the season’s commitments were,
because there would be existing orders for the season.’
Bernard had a deep understanding of the numbers necessary
to balance their shops’ stock profile, reaching decisions more or less
instantly. Correctly interpreting the sales patterns was a nuanced art,
borne of his knowledge of the crosscurrents within the stores. For
instance, a declining sales figure did not necessarily prove that a gar-
ment had completed its fashion moment.

You can see the sales figures each week. If you went out with
a thousand and it might start off with a high rate of sales,
and fall away each week, it could be because shop stocks are
reducing and all shops do not have a proper stock level. You
could then think, ‘Well, I’m only selling this number because
I haven’t got the stock.’
So there’s a lot of things to take into account. In ad-
dition you could be selling a particular garment in quantity
because it is a solus – in other words, there’s nothing else like
it – say, it’s the only printed blouse in the shop. But if you
introduce another two or three printed blouses you’re going
to sell less of the first.
So when you are looking at this information it is a
question of presenting it to yourself in a way that helps you
to take the right decision. To understand what the numbers
were really telling you.

Rifts I 371

Controlling the flow of stock into the shops was essential and
much of it would already be in the pipeline, but fresh designs would
come through daily or weekly too, or repeats in styles that were sell-
ing well, and they would need to incorporate these into the range too.
‘You would go through and look at the style of skirts or whatever,’ said
Leonard, ‘and my father would look at the books, and he would say,
“3,000 of that, 2,000 of that, 500 black” and so on.’
The ‘books’ were gigantic hardback, bound ledgers, the near-
est thing that the business possessed to a bible. Devised by Bernard,
they laid out key sales information across wide expanses of paper in
a simple visual form. There would be a photograph or drawing of a
garment at the top of each column, then maybe ten weeks of sales set
out beneath it.
‘Oh, the ledgers were wonderful,’ said Caroline, who would
herself soon become intimately involved in putting together the mer-
chandise that emblazoned their pages. ‘Anything that was bought, the
buyer had their buying sheet and would do a little drawing in the
front. And then they’d have lots of computer readouts, so you’d have
to find a style number and what it sold and what’s left, all in different
colours. The sales were in red.’
Similar styles of garments were grouped side-by-side, organ-
ised by range and subdivided according to type, such as patterned
blouses. This arrangement allowed a direct comparison of the sales
performance of similar garments that were competing against each
other within the stores – offering an eagle’s eye view of what was most
popular from one week to the next, as well as affording a relatively
simple means to forecast an onward pattern of sales or flagging up
a trend that was beginning to peter out. It also ensured that, if stock
of a particular garment was running low and could not be reordered
quickly, it was possible to identify a near equivalent style that could be
put in the stores to satisfy customer demand.

372 I Rifts

*

Life at home continued eventfully. Vanessa moved into Manor House
Drive – and later that year Bernard bought them an idyllic 1920s
house just outside London, surrounded by woodland, where they
spent weekends until in due course it became their family home.
Caroline continued to wrestle with school, and was asked to
leave Millfield a year before she was due to take her O levels. She was
delighted, since this meant that she could go home, and Bernard did
not rebuke her once for being expelled, instead doing his best to set-
tle her at a new school. But she refused to play ball. ‘We used to sit
there in these interviews, him, me and the head, and I was a terror. I’d
be rude and say I didn’t want to go to any of the schools. I wouldn’t
answer questions, just lashing out, and I remember thinking at the
time, “God, I’m being so awful and he’s fine, he’s just going with it.” All
through this he had such patience, because I was very angry – angry
at my life and how things had worked out, I suppose. Obviously he
blamed himself.’
That October Bernard took all three children for an extended
holiday in Israel. ‘I remember packing an awful lot,’ said Caroline, ‘as
teenage girls do, and he took one look at it and said, “What on earth
. . . you can’t take all this!” And of course, being a teenage girl, I said,
“Right then, I’m taking absolutely nothing.” So I had two outfits and
that is what I wore for three weeks.’ It was one of many moments
where she missed having a mother to sort her out. This spat aside,
she remembered it as a wonderful and fascinating holiday, visiting Tel
Aviv, Jerusalem and Eilat, the sleepy seaside town where David and
Ruth had spent a weekend years before.
‘We saw everything, doing Kibbutz, seeing the sights, and we
had this driver who became friends and we ended up going to his
house for dinner, which was a great honour. And my father could be
very relaxed because it was just his children.’

