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to Cadby Hall, a former piano showroom and factory in Hammersmith Road, near to Olympia. Following the earlier model of the tobacco business, the company began to manufacture the products needed to supply its catering enterprises, beginning with bread and rolls from the Cadby Hall bakery. Within twenty-five years the site held a complex of red-brick factory buildings, erected fortress-like around a central yard; thousands of workers were employed on the site.

      A retail chain to match demand to supply seemed an obvious next step. In the last years of the nineteenth century, ever-increasing numbers of clerical workers were commuting into central London from the suburbs to work, and they needed somewhere to buy their lunch. There were pubs, sausage and pie shops and coffee houses, and the chain of ABC restaurants run by the Aerated Bread Company. But these places, often known as ‘slap-bangs’ for the style of service they offered, had a somewhat sleazy reputation, and none was designed to appeal to the increasingly female workforce. The Lyons directors saw a gap in the market, and resolved to open a chain of establishments offering ‘good temperance fare at economic prices in attractive surroundings and with polite and dignified service’.

      With the opening of the first Lyons teashop at 213 Piccadilly in 1894, Joseph Lyons and his partners set standards of service to customers and sumptuousness of surroundings that astonished and delighted their clientele. Between the drab shopfronts of late Victorian London, the name of J. Lyons & Co. shone out in hand-carved art nouveau lettering, ornamented with floral swags and finished in real gold leaf against a white background. Inside there were gas chandeliers, red damask wallcoverings, elegant chairs and marble-topped tables, silver-plated teapots and fine china. Highly trained waitresses, originally known by the name ‘Gladys’ but later christened ‘Nippies’ (a shrewd PR move) for their speedy efficiency, eagerly waited to take the orders in made-to-measure uniforms with starched white aprons. The tea, of course, was delicious, and only twopence (1p) a cup. It was an instant success, with queues of customers patiently waiting outside on benches thoughtfully provided by the management. Within a year the capacity of the teashop had to be increased to cater for 400 rather than 200 customers at a time.

      The model was repeated over and over again. Two more teashops, in Queen Victoria Street and Chancery Lane, opened in 1894, another dozen the following year; there were 37 by the end of the century and 200 by 1925 on prime sites in London alone. The provincial expansion began in 1909, when Lyons bought the Ceylon Café chain; within a few years cafés in Bradford, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds and Liverpool had been converted into Lyons teashops.

      The identical white-and-gold fascias became as much a part of London life as double-decker buses or underground trains. At Montague Gluckstein’s insistence, the prices were the same whether a teashop was located among the department stores of the West End or the tailors’ shops of the East End – another innovation for the time. Whether or not they drove the dramatic social changes that followed the First World War, they certainly reflected them. Writing in the Daily Mail in October 1921, and quoted by Peter Bird in his history of the company, Lady Angela Forbes observed: ‘For the business girl, not only in the city but in every part of London, the nearest teashop is not far away … They share a table with men as naturally as they take a seat – or a strap – in tram and tube … From every point of view, and most emphatically from a woman’s, London has changed for the better during the past 25 years, in that metamorphosis the teashops have played a meritorious part.’

      Working on an even grander scale, the company simultaneously launched a number of larger and more up-market establishments, notably the Trocadero at Piccadilly Circus (1896), a palatial restaurant in the heart of London’s theatre district, and the Lyons Corner Houses. The first Corner House opened in Coventry Street in London’s West End in 1909, and was capable of serving 5,000 people at a time. There were restaurants catering to different tastes and budgets on the four upper floors, each with its own live band. (By the mid-1920s, Lyons had a budget of £150,000 a year for music alone – over £5 million in today’s terms.) There was a food hall on the ground floor, selling tea, coffee and high-quality cakes and biscuits. You could even get your hair done, book theatre tickets or avail yourself of that novel instrument, the telephone.

      Two more Corner Houses had opened in London by the mid-1930s, in Oxford Street and the Strand, as well as Maison Lyons at Marble Arch. They quickly achieved landmark status. ‘In these places,’ noted Montague Gluckstein with satisfaction, ‘people made the astonishing discovery that beauty and luxury in eating were not the prerogative solely of the very rich, and the man of modest income and his wife could realise something of the spirit of refinement and thoughtful service which actuates the very best and most exclusive restaurants of this and other European countries.’

      By the end of the 1930s Lyons had a total workforce of well over 30,000, making it one of the largest businesses in the country. Although its teashops and restaurants were the most visible part of the operation, food manufacturing occupied around two-thirds of its staff. As the number of outlets to be supplied grew, so did the Cadby Hall site and the range of products that Lyons made. After bread came tea, cakes, ice cream, confectionery and eventually ready frozen meals. The food production areas were highly mechanised: the Lyons continuous Swiss roll plant, which took in raw ingredients at one end and delivered filled, rolled, wrapped and packaged cakes at the other, was only one of a number of specialist bakeries working day and night. In addition to its own restaurants and teashops, the company supplied almost every grocer’s in the land with Red and Green Label Tea packed by the quarter pound, foil-wrapped Kup Kakes and Lyons Maid ice cream. In London it also delivered to private customers, its blue, white and gold liveried vans even drawing up at Buckingham Palace.

      In its unrelenting quest for quality, the company gradually brought many of the services it needed to run the business under its own control. The strong tradition of family ownership translated into a philosophy of self-reliance that pervaded every aspect of the company’s operations. It developed its own printing and packaging, laundry and dressmaking, and transport and vehicle maintenance operations, and bought a tea plantation in Nyasaland (now Malawi). The attention to detail that had gone into the design of the teashops remained a feature of all these activities. The new uniforms for the Nippies, designed in 1925, which were still made to measure for each waitress, followed fashion by featuring a shorter skirt, and were trimmed with no fewer than 30 pairs of pearl buttons. The tea leaves that ended up in a packet of Lyons Red Label were carefully blended from stocks either bought at auction in Mincing Lane, the centre of London’s tea trade, or imported direct from producers. Soft drinks for the restaurants were precisely graded, those for the Corner Houses containing little preservative and having a three-day shelf-life, while those for the teashops contained more preservative and could be kept for six weeks.

      Despite its size, Lyons remained very much a family business. After Joe Lyons’s death in 1917 Montague Gluckstein succeeded him as chairman, and thereafter the board consisted almost exclusively of Salmons and Glucksteins, fathers and sons, uncles and nephews. They tended to have large families, and there were many marriages between cousins so that the network of blood relationships was very close. The exception was the company secretary, George William Booth, who joined the company in 1891 and caused consternation in the early 1950s when he suggested he might retire – at the age of over eighty. ‘He wasn’t family,’ says Anthony Salmon, former Lyons board member and grandson of Montague Gluckstein, ‘but the family would never move without consulting him. He acted as a public conscience.’

      It was Booth who recognised that concern for quality and value, and a fine sense of what the customer wanted, were not always enough to ensure profitability. The problem Lyons faced was simple to express, much harder to solve. A typical teashop customer bought no more than a bun and a cup of tea, costing a few pence. The profit to the company on that transaction might be as little as a farthing (barely a tenth of a penny in today’s decimal currency, and even allowing for inflation worth only about 4p). Although the scale of the operation – 150 million meals sold per year – meant that overall turnover was high, the modest profit margin on each purchase could easily be wiped out if the clerical work involved in recording and analysing all those transactions was inefficient. And since almost everything Lyons sold had a limited shelf-life, it was essential to have an ordering and distribution system that accurately matched supply to demand.

      The

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