London History

Sad to read of the death of John Inman this week, star of ‘Are You Being Served’ and a man who improbably claimed a few years back that ‘for 28 years he’d been living with a very nice woman’. The very nice woman turned out to be called Ron - happily the two tied the knot in a civil ceremony a year or so back. Critics of the extraordinarily camp entertainer’s duplicity should remember that until well into his thirties homosexuality in England was illegal and practising one’s art could lead to prison - a bit of lavender never hurt anyone. But back to ‘Are You Being Served’ and the fictional Grace Bros store. It was based by writer Jeremy Croft on his early experiences of working as a shop assistant in posh Piccadilly menswear store Simpsons, which had traded on the London thoroughfare since 1894. Croft, who made his mark playing posh twits in Brit movies from the early sixties onward, maintained that Grace Bros wasn’t so much a parody as a straight lift. Simpson’s, alas, closed its doors in 1999, an increasingly lumbering relic of London retail past. John Inman, meanwhile, had spent time shopfitting and window-dressing in the grand environs of Selfridges on Oxford Street. Coming soon, we feel, a piece on the grand days of the London retail emporium … Derry and Toms, Whiteleys, the Army and Navy. Watch this space.