Rifts I 373

Clive recalled going into the desert, seeing cave drawings,
although there would be several similar trips over the years and he
could not be certain that his memories had not merged. Unlike Caro-
line, this was not Clive’s first visit to Israel – he had spent the previous
summer there with a friend – but nevertheless he regarded it as a
critical formative point for the whole family, consolidating Bernard’s
Zionism. It was a commitment forged, Clive believed, as for all in his
father’s generation, ‘Out of this tremendous reflective guilt when it
was discovered what was going on several hundred miles away across
the Channel in Germany. He still feels that.’
There was one unforgettable stop at the Prosthetic Center at
the Tel Hashomer hospital, near Tel Aviv, where they met severely
injured people receiving treatment from the unit that the Lewises had
funded. This came as a revelation to Caroline. ‘That was one of my
first feelings of “This is good”. You know, “This is amazing!”’
Recognising the power of the business as a social force was
one thing. Stronger still was her passion for fashion. As little as she
cared for studying, her business education was another story, and she
recalled a wonderful treat when she was just fifteen, accompanying
designers and buyers on a trip to Paris. ‘I was so excited. We must
have been doing the stores and maybe there was a show or some-
thing.’
Over the summer occasionally she also helped out Vanessa,
who had long left her Perspex crow’s nest and moved into a proper
office, although at that stage she was still buying merchandise for only
a few stores. ‘I was shy,’ said Caroline, ‘and the first thing she said to
me – you know, Vanessa is tough when it comes to the business – she
said to me, “Right, you have to cancel this order.”’
Undaunted, Caroline took to it immediately.

What I loved doing was to get the tickets that tear off – this
was before they were computerised – and sort them out with
the different style numbers and then count them all out and
then put them in a ledger, entering what you’ve sold so you

374 I Rifts

could see what you started with, what you’d sold, in what co-
lour and size and whatever. It was so simple and so complete-
ly correct and easy. I loved it. Such a great way of learning.

She helped out like a good Girl Friday, making coffee, accom-
panying Vanessa to suppliers around Great Portland Street and East-
castle Street, visiting the likes of Richard Caring. ‘It was the best thing
in the world. You’d go in and they had all the ranges there and you’d be
looking at stuff and they’d be saying, “Do you like this, and this, and
this?” and you’d start to learn. You know, the whole thing is not really
your view: it’s not what you think, it’s what’s going to sell.’
Caroline got her wish to remain in London. Thanks to her
spectacularly recalcitrant interview style, she failed to secure a place
at any other boarding school and ended up at a crammer, dividing her
time between Bernard in Manor House Drive and Jenny in central
London, when she was not spending weekends earning pocket mon-
ey, sweeping up at the hairdresser’s around the corner or helping out
at Jenny’s clothes shop. Everything was looking up.

Then Jenny began to feel unwell. ‘I remember her telling me
she was very ill and they wanted her to go into hospital and I said,
“You’ve got to.” And so she went in and had an operation.’
Not long afterwards, Caroline was at home alone in Manor
House Drive when Bernard came home unexpectedly. ‘It was the
middle of the day, I was upstairs, just by the linen cupboard, taking
something out, and I heard him walk very slowly up the stairs and I
thought, “Hmmm.”’
One look told her he was desperately upset. ‘He said, “Jenny is
going to die. She’s got cancer.”’
Bernard supported Jenny throughout the illness, and was by
her bed when she passed away, aged just forty. The loss affected them
all, particularly Caroline, who was re-sitting her exams at the time.
But it also marked the moment when the girl became an adult. ‘It was

