It looks as if BHS will be no more after this week unless someone saves it. It's sad. I have mostly fond memories working there, starting in Belfast in 1973 and finishing in London's Head Office in 1984. Here's an edited extract from my book "Retail Confidential" (recently packaged with "Much Calamity & The Redundancy Kid" into another book called "Shops, Shoppers, Shopping & Shafted".
Before long,
I had entered British Home Stores as a Trainee Manager in Belfast. In the early 1970s, BHS was seen as the
slightly poorer relation to the mighty Marks and Spencer, but still a force in
its own right in fresh food and clothing.
After my nine-months training apprenticeship, I was appointed department
manager of menswear as well as being becoming the security coordinator, for
these were dark days in Belfast, riddled with terrorist incidents including
bomb scares and, worse, occasional explosions.
Stores employed security guards at entrances to search customers for
incendiary devices and anything else threatening, and it was part of my job to
look after this team. It was a pretty
ineffective way to stop terrorists but it was the done thing to give customers the
impression that we were thinking about their safety. It brought a whole new dimension to customer
care and it was an experience that helped me to see the humanity necessary for
a successful business life. Tending to
customers rigid with shock and bleeding after a bomb exploded outside our shop
one afternoon was an extension of customer service that I hope I never have to
get involved with again.
But there
were lighter moments. In fact, to be
coarse for a second, I can honestly say that I have shoveled shit for my
employer. On one of the many evacuations
we endured following a telephoned bomb scare threat, the police and army
contingent brought a sniffer dog to roam the store in a bid to detect
explosives. As the brave dog scrambled
around and over the top of counter displays, it decided to stop on my
department and do its business. After
the all clear, I grabbed a bin and a shovel and scooped the poop before
customers were allowed back in. So,
whenever anyone talks about rolling up sleeves and getting hands dirty, they
are talking to an old campaigner here.
One of our
departmental managers’ pranks involved a mannequin’s hand. Each afternoon, about an hour before the shop
closed, our key holder would come in and tour the building to start locking
windows and fire doors, ensuring a fully secure shut down when we all left for
the evening. One part of his tour took
him down some stairs, around a corner and down a further flight to a fire door
at the back of the store. One day, a
couple of us disconnected a hand from one of the fashion department’s
mannequins and placed it on the handrail just around the corner of the
stairwell. The key holder, observed in
advance by us as a handrail holder as he descended the stairs, almost jumped
out of his skin when he touched the cold extremity. He was normally a gentle plodder as he did
his rounds, but on that day, he bounded up the stairs and shot out on to the
shop floor like a banshee with its tail on fire. In our privacy, we screamed with laughter for
ages and he developed a suspicious eye in our company from that day on. It is shameful, of course in retrospect, but
I include it as an illustration that we were prone to a little childish fun
from time to time in those days to counteract the seriousness of the business
we were in. If we had been identified as
the culprits, we reckoned that our defence rested on us arguing that we were
only giving him a hand.
I learnt many
lessons in the first of my eleven years with the company, especially about the
spirit of team work and the joys of camaraderie, both of which are not as
apparent today as they were then. This
was an age of shops opening at nine in the morning and shutting at six o’clock
at night, with quite a number closing on Wednesday afternoons. There was none of the modern-day relentless
24/7 pressure and demand and it is probably the “we never close” society that
has eroded the closeness and friendliness of retail colleagues in current
times. The BHS teams of the 1970s would
be in the local pub ten minutes after closing the shops, having fun and, dare I
say without sounding too Oprah Winfrey, bonding. We seemed to find common ground and team
spirit in our collective fear and dread of our managers who were tough,
sometimes uncompromising authoritarians, “old school” status-conscious bullies
at times, you might say. The most
fearsome of them all, Mr Robinson, (for these were the days when we were
definitely not on chummy first name terms) would rule his store and his team
with an iron fist and a terrifying scowl.
He controlled everything and if you crossed or displeased him in any
way, you were subjected to the fiercest bollocking you can imagine and you left
his presence shaking. He had the
sinister knack of arriving on the sales floor and, somehow, exuding an aura of
terror amongst the managers. We did not
even have to look up. We knew he was
there. On the occasions when I did look
up, he would be standing a good hundred feet away staring back at me before
wagging his come hither finger. In a
terrified Uriah Heep, ever so humble way, I would approach him knowing that he
had spotted at least three things on my department that needed attention. “Use your eyes, son. Make sure you see these things before I see
them.” I would nod silently and he would
march away to terrify the next department manager.
If you wanted
a new duster for your department, you had to take your old one to his office,
knock the door, await his barking instruction to enter and then request a
replacement cloth. He would be reclining
back in his chair, stone faced and, I swear, not blinking. He would grab the old rag dangling from your
trembling fingers, hold it up to the light, peer at you through the holes in
the fabric and then thrust it back at you.
“There’s at least half a dozen more cleans in that, boy,” he would
shout. This was one of my first
groundings in cost control, albeit a trifle extreme but a good lesson in
watching the pennies. I wasn’t rational
enough in those days to understand it but when I became a manager myself, I
often used this true tale as a benchmark against waste. My team members looked at me with the same
quizzical expression I had used a couple of decades before. But, no one can deny the principle of not
wasting a business’s money unnecessarily.
In another
store, the manager decided to change the layout completely. This was a two-floor shop and his plan was to
swap the top floor departments for the ones on the ground floor. There weren’t many health and safety
stipulations at the time and one Sunday, when the store was closed, a bunch of
us dismantled, transported and reassembled every counter in the shop, humping
fixtures up and down stairs, getting fingers trapped, knees banged, shins
damaged and feeling that every nerve and sinew in our bodies had laid
themselves down for the good of the business.
I recall one of our number renaming BHS as Bangers, Humpers and
Screwers, for that is what we were with our hammers, broad backs and
do-it-yourself toolboxes. But, despite
the hard graft, it was another instance of “we can do it” which we needed in
retailing then and continue to do so now.
It is like a massive hamster wheel and it is crucial that the wheel
keeps moving and that we all embrace the need for change and improvement, no
matter how scraped our knuckles or bruised our knees become in the process.
The BHS phase
of my career took me, as department manager, to stores in Belfast, Manchester,
Romford and then Wood Green, East Ham and Hackney in the London area. From the stores, I moved to head office on
the Marylebone Road in London to head up a team in a new IT project and then on
to the role as UK Audit Manager. By and
large, it was one of the most enjoyable and productive periods of my working
life and I have a lot to be thankful for.
