bl_flip2

Lewises, separate I 387

that we could have an exact record of what had been discussed and
agreed.’
Somehow the brothers kept their difficulties discreet within
the company. ‘Bernard would obviously talk to me about it,’ remem-
bered Vanessa. ‘He was concerned that Godfrey and Geoffrey would
find a way to cut the business into pieces. I remember just feeling sick
the whole time, worrying, “What’s going to happen?”’
In fact Geoffrey had decided he wanted out and was keen to
create a new business – to ‘own it’, according to Adele. He already
possessed twenty-five per cent of Chelsea Girl, but he convinced him-
self that he should take his share now – before it was taken from him.
Both Geoffrey and Godfrey became so preoccupied, dreaming of
their future, that they lost sight of where their good fortune had come
from in the first place. ‘I don’t think they thought that much about
Bernard and David and what they owed to the fact that Bernard and
David were the bread and butter of the business,’ said Adele. ‘There
was no common sense.’


Obviously it was an egotistical thing. The success all went to
Geoffrey’s head and, you know, all these thoughts that he had
of whether Bernard and David . . . he didn’t really think that
the business was going to go to Bernard and David’s children
and he would be left, because you know what? It wasn’t like
that. They were very equal in everything. Bernard and David
never gave anything other than everything they had to Geof-
frey and Godfrey . . . They were the fairest with everything.
But I don’t think Bernard was emotionally open with Geof-
frey and Godfrey, so things were pretty boom, boom, boom,
and they never really knew each other that well. Not like, say,
my family, where everything comes out.

Geoffrey hired a solicitor, John Hillman, to help negotiate
their exit, a provocative choice since he had worked a great deal with
David. Hillman’s interventions sowed acrimony that only made mat-
ters worse.

388 I Lewises, separate

Adele suffered, watching everything unravel.

Geoffrey wanted to leave the family, break out, do whatever
he wanted, while he was still young and the man of the mo-
ment – and I was very much the good Jewish wife with the
children, and there were some unhappy years for me.
During that time all of this was going on and my
words didn’t count. You know, I’m not silly, I could see where
it was going. When I heard about the split, first of all I just
told him and Godfrey, ‘You’re both mad.’ I was so against it
and they probably were against me for being against it. I said
to them, ‘You have spent all your life building up this busi-
ness and because you can’t do things your way you’re going
to walk away from it?’

There was one moment of doubt. ‘At some point while this was
all going on, Geoffrey came to me and he said, “I think I’m making a
mistake.” And I said, “Yeah. What are you going to do about it?” He
said, “I’m going to try and see if I can change it.” Apparently he did try.’
Whatever belated effort Geoffrey may have made, Bernard
had no recollection of it. In any case, by now there was no way to
reverse the direction of travel. ‘In the end all we wanted was to get a
legal split and come to a settlement, which we achieved by them sell-
ing their shares in the company to us.’
The end came in July 1977. Bernard and David were left with
120 shops and assorted investments. Godfrey and Geoffrey walked
away with sizeable funds. ‘It was better all round,’ said Bernard. ‘We
could get on with what we were doing, they could get on with what
they were doing. It was a pity that things had become so difficult.’ It
would be many years before all four spoke again.
It is interesting to note that, according to the Law Society, in
November 1989 the meddlesome John Hillman was disbarred for
various improprieties, including misappropriating clients’ money,
only to resurface in 2004 as a claimant for ownership of copyrights in
some Jimi Hendrix recordings.

Lewises, separate I 389

David and Bernard assumed that after the split Geoffrey and
Godfrey would form their own company, and originally that was the
plan. ‘They were going to go into business together, opening shops
together, and build them up,’ said Adele. ‘I think Geoffrey did feel he
could start with Godfrey and do it all himself and be proud of what
he’d done in his life.’
Surprisingly, instead they went their separate ways almost im-
mediately. Perhaps they wanted to forget the bitterness of the split.
Certainly, in his second wife Pru, Godfrey had found a gifted woman
who became his natural partner in life and business. Together they set
up a small chain of clothes shops called Clouds before retiring to Fort
Lauderdale in Florida. Meanwhile Geoffrey and Adele launched their
own company, the City Bag Store, securing concessions in numerous
chain stores as well as opening some standalone shops.
Looking back, Bernard did not blame his brothers for wanting
to strike out on their own.

I can see now that what they were doing, although stimu-
lating at the start, had begun to pall. They were not getting
enough personal fulfillment. You can see their point of view.
There was a prosperous business, a national business and
they were equal partners financially, but in the running of it
they weren’t. They did their bit, but the decisions were in fact
taken by me. David was occupied with his accountancy prac-
tice and developing our investment side. And in retrospect I
could well see them thinking, ‘I can take myself off and have
my own business. I’m a successful person, comparatively
wealthy, I can go off and do my own thing.’

But if he sympathised with their decision, neither he nor David
ever fully understood it. Over seven decades as an employer, he had
experienced little drama with staff. ‘Very few people have left the com-
pany,’ he said. ‘To get a better job, yes, but apart from that nobody’s ever

390 I Lewises, separate

left for a clash of personality.’ How much worse to lose his brothers.
Even once back on friendly terms with Geoffrey and Godfrey,
Bernard felt unable to ask either why they wanted to leave. Finally he
mustered the courage to raise the subject with Godfrey’s widow Pru,
four decades after the event, during a holiday in Barbados in February
2015. ‘At dinner, I had to get myself together to ask about the split.
“What was it about?” Pru confirmed it. She said basically they just
wanted to do their own thing and it was daft.’
The break up would remain one of his greatest regrets.

A misunderstanding, a lot of misunderstanding. Poor com-
munication all the way through. Today I think that the man-
agement skills called for with staff and colleagues or even
shareholders are very different from those needed with
brothers who are equal partners, and I, and probably all of
us, fell short in managing the relationship. We just did not
take that side of it seriously enough. It should not have been
beyond us.
I suppose with hindsight it did do them no good ser-
vice, making them equal partners.

Yet that seems too harsh a judgement. Although the part-
nership may have collapsed, Bernard’s primary goal was abundant-
ly achieved: to protect and provide for his mother and his brothers.
‘They had enough money, didn’t need to do anything for the rest of
their lives. They were all right. At the end of it all, we were four broth-
ers who had been business partners for twenty-five years, and had
done some good things together and there had been a time when we
were all pulling together when I was proud of us all.’

30

Motoring

The Lewis family’s fortunes hold up an uncanny mirror to British so-
cial history. In the 1930s they fought valiantly but the slide into pov-
erty was irresistible. The 1940s brought strife, bereavement and graft,
succeeded by the 1950s’ restraint, resolve and recovery. The 1960s siz-
zled with excitement, before tensions coalesced in the 1970s, plunging
the brothers into confusion and unease, while the nation’s economy
staggered under the weight of industrial unrest. But the decade was to
end with a vital new surge in energy.
It began the moment that the lawyers signed off on the split.
Bernard called his retail director, Cyril Kraines, into his office and
told him that Geoffrey and Godfrey had left the company.
Kraines’ eyes brimmed with tears – of joy, and relief. ‘I could
see he was very relieved, he had been with me from almost the begin-
ning and was aware of the conflict and the damage it was doing as he
attempted to deal with the irrational side effects. Also I guess there
were things going on that I was not aware of,’ said Bernard. ‘But he
could now run a cohesive operation.’
Vanessa remembered an overwhelming sense of release. ‘It
was the biggest weight off everyone’s minds.’ Yet the aftermath was
‘very matter of fact’, according to Leonard. ‘Just a matter of who was
going to take over which departments.’ Asked about any further fall-
out from the sudden change in the business, his reply was wry. ‘Well,
we didn’t have a social life at that time. So it did not affect our social
lives.’
It was all hands on deck as they set about reshaping the com-
pany. The most pressing item on the agenda was that the shops had

392 I Motoring

run down and needed pulling into shape in time for the all-important
Christmas season.
Bernard assigned Geoffrey and Godfrey’s departments to Va-
nessa. As she went through the ledgers she soon discovered that there
were sizeable holes to plug. Clearly, once they began preparing to exit
the company, Godfrey and Geoffrey had lost interest in buying goods
for future seasons. Consequently, their departments had virtually no
winter stock in the pipeline for 120 shops.
It sounds hair-raising, but Bernard was thrilled. ‘July 1978, af-
ter they left, we were immediately motoring again,’ he said. ‘That was
it. Total freedom. We weren’t three different companies. It was like a
whole new ball game.’
Up to this point, Chelsea Girl had been largely a follower, an
exploiter of fashion, not a leader. This strategic weakness was borne
out in the sales figures, which peaked and troughed rather alarmingly.
Bernard wanted to introduce a more consistent, planned approach to
merchandise, with a proper design studio and the design and buying
teams working together. In Vanessa, he had the ideal partner to real-
ise this vision and turn the company into a fully integrated, all-sing-
ing, all-dancing, fashion operation.

We’d had designers and we’d had buyers, but that was the
start of having what you might call a co-ordinated set-up,
with a professional fashion person running things. The point
is, none of us were professional fashion people, only Vanessa
is. I was an opportunist. I see an opening and get in. Because
of that, when fashion changed, as it did frequently, periodi-
cally, we were left a bit high and dry until we latched onto the
new thing. So we were more volatile as a fashion company
than we should have been.

Now Chelsea Girl functioned as a single entity, it could drive
purposefully towards one goal, and from then on the design side ‘just

Motoring I 393

grew and grew and grew’. Vanessa, Leonard, Julian and Bernard ran
everything, working very closely. Leonard was in charge of skirts,
trousers and jeans and later handbags, while Julian controlled the
data processing and footwear. ‘We also set up centralised methods of
control and reporting that had been lacking in the past, so that every-
one in the company knew who was buying what, and what was going
on, whoever was doing the buying.’

