Gondolas, grottoes and meeting the PM - What it was like to work at Lewis's during the golden age of department stores

Desmond Flanagan spent almost 10 years working at Lewis's during the 1960s heyday of department stores. Here he remembers his time on the shop floor

Desmond Flanagan was an up-and-coming actor and theatre director when he took a job as a window dresser at Manchester's largest department store.

With a baby on the way he needed a steady job, and figured the stage and the shop floor had quite a bit in common. "I thought 'If I can move actors round a stage, I can move mannequins round a shop window'," he said.

It was the start of more than a decade spent at Lewis's during the 1960s golden age of department stores. Standing on the corner of Market Street and Mosley Street, in what's now Primark, Lewis's opened its doors in 1877.

Built in a grand French renaissance style, with a marble pillars and a glass dome atop a vertigo-inducing five storey atrium, it was designed as a palace to all things commerce. The firm's motto was 'Friends of the people' and its stores aimed to be an inclusive shopping experience with hassle-free exchanges offered for unsatisfied customers.

And from the very beginning Lewis's, which began in Liverpool, before branching out into Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, Leeds and Leicester, specialised in the eye-catching publicity stunts.

The Liverpool store included a rooftop zoo which was home to bears and monkeys, while its window display once featured the hand of a woman dug from the ashes of Pompeii. In Manchester the basement was once flooded to create a miniature Venice-themed attraction, where shoppers could take a trip on gondolas, piloted by shop workers in traditional Venetian costume.

"My grandma could remember going on the gondolas," said Mr Flanagan. "It was probably sometime in the early 1900s.

"The rivers are culverted under the city centre so they had the idea of taking the water from the Medlock and using it to create a 'Trip to Venice' attraction. It probably created the idea of Lewis's as this great attraction. It was a tremendous publicity stunt."

After two years in the window dressing department, Mr Flanagan, who grew up in Harpurhey, took a job as assistant publicity manager. "It was like showbusiness all over again," he said. "but this time with a national company and a steady pay packet."

The job involved organised the displays in the fifth floor exhibition hall, which also doubled up as an occasional ballroom. It meant he came into contact with a wide range of celebrities, international visitors, members of the press and dignitaries.

"The main idea was to draw people up to the fifth floor, so they would go into the cafe or restaurant," said Mr Flanagan, a widower and father-of-two, of Uppermill, Saddleworth.

"We put on flower shows, fashion shows, brass band concerts, a space exhibition after the Sputnik launches, ballet contests. Once time we had a Hungarian fortnight where we brought over the chef and all his team from one of the best hotels in Budapest and let them take over the restaurant.

"The Prime Minister Ted Heath once came to visit an exhibition on British tailoring and my job was to escort him up to the fifth floor. He knew there would be photographers there so as we were about to go in he turned to me and said 'Mr Flanagan, have you got a hair comb?'."

But the biggest job was organising the Christmas grotto, a tradition fondly remembered to this day by generations of Mancunians. Mr Flanagan's job was to choose Father Christmas from among the store's 2,000 employees and co-ordinate the grand unveiling.

"The idea was Father Christmas would arrive to be greeted by the general manager," said Mr Flanagan. "Sometimes he would come down a ladder all the way from the fifth floor, or sometimes he would turn up on a sleigh."

After just over 10 years at Lewis's, Mr Flanagan decided it was time to branch out and set up his own publicity firm. Putting his acting background to good use, he also became an in-demand compere and public speaker.

Later, after his teenage son Jason suffered a traumatic brain injury when he was knocked down in Uppermill, Mr Flanagan began offering drama classes to patients at psychiatric hospitals and then became the national spokesperson for brain injury charity Headway, before helping to found the Head Forward Centre in Withington.

Now aged 90, and with a long, varied and rewarding career behind him, Mr Flanagan is writing his memoirs as part of the Age UK My Life project. And the memories of his time at Lewis's, which closed in 2001, remain as vivid as ever.

"I can still see the fifth floor in my mind's eye," he said "Saturday was shopping day and it would be full all day.

"Everybody would come at one point or another. The customers were mostly the working classes. The better off tended to go to Kendals and King Street, whereas Lewis's was more populist.

"It was a destination. People would go for the day out. You'd have people who came every week and never spent a penny.

"We had shop-walkers, dressed in pinstripe trousers and dark jackets - we'd call them security nowadays - and there was one lady called Gladys who came every week, and never bought a thing, but they let her do it because that was all part of the attraction and the publicity. It was a social centre as much as a shopping centre."