In an interview he gave at the time, Michael Caine, a man from Rotherhithe, complained about the cold in Finland, where much of the 1967 movie Billion Dollar Brain was shot. A bit of it, though, was made on location in London, including in Whiteleys department store on Queensway. What was Caine’s famous anti-hero character, Harry Palmer, doing in this deluxe Bayswater emporium? Why did he have a Thermos flask with him?
The flask contained six eggs with a built-in deadly virus, stolen from the Ministry of Defence’s top secret research facility at Porton Down. But when asked to take the flask to Helsinki, the former MI5 agent turned private detective didn’t know that. Curious, he goes to Whiteleys to make use of its shoe-fitting fluoroscope, or Pedoscope, an x-ray machine for determining the shoe sizes of customers.
Shoving the Thermos where feet were meant to go, Palmer detects the outlines of its contents. The flask and the eggs make brief appearances around the one-minute mark in the trailer below.
This landmark moment in cinema history is brought to your attention for two deeply self-indulgent reasons: one, because I’m a fan of Harry Palmer, especially in The Ipcress File (1965), which is a proper London movie that never gets old; two, I either can or cannot remember seeing, and maybe even using, the Whiteleys fluoroscope when I had occasion to hang out in the store a few times something like 45 years ago, either before or after pigging out at the nearby Standard Indian restaurant.
It’s all so tantalising. So when I happen to be in Queensway, as I happened to be the other day, I make a point of staring at the magisterial Whiteleys building and trying to remember. You might be more interested to know that it opened for business in 1911, and that by then the business’s creator, William Whiteley, was dead. Four years earlier, he had been shot in his previous store, round the corner in Westbourne Grove, by a man claiming to be his illegitimate son.
It was a terrible end to an exceptional life. Whiteley was born in a Yorkshire village in 1831, the son of a successful corn dealer who couldn’t be bothered to bring him up, letting an uncle do that instead. Whiteley left school at 14, thinking he might become a jockey or a vet, and paid his first visit to London to see the 1851 Great Exhibition.
There was no looking back. Convinced he could create a retail equivalent of the Crystal Palace (at that time in Hyde Park), he moved the capital and duly founded one of London’s first department stores, buying a row of shops on Westbourne Grove from 1863 and surviving a succession of fires in them before meeting his violent end. The Whiteleys Harry Palmer popped into 56 years later was instigated by the company’s board.
The building has appeared in other movies, too: Bette Davies did her shopping there in Connecting Rooms (1970) and it makes brief appearances in Love Actually and Closer. It shut in 2018 after some years of decline and is now undergoing an ambitious mixed-use revamp. A polite young man at the entrance wearing a uniform allowed me to take the photo of the atrium. I didn’t ask him if he knew about the Pedoscope.
Buy John Vane’s London novel Frightgeist: A Tall Tale of Fearful Times here or here. Subscribe to his Substack too.
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