Shopgirls Read online

  CONTENTS

  About the Book

  About the Authors

  Title Page

  Dedication

  List of Illustrations

  Prologue

  ONE

  The Girling of Shopwork

  TWO

  Servants of the Counter

  THREE

  Scandalous Shopgirls

  FOUR

  Grace Dare Undercover

  FIVE

  Thoroughly Modern Management

  SIX

  Strike!

  SEVEN

  Keep Calm and Carry On Shopping

  EIGHT

  Chelsea Girls and Counter-Cultures

  Epilogue

  Picture Section

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Book

  From the Victorian age through to the present day, an unsung army of shopgirls have been at the heart of Britain’s retail revolution. Shopgirls reveals their enterprising and courageous stories as never before.

  We meet Selfridges’ ‘businesswomen’, fighting for their good name, and arsonist suffragette Gladys Evans, jailed for standing up for her beliefs; join Margaret Bondfield as she goes undercover, fiercely championing the rights of early shopgirls; and stand alongside the impoverished interwar chain store assistants who stole stockings to supplement their meagre wages. We encounter young apprentices, the first generation of female graduate trainees and 1940s working mums. We follow Chili Bouchier’s journey from the small ladies’ department at Harrods to star of the silver screen; uncover the raw courage of John Lewis’s Miss Austin during the Blitz in the West End; and celebrate the art school entrepreneurs who kick-started the boutique movement of the swinging ’60s.

  As this lively book reveals, the story of British shopgirls – and their spirited camaraderie – is one woven deep into the fabric of our history and changes the way we understand our society. You will never shop in the same way again.

  About the Authors

  Pamela Cox is a social historian at the University of Essex. She has presented two major history series for BBC Two – Shopgirls: The True Story of Life Behind the Counter (2014) and Servants: The True Story of Life Below Stairs (2012), both produced by Annabel Hobley for betty. Her previous books include Bad Girls (2012) and Becoming Delinquent (2002).

  Annabel Hobley is a television producer and writer. Her credits for the BBC, ITV and More4 include Shopgirls: The True Story of Life Behind the Counter; Servants: The True Story of Life Below Stairs; McQueen & I, a documentary on fashion icons Alexander McQueen and Isabella Blow; and The Lost World of Mitchell & Kenyon, about an extraordinary treasure trove of Edwardian films.

  Dedicated to

  Leonore Davidoff

  and

  Alice and Dominic O’Malley

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  Chapter Illustrations

  1. Shopgirls at Marks and Spencer Ltd, 1890s. The Marks & Spencer Company Archive.

  2. ‘A Portable Shop Seat’, The Girl’s Own Paper, 1880. Public Domain.

  3. Fashionably dressed shopgirl. Courtesy 18 Stafford Terrace, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

  4. Suffragettes with smashed shop windows, 1912. Heritage Images/Getty Images.

  5. Selfridges shopgirls on duty, 1922. Reproduced by kind permission: Selfridges Archive.

  6. ‘West End Shop Girls’ Strike’, 1920. Courtesy Daily Mail.

  7. Bombed-blasted shop, c.1940. Popperfoto/Getty Images.

  8. Shop assistant Valerie Allen, 1969. Mirrorpix.

  Plate Section Illustrations

  1. Wisbech, 1854. Courtesy of the Wisbech & Fenland Museum.

  2. Jenner’s department store, 1895. © RCAHMS (Harry Bedford Lemere Collection) Licensor: www.rcahms.gov.uk.

  3. The Burlington Arcade, c.1910. Getty Images.

  4. Anderson and McAuley’s, early 1900s. National Museums Northern Ireland.

  5. The Shop Girl musical comedy, 1895. Courtesy Betty TV.

  6. ‘Miss Bondfield On Tour’, The Shop Assistant, July 1898 Reproduced with thanks to USDAW: Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers.

  7. ‘The case of Miss Cass’, Illustrated Police News, July 1887. By permission of the British Library.