But that Christmas-shaped hole in the merchandise needed to
be plugged and fast. Within a week of the split, Bernard and Vanessa
were on an aeroplane bound for Hong Kong; the first buying trip that
Bernard had undertaken there since handing over knitwear to God-
frey. It was also Vanessa’s first taste of the Orient.
The couple had already travelled together a great deal. Their
first trip, to Morocco, had been a delight only slightly marred when
Bernard initially balked at heading deep into the desert unaccompa-
nied. While his young companion craved the unknown, he felt he had
too many responsibilities to put himself in the path of any potential
danger. But breaking new ground for the business was another mat-
ter. This adventure in the Far East would be one of the most enjoyable
episodes in Bernard’s career.

Their mission was to source and buy knitwear, blouses and
jeans, and also to find new handbag suppliers. ‘Geoffrey had not done
handbags from Korea and Hong Kong, the main exporting countries,’
explained Leonard. This is not to say that Geoffrey’s department had
underperformed: it excelled at different things, Bernard explained.
‘Geoffrey was very good with the unstructured bag – something we
called the Safari bag, it was big with loops and pouches on the out-
side.’ But he had taken a different approach from his elder brother. ‘I
think Geoffrey worked with agents. He had a very good friend, Don-
ald Assan, who was in the bag business and he liked to work with
him.’ Now, new avenues were opening up, ripe to be explored.

394 I Motoring

On the first leg of the trip they stayed in the Hong Kong Hotel
beside the port, but there was no leisure for sightseeing or swimming.
And with so many shops to stock, they had to gamble, guessing which
factories would be best and placing large orders with unknown sup-
pliers. Yet in another way everything was deliciously simple. There
was nobody to tiptoe around, no fear of encroaching on others’ turf.
For Vanessa, this was a very heaven, combining her three
passions: for travel, fashion and Bernard. ‘We were designing on the
hoof. We could just do it. The freedom was wonderful. We used to go
into the factories and sit amongst the yarns and the bits and pieces,
and sketch things, and then sometimes we used to go out to a restau-
rant called Hugo’s and order wine and have a lovely drink and work
there until midnight. We had such fun.’
After two intense weeks in Hong Kong they flew to Taiwan in
search of a different quality of garment. ‘You could do stuff a bit more
fancy than you could do from Hong Kong – there were more patterns
and more variety,’ said Bernard. ‘I don’t know why. It could be the way
the industry had got itself together, could have been the American
influence, serving a slightly different market. In Hong Kong in those
days you dealt in the Hong Kong dollar, which was tied to sterling. In
Taiwan you dealt in US dollars.’

Then it was back to the airport for the final week of their od-
yssey – a short hop to South Korea in search of knitwear and poly-
urethane (PU) bags. The latter had become extremely important to
the trade, since they offered an affordable alternative to leather, yet
Chelsea Girl had not stocked any until now.

They checked in their luggage, settled into their seats, laid out
the paperwork and reviewed the work so far. They knew what they
had ordered, from where, at what cost. But now they needed to put
these figures in order, so that they could identify outstanding gaps
in their Christmas stock offering that remained to be plugged. In the

Motoring I 395

past Bernard had totted up costs and predicted income for a future
season, as well as the volume of stock, but the existing systems had
become too basic for the size of the business, yielding insufficiently
detailed information about the flow of stocks and sales, and the com-
pany now needed something more sophisticated. So he and Vanessa
decided to get creative.
Three hours later they landed in Seoul armed with a complete-
ly new, improved approach to running merchandise. The end result,
which they would call the projection system, offered a dynamic and
nuanced overview, enabling them to monitor and predict the flows
both of stock and revenue with greater clarity than ever before. One
of its key innovations was to work in units of stock (the number of
cardigans or blouses) as well as money. Because units are a granular
source of information, sales patterns would be far easier to read and
make predictions from than bald cash figures ever could be. Another
useful feature of the system was that it broke down each department
into types of garment or ranges, and subdivided fashion seasons into
months. Of course all retailers had sales figures to work from. What
made this system special was that it allowed Bernard to forecast what
their position should be (if they got things right), month by month,
across several dimensions for each group of merchandise: in terms
of sales, deliveries, stock and what they had on order. The projection
system was to prove so effective that the company continued to use a
variation of it four decades later.
If Vanessa and Bernard were making things up as they went
along, so too were many of the people with whom they dealt. In Seoul
they found a society still reeling from civil war. In 1953 hostilities
between North and South Korea had been suspended in a grudging
truce, but a painful legacy followed in their wake. By the 1960s pros-
titution and related services constituted one quarter of South Korea’s
gross national product (GNP), and from 1965 until 1973 the country

396 I Motoring

sent troops to Vietnam to fight alongside US soldiers, in return for
money and military defences to shore it up against the communist
North – enriching the country fivefold, even as it deepened citizens’
trauma. By the time Vanessa and Bernard visited, South Korea was
at the larval stage of industrialisation, and they would meet count-
less, doughty individuals striving to better their circumstances, just as
Bernard had on his first tour of Hong Kong.
‘Korea now is fantastic,’ he said. ‘But when we went out there
it was only a few years after they were eating grass.’
Vanessa remembered being picked up at the airport by a man
who said, ‘Hello Mr Lewis. Lovely to see you.’ But on the way to their
hotel, the Chosun – then the only hotel in Seoul – they realised they
had not a clue who he was. ‘He wasn’t the person who was supposed
to be meeting us, he had just hijacked us. He must have found out I
suppose, from the lists of who was coming. Anyway, it was all fine
because he ended up being a supplier.’
They were not the only foreigners eager to take a punt on the
opportunities on offer, and they found themselves competing both for
business and for a bed. ‘When we got to the hotel it was full, double-
booked, but we got our room,’ recalled Vanessa.
‘I remember a chap, same as me, he was out there buying,’
said Bernard. ‘He got back to his hotel one evening and his luggage
was out in the corridor. Somebody had bribed the receptionist to give
away his room.’
Against this backdrop of chaos they found great discipline
within the factories. Most were in the grip of conglomerates such as
Samsung, with few sweatshops and everything at a scale quite differ-
ent from Hong Kong. ‘You’d go into a buying room and there would
be ten men, all in suits with their calculators,’ said Vanessa.

But even there it was clear that this was a country still find-
ing its feet. ‘In the suppliers they would be constantly doing

Motoring I 397

their national anthem or whatever and you all had to stand
up. Even in the lift or wherever it was, the national anthem
would be going.’
Out on the streets, the atmosphere was febrile and
quite frightening. ‘There was a curfew and at night, all the
windows, there was a blackout. I remember going on buying
trips and there would be a dummy air raid, and you used to
have to go off the road and you’d miss your plane and that
would be it. But I loved it.’

Bernard and Vanessa returned to London, their files groaning
with orders and their suitcases jammed with samples, trusting that
the goods would come through in time for Chelsea Girl’s rails to be
groaning by Christmas. From then on, they went to the Far East on
buying marathons twice a year. There was plenty of scope for personal
inspiration.


It’s wonderful when a hit’s got a little history behind it. When
Bernard and I first started going after the split, going round
Hong Kong or wherever it was, often we’d design a shirt in-
spired by one of my shirts or something like that . . . We had
to get things going quickly and we didn’t have time to start
designing all the tops from scratch because the business had
been so flat while all this was going on, and the results we
got – some of the shirts and things, we were selling enormous
quantities. These were all missed opportunities from before.
It was fantastic.

Each time they returned to meet suppliers, the improvements
were touching to behold, particularly in South Korea. ‘It was very
good to see the way they pulled themselves out,’ said Bernard, ‘and
got more prosperous and better and better and better.’
After a few years they began travelling to India too. ‘It was a bit
of a shock,’ he recalled, still moved by memories of the poverty they
encountered. ‘People slept in the streets.’ When it came to making

398 I Motoring

deals, half the battle lay in comprehending India’s production system,
which was hand to mouth and very much a cottage industry. ‘They’d
do the sewing at home as well as the workshop. If they’re doing the
hand-print cloth they would make the wooden block, you’d see them
carving the thing out in the yard out back, and then they would put
the cloth on a table and print it out by hand.’ The mentality that pre-
vailed was almost comically unlike his own.

I won’t say they were completely disorganised, but they
couldn’t do things as they say they’re going to do it. If they
say the sample will be ready tomorrow it probably won’t be.
If they say they can get this order ready in sixty days, it prob-
ably won’t be. You had to understand their difficulties, and
allow for it and learn to work with them. If it’s something that
only they can do then it’s worth it. You didn’t allow yourself
to rely on them too much.
I remember one of our people, Abassi was his name,
when I pulled out a calculator he had never seen one before.
It was a Sharp, an electronic calculator, so I gave it to him.

Although he and Vanessa would make this trip again many
times, it was not one that Bernard relished, and he never overcame
his wariness of the unfamiliar cuisine. ‘He got so ill once,’ Vanessa re-
membered, ‘so sick, he was quite delirious. He wanted me to hire him
a jumbo jet to get him home.’ When finally Bernard recovered there
was not so much as a tot of alcohol available in the hotel to console
him.
Like Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea, India too would
grow increasingly sophisticated over the years. ‘You can make any-
thing there now,’ said Bernard. Their business relationships also sea-
soned into friendship. ‘One of our old suppliers has become very, very
successful. He’s got a big company out there and he comes across here,
he’s got an apartment in Grosvenor Square, and we go to Indian char-
ity functions with him.’

Motoring I 399

Bernard and Vanessa’s negotiating tactics quickly settled into
a routine. At each stage of a buying trip they would visit suppliers and
negotiate with them, refining the deal in a series of steps. ‘You don’t
agree any price until the last,’ said their son Sam, who would absorb
his parents’ lessons when he followed them into the business many
years later. ‘You squeeze them as tight as you can, but then you say,
“Okay, we’ve got to see other people. We’ll see you again on Friday at
this time.”’ Then on the final couple of days they would rent a large
room in the hotel. Each supplier would come for their appointed slot
to pitch their best product and best prices, and the orders were placed
after final negotiations.
Once Caroline had graduated from clearing out fabric bins
to become a junior buyer, she would accompany Vanessa on trips to
Hong Kong, China and Korea with a designer in tow. ‘For a young
woman travelling to all these places, working and creating and doing
business and seeing the factories, it’s the most amazing job.’ It was also
an intense one.

