In June 1999, a woman died in a former abbey in Essex, and the newspapers found a story they could not resist. Christina Foyle, who had run the world’s largest bookshop for more than half a century, had left a fortune of nearly £60 million. Most of it went to a new charitable foundation. A small portion was set aside for her fifteen cats, her dog Bobby, her four tortoises, and the people who cared for them.
Her relatives were strikingly absent. Her cousin, who had served as deputy chairman of the company and knew her as well as anyone alive, offered the most candid explanation on record. She left most of her money to charity, he wrote, because she did not like her family. Not because she was charitable.
The story of Foyles began in 1903, when two brothers in Peckham failed their civil service examinations. Instead of wasting the textbooks they had bought for study, William Alfred Foyle and Gilbert Foyle began selling them from their parents’ kitchen table. The response surprised them. Within a year, the informal business had become a commercial venture.
The first shop opened in Peckham, and by 1906 the brothers had secured premises on Charing Cross Road, the street that would become their permanent home. The building at numbers 111 to 119 was constructed specifically for the firm, opening in 1929, with stock that eventually reached some four million volumes spread over more than thirty miles of shelving. William Foyle claimed it was the first bookshop in the world built for its purpose, a claim historians consider debatable. What is not debatable is the scale.
The name Foyles became synonymous with bookselling in London. William Foyle was a showman. In 1932, hearing reports that the Nazis were burning books they considered un-German, he sent a telegram to Adolf Hitler offering to buy the books instead of seeing them destroyed. The reply attributed to the German government was that it would not corrupt English morals more than it had corrupted German morals.
During the Blitz, sandbags stuffed with unsaleable old books protected the shop front, and one newsreel claimed an employee piled copies of Hitler’s Mein Kampf on the roof as a substitute for sandbags. In 1940, a bomb landed directly on Charing Cross Road and nearly destroyed the shop. William built a bridge over the crater and called it Foyles Bridge, a gesture that captured his instinct for turning disaster into publicity. William died in 1963, and the shop passed to the only one of his children who had stayed with him.
Christina Foyle was born in London in January 1911. Because of delicate health, she was educated partly in Switzerland, the kind of finishing-school education that served more as a credential for a good marriage than as academic preparation. At seventeen, she left school and began working in her father’s bookshop. Unlike her brothers, she never left.
One brother died young; the others had no interest in the business. Christina took effective control in the mid-1940s and would manage the shop for roughly fifty-four years. Her most lasting achievement was the Foyles Literary Luncheon, an institution she created as a teenager and ran for the rest of her career. The idea grew from conversations she had with young writers who visited the shop.
When she suggested to her father that they should hold a luncheon and invite customers to meet the authors, he told her to organize it herself. The first was held in October 1930 at a Holborn restaurant, when Christina was only nineteen. As the event grew in fame through the thirties, it moved to the Grosvenor House Hotel and later the Dorchester, with audiences swelling to two thousand. Over seventy years, the guest list included George Bernard Shaw, H.
G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Arthur Conan Doyle, Charlie Chaplin, Haile Selassie, T. S. Eliot, Margaret Thatcher, Charles de Gaulle, John Lennon, and many others.
In 1939, Christina sent invitations to Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. Hitler declined, citing urgent business. Mussolini’s office replied that attendance was beneath his dignity for the time being. Stalin never answered.
By the time of her death, nearly seven hundred luncheons had hosted more than a thousand speakers and an estimated half a million guests. Behind the shop door, however, Foyles under Christina’s management became legendary for retail dysfunction. The most notorious element was the payment system. Customers who wanted to buy a single book had to queue three separate times: once for a clerk to write a bill, once at a separate cash desk to pay it, and once back at the original counter to collect the book.
Books were classified by publisher rather than by author or subject. There were no cash registers, no calculators, and for most of Christina’s tenure no telephone ordering system. She was known to dismiss employees on a whim; one widely repeated story claims she fired forty women at once for talking too loudly. Staff turnover by the time of her death was said to be 130 percent a year.
The chaotic voucher and bonus system also allowed a fraud lasting about twenty years to go undetected, costing the company an estimated £10 million. In 1965, the public test of her management style came with union confrontation. A bookseller named Marius Webb, alarmed by the frequency of arbitrary dismissals, quietly began organizing colleagues into the shop workers’ union. He was eventually fired after being reported by a management loyalist, and the dismissal provoked public protests.
An initial strike lasted three days and was followed by a longer one involving about a hundred workers, roughly half the workforce. It achieved wage increases and some reduction in arbitrary dismissals, but within a few years the old practices resumed. The workplace returned to the same patterns that had caused the strike. The deepest and least public side of Christina’s character was her relationship with her extended family.
William Foyle had transferred the majority share of the company to her several years before his death, and she used that control absolutely. Her cousin Bill Samuel wrote that her mismanagement destroyed most of the value of the bookselling business while the property portfolio managed by her husband rose quietly in value. Later, Samuel offered his blunt judgment on her motives: she left most of her fortune to charity because she did not like her family, not because she was charitable. The family estrangement had a documented victim in her nephew Christopher Foyle, who left the business frustrated and spent thirty years building his own career as founder of the air freight company Air Foyle.
The shop itself, as a separate entity from her personal estate, passed to her nephews, and they spent years rescuing it. Christopher became chairman, Bill Samuel deputy chairman, and together they modernized everything she had refused to change. Payment was simplified, books were reclassified by subject and author, staff policies were established, and by 2007 the first chief executive from outside the family had been appointed. The business returned to profitability.
Christina Foyle died at Beeleigh Abbey on 8 June 1999, aged 88. Her will left £100,000 to her gardener, a cottage to the woman who cared for her cats, and instructions to provide an income of £20,000 a year for the care of the animals. The will stated plainly that her pets were very dear to her and she wanted them well cared for. The rest of the estate, tens of millions of pounds, went to a new charitable foundation focused on the arts and education.
The widely repeated claim that she left £59 million to the cats misrepresents the document: the animal provisions amounted to roughly one to two percent of the total. What is fully accurate is the deliberate exclusion of her blood relatives. The executors created the Foyle Foundation specifically to distribute the residue. By the time of its final winding down, expected between 2024 and 2025, the foundation was expected to have given away nearly £200 million to public libraries, schools, theatres, orchestras, and arts organizations across Britain.
Bill Samuel, with precision, called it a good legacy for a man born in poverty in the East End of London at the end of the nineteenth century, crediting his grandfather William’s commercial instinct and Ron Batty’s property management rather than Christina herself. The money came from William Foyle’s business drive and her husband’s stewardship. The charitable purpose came from Christina’s grievance against her family. The law of England gave her the right to act on it, and she did.
In 2018, the Foyle family sold the retail business to Waterstones, ending 115 years of unbroken family ownership. The historic building that had housed thirty miles of shelving was demolished to make way for a tower block. Beeleigh Abbey, restored after years of damage caused by her cats’ scent, was put on the market in June 2024. For the first time in 120 years, the family business that began with a failed examination and a kitchen table in Peckham was no longer a family company.
The cats got the headlines. The foundation got the money. The family got nothing.