  8. Whiteley’s, 1887. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

  9. ‘The Delights of “Living-In”’, The Shop Assistant, March 1901. Reproduced with thanks to USDAW: Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers.

  10. Harrods’ moving staircase, 1898. Courtesy of Harrods Archive.

  11. Marks and Spencer Ltd stall, 1906. The Marks & Spencer Company Archive.

  12. Selfridges window display. The Draper’s Record, 20 March 1909. By kind permission of EMAP.

  13. Marshall & Snelgrove’s, The Draper’s Record, 20 March 1909. By kind permission of EMAP.

  14. Selfridges advertisement, 1909. Reproduced by kind permission: Selfridges Archive.

  15. Lucile’s models, 1912. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

  16. Suffragettes, 1912. Getty Images.

  17. Co-op departmental manageresses. From The Jubilee History of Annfield Plain Industrial Co-operative Society Ltd. 1870 to 1920, 1921. Public Domain.

  18. Harrods’ ‘Green Lady’, First World War. Courtesy of Harrods Archive.

  19. Women serving in a grocer’s shop, 1915. Getty Images.

  20. Co-Operative Society Ltd, c.1929. Getty Images.

  21. Woolworths shopgirls, 1937. Getty Images.

  22. Shopgirls from Marks and Spencer Ltd, 1936. The Marks & Spencer Company Archive.

  23. Bombed-out John Lewis, 1940. Popperfoto/Getty Images.

  24. Former Woolworths shopgirl, Second World War. Mary Evans.

  25. London’s first self-service store, 1948. Getty Images.

  26. Biba twins, 1966. Getty Images.

  27. ‘This is your Company’, 1958. Courtesy of WoolworthsMuseum.co.uk 3D and 6D Pictures Ltd.

  PROLOGUE

  ‘And there is a girl behind the counter too – I would as soon have her true history as the hundred and fiftieth life of Napoleon or seventieth study of Keats.’

  Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 1929

  In 1900, a quarter of a million women worked in shops. By the mid 1960s, the number was over a million, nearly one fifth of the country’s female workforce. Today, women are such familiar figures behind the till, the counter and in the boardrooms of retail chains that it’s hard to imagine shoplife without them. Yet there was a time, not so long ago, when they were rare. This is the story of shopgirls and the part they have played, from the Victorian age through to the present day, in Britain’s retail revolution.

  Napoleon’s famous line – often quoted in the many biographies of him bemoaned by Virginia Woolf – that Britain was ‘a nation of shopkeepers’ was meant as an insult. To him, we were a country powered by nothing more than shallow commerce, not grand designs.

  But British shopkeeping went hand in hand with growth in trade and empire. By the early nineteenth century, British commerce was booming and the country was indeed experiencing a huge growth in shops of every kind. And, as Woolf may have guessed, in becoming a ‘nation of shopkeepers’, we had come to rely on a growing, but unsung, army of shopgirls.

  Coined in the 1820s, the very word ‘shopgirl’ was new: a new term to describe a very new kind of employee, and a term that would be used for the next 150 years. The Industrial Revolution had created jobs for legions of additional workers but they only had jobs if people bought the things they made. Britain’s prosperity depended on consumers just as much as on manufacturers. As people left the countryside and crowded into towns and cities, wages rose and
even the most meagre income had to buy basic provisions. More demand meant more shops, and more shops meant a different kind of shop assistant. From small local outlets to large drapery stores, proprietors started to see selling as a job for the girls and no longer just for the boys.

  The story of British shopgirls is one woven deep into the fabric of our country’s history and yet, until now, historians have allowed them to fall through the cracks. They have remained ‘behind the counter’ of history – playing a vital part in the stories of work, consumer culture, living standards and politics but rarely mentioned. We hope this book changes that.

