Selfridge Reorganized

Pert, imaginative, Wisconsin-born Harry Gordon Selfridge is, as he likes to say, the only man ever to buy a business from five Jews and sell it to seven Scotchmen at a profit. The business was Chicago's Schlesinger & Mayer department store, sold to Carson Pirie Scott & Co. Harry Selfridge also made $1,000,000 from Marshall Field & Co., went to England with his profits. In 1909 he amazed Londoners with his magnificent effrontery by setting up a department store on Oxford Street, running it in the breeziest American tradition.

So successful was Selfridge & Co., Ltd. that its owner was able to buy ducal mansions, hobnob with London sophisticates. So wild was "King" Selfridge's personal spending that he had to found a holding company--The Gordon Selfridge Trust, Ltd.--with his Selfridge & Co. common as assets to raise -L-1,100,000 of quick money. By 1933 he was some $1,000,000 in debt again. Then Selfridge & Co. headed for trouble too.

After 1938 net profits dropped to -L-166,946--less than half those of two years before--Selfridge resigned his chairmanship, took the inactive, empty post of president. But 1939's statement (for year ended Jan. 31, 1940) was worse: net profits had dribbled to a mere -L-21,093. Harry Selfridge, who had called Hitler a great patriot in 1937, could now blame him for part of his troubles, since retail sales have collapsed since the war. But as stockholders wandered into their 32nd Annual Ordinary General Meeting last week, they knew there were other reasons too: 1) an ill-timed -L-5,000,000 expansion scheme of eight years ago, 2) a 25% yearly dividend on -L-450,000 of William Whiteley Ltd. stock, guaranteed for 15 years when Selfridge took over the fading rival firm in 1927.

Upshot of the meeting was the acceptance of a tentative plan of reorganization. Whiteley was to be released from Selfridge control, and Selfridge would be split into two: 1) a new trading company, 2) the old company as a holding unit for allocation and transference of future trading profits. The new company will take on the old company's trading assets and properties securing the old Selfridge debentures. Job of the old company is ostensibly to untangle Selfridge's financial mess. Whiteley stockholders will get new Selfridge redemption stock in lieu of guaranteed dividends due them for the next three years.

In the maze of reorganization, stockholders had not forgotten the father of their fiscal woes. Insisted one: "I understand there is an idea of giving the late chairman a pension. I'd like to know what it is likely to be." A reticent chairman finally announced that Harry Selfridge had been retained as "consultant" at a salary of -L-2,000 a year. Result was a sort of polite mob scene.

"That's too much."

"He's wasted our money."

"I object strongly to paying him anything."

"There's that -L-114,000 he owes the company."

"Perhaps Mr. Selfridge will serve for nothing."

"Perhaps he will pay off some of his debt with the -L-2,000 a year."

King Selfridge was not present to hear these recriminations (largely female). Since he resigned the chairmanship he has lived quietly in a Park Lane flat. He works eight hours a day on his private affairs, continues to write a biography of the 15th-century Florentine Merchant-Trader Cosimo de' Medici. The huge glass window of his former office on Oxford Street, cut with autographs of the great and near-great, has been shattered by a bomb.

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