You’d have a lot of fun but you’ve got to make it work, there
and then. You’ve got one chance. So you have to be very disci-
plined. I mean, you’re sending out all your designs and mea-
surements weeks and weeks beforehand, telling them what
samples to make. Then you get out there and you’ve got to
make a range of it, but you’ve got to work very quickly to
change things as well. They’re long days and it’s full on, going
around the factories. And then you’ve got the whole thing
with the suppliers, they invite you to their house for dinner
and some of them became friends.
I used to go to Delhi and that was an amazing place
to work from. In India they can make things really quick-
ly, they do the most intricate beading work in twenty-four
hours. But you might have three factories making the same
dress and they’d all interpret it a little differently. You’d like
one and then you’d have to think, is it the right factory? Can
I work with these people? Are they going to deliver on time?

400 I Motoring

Exacting though it was, Caroline adored being able to focus so
closely on a task. ‘You were just doing that range, away from the prob-
lems of the office. Vanessa was just very good at it all. She is a gutsy
lady, but also very methodical: she could go through all the muck and
realise what was going to be good and, if not, change it and be tough.’
Experimentation was still built into every buy. When Caroline
started working for the coat and dress department, she was deputised
to be their trend radar, often spending three days a week scouting
new styles in wholesalers around Great Portland Street and Eastcastle
Street. ‘I would buy a small quantity and do a little sort of caption
around it – new direction or whatever. Those were our trials, and
you can get a very quick reaction to them. Then you knew where you
were. Like, this is going to be big.’
As she got into the hang of introducing newer designs and
themes, she learned how to stir them into the broader fashion mix
and prolong the life cycle of each trend by adapting them through
succeeding seasons. ‘Say, we’ve got to do next spring in Hong Kong,
you’ll take bits from the new style or you’ll tweak it a bit, because you
can’t do the same thing. And then you’ll make it into a summer dress.
Vanessa is very good at that.’
Just as the market stalls once proved a good university for
Bernard, so Chelsea Girl was providing the next generation of the
Lewis family with a very handsome education indeed.

31

Flying

Bernard may not have had a jumbo jet to fetch him when he fell ill
during that early trip to India, but by now he did have one aeroplane
at his disposal. Initially it was acquired largely as a toy after David
decided to take up flying in the early 1970s. ‘He asked me if I minded
the plane being owned by the company. It was a modest four-seater
Piper Aztec with two propeller engines.’ But the family soon put the
toy to work.

In 1973, when Bernard was planning the warehouse at Chel-
sea House, he flew out to Basel in north-west Switzerland for a re-
search trip with Leonard and two management consultants. As the
pilot began their descent, both engines stopped. ‘We glided down
with no power for a minute or two,’ he remembered, ‘wondering if we
would safely land.’ The fuel pipes had frozen in the icy atmosphere,
but as they descended to warmer air the pipes thawed, the fuel came
through and the airstream must have turned the propellers, because
the engines started again. ‘I don’t think the two consultants who were
sitting behind us knew what was going on, but Leonard and I did, and
I was impressed with how cool and calm he was.’

Neither Bernard nor Leonard let this terrifying experience
deter them from flying. Caroline described how the family would jet
around the country together on most Saturdays. ‘If you were going
up to Liverpool or Scotland or wherever, you could get two cities or
towns done in a day. I got to the stage where I could recognise the
land below.’ The trips offered cherished moments of peace with her
father. ‘He would talk, he’d want my perspective on fashion, what I
thought about this, that and the other.’

402 I Flying

Despite his thwarted dream of becoming an RAF pilot, Ber-
nard never bothered to learn himself and took over the controls on
just one occasion, when out flying with David. ‘We came across these
lovely clouds, bundles of them to weave in and out of.’ But he was not
tempted to try again. For him, flying had lost its sporting magic. ‘Our
plane is not fun. It’s all electronics, avionics, navigation, checking this
and that. I mean, if we were flying together, David would have to get
there at least half an hour before me, deal with air traffic control and
meteorology, check the plane. It was not enough to just check the in-
struments. He had to go round the petrol tank and make sure that
it’s not airlocked. It would be nice if you had somebody else to do
it and you could just ease yourself into the pilot seat and say, let me
take over. But they don’t do that. And anyway, it’s mainly autopilot.’
David, on the other hand, remained a committed aviator, continuing
to fly into his mid-eighties. In 2010 he would display his affection
for the RAF when he became one of the largest private donors to the
memorial erected in London to commemorate the wartime service of
Bomber Command.

After the Basel mishap, the Lewises upgraded their plane and
would do so again several times over, acquiring a succession of larger
business jets, as the family’s businesses continued their steady upward
climb.

*
Asked to identify exactly what her company responsibilities comprised
at this time, Vanessa had to think very hard. The couple worked hand-
in-glove, doing almost everything together. ‘It was all joined up and a
very exciting time.’ Bernard was happy to entrust hard talk to her, as
she found out when a significant order with a Korean supplier turned
sour. It had been placed in US dollars as was customary, when the
dollar exchange rate suddenly took a dramatic turn against sterling.
Overnight, what had been a good deal for Chelsea Girl became very

Flying I 403

expensive, throwing out all the calculations that Vanessa and Bernard
had made when signing off on the order. Stick to its terms and either
they would lose some of their profit or they would be forced to sell the
garments at a higher price, limiting potential sales – neither of which
was a particularly palatable option.

Normally one would just say that was that but Bernard said,
‘No, you’ve got to get out to Korea and see them face to face
and see what you can do.’ And I did get a better price. That
taught me a big lesson. It is never just about the one deal. A
lot of the talk that goes with it – that is how we build our rela-
tionship with a supplier who might be valuable. He would al-
ways discuss more business and perhaps place an additional
order, to show that we were worth looking after. That’s what
he was so good at.

It must have been after this debacle that David arranged
for the business to buy currencies forward when import deals were
agreed, to cover against any exchange rate fluctuations and protect
their garments’ selling price.

In the meantime Leonard was ripening into a classic entre-
preneur, fearless, feisty, seething with energy and ambition. Bernard
once estimated that they spent half a day each week discussing com-
pletely new propositions. Some proved to be gold. ‘We were a good
team,’ he said. For example, in 1977 Leonard argued it was high time
that Chelsea Girl launched its own jeans department and with Ber-
nard and Vanessa’s blessing, he recruited a designer and conceived
two new brands, CG American and 77s.

Then he booked a ticket to Hong Kong for his first buying trip,
entirely alone. No sooner had he checked into the Mandarin Hotel
than he hit the phone. ‘But nobody answered my calls. Everybody was
out. I didn’t know there was a typhoon expected!’

He was not flying entirely blind, however, having booked

404 I Flying

appointments with manufacturers that the company used on other
ranges, all of whom were eager to deepen their bond with the Lewises.
After sitting out the storm, he did the rounds, admiring the skyscrap-
ers that were springing up all around as he criss-crossed the island, a
vivid illustration in glass, concrete and steel of the vertiginous rise in
Hong Kong’s fortunes.

It was an auspicious start, although it took a while to arrive at
the optimal design for the jeans, Caroline explained. ‘It’s so difficult,
especially with women and all their different shapes. We take a lot of
time, breaking it down and getting the right fit.’ But once they cracked
it, the small range of jeans soon grew into a dedicated department
within every branch, each with their own nest of fitting rooms. This
marked the first but far from the last of Leonard’s brilliant ideas.

In an interview with the Drapers Record Bernard described
the end of the 1970s and the early 1980s as a time of growth, greater
organisation and ‘learning to use the computer’. The pace was fierce as
they set about modernising the group. ‘You could see we were moving
ahead again,’ said Vanessa. ‘There seemed to be openings the whole
time.’

Bernard never lost sight of the fact that Chelsea Girl’s con-
tinued success was by no means inevitable. ‘Business doesn’t just roll
on, you have to drive it on.’ Opening new shops was only part of it.
Being creative, unearthing fresh retail opportunities latent within the
fashion cycle, mattered just as much. One area in which it was vital to
keep nimble was the CMT department.

‘Cloth can sometimes get surplus to what’s required. So you
want to clear the cloth,’ he said. ‘Either you can drop it out to some-
body else at a fraction of what it cost you, or you can give customers
what they want, which is a reasonably stylish garment at a very good
price. Mark the cloth down a bit and make something at a slightly
lower mark-up.’ This was what they termed value product, and they
aimed to manufacture it at a time of year when factories were less
busy and would accept a lower make price.

Flying I 405

The rhythms of the supply chain offered other opportunities.
‘In a similar vein, for instance, coats normally don’t sell that well after
Christmas, but if you have a killer price you can sell some. The coat
manufacturers have to deliver their regular stuff by mid-November.
There’s a saying in the coat-making business that it shuts down on
Lord Mayor’s Day [the second Saturday in November]. So then they
have empty factories, and at the end of the season you can sometimes
do a good deal on the cloth and the making price. It’s not a massive
business, but it’s there to do and you’ve got to do what you can.’

Increasingly, the Bernard and Vanessa double-act was becom-
ing a trio with Leonard. Together the three travelled to America to
glimpse the future of retail in the mid-West and beyond. ‘We went
around all the shopping malls,’ she remembered, ‘and I thought, “It
will never happen.”’ But when shopping centres duly began nibbling
away at the trade of high streets across the United Kingdom, there
was no question of Chelsea Girl ignoring them. ‘We moved into them
because they were available. The competition was going in and we’d
go in. It was a way of getting better stores.’ And these bigger shops
presented an opportunity to offer a broader range of stock to greater
numbers of customers, who were drawn to the shopping centres from
far and wide.