  In contrast, the writers of Victorian music hall songs, newspaper columns, plays and novels were obsessed with shopgirls. The label itself was always double-edged, quickly becoming a shorthand for both the lowering effects of mass consumer culture and, at the same time, its guilty pleasures and attractions. Certain kinds of shopgirls became the stuff of fantasy: who were these girls behind the counter in their demure black silk dresses and what were they really selling? Émile Zola’s classic 1883 novel, The Ladies’ Paradise, is a torrid tale of the temptations posed by Paris’s new and decadent department stores. His lead shopgirl is ingénue Denise Baudu, a provincial draper’s assistant. The story sees her battling through the store’s moral maze to find her eventual reward, not only in a promotion, but also in a socially mobile marriage to the boss, Octave Mouret, having steadfastly resisted his earlier efforts to seduce her.

  Zola based his novel on the Bon Marché, one of Europe’s first and finest department stores. As we shall discover, by the time the book was published, Britain also boasted several stores of a similar scale, from Whiteley’s and Harrods in London, to Kendals in Manchester and Jenners in Edinburgh. These large stores, with their opulent designs, seductive displays and luxury goods, seemed to be far removed from the two other worlds that the Victorians held most dear: home and work. Shops like these were places for spending, distinct from the more ‘noble’ arts of homemaking or manufacturing. Spending was the antithesis of ‘working’, however much thought, skill, planning and budgeting went into it. It was an activity of leisure and in particular of women’s leisure, regardless of whether the items bought on a given excursion were ‘essential’ provisions from the grocer’s or butcher’s or more ‘frivolous’ purchases from the milliner’s, confectioner’s or draper’s.

  Shopgirls’ lives have also been played out on screen in several period dramas. In the early 1990s, the television series The House of Eliott, told the story of the Eliott sisters as they evolved from humble dressmakers into owners of an haute-couture house in Edwardian London. The more recent Mr Selfridge depicts the same era and locale, presenting Harry Gordon Selfridge as a man who understands not only what his female customers want, but also how his many female staff can help give them just that. One of its storylines follows young Agnes Towler as she overcomes her deprived background and works her way up from junior assistant to head of displays.

  Another television drama, The Paradise – based on Zola’s novel but set in the 1870s in a northern English town – takes young Denise Lovett on a similar journey, moving from her uncle’s dowdy draper’s to the new department store down the road, eventually rising to become a head of department. These romanticised ‘rags to riches’ storylines were ripped apart by comedians French and Saunders in their own House of Eliott sketches, with the couture house mercilessly parodied as the ‘House of Idiot’. The sketches were harsh but fair. In reality, although some shopgirls lived the dream and rose to the top, many others did not. An earlier 1970s sitcom was closer to the mark: one of the running jokes in Are You Being Served? was that poor Miss Brahms would never get ahead in ladieswear at Grace Brothers so long as the gorgon Mrs Slocombe lived and breathed.

  All this has made it hard for us to think of shops, whatever their size, as serious workplaces. Shops were distinct from the workshops, sweatshops, mills, factories, farms, mines and docks, where ‘real workers’ spent their working day. They were the places where the goods that those workers had produced were ‘merely’ displayed and sold. This helps to explain why shopworkers themselves, both male and female, from the very beginning struggled to gain status, despite taking pride in their jobs. It also helps explain why the real, rather than the fictional, history of their working lives has been overlooked, despite their huge numbers. Theirs doesn’t seem – at first glance – to be a courageous history.

  Yet shops have always been about more than shopping. They are sociable places where, for generations, customers have come not just to buy but also to see and be seen, to catch up with friends, gossip and watch the world go by. They are places where creativity sparks and passions fly. Because they trade on trust, assistants have continually to find new and inventive ways to attract, keep and reward their customers. At the same time, of course, they are always ready to squeeze a profit from those same customers. Shopgirls have long been at the heart of these everyday dramas. Their work has always been about more than just selling. As Virginia Woolf suspected, shopgirls and their stories are a powerful part of our shared – sometimes heroic, sometimes shameful – social history.

  Shopgirls in the 1890s at Marks and Spencer Ltd. Shopgirls had to provide their own black dresses as uniform, leading to a variation in dress and collar styles.