Rifts I 375

probably the first time I realised that parents have these weaknesses.
That turned a corner, majorly turned a corner, for me and for my re-
lationship with my father. I grew up a lot.’
It was also the end for Caroline and formal education. ‘Every-
thing was up in the air. So I said – because I was seventeen – I said,
“Right, I will take over her shop.”’
Jenny’s clothes shop could hardly have been more different
from the commercial cool of Chelsea Girl. It stood on a corner of Hol-
land Street, opposite the Elephant and Castle pub, at the fraying edge
of a residential area where millionaires rubbed shoulders with Kens-
ingtonians living in genteel, and not so genteel, poverty. This was long
before anyone thought of calling the second-hand stock it contained
vintage. But Caroline delighted in everything about the business.
‘It was like Coronation Street. You had all the locals and they’d
all be characters. They’d come in and you’d hear their life story, what’s
happened to them that week, and they’d update the storyline. It was
amazing.’ She kept on Jane-Sarah, J.S., another of Jenny’s Saturday
girls, who had also attended a crammer, and the girls ran it together,
fast becoming best friends.
After three years Caroline wanted to do more with the store,
to develop the business, but did not know where to take it. ‘So then
it was suggested that I go and work in the company. It’s what I always
wanted to do, so obviously after three years I was ready.’
J.S. came along too, joining Debbie, David’s daughter, who
had recently taken up a position in the accessories buying depart-
ment. David’s son Julian had also entered the business after grad-
uating from university and spending a year or two in a computer
company. Although in time Debbie would decide to pursue another
path, Caroline, Julian and J.S. were in it for the long haul.

28

Rivals

Caroline’s entrée into the business took her back to her favourite de-
partment, where Miss Mincheo had once rustled up birthday frocks
for her. But this time she was a clerk, under the watch of Lorraine
Harper, the buyer in charge of dresses, coats and outerwear.
Buying continued to be a dynamic role. Eighty per cent of the
merchandise was designed in-house, with much of it made in the East
End, although an increasing percentage of summer dresses hailed
from India, Portugal and Greece. But Caroline’s first role was less than
exotic: clearing out bins of fabric swatches.
On Monday morning they would receive their customers’
verdicts on the latest stock. For Caroline, reading the weekly sales
reports was almost as exciting as listening to Radio 1 count down the
top forty singles chart to reveal the latest number one smash record.
‘Nine a.m. there would be all of the readouts from the whole of the
last week up to the Saturday. I’d have to go to the computer depart-
ment and get them. There’s a basket of paper waiting for you to lay it
out on the ledgers and you can see whether the hits are the hits you
expect, which ones are sinking.’

The figures could deliver surprises. ‘Sometimes you thought,
“What the …?” And sometimes you’d think, “Oh no! God!” And then,
“Shit, what are we going to do?”’
Granulating the numbers uncovered a more detailed picture.
‘The next stage would be to look at another computer readout so
you could see where it’s selling.’ This was over to J.S., who was in the
merchandise side of the business, involved more in numbers than in
fashion.

Rivals I 377

She would go through and look at each store, what sizes were
selling. So you could work out if there was a pattern to it, see
stores that weren’t doing so well, and then you had to think
about why. If it’s doing well in the next town, it’s probably
because it wasn’t stocked properly – they put it somewhere
bad, or didn’t put it out, or didn’t get the delivery or whatever.
All these things you have to know. So many variables
and so it’s what I call, or what my father calls, a job of work,
and it’s such a great way to know a business, how to run it and
get down to it. And it’s all common sense.