When Julian moved on from retail to join the investments
wing led by his father David, it seemed only natural that Leonard
should take over the footwear department. Keen to develop the de-
partment, he recruited a footwear professional, a man in his forties
– not the likeliest candidate to cater for teenaged females’ feet, you
might think. But it was a logical move. ‘The footwear business in
those days was run mainly by men, business people as opposed to
fashion people,’ explained Bernard, ‘and he had been in the industry
all his life, working for chains.’

Leonard’s new recruit spent a period in due diligence, observ-
ing how the department operated – ‘tightly, the way we ran fashion’, as

406 I Flying

Bernard put it – then reported his findings to Leonard. After digest-
ing them Leonard went to his father with a bold proposal to double
their stockholding in footwear in order to maximise every sale.

Initially, Bernard was a bit sceptical. What if they bulk bought
the wrong items and got stuck with large amounts of stock? But Leon-
ard trusted his man, so they agreed to give the plan a go. The exper-
iment duly paid off and from then on footwear began to take in a lot
more money. Henceforth every store had its dedicated shoe depart-
ment.

After graduating, Clive continued his law training, qualifying
as a barrister before deciding to join the business to work with David.
Initially he shadowed him for twelve months, working on tax, invest-
ments, legal matters and taking day-to-day responsibility for a new
venture in commercial shipping – but in essence, he was sitting with
David, travelling with him, and becoming involved in everything that
his uncle was doing.

David had built up an impressive range of investments across
a host of business areas. Clive saw first-hand how much pleasure his
uncle derived from this work. ‘David liked the idea: the discussions,
the grand thinking.’ But the Lewis style remained anything but grand.
‘In those days,’ said Clive, ‘David, Bernard, Leonard, Julian and I just
had lunch together every week or so. An observer would probably
have been baffled at how topics could switch between business and
family and from minute detail to broad brush plans. It was casual.
It would be too grand to say they were board meetings – there was
hardly any formality, and there weren’t proper meetings for years and
years. Really, Bernard and David were having lunch to keep each oth-
er informed and we went along because we were there. But, of course,
we listened, talked and learned.’

This freeform approach was typical of how they did business.

Flying I 407

‘We weren’t looking for formal agreement of each other’s activities
unless it was something major,’ explained Bernard, ‘but did keep each
other informed about what we were doing, thinking and planning,
and we consulted each other. We had quite a lot of informal one-to-
one chats and both kept each other in the loop.’

Shadowing his uncle brought Clive into more frequent con-
tact with his father too. ‘I used to go and talk to him a lot. About the
company and about how I should be working with David and that
kind of thing. How does David work, how does he function.’

Satisfying and successful as David’s ventures were, and very
pleasing to Bernard, they did not stir his heart. ‘No, no, I didn’t get a
personal charge out of it, not like the retail. It was wonderful, but it
was David’s project. I wasn’t building it.’

This is not to say that Bernard was uninterested in that side of
the business.

In our early days, David and I were both very much aware
of the volatility of fashion retailing. We just didn’t trust it, so
many small chains had come and gone, and we were deter-
mined to get money safely invested elsewhere. It was great
when we started the other projects, and I was not only inter-
ested but also involved in all of them. Now we were not only
shopkeepers but business people, able to do deals involving
property, hotels, invest in the stock market etc.
My project was to build a retail business and make
money to pass on to David to build an investment business,
which would be more stable and demand less day-to-day at-
tention than fashion retailing. As we got bigger each individ-
ual deal became less important to the whole and needed less
joint scrutiny and therefore less involvement from me, but all
deals were always discussed and agreed. David also became
less involved in the retail; he stopped visiting the shops and
was not always aware of a new opening. We evolved from one
business into two separate but linked businesses, but we were
both (and I still am) very interested in both sectors and I am
sure that David was still interested in our retail business.

408 I Flying

What is interesting is that although I don’t run the
fashion business any more, I still feel emotionally involved
and in a way responsible for it. I am very proud of what we
have achieved with creating and building what we call the
investment side, although it is much more than that today; it
is in fact a group of several different businesses, but probably
because I didn’t create it, I am able to be a little bit more de-
tached.

The fluid manner in which they operated is illustrated by an-
other research trip that Leonard took to the west coast. He was scout-
ing retail ideas when he bumped into an old school friend and the
friend introduced him to an American property developer, who was
hoping to build some office blocks. Leonard called Bernard, who also
happened to be in the States at the time, and he met the man and
agreed with Leonard that the proposition seemed worth following up.
So both Bernard and David flew out again, to agree a deal that kicked
off the Lewis Trust’s US property division, which in years to come
would expand from commercial property into hotels, including what
was then the Ritz-Carlton in Palm Beach.

As the business powered ahead, the pace of growth never felt
overwhelming, said Bernard. Once all departments were performing
as he wanted, he continued reshaping the company, pulling back from
the merchandise and promoting senior staff so the business could
function independently of him. ‘I needed to delegate a fair amount
and get people to use their initiative, we would never have got things
done otherwise.’

Above all, he wanted to avoid a corporate structure and
maintain an entrepreneurial spirit. ‘I thought of Chelsea Girl as four
separate and linked companies – merchandise, shops, finance, and
warehouse and transport, each run with their own ethos.’ The life-
blood of the business was merchandise and eventually four buying

Flying I 409

directors ran it, each controlling a group of departments. Vanessa was
in charge of tops, and then there were Lorraine Harper, Nella Pearce
and Beverley Williams.

I think they became some of the best in the business. All were
promoted from within and had been with me on buying trips.
Each ran their own semi-autonomous company with
a vertical set-up: their own designers, production managers,
and they did their own cloth buying. They selected their own
staff, fixed their salaries and decided what merchandise to
import, manufacture or buy in. It was a quick-moving opera-
tion that aimed for performance and accountability, with job
satisfaction.
We tried to see that nobody had too much to do so
we could be hands-on with every garment. Operationally, we
wanted to be as small and nimble as we could be, small teams
with minimal administration, backed up by the resources of
a large company.
We had to make sure that we were always with our
core market. As the fashion changes it is easy to stray and
lose sight of where our money is. I wanted them to have time
to visit our shops, the competition, suppliers and the market
generally, so that they really could have ownership of what
they were doing and be people I could talk to and be able to
help me assess our performance and decide our direction.

These handovers were far more considered than when he had
devolved departments to his younger brothers, and took place grad-
ually over a period of up to a year, in gentle transfusions not just of
executive power but also his mindset.

Fashion product people are not always natural managers:
they are creative, their interest is to create fashion, they are in
it because they like doing it. That is their skill, and if I want
them to take on management responsibilities in addition I
know I have to stay in touch and provide some guidance and

410 I Flying

support – informal opportunities for relaxed discussion to
encourage them to share ideas and problems and exchange
views with me, if possible before they start a project. This is
what I believe leading from the front means. You share re-
sponsibility but you don’t lose it. I wanted to set up the com-
pany so that it could run without me. Then my job was to
provide the leadership and ideas needed to deliver that extra
bit of performance, identify problems, think of solutions and
see them through.

Caroline described how her father steered the business with a
gentle but unerring touch:

He would listen to what the buyers were saying about what
would work, what the top styles were for that season or that
buy – he couldn’t say whether they were going to work or
not, but if he trusted his buyer that is what he would go with.
Then he would look through the figures, find the weaknesses
and reshape the ranges and get to where it should be. So, he
could change the balance of the order. Or look at it a different
way or say, ‘Could we do it that way and think outside the
box?’ That is what he’s good at.

I picture Bernard at head office rather like a plate spinner in a
circus, calmly, restlessly roaming around, ensuring that every element
was moving at optimal speed, quick to spot if things were about to
wobble. But he preferred another, more purposeful metaphor.

It was like driving a coach and horses, about eight thorough-
bred horses, and you’re sitting there urging and guiding them
along with eight reins in your hands, keeping it on the right
track with each of the horses requiring individual attention.
It’s a question of leading the teams, which is how we thought
of ourselves, the buyers, the designers, the retail. A lot of
them were good creative people and needed to be encour-
aged and respected.

Flying I 411

We have tried other set-ups. Later on Leonard hived
off the development from the buying departments into a
separate self-contained unit, hoping that it would be more
inspirational, but found that it did not work as well for us as
being integrated into the buying process. So after a while we
abandoned the experiment and reverted to our normal sys-
tems which were smoother in operation and more practical.
What we were about was fashion, speed and price.

*

In 1980 they received an approach from Great Universal Stores, the
legendary company set up by Sir Isaac Wolfson, who had now entered
his fourth decade as chairman. ‘Their proposition was for us to sell
GUS our company and for us to run all their retail groups – several
hundred shops in different trades.’ This was quite a fillip for Bernard,
who had long admired Wolfson. But after studying the list of GUS’s
retail properties, Bernard decided that he would prefer to concen-
trate on building his own business. Independence and control were of
greater importance to him than scale, although he admitted that he
was tempted.

Looking back on his career from the vantage of seven indus-
trious decades, Bernard would wonder occasionally if a more varied
business life might have been more engaging, conceding that often
his day-to-day work could be a drudge, but by the time Isaac Wolfson
came knocking it had long been clear to him that growing the busi-
ness, enhancing its profits, would reap increasing economies of scale
– compelling reasons to stick with what he knew. ‘We could get better
shops, do better property deals, and attract the best people to work
with us. The snowball effect.’ At no point would he have been willing
to relinquish hands-on control, the formula that had brought him so
much success. All the same, he would not have felt so comfortable
turning down the offer from GUS without the sense of security and
balance provided by the investment business.

