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until the early 1990s, sharing all the proceeds of the business equally and owning houses and even cars communally rather than individually. Pushed to think of an exception, a surviving family member says that he supposes he might have been allowed to keep his winnings if he had a lucky bet on the horses.

      From small beginnings the company grew rapidly. To increase its profitability in the highly competitive cigar-making market, the directors opened a retail tobacconist’s shop in Edgware Road shortly after the company’s foundation. By 1894 there were thirty Salmon & Gluckstein shops throughout London. Three years later there were double this number, and by the end of the century it was the world’s largest chain of tobacconists with 140 shops.

      The shops sold Salmon & Gluckstein’s own products – such as ‘Raspberry Buds’ and ‘Snake Charmer’ cigarettes – as well as cigars and cigarettes from other manufacturers. With Boots the Chemists, the stationers W. H. Smith and Barratt’s Shoes, the company was among the first in Britain to recognise that selling through multiple outlets gave it the bargaining power to drive down wholesale prices, and hence to inspire consumer loyalty by passing on savings to enthusiastic customers. It sold its products at aggressively competitive prices, leading to frequent protests from small, independent tobacconists who could not command such large discounts from suppliers. Salmon & Gluckstein also made extensive use of advertising (‘The more you smoke, the more you save!’) and of gimmicks such as cigarette cards, now collectors’ items, that could be saved up and exchanged for gifts. Their business methods occasionally verged on the unscrupulous: on one occasion they were successfully sued for continuing to label their cigarettes ‘handmade’ after they had introduced automatic cigarette-rolling machines. But while their competitiveness provoked indignation among their rivals, their success could only earn grudging admiration.

      By the end of the nineteenth century the tobacco business in the United Kingdom was under threat from the United States. ‘Buck’ Duke, the uncrowned king of the American tobacco industry, had used factory automation, national advertising, price-cutting and takeovers to give his American Tobacco Company a virtual monopoly on the booming cigarette market in the United States. In 1901 he bought a British company, Ogden, and seemed set to wipe out all British competition in the same way. In some respects the situation mirrored the predicament of the British computer manufacturers sixty years later, and the tobacco industry adopted the same solution. In December 1901, thirteen of the biggest British companies, led by W. D. & H. O. Wills, merged to form Imperial Tobacco Ltd. In 1902 American Tobacco and Imperial Tobacco agreed not to compete in each other’s home territories, and formed a joint company, British American Tobacco, to market all their products overseas.

      Salmon & Gluckstein had held on to their independence in 1901. But a year later they sold a controlling interest in their greatest asset, the Salmon & Gluckstein chain of retail tobacconists, to Imperial Tobacco. By that time, however, tobacco had ceased to be the main business interest of the Salmon and Gluckstein family.

      Montague Gluckstein, though younger than his brother Isidore, was the driving force of the business and spent much of his time on the road promoting the company’s products at trade fairs and exhibitions around the country. Entrepreneur that he was, he used the time to think about new business opportunities. He told his story to the author William H. Beable, whose Romance of Great Businesses was published in 1926: ‘Any man moving about the country can, if he cares, pick up useful information upon the needs of the public, and he can then try to plan a way to meet them.’ It was Montague’s experience at exhibitions that ‘first brought home to me the dreary and standstill methods’ of the catering establishments he was forced to patronise.

      The Great Exhibition of 1851, which took place in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, was the forerunner of a series of similar events mounted by major cities in the years that followed. They combined popular entertainment with the opportunity for businesses at home and overseas to promote their wares. They were the Millennium Domes of their day: the difference being only that they were hugely popular and successful. The Manchester Exhibition of 1887, for example, attracted five million visitors. But as he queued for an indifferent and expensive cup of tea, or ventured in search of a pie or a sausage in a neighbouring pub, the fastidious Montague Gluckstein reflected that as far as refreshments were concerned the exhibitions catered very poorly for their visitors, especially women and families. ‘The ordinary man visiting a strange town and wanting a meal had a choice between a public-house, where he would get cold meat, pickles and beer, or a coffee-house, with its dirty little horse-box-like compartments, untidy shirt-sleeved waiters, grimy tablecloths, bad food and worse smells,’ wrote Thomas Charles Bridges, describing Montague Gluckstein’s experience in his 1928 book Kings of Commerce.

      Surely, thought Gluckstein, there was money to be made from offering people at least a good cup of tea when they were away from home? When, in the mid-1880s, he proposed to his brother and brother-in-law that they diversify into catering, they were slow to agree. They were concerned about the risks involved in a new area of business, one which, as Montague Gluckstein himself put it, was seen as ‘hardly the thing for people engaged in the aristocratic business of cigar manufacturing’. Eventually they concurred, as long as the catering venture was screened behind a different trading name.

      The compromise was to find a partner to run the new venture who was almost family, but not quite. Joseph Lyons, an entrepreneur and salesman, was a distant relative of Rose Cohen, the wife of Isidore Gluckstein. Born in Southwark in 1847, Joseph Nathaniel Lyons had begun his working life as an optician’s apprentice, but his quick imagination and gift for selling had led him into a colourful assortment of other occupations. He invented a device called a chromatic stereoscope – a combination of telescope, microscope, magnifying glass and binoculars – and sold it for 1s 6d (7½p). He wrote detective stories, music hall sketches and songs, and was a moderately successful watercolourist. He was married to Psyche Cohen, the daughter of an entertainer who later ran the Pavilion Theatre in Whitechapel; his marriage certificate gave his occupation as ‘artist’.

      Once the brothers had agreed that Lyons was their man, Montague Gluckstein went to meet him. At the time he was running a stall, probably selling his own artistic or technological creations, at the 1886 exhibition in Liverpool. ‘I went there for a night, that stall was closed down, and the terms of our arrangement I put on an ordinary sheet of notepaper,’ recalled Gluckstein. The deal they struck was that they would go into the catering business together as long as Joe Lyons could win the catering contract for a large exhibition taking place in Newcastle in 1887 to mark the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria.

      Joe Lyons had no previous catering experience, and none of managing a business larger than a market stall. But he was cheerful, ebullient and persuasive, and he had the resources of a highly respected firm behind him. He won the contract, and he and his partners discovered, just as Gluckstein had supposed, that there was a vast, untapped market for the combination of style and good value that they felt they could offer. There was nothing tentative about the first venture into catering by J. Lyons & Co., the name adopted for the new company in 1887. Customers in the tea pavilion at the Newcastle exhibition were entertained by a Hungarian string band, they could choose from a varied menu and enjoy attentive service, and of course, they could wash their meals down with a pot of excellent tea for threepence (1¼p). ‘Out of that humble but very important trio, tea, bread and butter of the best kind sold at a reasonable price,’ reflected Gluckstein later, ‘the foundation was laid of what was afterwards to be the largest catering business in the world.’

      Catering on a huge scale for exhibitions and similar temporary events was to remain an important part of the company’s activities for the rest of its existence, but the Lyons directors did not stop there. In 1891 Joseph Lyons raised the capital to mount a spectacular entertainment called ‘Venice in London’, complete with Italian gondolas on water-filled canals, at the Olympia exhibition hall in West London. The show ran for more than a year, and others followed. At the same time J. Lyons & Co. won the contract to provide all the catering at Olympia, a contract they held until 1978. The association with Olympia was a factor in uprooting the family firm from its East London origins. First, Montague Gluckstein moved from his flat above a tobacconist’s to a house in Kensington, next to Olympia. Then in 1894, the year J. Lyons & Co. was

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