Within an hour or two they would have a fair idea of what
had happened, and if a garment undeniably failed to make the grade,
then came the difficult choices – choices that also needed to be made
quickly too. ‘If, say, you’ve bought a whole lot of fabric and you’ve
used half of it to make these dresses and the dresses don’t sell, then
you’re committed. You can’t get out of the other fabric. You’ve got to
think.’
Caroline rapidly gained in confidence, rising to junior buyer,
but she grew increasingly impatient too, often bringing her grievances
to her father. ‘I’d sit there complaining about this, complaining about
that, I want to do that, she said this . . . He must have got so fed up with
me, but he always had time, no matter what. He’d always have time.’
She was not the only Lewis tapping on Bernard’s door. Her
supremely energetic big brother had already beaten a well-worn path
there. From the day he started, Leonard was, remembered a colleague,
‘into everything. He’d have a new idea every day.’ And he took those
ideas straight to Bernard, wanting to action them immediately, or bet-
ter yet, yesterday. ‘I always remember the doors slamming when he
came in, and he’d always be talking,’ said Vanessa. ‘He was very, very
good. Bernard gave him the skirts to do pretty quickly.’
But Geoffrey was not happy and Adele offered an insight into
what lay behind his fears. ‘And then Leonard came along. Let’s say

378 I Rivals

Bernard, call him the boss for the minute, and then his sons – well,
I think everyone was wondering where did their children come in?
Geoffrey was a person who planned things. And possibly in his mind
he saw the business going to the grandchildren. In his mind,’ she em-
phasised, ‘not because it was suggested.’ But one thing is certain: very
soon a great deal of friction crept into Geoffrey’s and, to a lesser ex-
tent, into Godfrey’s increasingly rare interactions with Bernard and
David.

The head office at Chelsea House was finally ready to open in
1975. Each brother designed his own workspace. ‘They had super-
duper offices,’ recalled Bernard. ‘Godfrey’s had a completely white
carpet. Geoffrey’s was more arty – a section had a raised floor.’ But
when the brothers’ departments moved into the new building, nei-
ther Godfrey nor Geoffrey came with them, sticking it out in Princes
Street instead. By contrast, David took up full resident’s rights, having
finally decided he was sufficiently occupied by the family business to
sell his accountancy practice in 1974. It was like a revolving door; as
the elder brother and eldest sons entered, the younger brothers exited.
Once again, neither David nor Bernard asked their brothers why they
did not materialise. ‘No, it wasn’t our style,’ said Bernard. ‘We leave
people alone to get on with it. We weren’t in charge of them.’ In any
case, to ask would have risked confrontation. ‘By that time things
were very difficult. You wanted to run the business and leave things
alone, not stir things up.’
As the distance grew, the brothers’ differences appeared more
pronounced. ‘They wanted to protect their turf,’ said Vanessa. But of
course it was easier for David and Bernard to be less territorial and
more dispassionate; their command of their respective fields was nev-
er in doubt. There was no pique on David’s part, for instance, when
Bernard took over retail property.
‘The important thing in retail property is how much is the

Rivals I 379

shop going to take – probably more important than what you pay for
it,’ he explained. ‘As I was dealing with the merchandise and with the
shops rather than David, my view on a shop’s potential was obviously
better than his, so shop property gradually moved to me. It wasn’t a
formal transfer of responsibility, David still did the property people’s
salary reviews et cetera, but they reported to me operationally.’
Equally important was the fact that, with so many other en-
terprises afoot, and having built a successful accountancy practice,
David had nothing to prove. Whereas decades later Geoffrey wrote to
David, conceding that any criticism had struck him as a personal at-
tack, all the more painfully because he looked up to his eldest brother
as a father figure – even though he also wanted very much to be seen
as his own man.
Regrettably, the contradictions between Bernard’s profound
desire to respect everyone’s independence and the practical needs
of the business became increasingly untenable. This was brought
into focus after Geoffrey became smitten by the dramatic layout of a
Knightsbridge shop for Fiorucci, the upmarket Italian jeans company.