412 I Flying

I did miss, to some extent, the stimulation that comes from
totally new projects and situations and working with new
people. I knew that I was not fully stretching myself, but the
grand project was being achieved.
What I did find interesting was the creative side, un-
derstanding your market. Putting the right people into the
right position within the company and helping their devel-
opment, knowing who your customer is and matching the
merchandise and retail environment to them, and spotting
opportunities – identifying what to change and working out
how to do it, then getting it done. But opening a new and
profitable shop was always the best.

*

That same year David and Bernard’s devotion to Israel received its
greatest test yet, when Gideon Patt, the country’s Minister of Tourism,
paid them a visit in Chelsea House. Patt wanted to talk about Eilat.
Although an ancient place, named in the Old Testament, with a ven-
erable history of copper mining and trade, by the late twentieth cen-
tury this southern fishing port had only a couple of small old hotels
and precious little in the way of immediate cultural appeal. Despite
concerted efforts to promote it as a holiday destination, the tourist in-
dustry was embryonic compared with other hotspots around Europe.
‘Nothing was going on there, it was what could be called a one-horse
town,’ said Bernard. ‘The idea was “How can we get this going?”’

Intrigued by Patt’s pitch, the brothers flew to Jerusalem, where
they were taken to see Teddy Kollek, the city’s renowned and ex-
tremely persuasive mayor. Kollek’s fingerprints can be traced all over
the major phases of Israel’s emergence as an independent state, in-
cluding a stint as director-general of the office of David Ben-Gurion,
the country’s first Prime Minister and, for many, its founding father.
Kollek’s aptitude for raising money from private individuals for civ-
ic projects had earned him the title of ‘greatest builder of Jerusalem
since Herod’.

Flying I 413

Kollek extolled the opportunity that lay before the brothers to
play their own part in transforming the country into a modern nation
with an economy to match. Afterwards they travelled to Eilat with the
officials. It was still the lovely spot that the brothers remembered from
their respective holidays in the area, with crystalline blue seas above
and fabulous coral reefs beyond the shore, where one could occasion-
ally glimpse a friendly passing dolphin. Even so, with no precedents
for large-scale tourism in the region, and no established operators
funnelling visitors in that direction, investing in Eilat fell a consid-
erable distance short of a safe bet. But the proposition appealed to
David and Bernard’s pioneering, patriotic spirits and Israel’s Tourist
Ministry backed the scheme, willing to offer a subsidy for each bed-
room they put up. ‘So we built a hotel.’

In July 1984, after four years of planning led largely by David,
King Solomon’s Palace threw open its gates to offer 200 beautifully
appointed rooms overlooking Eilat’s marina.

‘This is my Zionism,’ said David at the opening ceremony. ‘I
know and believe that the State of Israel needs to stand on its own two
feet and this is one of the ways it can do that.’

The first batch of intrepid holidaymakers must have enjoyed
themselves because bookings grew and demand soon outstripped
supply, leading to the next project in Eilat. Steadily David built up a
group of hotels across the country that the family called Isrotel.

Both brothers shunned publicity in Britain, but in Israel Da-
vid did not try to minimise his profile, since it might help him to in-
fluence public opinion if the business needed it, and he became well
known as a socks-and-sandals-wearing entrepreneur and philanthro-
pist (a sartorial bent that was to the occasional chagrin of his chil-
dren). Bernard agreed that his brother was a little bit of a character,
but one with enormous determination.

For instance, while we were building our first hotel, maybe
the second, we couldn’t get our Italian bathrooms through
because of a dock strike. David took a half-page advertise-

414 I Flying

ment in the main newspaper saying that although Israel is
desperately trying to get itself accepted commercially, this
strike is causing serious damage, both economically and to
its reputation. I could not say that David’s actions hastened
the ending of the strike, but he did get his bathrooms.

By 2018 Isrotel comprised seventeen spas and hotels across
Israel, helping to turn Eilat, Haifa, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem into luxury
destinations for travellers from all over the world.

‘Now Eilat,’ said Bernard, ‘David really made it a first-class re-
sort. David is famous in Eilat.’ The port became the crown jewel of
Israel’s tourism industry, according to the Daily Telegraph, and Caro-
line recalled her shock when she visited again for the first time since
travelling to that sleepy, one-horse town with her father and broth-
ers, years earlier. ‘I remember going there thinking, “Oh my goodness
gracious! How did that happen?”’

So remarkable was the transformation that Eilat’s residents
began talk of life in the town as falling into two distinct historical pe-
riods: ‘Before David Lewis’ and ‘After David Lewis’. Thanks to this and
to his charitable efforts, in 1995 the Queen awarded David the CBE.
In 2001 he was made an honorary Israeli citizen, an accolade only
surpassed in 2009, when Israel’s President Shimon Peres inaugurated
Eilat’s newest road, the David Lewis Promenade.

But although David liked his yacht and plane, he never lost
his modesty, happily flying on budget airlines and buying his clothes
from any local high street shop. Far more satisfying to him was the
influence that he could bring to bear. ‘He enjoyed his public speak-
ing, his reputation and contacts in Israel and also with what could be
called Jewish community leaders in the UK, where he was well known
and his opinions were valued,’ said Bernard. In 2010, at an event held
in David’s honour in London, the Israeli ambassador summed up his
achievements: ‘David revolutionised Israeli tourism. Before him, the
Red Sea was uncharted territory.’

32

Career girls

On marched the 1980s, as the imperious forces of the free market that
had been unleashed by the Conservative government transformed
Britain’s economy. The three-day week became a fast-fading mem-
ory amid the rise of stock market sell-offs, gleaming new shopping
centres, and diamanté-studded soap operas like Dynasty and Dal-
las, which jostled aside bleaker thoughts of striking miners and the
lengthening dole queues outside job centres of those unfortunates
who had been left behind.
As the culture changed, a new fashion stereotype rose up to
meet it: the career girl in her sky-scraping stiletto heels. In her sharply
tailored suit jacket, with foam-stuffed shoulder pads thick enough to
muffle the blow when she crashed into the glass ceiling, the cover girl
presented a figure as ambivalent as she was aspirational, reflecting the
shifting mood not just in fashion but in femininity. Women’s uneasy
social status was embodied by the new global icons of empowered
femininity, American pop star Madonna and the United Kingdom’s
Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, figures who were as reviled as
they were adored.
At home the balance shifted for Bernard and Vanessa, after
she converted to Judaism and they married in 1981. Their son Sam
was born in 1984, followed by Jake in 1986.
Fatherhood would be more relaxed for Bernard the second
time around. He had the privilege of witnessing both boys’ births, and
they went on to enjoy a more conventional family life together. ‘With
Leonard, Clive and Caroline, Lorna unfortunately was frequently not

416 I Career girls

there, so it was often just me. Now with Sam and Jake, with Vanessa,
it’s a straightforward, normal family. There’s a mother there. So the
relationship with Sam and Jake is a little bit different.’
Motherhood did not cause Vanessa to break her profession-
al stride. If anything, their boys saw her work more intensively than
their father. ‘I remember the newspaper with dad,’ said Jake. ‘Mum
used to come home with a big folder of all these different cut out fab-
rics.’
She continued to drive Chelsea Girl’s creativity and design,
roaming the world in search of stock and inspiration, often with the
children in tow, or faxing home daily letters if they had to stay behind
for school. ‘We were doing a lot of travelling,’ she said. ‘I remember
going to Portugal with Sam when he was in his little trolley, one of
those walkers, I would have been buying T-shirts. I remember going
to Tokyo to do the shops, and to Korea and to Hong Kong.’ Sam re-
called accompanying her to Delhi and Agra with her team, finding
time for a pit stop at the Taj Mahal between factory visits.
Sam and Jake remembered Bernard as often busy, like their
mother, but there was plenty of fun too. They watched The Simpsons
together of an evening, went out to restaurants for special Friday
night dinners, and Bernard would memorise jokes from the news-
paper. ‘That was his banter,’ said Jake. ‘A man walks into a pet shop
and asked if you’ve got any dogs going cheap. No sir, birds go cheep,
dogs go woof. Stupid stuff like that, but it just tickled me.’ Bernard’s
speciality, as with his first brood, was confecting magnificent, terrify-
ing tales, not just for bedtime but to entertain them over supper or on
holiday. ‘He was very, very good, he would captivate us,’ said Sam. The
most memorable, which must have been retold dozens of times, in-
volved a trip to McDonald’s, where occasionally he would take them
for a treat in real life. But in the story things went horribly wrong.
‘Jake and I both got lost and somehow we ended up in the kitchen and

Career girls I 417

the chef saw us and turned us into meat for burgers. I can’t remember
the end of it, but I think what happened was just as Dad was about to
eat his burger he saw a bit of our clothing or something and realised
it was us in the burger so he went back into the kitchen and put us
reverse into the machine to get us out again. There were lots of stories
like that.’ (Bernard noted that the story he told was not in fact about
his boys, just two brothers, but their imagination filled in the rest.)
Jake and Sam could be a little disconcerted that Bernard was
an older father, particularly once they realised that he was in his
sixties, but it was the number that concerned them more than the
living reality, since he was always very active, mucking about with
them in the garden, taking them off to the woods with their pet dogs.
They would watch him stride purposefully around the streets of Bea-
consfield along a set and unvarying route, a personal cassette player
plugged into his ears, pumping out marching music that his son-in-
law had remixed to run at exactly the required tempo, never noticing
as Vanessa drove past, taking the boys to school. On warm days, dis-
liking the sensation of being sticky, he would transfer his allegiances
to the local Sainsbury’s supermarket, and do laps around its air-con-
ditioned aisles instead.
‘And to this day it’s absolutely phenomenal to see, he’s a true
champion,’ said Jake. ‘You’ll go downstairs in the morning and he’s
lifting weights, he’s already been for a swim – you know, at ninety-one
years old.’
Self-discipline characterised everything Bernard did. He was
never heard to use language stronger than ‘Bloody hell!’, although if
the boys were squabbling during a long car journey, he might swat
them with his newspaper. ‘That’s when we knew we had really pissed
him off.’

