Wakefield ~ Hidden In Plain Sight: 12. BLUE PLAQUES OF WAKEFIELD

WILLIAM WHITELEY'S APPRENTICESHIP - CENTRAL CHAMBERS, THE BULL RING

Department store opened along with can of worms...

I park up a short distance from Barbara Hepworth’s childhood home [Read #1 here] on Westfield Road, the side road that runs down one wing of the grounds of QEGS school. This is appropriate, as my next destination is the original building that housed the school. Firstly, however, I have to get my chariot ready, my two-wheeled Hawking mobile.

I haul the electric bike out of the car with great effort, unfold it with some struggle and attach the front wheel with no little difficulty. Machinery and me are not on first name terms and the weight of this beast means I have to take my first rest when it is finally ready and looking at me like a dog that’s been promised a walk. I sit in the car and go through my route once more, before checking I have everything with me that I might need.

Water – no. Snacks – no. Notepad – no. Bag for water, snacks and notepad – yes.

OK, that was a no too, but hardly surprising considering I’d not brought the first three. I’ve been so concentrated on making sure I bring my helmet, front wheel and print out of the blue plaques I’m intending to visit on this tour today that I didn’t give a second thought to being otherwise prepared. Never mind, the beauty of an electric bike after you have got over the shock of how much it weighs is that it requires little physical effort once you get on your way.

I head into town towards the Trinity Shopping Centre, gently turning over the pedals while the battery of my mobile throne takes any strain. Not that there’s much strain to talk of yet – it’s half a mile of entirely flat road. Dismounting on Union Street, opposite the Market Hall, I’m welcomed by two youths, one asking the other, “What the f--- is that?” I bet Bradley Wiggins, or for that matter Stephen Hawking, never had to contend with such comments. I thought I’d bought quite a stylish-looking mountain bike with the only clue it’s an electric bike being the big battery encased in a pouch at the front, but apparently not. I suddenly feel a little self-conscious, but then remind myself that I’m a middle-aged man with a mortgage. Why should I care what two spotty youths think about my mode of transport? At least it’s not a pink Brompton. That might have made them spontaneously combust. Or led to a beating for me.

I wheel my very mean machine through the sprinkling of shoppers to the Elizabethan Gallery. As part of a tour of blue plaques in Wakefield this is a strange choice, as I’m almost sure that it doesn’t have one. I have to pay a visit to check, though, as I find it hard to believe that this is the case. This small stone building was built shortly after Queen Elizabeth I granted a charter in 1591 to found a school in Wakefield. 1591 – that’s only three years after the Spanish Armada had been repelled and this building is still standing in Wakefield today. Indeed, it is thought to be the oldest building still existing in Yorkshire that was once used as a school.

Yet after examining the exterior I can find no blue plaque. I’m either blind or missing something relevant to the criteria used for awarding one.

I take a few photographs and enjoy the incongruity of seeing this Elizabethan building sitting amongst its modern counterparts – Burger King, Starbucks and a bookies. Queen Elizabeth Grammar School moved to its present site on Northgate in the 1850s, but thankfully other uses have been found for the building over the years. Currently, the Council seem to rent it out to whoever wants to use it for a meeting or event. May I suggest the next meeting is called to ask the question, why is there not a blue plaque on the outside of the building?

I depart this small area of Elizabethan Wakefield and wheel round the corner to the Bull Ring in search of the main subject of this post, the blue plaque honouring William Whiteley. I’ve almost given up on locating it when I finally find it between Scott Banks and the Vegas Bar. The plaque is in need of some lustre, but the story that it begins to tell is anything but lacking in star quality.

William Whiteley was the man from the small village of Purston, between Wakefield and Pontefract, who went on to become a celebrated businessmen of the Victorian age, as he founded one of the world’s first department stores. The development of Whiteleys in Westbourne Grove, London took place at the same time as that of Harrods and was at least as well-known. His first job, however, was in premises very close to where I was standing now.

He was born in 1831. His father was a prosperous corn dealer but he showed little interest in young William, who was mostly raised by his uncle. Some of this childhood was spent living in Agbrigg and at 14, William left school to work on his uncle’s farm. Perhaps inspired by working with animals, he thought about becoming a vet or even a jockey, but he received no encouragement from his family with these aspirations. Instead, in 1848, he began a seven-year apprenticeship with Harnew & Glover, the largest drapers store in Wakefield.

It may not have been his first choice, but Whiteley applied himself and as he later said, he received a ‘severe drilling in the arts and mysteries of the trade’ from this Wakefield company. His eyes were to be opened to wider possibilities in the world, however, by a visit in 1851 to the Great Exhibition. The grand scale of the event at the Crystal Palace, where different areas of the building celebrated such fields as science, engineering and the Empire gave him the idea of creating a vast store where goods of all kinds could be sold under the same roof. This light bulb moment was to make him, for a time, possibly the most important shopkeeper in the world.

Once the epicentre of the woollen trade in Yorkshire, Wakefield was now in decline. It was clear that the town was no longer going to be able to hold the young draper whose head had been turned by the bright lights of London (which is remarkable considering the lack of electricity at the time). As soon as he had completed his apprenticeship, he arrived in the capital with, as the story went, just £10 in his pocket. It was 1855 and he was aged 24.

He took jobs with traditional haberdasheries and other retailers and put all his other efforts into saving cash. By not smoking, drinking and generally living frugally, he was able to save £700 over the next few years. He used this money to open his own drapery, or ‘fancy goods’ store in 1863 at 31 Westbourne Grove, Bayswater. Soon, he began buying neighbouring shops, till by 1875 he owned an unbroken row of shop fronts. His business model was one based on mass market appeal, but one of his key lines of expansion was into the food market with the opening of a meat and vegetables department. He even purchased his own farm on the outskirts of London, in order to supply fresh produce to his stores.