It was all white and the merchandise was hanging on a rail,
like a wall of merchandise, you could get to it from both
sides, with a shelf above it – a bit like a maze in right-angled
patterns. It wasn’t curved and it wasn’t an easy customer flow.
This was okay for high-priced stuff in Knightsbridge
– it was an idiosyncratic and heavily identified presentation
of merchandise, which was great for Fiorucci, all they did
were jeans and a certain type of sweatshirt top. But it just
wasn’t practical for our business, the way our customer shops.
We were general, we sold everything, and we’ve got to make
it easy for the customer. And this was the complete oppo-
site. You couldn’t make a group of merchandise. You couldn’t
put dresses together, skirts together, sweaters together, or do
something different and create a look – team together a dress,
a skirt, blouse and sweater.

380 I Rivals

In other words, Fiorucci’s tricksy layout was an ingenious way
to make a dull, costly product appear interesting and persuade people
to pay more for it. By contrast, Chelsea Girl’s product range was mass
market, varied and inherently playful. Profits depended on getting
customers to buy in quantity, and their shops needed to make that
process easy for customers, by reducing and not introducing labyrin-
thine obstacles to purchase. But Geoffrey was determined to experi-
ment with that style in a Chelsea Girl, so he did. Bernard visited the
shop on the day it opened and found exactly what he had expected:
a succession of convoluted corridors broken up by dividers. ‘It just
wasn’t for our market.’ Later that week he told Geoffrey it was not
really working.
‘I wasn’t going on at him, it was just an observation, and he
flared up. I think what he said was, “Was it busy?” I said, “Yes, it was
the opening day.” And he said, “Well that’s it.” And he walked off. You
couldn’t have a discussion, because his mind was fixed. He wanted to
do what he wanted to do and that’s that. However, he must have taken
notice because we didn’t do any more shops like that.’

At the time, Leonard was shielded from the tensions between
his father and uncles, and he learnt the depth of the conflict only at a
very late stage; however, the issues that Bernard had with his uncles
were plain to him. ‘What he found difficulty with was that they were
illogical, that they would get a feeling for something and then go at
it with gut feelings. My father’s view of business is that he knows that
some new ideas go wrong. What he’s good at is recognising that when
you’ve got something you need to focus on it and not get sidetracked.
He’s very much a process person, and that is marvellous. If you’ve got
something then he’s the first to milk it, work it very hard. He devel-
oped all these different systems and processes for merchandise and
product development.’
Instead, the naturally creative Geoffrey went with his intuition,

Rivals I 381

which can be a roguish god. ‘Now I’m sure Geoffrey considered the
needs of the business,’ said Bernard. ‘But he didn’t just do something
because it was what the business required – it started from what he
wanted to do. The same as Chelsea Girl. That happened because he
wanted to do a boutique, and he did a brilliant one. The Chelsea Girls
were all great. He advanced them and moved them ahead – he didn’t
do the same thing every year, it was creative. But you couldn’t inter-
fere with him. You couldn’t have a discussion.’ With shopfitting, often
Geoffrey did not know what he was going to do until he was standing
in the shop. Bernard summed it up as ‘an artistic approach in a busi-
ness setting’. While this worked well in some aspects of a business, it
could not be effective overall. ‘If he was right by intuition and timing,
that’s great. It doesn’t mean to say you can base a business on that.’

To an outsider’s eye, and with the benefit of hindsight, it seems
inevitable that such a different approach would put him on a collision
course with Bernard and David. Gut feelings are hard to set out in
a way that they could understand. No wonder if, when challenged,
Geoffrey leapt to the defensive, until gradually attack became his de-
fault position.

Godfrey, too, began to strain for greater input into the busi-
ness and wanted to try menswear. The brothers agreed and he left for
a six-week odyssey around Hong Kong to acquire stock. ‘Two solus
menswear shops were opened in Sheffield and Plymouth and sever-
al existing shops were refitted to accommodate the new department,
and it must have been a big disappointment for him when he couldn’t
find a way to make it work for us and closed it after a couple of years.’
Geoffrey and Godfrey’s alienation from their elder brothers can only
have been heightened by witnessing the comparative ease between
David and Bernard. ‘We were partners all our lives, and always got on
well. We weren’t looking for formal agreement of each other’s activi-
ties unless it was something major, but did keep each other informed

382 I Rivals

about what we were doing, thinking and planning. The way we would
tackle a problem, you know, we’d work things out and discuss it and
would frequently come to the same decision independently.’ Not that
they were always on the same wavelength.