Each weekend of their childhood involved a trip or three to the
shops, with the promised reward of a video to take home afterwards

418 I Career girls

from Blockbuster. True to form, Bernard would always be ‘moving
rails around and doing this, that and the other’, while Vanessa would
look at clothes. Meanwhile Jake and Sam would hide under the rails
and run around, getting into trouble. ‘On one occasion we got lost in
Slough shopping centre and we were bawling our eyes out and then
on the tannoy they had to get Mr and Mrs Lewis.’
There was a period when Bernard would drive them to a syn-
agogue school on Sunday mornings, but Sam remembered nothing
about this apart from the journey there and back, listening to the
music and comic poetry on John Peel’s Radio 4 show, Home Truths.
‘Sometimes there’d be really old music and Dad would be like, “This
was the golden era.”’ They soon stopped attending, however, because
Hebrew held no more interest for them than it had for Bernard.
The paterfamilias role in the Lewis clan belonged to David,
who hosted Passover dinners at his home in north London. ‘David
loved having people round and entertaining,’ remembered Jake. ‘He
was a very big character. I always saw my dad as a very serious charac-
ter and David as the more fun extension of him, but there’s something
about Dad which has kept him young in his head.’ He agreed with
his mother’s view that although Bernard claimed to be incapable of
making small talk, in reality he could – he just did not count it as real
conversation, therefore he did not notice when it had happened.

Bernard seldom dwelled on his impoverished childhood, and
the boys learned far more about it from other members of the family.
On the other hand he did impress the boys with his stories of start-
ing the business and running market stalls on his own as a child. He
also taught them to respect money, switching off the lights in emp-
ty rooms. Permitting himself to use a fresh razorblade each day was
considered an indulgence. But perhaps his most lavish step was when
finally he relented and hired a driver to take him to work and round
the shops. ‘He said that’s probably the luxury he values most, but it’s

Career girls I 419

not quite fair because he works in the back of the car,’ Sam pointed
out. ‘If he was driving he couldn’t be working.’ Indeed, the cars would
get through 100,000 miles in two or three years, thanks to all those
store visits.
There was little chance that the boys would be spoilt. ‘My
friends would get branded clothing and we wouldn’t. I wanted for
years a pair of Timberland boots but I used to get the Marks & Spen-
cer equivalent. Dad used to compare every bit of branded clothing
that we could possibly want with Marks & Spencer and say it’s exactly
the same quality but it’s a better price and it’s just as fashionable. Mum
used to say, “No it isn’t.” But she’d agree with Dad.’
Increasingly the fascination with the business spilled over to
Sam, who would eagerly eavesdrop on his parents, enraptured by their
discussions of the latest twists and turns in the rag trade. ‘We were
talking about it at dinner every Friday night when we went out, and
in the evenings after school. There were a huge amount of snippets of
information about the company that I picked up along the way and
learned just by having those conversations.’ By contrast, Jake came to
regard the business less as an object of interest than a rival. ‘There’s a
feeling that there’s a sick child and it is the company and I felt like I
was competing against it. I just wished we could have talked about –
well, God knows what normal families talk about, but I’m sure it isn’t
suppliers of fabrics.’

*

As the different departments grew, Chelsea Girl manufactured an
even greater proportion of stock. Aside from knitwear, the only ele-
ment they did not design in-house was accessories. As a result, main-
taining a steady flow of design talent became a priority.

420 I Career girls

‘Vanessa is understanding when design people move on so
that they can get wider experience,’ said Bernard. ‘Not the top people
– Naomi, her top person, has been with her for very many years, she
started from college – but as designers leave, it leaves openings for
new people, and we like fresh input and ideas all the time.’
Kingston College of Fashion became a particularly fruitful
source of young talent. ‘We started a prize scheme down there and we
sent two of our people down to be the judges, about thirty years ago.
That ran for a few years. We also sponsored the National Graduate
Fashion Week for several years.’
Vanessa’s approach to her work was highly intuitive, steeping
herself in the market, always keeping a magpie eye out for useful ideas
in the shops and on the streets. ‘I have designers who work constantly,
looking at the catwalks and what this or that designer is doing. I’ve
never followed stuff slavishly but I have instinct. I just know when I
see a new trend if it will be good for us, and I can’t explain why.’ By
the twenty-first century, fashion scouting in the company would be
a 24/7, digitally enhanced global task. ‘We are following the bloggers
as much as designers. And we send people to clubs, they go to Ibiza
or go and do a report on Coachella, the big festival in America. They
take loads of photos, they’ll stream them back.’ Although technology
may have accelerated the process, it does not sound a million miles
away from Bernard’s days trawling around discotheques and along
the beaches of St Tropez, hoping to trap the latest fleeting butterfly
burst of street style, pin it on the wing, and send it flying out of Chel-
sea Girl stores.

Spotting the right trends remained half the battle. Then came
the task of refashioning it to suit their clientele. There was no set reci-
pe. ‘You’ve got to have a balance,’ said Vanessa. ‘You have to have your
essentials, which are everyday wear that everyone likes, and then you
have this enormous swathe of fashion out there, and you have to edit
it to be right for your customer.’

Career girls I 421

Editing ranges also required a sense of the different empha-
ses of the stores. As a buyer, Caroline would ask herself, what would
the girls riffling through the rails want to wear on Friday and Satur-
day night? Not just girls on Oxford Street, but in the nightspots of
Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow. There was no single answer. ‘In the
north the girls dressed up more, the south wasn’t so dressy.’ But each
passing season honed her feeling for the Chelsea Girl shopper, and
this distinctiveness mattered increasingly through the 1980s as other
retailers, like Miss Selfridge, Dorothy Perkins and Top Shop, began to
gnaw at their corner of the young fashion market.
‘Then you get creative, because as time goes on and there’s
more competition you realise you have to tweak it. It has to be just
for your company. Everyone has, as they say, their own handwriting,
their own brand that they have to buy for, and so you don’t want the
same as the others.’
This is not to say that everyone in the business shared the
same opinion about what would work. Caroline remembered a flare
up with Leonard.

I was running dresses and it was a very big Christmas sea-
son – it was all Princess Diana. J.S., my old friend, we were
working together by this stage so she was my merchandiser.
I think I drove her mad, because I’m creative and all over the
place and she had to focus, but together you’d have to make
the figures and decide what quantities you were going to buy
and do the projections, work out how much you were going
to sell each week and what was going to be left at the end.
So in order to buy something you have to prove all
this before you bought it, you have to work very quickly. And
there was a velvet party dress, like a coat dress. I can’t remem-
ber the name, probably we called it Diana after the Princess
of Wales, and it had a scalloped neck, big gold buttons down
the front, puff sleeves, and we did it in black, navy and dark
aubergine. And when J.S. and I went through the figures we
committed a lot.

422 I Career girls

But then Leonard came and saw me and he went mad that
we’d committed so much. And I said, ‘You’re wrong.’ He said, ‘No,
you’re wrong.’ So I let it go and it sold out! He probably laughed about
it. No, he doesn’t need the last word.
What was that evanescent something, the signature that made
a garment a Chelsea Girl garment? ‘When I was doing it,’ she said, ‘it
was up-to-date fashion but it always had that extra touch of design.’
The company’s essential spirit had barely changed since Bernard de-
signed his first proper smash hit, when he commissioned a top em-
broidered with two fluffy poodles conjoined by a tinkling gold chain.

33

The next big thing

In 1982 Leonard noticed a new contender on the retail landscape.
‘I remember visiting Top Shop in Liverpool and there was a
branch of Top Man in the basement and I thought, “How can Top
Man work in the basement?” Then I was in our Enfield shop and
looking at the takings and I thought, “Why are the takings so low
upstairs?” I thought we couldn’t sell merchandise upstairs, and then
I thought again, “I wonder…” I then set myself the task of improving
the takings of the shops’ secondary floors.’
He realised that here was an opportunity to invigorate rela-
tively unprofitable areas of their own stores by offering something to
entice in a different customer. A secondary sales floor could be far
more effective if they put a totally different trade on it – rendering it a
destination in its own right instead of being women’s overflow. God-
frey’s abortive menswear division was about to have a second lease of
life.
Leonard planned his new project carefully. ‘Before he start-
ed he took on a head of menswear buying and he took on buying
staff and he had it well organised,’ said Bernard. ‘He identified the
shops, starting by using Chelsea Girl basements or first floors that we
were not using productively.’ The new enterprise could have only one
name: Chelsea Man.
After the launch everything went well. Then they received a
warning letter from solicitors. Somebody else was already operating
a Chelsea Man and if the Lewises did not cease trading under this
name, they would sue. But having created the Chelsea Girl brand, the
family were reluctant to give up its brother brand lightly. So began a

424 I The next big thing

legal dispute reminiscent of the epic case of Jarndyce versus Jarndyce
in Charles Dickens’ novel, Bleak House.
It fell to Clive, who now directed all of Chelsea Girl’s legal
work, to shepherd their defence through ten attritional years of litiga-
tion before the Lewis Trust Group finally lost the fight. ‘It was a huge
drag on my time and the business,’ he said ruefully.
They renamed the menswear department Concept Man. ‘That
was the easiest,’ said Bernard, ‘but we never liked that.’ Still, it served
as a useful subdivision within many Chelsea Girl branches, enlarging
the scope of the business, meaning that they could also take on larg-
er premises and broaden their customer base. Young men out shop-
ping with girlfriends now had somewhere to spend their own money
instead of standing around, twiddling their thumbs outside Chelsea
Girl’s changing rooms.
Despite the astringent effect that the Concept Man debacle
would have on the company, while it was ongoing there would be
other legal tussles. As fashion retail became more professional, the
age of using other people’s designs with impunity was drawing to a
close, and the Lewises grew increasingly impatient when competitors
used their ideas – somewhat ironic, given the decades that they had
spent pursuing the latest fashion. When another ill-fated company,
Bamber, blatantly copied one of their garments – ‘something like a
suit or jacket and top’ – Bernard snapped.

