Postcards from the Edge
Mary Kenny
It was sad to see the closure of Debenhams, with the loss of so many jobs. The department store, as an institution, no longer aligns with modern habits of shopping. Even before the pandemic, that trend was apparent.
Every fashion has its day – but the department store should be recognised as having played a key role in the emancipation of women.
Le Bon Marché in Paris, which opened in the 1850s, was the first modern department store. Au Printemps and Galeries Lafayette followed in the 1870s, designed to attract women at a time when respectable females did not sally forth without a chaperone. The department store provided what we might call a ‘safe space’ for ladies to meet, dally, lunch and browse without being harassed or molested.
By the 1890s there were, according to Norman Stone’s history of Europe, great department stores in every European city. They emblematised freedom, convenience – and a sense of luxury and glamour.
Gordon Selfridge caught that spirit of the age when he opened Selfridges in Oxford Street in the 1900s, with a special eye to the female market.
In my young days London was full of fabulous department stores – Swan & Edgar, Dickins & Jones, the practical John Lewis, the distinctive Liberty, Selfridges and Harrods. We also frequented a bread-and-butter store in Holborn called Gamages, which sounded genuinely Dickensian, but seemed to stock everything.
Some still stand, as does Fortnum & Mason, whose roots go back to 1707 (even if it was seldom within the ambit of the ordinary housewife).
Shopping habits change inexorably, and, over recent years, the department stores I’ve visited have had a forlorn air, either in town centres or in out-of-town shopping malls. Younger shoppers have switched to online shopping and niche boutiques.
The department store was a feminine and a feminist institution – because it enhanced female freedom. It’s bitterly ironic that those now losing their jobs in this part of the retail trade are overwhelmingly women.
The original, Le Bon Marché in Paris, still survives. As soon as I get a jab in my arm, I’ll be on that Eurostar to visit the Rue de Sèvres once again.
America is a great country – for oldies! President-elect Biden is 78. Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi is 80; Steny Hoyer, House Majority Leader, 81; Jim Clyburn, House Majority Whip, 80; Mitch Mcconnell, Senate Majority Leader, 79 in February; Chuck Schumer, Senate Minority Leader, 70; Janet Yellen, the incoming Treasury Secretary, 74.
And let’s not forget the radical Bernie Sanders, who may well get a government job, 79. Hooray!
Back in 1942, my late husband was a schoolboy at Marlborough College. Because of the war, the younger teachers had been called up. Older masters were brought out of retirement to fill in – and some were quite eccentric.
The language teacher was an old chap who had served in the First World War. He set about teaching the boys German by making them learn reams of the poet Heine. He also taught them German marching songs that he had picked up while on the Western Front, notably a sad ballad called Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden. This was all about a soldier whose best mate died by his side. The veteran teacher would sometimes be moved to tears by this elegy.
Even as a schoolboy, Richard thought it a little rum that the class should be singing a German soldier’s song, while Britain was at all-out war with Germany.
But no one stopped the eccentric schoolteacher. Later, Richard came to believe that the very oddness of the situation had made lessons memorable. And he learned very good German.
When an Etonian schoolteacher, Will Knowland, got the sack in December after airing certain oddball, masculinist views, the thought occurred that eccentric schoolteachers are sometimes unforgettable schoolteachers.
From Miss Jean Brodie to the Robin Williams character in Dead Poets Society, that’s certainly the legend.
A popular French comedian, Pierre Desproges – now dead – was once asked, ‘Can you make a joke about any subject?’ Shrewdly, this Limousin-born comic answered, ‘Yes, you can. But not in front of everyone.’
A wisely proportionate response to the question of ‘censorship’, which has exercised the public realm in recent times.
The Pogues singer Shane Macgowan had of one of his ditties recently ‘censored’ by the BBC because it contained language some consider offensive. Possibly a prissy judgement, but the Desproges principle comes to mind: you can’t say everything in front of everyone.
That’s the problem with social media. Everyone is saying everything in front of everyone, and that leads to outrage or censure.