{"id":12419,"date":"2025-12-02T17:16:21","date_gmt":"2025-12-02T16:16:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jlpjobs.com\/?p=12419"},"modified":"2025-12-19T12:26:41","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T11:26:41","slug":"the-history-of-the-partnership","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jlpjobs.com\/blog\/the-history-of-the-partnership\/","title":{"rendered":"The history of the Partnership"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The first John Lewis…<\/h2>\n

John Lewis Senior was born in Shepton Mallet, Somerset, in 1836. His parents died while he was a child and he was brought up largely by his aunt, Ann Speed. At 14 he was apprenticed to a local draper and, by the age of 20, he had moved to London and was working in Peter Robinson’s shop in Oxford Circus. He soon became the youngest silk buyer in the capital.<\/p>\n

In 1864, John Lewis then opened his own small draper’s shop on Oxford Street in London. He took the grand total of 16s 4d (82p) on his first day. Even from its early days though, the business began to grow. He soon expanded into neighbouring properties and rebuilt much of the shop in the 1880s.<\/p>\n

His trading policy was simple \u2013 a wide assortment, low margins, and fair dealing \u2013 and ironically (considering how big John Lewis Christmas adverts now are) he never advertised.<\/p>\n

In 1884, John Lewis. Senior married Eliza Baker, a teacher who had been one of the first women to attend Cambridge University. They had two sons, John Spedan, who was born in 1885 and and Oswald, born in 1887.<\/p>\n

Both boys followed their father into the family business after leaving education, but it was John Spedan in particular who began to see things differently.<\/p>\n

By the time Spedan reached his 21st birthday, John Lewis Senior now controlled two shops; his original one on Oxford Street and Peter Jones in Sloane square which is still part of the business today.<\/p>\n

At this coming of age, Spedan received a quarter share in his father’s business, valued at \u00a350,000, which entitled him to a quarter of the profits of the Oxford Street shop. Shortly afterwards he also became a director of Peter Jones Ltd. Oswald received a similar share on his coming of age. The two younger Lewises encouraged the shop staff to take an interest in sport and started a staff magazine, the Byron Quarterly.<\/p>\n\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n\n\n

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Revolutionary Ideas<\/h2>\n

It wasn’t long before Spedan became uneasy that he, his brother and his father were receiving more income from the family business than all their employees put together. After a riding accident forced him to have two operations and a long period of recovery, he thought deeply about his own future and that of the business. He was eager to share his profits with his staff and to redistribute money which was being kept in reserve.<\/p>\n

In order to do this, Spedan decided he would have to make the business into a limited liability company, distributing the profits to the employees in the form of shares in proportion to their pay. His father’s reaction to this suggestion \u2013 and to his inevitable smaller share of the retained profits \u2013 was somewhat negative.<\/p>\n\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n\n\n

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The Experiment<\/h2>\n

It was in 1914 that John Lewis Senior handed over the entire managerial control of the Peter Jones shop to Spedan, who became the shop’s chairman and its nominal managing director. He was then free to start putting his forward-thinking ideas into practice. However, his father made him continue to work until 5pm at the Oxford Street shop, and the Peter Jones business was doing badly.<\/p>\n

Spedan’s first move was to shorten the working day by an hour and to start a departmental system of commission. He also set up the staff committees in which elected representatives held regular meetings with him in the absence of their managers. This system is still in operation.<\/p>\n

Spedan had a serious disagreement with his father in 1916 that was to shape the future of the John Lewis Partnership. He withdrew from active participation in the Oxford Street shop and swapped his quarter-share of the business for his father’s controlling holding in the capital of Peter Jones Limited.<\/p>\n

Over the next few years he made further changes at Peter Jones, giving the staff a third week’s holiday, taking on unusually well educated people for management posts, and starting The Gazette (our internal news publication which is still published in the Partnership today).<\/p>\n

In 1919 he set up a staff council (the forerunner of today’s Partnership, Divisional and Branch Councils). His employee-ownership and democratic business model ideas were starting to flourish and Peter Jones was commercially, all the better for it.<\/p>\n\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n\n\n

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