He could not recall what triggered him to launch proceedings;
this was hardly the first time such copying had happened. ‘But they
must have been knocking us off a bit. We’re designing and they’re
just knocking off left, right and centre, so you have to make a stand.
There’s got to be protection or designers are finished. It went to the
High Court. I was in the witness box. We won for £70,000.’
The one-time fashion poacher had become a copyright game-
keeper. But the victory did not deter everyone from lifting Chelsea

The next big thing I 425

Girl designs. On the contrary, it was to be the first of many such fights.
‘Then it snowballed, on and on.’ Sometimes Chelsea Girl
found themselves on the defending side too, including a bit of a to-
do, as Bernard put it, over a pair of jeans.

There’s an acceptable way of doing a version, whereby you
can be inspired by something, which is fine – you haven’t
crossed the line. But one of our people had crossed the line.
I don’t know how it got through our hierarchy but it did and
it got into the shops. Clive took the case over and we settled,
paid them a lot of money, because jeans run for a longer pe-
riod and they are not that cheap to start with. Since then we
have an in-house legal team. They are very good and we train
our designers, but we still have copyright cases against peo-
ple more or less continuously.

After one such dispute with another large retailer, Clive ended
up becoming friendly with the CEO. ‘The man said to him, “How
many designers have you got?” Clive said, “I think about seventy.”
And he said, “I couldn’t be doing with all those creative people. We
will continue to copy but we won’t copy you.’

*

By the mid-1980s Chelsea Girl was no longer a teenager. Despite the
company’s successful consolidation into a fashion-forward outfit,
there were signs that the brand was falling out of step with its target
customer. The first baby boomers, Chelsea Girl’s initial devotees, had
long since grown up and had children, but their daughters were not
necessarily following their mums into the stores.
‘The fashion look was changing,’ said Vanessa. ‘It was getting
just a bit older and more sophisticated. Yuppies were emerging, and
the attitude of the twenty-one-year-old was different. Society wanted
better things.’

426 I The next big thing

If shoppers were moving on, so too was Chelsea Girl’s
competition. The biggest shift was first set in motion in 1982, when
Hepworth’s, a ready-to-wear men’s suit specialist and one of the
world’s first retail chains (boasting 100 outlets as early as 1884), ac-
quired Kendall & Sons, an ailing seventy-store rainwear chain. This
acquisition took the company up to 600 shops. But Sir Terence Con-
ran, the designer and Habitat founder who now acted as Hepworth’s
chairman, wanted to try something new. He hired George Davies, a
highly entrepreneurial alumnus of Littlewoods, to refresh Kendall’s.
Davies went away to think and came back with a statement of colossal
retail ambition: he would convert the stores into a new chain called
Next. Sure enough, it was destined to become the next big thing on
the British high street.
Davies had a simple objective: to seduce a more sophisticat-
ed customer. But his highly original solution was to come up with
what he called the ‘total concept look’. In practical terms this meant
that inside the shops stock was organised into ranges of garments that
could be mixed and matched. Each range was grouped in a different
location and set out in a chic and considered style of display.
‘Next presented something very different to us,’ said Vanessa.
‘Kind of co-ordinated, upmarket. It was lovely at the start.’

Not only did the total concept approach feel exciting, a so-
phisticated notch above anything else available on the British high
street, but it also encouraged customers to purchase far beyond their
original intentions. Many walked into the shop meaning to buy one
thing, only to walk out with a carrier bag containing on average four
extra garments to go along with it.
This was not the limit of Davies’s vision. After becoming
Next’s chief executive and introducing menswear and children’s de-
partments, he perceived a huge, untapped potential in direct sales. So
in 1987 the company acquired the Grattan catalogue company and

The next big thing I 427

used it to launch the Next Directory. This would be a highly covetable
hardback book, quite unlike the Littlewoods catalogue, where Davies
began his career. Customers loved seeing the Directory on their coffee
table, featuring as it did top models more often seen in Vogue and
photographers such as Herb Ritts, as well as fabric swatches and a
then unbeatable promise to deliver goods within forty-eight hours.
The success of the Directory also offered a clue that, some day in the
future, clothes shopping from the comfort of home could become
something that a great many people might just get used to.

As Next gathered steam, other Chelsea Girl rivals began to
surge ahead too, with Top Shop, Miss Selfridge, Warehouse and Oasis
snapping at their heels. ‘Some were a little bit more grown up,’ said
Vanessa. ‘For some reason we were beginning to look a bit tired.’ Al-
though the heart of the business beat on, Bernard felt that it was not
as strong as it had been. ‘We had been working on the merchandise,
moving it on, developing a new handwriting, but the Chelsea Girl
image was not helping. We hadn’t been terribly good at looking after
the brand.’

They played around with the look of the stores. ‘But we
couldn’t get a new shopfit that did the trick,’ said Vanessa. ‘We tried
lots of different things but they just weren’t doing enough.’
Help was to come from an unexpected quarter. One of the
menswear team had suggested to Leonard that they could open a few
smarter menswear shops, to capture the aspirational mood that Next
traded on. He liked the idea and Bernard agreed. ‘We selected our
Exeter shop for the experiment and Leonard converted it.’
The ambition was to create a store with an air of Ralph Lau-
ren about it, but the inspiration could not have been more personal.
‘Leonard had the vision for this shop, all scumbled and a bit antiquey,
like his home. It was a lovely, lovely concept,’ said Vanessa.
Casting around for a name for his new brand, Leonard was

428 I The next big thing

determined not to use words associated with a person. ‘There had
been Banana Republic, there was Next,’ said Bernard. ‘He toyed with
a few different things. At one time he fancied Oyster Island, but I
don’t like shellfish, so I didn’t like that.’ Brainstorming was very much
a family affair. ‘We were all writing lots of ideas for what the name
should be,’ recalled Caroline. ‘It was very exciting.’
Leonard hit upon the answer one day, cruising in his little mo-
tor boat along the Thames near his home in Marlow, when he noticed
an island in the river. River Island it would be.
Leonard and Bernard flew down to Exeter for the opening. ‘It
was very encouraging, and it was clear that he had done something a
bit special. We came back on the plane. I remember Leonard sitting
opposite me, and I said, “We’ve got something here. Womenswear is
bigger than menswear. Why don’t you try a womenswear one?”’
Initially this was not quite what Leonard had in mind: his vi-
sion was all about creating a new chain of upmarket menswear. As
Vanessa said, ‘He’d done this marvellous shop. But Bernard loved all
the new things.’ And womenswear was a bigger market. So Bernard
won Leonard round.

I wanted to exploit this great new development to the fullest
extent. So we agreed he was going to take two shops, in Luton
and Oxford. I left it completely to him. We were working with
shopfit designers called Dalziel & Pow, who we’re still very
friendly with and use occasionally, and we did one, one week,
and a fortnight later the other one. And they were great. From
the word go they were fantastic. It went like wildfire.

‘Showcased differently, the product looked much better,’ said
Clive. The excitement of the new stores immediately translated to the
cash register. All in all, it was ‘incredible’, said Caroline. Or as Vanessa
put it, ‘Absolutely brilliant.’
Here was proof, if proof were needed, that Chelsea Girl’s

The next big thing I 429

clothes were not the issue. The family realised that Chelsea Girl, a
child of the 1960s, could not become a woman of the 1990s. Just over
twenty years after the first metamorphosis of Lewis Separates into
Chelsea Girl, the business was about to shed its past once more. ‘We
thought it was best to have a clean sweep,’ said Bernard. ‘And so we
decided to carry on converting to River Island, one a week.’ Luckily,
being a family business, they could make the decision quickly and act
without delay.
If changing tack seemed to Bernard the obvious thing to do
– and it was not as if they had not done it before – by any estimation,
killing off Chelsea Girl was a bold move.

Yes, it’s been pointed out that we’d done it twice. Although
Hepworth’s had done something similar when they changed
Kendall’s to Next, theirs was a launch of a new company.
Ours was more a moving on of the same company.
People have said that it took enormous courage. It
didn’t seem too remarkable to me at the time. The reason for
changing our name was that we wanted to move our market
position. So one of the tools for shifting market position, the
customer’s perception of us, was to change totally, the shopfit
and the name. Most customers were completely unaware that
it was the same business.

His ease in reaching this decision recalls the idea he had ar-
ticulated many years before: deciding is usually less difficult than un-
derstanding. Once a problem is correctly grasped, the right solution
frequently presents itself.
As the shops’ conversion proceeded, for a while the two retail-
ers existed side by side. But the Lewises decided to close down Chel-
sea Girl as soon as possible. ‘Bernard felt we should not be diluting
our creative energies by running them both,’ recalled Vanessa, ‘and
concentrate on doing one thing well.’
The contrast between the new and old shops was enormous.

