Family Business — the John Lewis family brought to vivid life
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The flair and hard work of Spedan Lewis turned John Lewis into middle England’s favourite department store chain. He was crazy about sport, opera and animals. The howling of the gibbons in his menagerie triggered a feud with a neighbour whose house he then bought.
Most strikingly of all, he gave his business away. The recipients in 1950 were “the partners”, a group of employees including many shopfloor staff, as Victoria Glendinning relates in her entertaining Lewis family biography. The partnership prospered for another 70 years under the system Spedan established. This combines elements of a workers’ collective, a parish council and a conventional limited liability company.
Partners receive an annual dividend and elect representatives to a council that holds the executive chairman — currently Sharon White, a former Ofcom boss — to account. They can raise their concerns anonymously in The Gazette, an in-house publication.
In the first two decades of this century, if any organisation was struggling, middle-class Britons would mutter “why can’t it be run like John Lewis?”, their go-to supplier of curtains and saucepans. Socialists of a nostalgic Fabian stripe lauded the store chain as an exemplar of industrial democracy. Conservatives embarrassed by the party’s incestuous ties to big business saw it as a signpost to a better way. In coalition with the Tories, the Liberal Democrats called for “a John Lewis economy”.
John Lewis is now closing stores and restructuring under the dual onslaught of the pandemic and Amazon, the modern incarnation of ruthless proprietary capitalism. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has more in common with John Lewis than the latter’s son Spedan. The watchwords of the founder, a self-made man from Somerset, were “value” and “assortment”. He was never knowingly undersold. He was also extremely mean, especially in the pay and conditions allotted to staff.
Victoria Glendinning believes the 1950 handover was Spedan’s “final moral riposte to his father”, who was dead by then. She may be underselling Spedan himself in emphasising familial motives over philosophical ones. The focus of her book is firmly on personalities rather than social reform.
It is also weak on John Lewis as a business. The 70 years of company history between Spedan’s giveaway and the present day is covered mainly in an 11-page epilogue. This chapter is flat enough to feature in one of the sponsored business histories that litter the offices of the FT, spines forlornly unbroken.
The book should really be titled “A Business Family” rather than “Family Business”. One suspects the publisher is hoping for crossover purchasing by customers inclined to buy works such as Jeff Bezos: Biography of a Billionaire Business Titan.
Readers are more likely to get to the end of Glendinning’s book. She is a consummate biographer whose past works include books on Thomas Stamford Raffles, founder of modern Singapore, and Bloomsbury Group members. She brings the Lewis family to life with wry commentary and telling detail. Her most acute observation is that the Lewis men may have been on the autistic spectrum. Both Spedan and his father were obsessives and easily upset. Neither ever really fitted in.
John was a misanthropic miser. Spedan was kind and gregarious, but only within his family and his business. Socially awkward bosses have a weakness for adopting favoured employees as surrogate friends. Lieutenants sat through Spedan’s monologues knowing career opportunities might follow. When he retired from executive duties, his nominated successor was a colleague who let him win at billiards.
From his mid-twenties, Spedan was close to his nurse and housekeeper Eleanor McElroy, a diminutive Liverpudlian some 15 years his senior. She may have been his lover. Say what you like about old-fashioned English hypocrisy: it gave plenty of cover for unconventional relationships provided they were discreet. The pair remained friends after Spedan married Beatrice Hunter, an Oxford-educated buyer at Peter Jones, the store he was running at the time. She was a more suitable spouse for a businessman from a nouveau riche family and became closely involved in the partnership project.
Quirky, brilliant Spedan is the star of this book. Glendinning can do very little for his tedious brother Oswald. Ashamed of his shopkeeping lineage, he got his capital out of the business but ended up working there again in later life when his funds were low. In between, he was a backbench Tory MP whose apogee was asking a question in parliament about Wellington boots. He could not even secure a peerage by the tried-and-tested means of donating a large sum to party funds.
“Clogs to clogs in three generations” was the adage applied to family businesses in the days when sabots were symbols of poverty rather than utilitarian chic. Spedan spared John Lewis from that by handing its ownership to its staff and its management to outsiders, rather than to his unimpressive son Ted.
It would be a pity if those brave decisions had simply postponed the decline and fall of John Lewis to our current decade. Business needs communitarian counterweights to such winner-takes-all enterprises as Amazon.
Family Business: An Intimate History of John Lewis and the Partnership by Victoria Glendinning, William Collins £20, 338 pages
Jonathan Guthrie is the head of Lex
Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café
Comments