In a way I think I was more analytical. Although David was
the accountant, he did have an imaginative mind and a tiny,
mildly reckless streak. And in business I think some of the
things he did were a bit creative. I mean, completely legal, but
surprising, original. I remember the occasional deal that Da-
vid introduced me to, him asking what did I think of it. Once
there was some proposition, an invention to do with paint
that someone had asked John Hillman, a solicitor friend of
David’s, to find an investor for.
So I went through it with John and came back and
said to David, ‘It’s a good idea but there are plenty of good
ideas and very few of them come through to money and this
one needs a lot of development.’ So we didn’t do it. But I don’t
recollect anything that either of us wanted to do that the oth-
er said no to. I think we respected each other’s judgement.

Understandably, Godfrey and Geoffrey felt their views carried
less weight. ‘I guess David always had the last word with Bernard,’
said Adele, ‘and maybe Geoffrey felt that he was the real fly in the
ointment. I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense.’
But it does make sense. By now David had opened an invest-
ments division, Cavendish Asset Management (he chose the name
because Harley Street led into Cavendish Square) to complement the
activities of their bank, CCD. His varied raft of activities included
property development, hotels, investments in equities and other busi-
nesses, such as the Faith shoes chain. But he only entered the compa-
ny full-time in 1975, and all the work he had done prior to this in in-
vestment and property was, said Bernard, ‘a foreign land’ to Geoffrey
and Godfrey. As a result, to them David may well have appeared to be
something of an interloper.

Rivals I 383

If the distance between the brothers had grown by degrees,
their estrangement proved the more intractable because it proceeded
unchallenged. Adele tried to sound the alarm.
‘I called a meeting with Bernard and David in Harley Street. I
was really nervous. And I just said, “I’ve come here because I feel the
family is breaking down and in case you hadn’t noticed I wanted you
to be aware.”’ But her intervention did not have the desired effect. ‘I
didn’t come away feeling satisfied, but feeling that I’ve told them, it’s
off my shoulders. Maybe I’m wrong, and maybe I’m seeing things that
they don’t see, but I’ve made them aware. It was very friendly. I think
they knew anyway.’
It is hard to pinpoint the exact moment that the brothers’ rela-
tionships became irreparable. But the friction between them began to
cascade dysfunction through the company, and board meetings bare-
ly ever took place.
Window dressing became a constant source of strife. ‘You
would think the visual merchandisers would work closely with the
fashion element, the buyers, as they were applying the fashion,’ Ber-
nard remembered. ‘Well, they didn’t. Geoffrey ran them complete-
ly separately, nothing to do with retail.’ As a result the visual display
team spoke neither to the shop managers nor the buyers.
Perhaps the big problems began when Bernard attempted to
join up the thinking, encouraging area controllers to liaise over the
windows. ‘It wasn’t about me taking over. I wanted retail and the buy-
ers and the windows to be more integrated. Talk to each other more.’
Yet they would not, no more than Geoffrey would talk to Bernard.
The problem became ‘a running sore’.

The buyers and managers, nobody could understand why
we were doing what we were doing. You would get the win-
dows being dressed, not reflecting the fashion trend we were
following. There would be a travelling window dresser who

384 I Rivals

would have maybe ten shops, and in each shop there would
be a girl who was trained up to change items in the window.
If new merchandise came in she put it in. But she worked for
the shop – she was shop staff. Whereas the travelling win-
dow dresser would work for Geoffrey’s side of the business.
So who is instructing, who is training whom?