430 I The next big thing

As adolescents with pocket money to burn, my friends and I often
spent it in Chelsea Girl in Northampton’s Grosvenor Centre. It could
be a bit of a rummage in there, but we always left the shop happy,
bearing a bargain or three. When the shop seemingly disappeared
overnight I was sad – goodbye cheap, clinging CG jeans! But River
Island intrigued me from the off. Inside, it looked as if it had been
transported wholesale from some exotic plantation in America’s Deep
South. There were white painted shutters and lovely vintage images
on the walls, and clothes tucked into intimate nooks instead of packed
onto long or circular rails. It felt as if somebody with a very particular
taste had handpicked everything, and now they were inviting us into
their dressing room. The fashion also keyed into the trends for Levi’s
jeans and Americana, which everyone loved at the time, introducing
unfamiliar new styles like chinos.
Shopping there, my friends and I felt we were being treated
like sophisticated grown-ups, and at thirteen years old, we liked this
feeling a lot. Some of the clothes even had labels with intriguing de-
signer names: Charlotte Halton and Louisa Calvino. ‘Who are they?’
I thought, thrilled to be in contact with actual designer clothes. Lit-
tle did I suspect that these designers were pure invention. As Caro-
line explained, converting the shops presented a significant problem:
namely, that all the merchandise was labelled Chelsea Girl, which ob-
viously could not go into River Island. So Leonard had the brilliant
idea of inventing brands that could sell in both stores. This helped
both to manage the transfer from Chelsea Girl, and to develop and
group different fashion looks within the new shopfit.
When the Lewises said goodbye to Chelsea Girl they were
walking away from a brand with a rich back story and wealth of
associations. But in River Island they had created a powerful new
one, conveying a layered sense of history threaded through a store

The next big thing I 431

design that made River Island seem both pleasingly exotic and fa-
miliar, practically overnight. Would they ever revive Chelsea Girl?
‘We have occasionally used it for a specialised range,’ said Bernard.
‘But there are no other plans at the moment.’
River Island also began a new phase in the company’s organ-
isation, as Leonard began to assume a leadership role. Although Ber-
nard stepped back from running the merchandise he continued to
stay in touch with it, reading all the trading reports as well as oversee-
ing the shops and shop property, shop-fitting, warehouse and trans-
port. ‘Leonard gets a lot of good ideas and we worked well together.
I’ve had a few myself. You have to sort out the ones you can use and
find a way to make them work, plan them out properly. It was a great
partnership.’
Clive’s impression was that Leonard became River Island’s
MD, in effect the brand and product head – an arrangement that re-
flected his father’s and brother’s personalities. ‘Bernard and Leonard
work in different ways. Leonard is about the big ideas, whereas Ber-
nard is nuts and bolts detail.’
‘Leonard is extremely creative and smart,’ said Caroline.
‘When we were changing from Chelsea Girl to River Island he’d go,
“Right, let’s do it like this.” And then we’d go, “Okay.” And you’d go
back and you’d think, “No, that can’t be done like that, it’s just impos-
sible.”’ But more often than not, his ideas worked out.

34

A bend in the river

As the quest for growth continued into the 1990s, Leonard brought in
two senior managers, Richard Bradbury, who would lead buying for
womenswear, and Martin Parker to run menswear.
Caroline was redeployed to oversee a new range of branded
goods after Leonard negotiated a deal with Caterpillar, a large Amer-
ican company that specialised in construction machinery. ‘We got a
licence to do clothing using the Caterpillar brand to go with the boots
that we already stocked. So I did the womenswear on it and we did
our fashion-forward thing, that worked very well.’
When the Caterpillar deal ended they began a new relation-
ship with Jeep instead. ‘We were selling the range this time as well
– in the stores but also to outside stores and different companies. I
remember we showed in Germany, in Düsseldorf. It was beautiful
stuff but it didn’t do well because it was just the wrong brand. People
couldn’t identify with it. If you’d taken the bloody Jeep off it would
have been better.’
After that deal folded, Richard Bradbury moved Caroline
across to market research and public relations – not an ideal pairing
from her point of view, because it took her away from the fashion that
she adored. On the other hand, her dissatisfaction in this new role
had the virtue of simplifying her choices after her first marriage end-
ed and she fell in love again with a record industry executive, Lucian
Grainge. When they decided to marry it became abundantly clear
that his exceptionally demanding career as head of Universal Music
would require a great deal of input from her, helping to nurture artists

A bend in the river I 433

and relationships. In due course this led her into an extraordinary
life based in Los Angeles, where she would find herself dining with
American presidents and Silicon Valley titans one day, superstars the
next. ‘I remember as a young girl, lying on my bedroom floor with
my little record player and putting “Your Song” on over and over, and
knowing every single word. And now I’m at Elton John’s house in
the south of France, sitting next to Elton at this little lunch, with my
father and Vanessa, and I’m thinking, “How did this happen?”’
There was a check to the family’s happiness in 1993, when Da-
vid discovered that he had cancer of the colon. He would go on to
make a full recovery, but the shock had a wonderful secondary out-
come because it prompted all four brothers to reconcile at last. Adele
remembered the moment.

Geoffrey said to me, ‘I want to see David.’ I thought, Thank
God. He went to the hospital and funnily enough they were
wheeling David out on a trolley. And David happened to
open his eyes and saw Geoffrey, and – because he was so fa-
therly to the boys, he was such a father, seriously a father
– when he saw Geoffrey, he said, ‘Geoffrey, you’re here.’ And
that was it. They made up, we all went to Israel and had a
huge party together. David made big parties in his house. We
made parties, anniversaries. It’s funny, it all ended amicably.

Although Bernard had relinquished many of the reins of Riv-
er Island’s day-to-day business to Leonard, he remained a powerful
guiding force. ‘What my father does, and has always done, is monitor,’
said Clive. ‘He understands the numbers exceptionally well. He prob-
ably still reads them every night, as he did when we lived in Willes-
den. It has never been the case that he stopped doing stuff. He is an
exceptionally valuable presence, in the way he can see a problem in
the business.’ But the next challenge on the horizon was one nobody
could have foreseen.

434 I A bend in the river

Eyeing the success of George Davies’ Next Directory,
Leonard decided to launch a River Island catalogue. He recruited a
senior executive to run it and everything was teed up and ready to go
when the unthinkable happened. It was a beautiful Sunday morning
in June 1994, shortly after Leonard’s fortieth birthday, when he had
an accident, falling off his horse and sustaining an extremely serious
head injury with an uncertain prognosis. He lay in a coma for two
weeks.
Everybody was intensely preoccupied with Leonard, but there
were also immediate ramifications for the business that could not be
ignored. Bernard had no option but to re-enter the fray. Two years
shy of his seventieth birthday, he was, as he put it, ‘running the whole
show all over again’. He immediately recognised that he would need
another family member’s support to cope with the workload, and
asked Clive to deputise for him.
Clive had had little to do with the fashion side of the company,
and was then running the company’s housebuilding division, the UK
and US property and CCB (a small bank), when he moved across to
take control of retail, the warehouse and transport. Yet with charac-
teristic Lewis modesty, he played down the challenge. ‘So I became
chief executive of River Island at thirty-eight, knowing almost noth-
ing about product. But I did know the business. And although I took
the title of chief executive, I wasn’t. The business didn’t really need
one because everybody was in place. It wasn’t a particularly compli-
cated thing to take the report of retail and some of the planning. Some
of the things I was doing previously had to be handed over, but most
I continued with.’
Bernard faced other difficult calls, with Leonard’s catalogue
project on the cusp. ‘Mail order was just about ready to launch. But it
was just going to be too much – I had to absorb all Leonard’s work –
so I had to take the decision there and then, whilst he was in intensive
care, to abandon it.’

A bend in the river I 435

He also brought back Vanessa, who had stepped back from
merchandise, into a more central position. ‘She was the person out
and about in design and buying, moving and chasing things along,
supervising visual merchandising, assessing people and product and
keeping me in touch with the heart of the business.’
This shift was significant, said Clive. ‘Since the accident, it
wouldn’t be right to separate Vanessa from Bernard in the guidance
of the business. She is product and creative, and they are a very, very
close team. She has a huge amount of influence as brand and design
director.’ Vanessa’s instinct, her unwavering eye, steered the soul of
the company.
As things settled down, Richard Bradbury took the reins of
both men’s and women’s merchandise, now reporting to Bernard, and
River Island continued to expand. Decades after Bernard had ruled
out entering the European market, the company opened its first shops
abroad, starting in the Republic of Ireland, followed by outposts across
Europe and the Middle East.
In the meantime, over a long and challenging period, Leonard
summoned his exceptional determination and resilience to mount
a recovery that defied all expectations. He returned to the company
board, launching a strategic investment team, bringing new projects
to the table while continuing to take a special interest in River Island.
After the accident, like many couples in such a situation, he
and Emma were unable to sustain their marriage. But they reared
three wonderful boys, Joseph, Oliver and Jamie. In time Leonard was
to find love again with Ingrid, another talented fashion retailer, and
together they would have a baby daughter, whom they named Lor-
na, in honour of his mother, who passed away peacefully in 1996, a
couple of years after the accident, surrounded by her children and
Bernard.

436 I A bend in the river

*

As Bernard and Vanessa piloted the business onto a new course, it was
time for Sam and Jake to step forward and take their turn at a great
Lewis family tradition. ‘In school holidays they would work in the
High Wycombe shop from about fourteen, just the local shop. I had
to pay them personally because they weren’t allowed by law to work,
they were too young, so they couldn’t be on the payroll.’ Although the
extra pocket money was welcome, neither boy revelled in the experi-
ence, particularly not Jake. ‘Staff used to call him the helicopter,’ said
Sam, ‘because he used to just sort of walk around the shop.’
Both boys followed their siblings to board at Millfield School,
Jake leaving at seventeen to join the company’s visual merchandising
department. ‘I loved the people and I loved that I got on really well
with everyone there, but I felt it wasn’t possibly a natural work envi-
ronment for me.’
His true passion was music, and he began promoting club
nights in his spare time, handing out flyers in Camden. After a few
years he could resist the entrepreneurial itch no longer. ‘I remember
being so envious of all the stories of my dad grafting with the green-
grocery, and if I had gone into the family business I would never ever
have had the opportunity of doing anything like that.’ So he left River
Island to map a very different course, first as a promoter then as op-
erator of a couple of music venues, jokingly referring to himself as
the family’s black sheep. ‘My dad was always very, very forward with
letting me know that anything that we choose to do he would support
it and be happy with it.’ All that mattered to Bernard was that his chil-
dren should try their best and attack life with gusto.
Over a series of conversations when Jake was in his late twen-
ties, he arrived at a greater understanding of his father’s personality.
‘Understanding his childhood, his dynamic, having to take a huge