Hall of Fame Biographies

However, denied a senior partnership with that company, Selfridge left his job and his country, moving to London at the age of 50. There he bought a piece of property on what was then the unfashionable end of Oxford Street and in 1909 the Selfridge department store opened, representing a revolution in UK retailing.

Considered the world's largest department store at the time, inside the huge complex, shoppers found such amenities as a post office, a library, rooms dedicated to foreign visitors, and a department dedicated to selling items for clergymen.

Selfridge, a keen marketer, also had a sense of the visual, adding window displays to the outside of the department store and a rooftop garden. Inside the store, shoppers were treated to lavish displays and decorations. In 1913, the store added another innovation, a nursery for customers' children while they shopped. Selfridge also began offering Christmas puddings to the bus drivers operating the routes past the Oxford Street store, encouraging the buses to stop and passengers to come into the store.

Selfridge's wife Rosalie died in the influenza pandemic of 1918. As a widower, Selfridge had numerous liaisons, including those with the celebrated Dolly Sisters and the divorcée Syrie Barnardo Wellcome, who would later become better known as the decorator Syrie Maugham. He also maintained a busy social life with lavish entertainment at his home in Berkeley Square. At the height of his fortune he leased, as his family home, Highcliffe Castle in Hampshire. In addition, he purchased Hengistbury Head, a mile-long promontory on England's southern coast, where he planned to build a magnificent castle.

Buoyed by the store's success, Selfridge took the company public in 1921, and expanded its property holdings, giving the company one of the largest parcels of privately held land in the Oxford Street district of London. Later that same decade, Selfridge became the first department store in the world to open a department dedicated to the television.

Yet during the years of the Great Depression, Selfridge watched his fortune rapidly decline and then disappear - a situation not helped by his free-spending ways. He was finally forced to sell his company to Lewis's Investment Trust in 1941 and he moved from his lavish home. In 1947 he died in straitened circumstances, at Putney, in south-west London.