From the humble beginnings of a single drapery store, the boy from Wakefield had now built an empire which eventually covered 14 acres. Alongside Liberty’s and Harrods, Whiteleys was one of the three main department stores in London and it was around this time that its founder began to refer to himself as ‘The Universal Provider’. The origin of this moniker was the claim that he could provide anything from a pin to an elephant. Indeed, a customer had once challenged him to source an elephant for purchase and Whiteley found him one the very same day.

William Whiteley

In 1867, Whiteley married one of his staff, Harriet Sarah Hill. In both his professional and personal life, everything seemed to be going smoothly and his trajectory appeared to be heading in one direction. However, choppy waters were ahead.

Whiteley was a ruthless businessman and a randy boss, who undercut his rivals and over-felt his staff. His retail competitors resented his intrusion on their patch so much that in 1876 they staged an angry charivari. A what, I asked, as I read this for the first time? Wikipedia told me that it was a public shaming ritual, whereby the disgruntled shopkeepers demonstrated in the streets and burnt an effigy dressed in traditional draper’s garb.

Worse still, there were several bad fires at Whiteley’s store in the 1880s. One in 1887 was one of the largest fires in London’s history and, suspecting foul play, Whiteley offered a reward of £3,000 for information leading to arrests. Interestingly, Harrods also suffered a fire in 1883. Fingers were pointed at another shop in the area, Arsonists Are Us, but no culprits were ever held to account.

Whiteley was not the type of person to get out of the kitchen when the heat rose. Deploying his prodigious levels of energy, he built his business back up and by 1890 he had over 6,000 staff working for him. And working for him they did. Six days a week from 7am to 11pm, he even housed them in company accommodation. Unfortunately, he was not only interested in their labour. His seduction of shop girls appears to have been an open secret within the store, the short, stocky Whiteley taking many an opportunity that his position afforded and it was only a matter of time before his libidinous ways caught up with him.

First, in 1881, his wife divorced him, citing adultery and cruelty in divorce proceedings. Some credence was given to this by Whiteley buying another woman, Louisa Turner, a house in Kilburn shortly afterwards and having a son by her in 1885. But Whiteley had set a few time bombs ticking over the years and one was to go off rather badly in 1907.

Horace Rayner

On January 24, Whiteley was making his daily inspection of the store. Nearly eighty now, he still appeared on the shop floor every day, dressed in a frock coat and top hat, to make sure everything was running to his liking. While in his office, he was confronted by a 29-year-old man called Horace George Rayner, who claimed to be his illegitimate son, ‘Cecil’ Rayner. The man demanded money and Whiteley was about to call for the police when Rayner produced a gun and shot Whiteley twice in the head. After killing Whiteley, he turned the gun on himself, but failed in his suicide attempt.

I’ve read several sources that suggest Rayner was mistaken in his belief and that he was in fact the son of Whiteley’s friend, the financier George Rayner and Emily Turner. Turner, now where have I heard that name recently? Ah yes, Louisa Turner, the woman Whiteley had a son with a few years after Horace/Cecil was born was the sister of Emily. Clearly, Whiteley’s love life around the late 1870s and early 1880s was tangled and perhaps only Jeremy Kyle with his fondness for paternity tests could have made sense of it. It doesn’t seem beyond the realms of possibility, however, that Whiteley may have had a weakness for any woman with the surname Turner. The only thing clear from this episode is that Whiteley was now dead.

Whiteley - Philanthropist and Philanderer

During the ensuing trial, Horace Rayner pleaded insanity, but he was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. Whiteley’s character, though, was put through the mangle. In public he was courteous, charming and was known as a great benefactor, but it emerged in the courtroom that he had been a tyrant with wandering hands. This led to a public outcry and the Home Secretary caved to media pressure in time-honoured fashion and commuted Rayner’s sentence to life imprisonment. He was back on the streets a mere twelve years later.

Two of Whiteley’s sons opened a new shop while Rayner was in jail. The new store on Queensway, Bayswater was officially opened in 1911 by the Lord Mayor of London, in the presence of a crowd of thousands. It was claimed to be the largest shop in the world and was the height of luxury, featuring both a theatre and, on the roof, a golf course. Testament to its fame is the fact that it is mentioned in a number of early 20^th century novels. In George Bernard Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion’, for example (later adapted into the musical ‘My Fair Lady’), Higgins asks where he can buy a gown for Eliza Doolittle. The response is ‘Whiteley’s of course!’

The Whiteleys sold out to Harry Selfridge in 1927, but the name remained on Queensway in various forms. I lived in the area for a short time in the late 1990s and regularly walked through the Whiteleys Shopping Centre. At that time it was a collection of shops, like any other shopping centre and I had no idea why it was called Whiteleys. This boy from Wakefield never knew the name was the result of the famously successful endeavours of another boy from Wakefield.

Whiteley's grave in Kensal Green Cemetery: he's buried alongside many other notables of the past such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Anthony Trollope and Charles Babbage. These luminaries drew a visit from me when I lived in London but, as mentioned above, I had no reason to search out Whiteley's grave.

William Whiteley’s greatest legacy came, however, from a result of his will. He left £1 million (equivalent to over £100 million today) and some of it was used to found a housing community for the poor and elderly. Whiteley Village in Elmbridge on the outskirts of Greater London is still there and operational today.