  CHAPTER 1

  THE GIRLING OF SHOPWORK

  ‘Romantic Freak of a Glasgow Girl of Sixteen’ – so read the headline on an extraordinary newspaper story about one young person who was desperate to break into shopwork. In July 1861, the Glasgow Daily Herald reported that a young man had answered a provision dealer’s advertisement, displayed in the shop window, and was duly hired as a shop assistant. All went well for the first few days, ‘the lad giving rather extra satisfaction’. Then the landlady of the lad’s lodging house visited the provision dealer and ‘lo and behold! He was told that his young, active shopman, instead of being of the masculine was of the feminine gender.’ The supposed shopman tried to deny it, but finally confessed to being a young girl of sixteen. Her employer promptly sacked her; he only employed men and wasn’t about to give jobs to women, let alone a cross-dressing ‘romantic freak’. The unnamed sixteen-year-old was clearly a girl with spirit, desperate to earn her own living, so much so that she pulled off the trick a second time, landing a situation in another shop, again disguised as a man. On being discovered yet again, she was sent back to live with her parents. The Herald reporter hoped she would never abandon her parental home again, except when married and in ‘her proper position as a daughter of Mother Eve’.1

  That same year, farmer’s daughter Eliza Close was a little more successful than our courageous sixteen-year-old: she found work as a shopgirl in London. In Arthur Munby’s account of meeting her in Hyde Park one June evening, Eliza comes across as a cheerful, though perhaps naive, young woman. Munby is a notorious figure today: a Victorian civil servant and writer whose fetishistic interest in working women was partly, though not solely, sexual. He took a forensic, anthropological approach to understanding the minutiae of working-class women’s lives, collecting photographs of servant maids, pit lasses, acrobats and fishergirls. He sketched these objects of his fascination, wrote a book on the tombstone epitaphs of servants and kept diaries cataloguing his hundreds of encounters with these women, sexual and social. The fragile manuscripts, with page after page of closely written entries, record his evening conversation with Eliza as they sheltered from a shower together, under a tree: ‘I found she was ready to tell me all I wanted to know about the life of the shop.’

  Eliza enjoyed her shopwork, preferring it to living in the country – ‘so solitary’ was her complaint. Munby found her black silk gown and pretty green and white bonnet tasteful ‘but beyond her class, as times go’. He implied that Eliza was dressing above her station, her colourful bonnet a little fanciful for a shopgirl, who would normally be dressed completely in black with a white collar. Munby was always obsessively alert to the gradations of st
atus and class. She painted him a picture of life in the shop, ruled by the employer she called ‘the master’ and ‘our old gentleman’, and of sharing work and living quarters with seven other assistants, four men and three women. Their lives were shop-bound, with working hours from eight in the morning until nine at night and Eliza exclaiming, ‘You don’t go out of the shop all day except downstairs for meals.’2

  Munby didn’t quite understand why Eliza Close preferred working in this closed, restricted world to ‘the freshness and freedom of a farm’; he dismissed her preference nonchalantly as ‘the foolishness of half-educated girls’. Among other poorly educated girls Munby wouldn’t have understood are Henrietta Woodward, aged seventeen in 1861, Georgina Bathurst, aged sixteen, and Sarah Lord, aged just fifteen, all three serving their apprenticeships at Stoddart’s drapery store in the centre of the little town of Witney in Oxfordshire. We know from the census of 1861 that Sarah came from a village just three miles away, while the other two came from further afield, Wiltshire and Staffordshire. Sarah’s father ran a small farm of 106 acres with his large family, and Sarah was the only one of her siblings to leave farming. But otherwise we know little about these teenagers, for Stoddart’s drapery has not survived, let alone the girls’ apprenticeship papers. They are likely to have been indentured to Stoddart’s for three to seven years, receiving no wages.

  Why were young women such as these drawn to shopwork? The attractions are not immediately obvious: shop hours were longer than those for factory work, which by the mid 1900s had been curtailed to ten hours a day for women, and the conditions were challenging. What world did these young women hope to enter and what kind of women did they hope to become as shopgirls?

  The advertisements in the local newspapers of the day certainly made clear what kind of women the shopkeepers themselves were searching for: