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BRIAN DEER:
HARD SELL Page 2
If any of the
exhibits at 183 are pivotal, it must be his personal
Bible. For many years the pages have been opened at a
passage he marked in thick pencil for personal
contemplation. "And thou shalt bestow that money
for whatsoever thy soul lusteth after," he
selected from verse 26 of Deuteronomy 14. "For
oxen, or for sheep, or for wine, or for strong drink,
or for whatsoever thy soul desireth."
Henry
Wellcome was born in 1853, and grew up in Minnesota.
Two uncles and his brother were Christian ministers,
and his father was a noted lectern-thumper of the
fundamentalist Second Adventist Church. This austere
congregation was at the time in some confusion, after
an end-of-the-world prophecy had - in 1844 - gone
seriously unfulfilled.
He
acquired from his father a tough-minded religiosity
and, more usefully, a facility to persuade. Young
"Hank", as he was then known, worked for a
time in an uncle's drugstore, in the frontier
settlement of Garden City. And it was there, aged 16,
that he came up with a Big Idea that he was to deploy
pretty much all his life.
Realising
that it was not so much what a drugstore sold that
mattered, but the way that it was presented, he
bottled lemon juice and advertised it as invisible
ink, with a pitch to shame a snake oil salesman:
Wellcome's
Magic Ink
THE GREATEST WONDER OF THE AGE
This is something entirely New and Novel!
DIRECTIONS
Write with a quill or golden pen on white paper.
No trace is visible until held to the fire when
it becomes very black.
Prepared only by
H.S. WELLCOME
Garden City, Minn.
His
drugstore experience propelled him to pharmacy
college, where he further developed his idea. It was
less the science of medicine, he realized, than it
was the marketing that created the profits. Taking
the next step, in 1880, he moved to Britain, at the
age of 26, and went into partnership with one Silas
Burroughs: an even better salesman than himself.
Medicines
were still mainly powders or liquids, so the two men
first started a European agency for the newfangled
style of American tablets. Wellcome prepared
attractive-looking chests, containing such age-old
remedies as ipecacuanha, strychnine and quinine. And
in 1884 he laid claim to their format under the
registered brand name "Tabloid".
Tabloid
chests of medicines (some of which are displayed at
183) were often given away to influential people, and
became the start of the modern industry's famed
"freebies". Beginning as complimentary
first-aid kits for the rich and powerful, the idea
was soon expanded to provide foreign travel expenses
and financial support for useful contacts.
Wellcome
and Burroughs were especially noted for pioneering
door-to-door selling to doctors. Pursuing the Big
Idea, they realised that people became physicians
often for reasons less to do with compassion than for
family, prestige or wealth. Burroughs, in particular,
was adept at calling on physicians with a gift and
free samples, and departing with the knowledge that a
new crop of patients had been won to the Tabloid
brand.
Henry
had comparable business acumen, but found time for a
personal passion for exploration. Inheriting from his
father a belief in the Bible's literal truth, he
spent vast sums from the Tabloid coffers to scour
Africa for evidence of prehistoric white tribes. In
one project in Sudan, he hired 4,000 people to dig
for four years, trying to prove that evolution was
wrong.
In
such bizarre ventures, the Wellcome founder’s
personality came dramatically to the fore. Donning
the white pith helmet of the imperial explorer, he
would distribute peacock feathers among his native
workers who abstained from alcoholic drink. As an
alternative to such carrots, there was also a stick:
he would whip men caught asleep on watch.
These
aspects of his character have caused a few headaches
to those concerned with his empire’s image. Much
of his personal archive is claimed to have been
destroyed, while a biography commissioned in the
1940s from a staff member (who noted Henry's
"inflexible spirit of intolerance") has
been kept locked away by the Trust.
None
of these headaches has been worse than dealing with
his marriage (in 1901) and divorce. His wife, Syrie
Barnardo, daughter of Britain's most celebrated
child-care philanthropist, Dr Thomas Barnardo, was 27
years his junior. And according to her friends, Syrie
disliked Henry's cruelty: most notably alleging that
he used to beat her with a sjambok, a South African
cattle whip.
Perhaps
in reaction, Syrie used his foreign trips as
opportunities to court other men. Gordon Selfridge,
an American-born department store magnate, was one.
Then, at some time around 1911, she met, had a
relationship, a child, and then a marriage, with the
young Willie Somerset Maugham. He was England's most
celebrated playwright of his time and, somewhat
awkwardly for Syrie, was gay.
But
according to the suppressed Wellcome biography (once
briefly seen by someone writing about Syrie), the
effect on Henry of his wife's affair with the
playwright "soured his character for the
remainder of his life". By the time he came to
draft his will and memorandum - the biography
concluded - the old man had lapsed "into a
morbid misery only to be soothed by a vicious
preoccupation in his own interests".
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