As a result, the girl might get flak from the shop if she did not
display a new style that had just arrived, and flak from the window
dresser if she did. And nobody could say who was right.
Communication with Godfrey and his department proved lit-
tle easier. He and his PA were still in Princes Street, with his knitwear
and blouse buyers and designers in Chelsea House. In their minds,
they were answerable to him alone.
‘Once Godfrey was away,’ remembered Bernard, ‘I think in
Hong Kong, and something cropped up and I asked to see the knit-
wear merchandise records.’ He had to keep on asking. ‘So eventually
somebody brought them to me, obviously highly embarrassed, and
said, “Godfrey wouldn’t like this.”’
‘When I joined, Godfrey and Geoffrey’s departments were
fine,’ said Vanessa. ‘Bernard was very proud of the bags department
and Godfrey was a very good buyer, but as the company got bigger
they seemed to lose interest and did not want to discuss anything.
They resented Bernard and they resented David and I don’t know
why.’
Evolving the business, profiting from the rich information
streaming through it, started to seem impossible. Vanessa only fully
appreciated how sclerotic the situation had become when she had a
runaway success with a garment called a Simon shirt.

They were sort of soft, 1970s jersey shirts with a collar and it
was phenomenal, absolutely phenomenal. I ended up buying
hundreds and hundreds. They just took off. But Godfrey was

Rivals I 385

doing tops and he had his own CMT with a designer called
Mrs Berger. And I said to Bernard, ‘Why on earth aren’t we
doing this?’ – because I didn’t understand all that was go-
ing on. ‘Let me tell Godfrey about it.’ And Bernard said, ‘No,
don’t. Leave it alone, it may cause trouble, he could take it as
a criticism. If we miss it, we miss it.’ I remember being abso-
lutely devastated. It was bad for the business.

With neither the brothers nor their departments on speaking
terms, even the stock in the stores began to look as if it was engaged
in a quarrel. ‘Godfrey was going off and buying knitwear that was
probably all right, but it might not go with the bottoms that we were
doing. It was absolute pot luck what went into the shops.’
Bernard blamed himself. ‘I should have set up a method of
central planning, whereby we all knew what was going on in each de-
partment – whoever was in charge, whether it was me or somebody.
But I didn’t.’
With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that although in the-
ory all four brothers were equal partners, in practice they were less
than equal. Failing to acknowledge this lopsidedness and allow for
it in the structure of the company made the business unmanageable.
Instead, dysfunction was in its bones and Bernard could see no way to
reset. ‘We were three companies. There was what I did, what Geoffrey
did and what Godfrey did. You’d get in the design room, blouses and
skirts and everyone else, instead of them talking to each other, they’re
doing their own thing.’
The situation worried him desperately. ‘The business started
to run down. The products started to slip, the shopfitting, everything
started to slip. Turnover began to decline. Things became virtually
impossible.’ Something had to give.

29

Lewises, separate

By 1976 the brothers had reached stalemate. Because they no longer
met, they could not discuss taking on new shops, so the company
stopped expanding. They could not talk about shopfitting, so they
stopped refreshing the stores.
‘As partners we needed to agree to things and if you’re going
to take a shop and sign a lease you can’t have David and I do it alone.
If David signs the lease or I sign the lease, a little way down the road
Geoffrey could object, “I didn’t agree to that.” You’d get yourself in a
difficult position.’
They cast around for solutions. ‘David and I were both be-
mused as to what to do. We’d got a good company but it was being
seriously damaged.’ Bernard asked Geoffrey if he could come and talk
to him, arranging to visit his home in Old Church Street at seven
o’clock one evening. ‘He turned up at eight. I put it to him – a com-
promise, whereby he and Godfrey could remain partners without
having to work in the business at all. He wasn’t the least bit interest-
ed.’ Neither Bernard nor David ever put this proposition to Godfrey;
they assumed that their younger brothers were a solid team, in the
same way that they were. One wonders what might have happened if
instead Godfrey had been treated as his own man. Perhaps he could
have talked Geoffrey into accepting the offer.

The gathering momentum could lead in only one direction.
‘In 1977 things became very fraught, very legalistic and precise. We
had more formal board meetings to try and improve the mood, but
we had a dictation machine and produced transcripts afterwards, so