Industry | 2010.03.27
An unauthorised history of Smythson's
Samantha Cameron\'s £800 bags fit right in at a firm indirectly made rich by the sale of public assets
A few years ago that fine documentary photographer Stephen Gill extended his craft to what I reluctantly suppose would have to be called conceptual art. Photographing a junk market in east London, he came across a plastic camera and bought it for 50p. Then he began photographing the junk with his junk camera. The unsharp prints were a critical success when they were gathered together in a book, though people struggled to say why, and it was for similarly inchoate reasons that this week I bought a notebook in Smythson\'s of Bond Street. Making notes for a piece about Smythson\'s in a Smythson\'s notebook while sitting in Smythson\'s principal shop … why, people have won the Turner for less.
I found I couldn\'t do it. Even the cheapest, smallest and simplest Smythson\'s notebook, the kind with a cover marked "Notes" rather than "Snogs" or "Follow Your Dreams", cost £30. Bound in supple blue lambskin, it measured four inches by two and a half and featured a stitched spine, gilt-edged paper and a place-mark ribbon. Assuring me it was the cheapest, and rather amused to hear that word spoken in Smythson\'s, an assistant placed it inside a draw-ribbon felt satchel and then into a stiff paper carrier bag which was tied shut with more ribbon. Unless you were Marcus Aurelius or Keats, to mark such a cute and expensive little object with writing would surely be to defile it. Even unpacking it felt like a shame.
There is, of course, a cult of notebooks, which has come with the cleverly promoted idea that those of a special quality can turn you from a scribbler into a writer. Muriel Spark was loyal to notebooks supplied by James Thin in Edinburgh; write in a Moleskine from Paris and the ghost of Bruce Chatwin or Hemingway might breathe into your pen. Smythson\'s play the same game. The last pages of my new notebook describe its crushable binding and unique "featherweight" paper, copyrighted by Frank Smythson in 1916, and add that these characteristics have made it "internationally popular with many distinguished writers, journalists, travellers and explorers". I\'ve never met anyone with a claim to these categories who held a Smythson\'s notebook in his hand – it would cost a reasonably industrious notetaker, anyone with more to say than "Tuesday: discovered source of Nile", at least £100 a week in notebooks. The real reason to buy a Smythson comes in the next sentence: "Used by \'the great and good\' over many generations, they have been called a \'secret social passport\'."
Boasting about secrecy would seem to destroy the point of it, converting reticent "good taste" into show-off snobbery, but this is the age of brand. Not so long ago, Smythson\'s was confined to Bond Street. Now it has branches in New York and Los Angeles, another two at Heathrow, stalls in several department stores and Samantha Cameron as its creative director. Their success, including Cameron\'s, depends less now on printing handsome stationery for English gentlefolk and more on selling baubles to the impressionable rich. Heritage is the pitch – "I bought a diary from the shop that once sold another to a woman who danced with the Prince of Wales" – and to keep the flame alive the Bond Street store has installed a miniature museum in an alcove behind the shelves showing the Cameron handbag range.
I wonder they don\'t call it the Smythsonian. I took out my old notebook (Pukka Pads of Poole, £1.95) and looked into the glass cases. Here was some printed publicity from the founder, Frank Smythson, promising the best workmanship at "really moderate charges" for buyers of stationery in 1887. Here was an extract from Anthony Trollope\'s The Small House at Allington with a description of "typical Smythson writing paper" according the caption, which omitted to mention the novel predated the shop\'s opening by 23 years. Here was Sigmund Freud\'s visiting card – 39 Elsworthy Road, NW3 – and writing paper headed with only one word, Sandringham, and a picture of Princes William and Harry at a polo match "closely inspecting a gift bought from Smythson". Edward and Mrs Simpson, Grace Kelly and Katharine Hepburn had all bought diaries and address books; Hepburn\'s was stamped "London, New York, California" in gold.
There was nothing to say when Smythson\'s started to sell handbags, though Frank Smythson advertised "Fancy Articles of a High-Class Character" from the beginning. Cameron launched her "Nancy" and "Daphne" models in 2007, and this week updated them with zipped versions that are slightly cheaper than the £800 originals, now called "classics". I asked an assistant, a pleasant young woman from the better part of Delhi, if she could price the new designs in cheapest-notebook equivalents and she came up with a figure of 15, but in fact it was 21 and two-thirds.
Value isn\'t always easy to quantify. When Cameron joined Smythson as a 25-year-old in 1996, a dying Conservative government\'s last privatisation programme had begun to break up British Rail. This coincidence had unexpected consequences for Cameron\'s career and income. In 1996, the Treasury sold a lot of old BR rolling stock at an infamously low price to one of the new train-leasing companies, Porterbrook, run by a management buy-out team that had recruited a finance director, Ray Cork, from a car-hire firm in the Midlands. Cork and his colleagues paid the Treasury £526m for the trains and six months later, without improving a single carriage or commissioning a new one, sold their company to Stagecoach for £300m more. Cork, who had personally invested no more than £100,000, made £17m. Two years later he used £3m of this profit to back another buy-out, this time by Smythson from its owners, the John Menzies stationery and newsagent firm. Cork\'s good luck or sharp eye for a bargain was in here, too. In 2005 he sold Smythson to a private equity consortium for £15.5m and banked £9.3m. Cameron\'s share of the remainder was thought to be £300,000. Last December, Smythson was sold again. Greenwill SA, a holding company for an Italian leather goods manufacturer (handbags, no doubt), paid £18m; Cameron was reported to be in line for a £50,000 bonus.
Walking down Bond Street with my little blue carrier bag ("Bond Street blue" said the assistant), it seemed to me that Smythson\'s could be thought of in various ways. First and most conventionally as an old English institution that a politician\'s wife had revitalised with her irony and fun; the bright colours, the little notebook labelled "Snogs". Second as another British company owned, and ultimately managed, from abroad. Third as the unlikely beneficiary of an absurdly underpriced public asset, and therefore in some complicated way – a diagram would take more than a page of the cheapest Smythson notebook – a swindle of the taxpayer. But what I mainly thought was: what a self-important and stupid shop.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/20[...]ack-smythsons-samantha-cameron
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