Shopgirls Page 4
The need for staff was great. Even though the vast majority of shops in Britain were still single traders or smaller establishments employing just a handful of assistants – the emerging department stores still represented less than 1 per cent of retail trade32 – the actual number of shops was increasing exponentially all over the country. In 1875 there were just under 300,000 shops; it is estimated that over the next thirty years this number doubled.33
No wonder the local papers were full of advertisements for shopworkers. And the main reason why proprietors were recruiting ‘Young Female Shop Assistants’? Not only were there thousands of ‘superfluous women’ in need of work, as highlighted by the census and the Langham Ladies, but these women came cheap – they were significantly less expensive to employ than the men. A shopgirl in the 1870s received two thirds or even just half of the salary of a young male assistant. Typically in this period a shopgirl might receive £25 a year, while her male counterpart would take home £40. It was this single factor that galvanised the shopocracy into fighting against all the other bars to employing women in shops. The concerns about respectability and gentility; the worries that women weren’t physically strong enough or professional enough to work on the shopfloor, these all went out the window as soon as the monetary benefits became clear. In this regard, these male shopkeepers had become the unlikely allies of the early feminists.
However, it is difficult to get a clear picture of shop salaries, even among women workers, because of the large number of factors involved. Shopgirls’ pay depended on the status and location of the shop – a London Regent Street store offered substantially more than Nelson Foster’s in Wisbech. Wages also reflected each shop assistant’s exact role within the store, from apprentice to junior assistant, from senior assistant to floorwalker. In addition, shop assistants often received commissions on sales, but employers usually deducted fines at source. For example, Eliza Close, the young woman interviewed by Arthur Munby in Hyde Park, received less than £20 a year, plus board and lodging. Munby, with his eagle eye for detail, noted in his diary the effect the differing salary grades had on women and the clothes they wore when walking through London on a Saturday afternoon: ‘They seem to be of two classes, generally, elegant milliners and shopwomen, earning good wages and affecting the dress and style of ladies, and needlewomen and prentice girls, whose clothes are of fashionable cut but worn and poor.’34 Typically for Munby, he admires them all: ‘The number of fair faces and tall good figures in both of these classes is remarkable.’
Eliza Close was quite aware that her fellow shopmen earned better salaries than her – ‘the men get a deal more than us’ – but she also recognised that she earned more as a shopgirl than as a servant, saying, ‘It’s much better than service.’35
Despite the commercial imperative and the desire of women like Eliza to move into shopwork, the shopkeepers still had quite a job on their hands to break down the social barriers to employing this plentiful cheap source of labour. While Jessie Boucherett and the early feminists felt that the main social concern about shopwork – its supposed lack of respectability – should simply be dismissed, the wilier members of the shopocracy across the country had more concrete tactics. The original model for apprenticeships, which saw apprentices living as part of the family above the shop, was based on an ideal of benevolent paternalism. Young apprentices like Nelson Foster’s assistant in Wisbech, John Batterman, were regarded as members of the household, sleeping, eating and socialising in a domestic setting. Shop proprietors now adapted this paternalistic model to their growing businesses, increasing the number of live-in staff. The message they were sending was clear: we are in charge of the welfare of our young shop assistants, we can protect your sons and daughters from physical and moral harm, we will keep them respectable. ‘Eliza, what ’ud your father and mother say to me if I didn’t keep an eye on you?’ asked Eliza Close’s master, who lived alongside his seven assistants in rooms above his drapery.36 The old gentleman, who came from Harborough in Leicestershire just like Eliza, refused to let her go to dancing rooms, made sure she went to church and frowned on any joking with young men.
Like this old gentleman, many proprietors were genuinely motivated to play the role of benevolent paterfamilias – often because of their own Christian beliefs. Emerson Muschamp Bainbridge, founder of Bainbridge’s in Newcastle, was a force of nature, his activities ‘volcanic’ according to his fellow Tyneside store-keeper J.J. Fenwick.37 Bainbridge led from the front and demanded a willing subservience from his employees. Both Bainbridge and Fenwick were staunch Wesleyan Methodists; Bainbridge preferred to recruit Methodist assistants and, despite his authoritarianism, he was comparatively generous. At a time when working hours were still extremely long, Bainbridge allowed his staff time off as follows: ‘one evening a week for courting purposes and two if they go to prayer meetings regularly’. James Howell was the founder of Howells department store in Cardiff (now rebranded as House of Fraser); he too was a devout Methodist, instituting evening hymn sessions in the men’s dormitory.38 Other proprietors recruited directly from religious institutions, such as Roman Catholic schools, hiring school-leavers as apprentices and keeping the local priest on hand to communicate with and monitor the welfare of his former pupils. One large draper with thirty apprentices took them all from local Sunday schools; he knew the family background of each and felt he could mould his apprentices, being ‘of the opinion that an employer can make his hands what he likes’.39
Religion and concepts of morality imbued all aspects of Victorian life – private and also public – in ways difficult for many of us to fathom today. These store proprietors in Manchester and Newcastle, in Derry and Southend, were shaping a public role for themselves as embodiments of civic pride. Religiously and politically active, they emerged as influential figures in the growing Victorian cities. As well as a shopman, Joshua Allder in Croydon was a Nonconformist, elected onto the local Board of Health and Croydon County Council. Charles Jenner not only founded and expanded the oldest department store in Scotland but also became the first director of the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh – perhaps galvanised by the deaths of his own children – and was a philanthropist, patron of the arts and man of science, investigating plants and giving his name to a grey-felted thistle and an alpine moss.40 The Brown family fundamentally reshaped Chester by organising, together with other traders, a policing rota to rid the Chester Rows of ‘rowdies and dissolute women’. The Rows, as the streets around the cathedral are known, have architecturally unique medieval first-floor covered walkways, which in the early part of the nineteenth century were seen as a centre of vice. William Brown’s plan worked: by the 1870s central Chester had blossomed into a middle-class resort, its medieval and neoclassical architecture tempting shoppers to town.41 William and his brother Charles became town councillors; Charles Brown was elected Mayor of Chester six times and his portrait, in oils, in which he sits almost regal in fur-trimmed robes and gold chain, still hangs in Committee Room 1 of Chester Town Hall.
For some, however, the claim to respectability and benevolent paternalism by many of the shop-owners was nothing but a useful ploy, motivated less by Christian and philanthropic values and more by the need to win over the new cheap labour.42 William Whiteley, as always, took the most flamboyant approach, wholeheartedly embracing his public role of genial father figure to his employees and incorporating his actual family into his performance. He was not alone in setting up a range of activities to occupy his shop assistants in their precious leisure hours, such as a brass band, quoits, reading rooms and a rifle volunteer club, all of which were designed to promote a sense of loyalty to the family firm. But he explicitly took the concept one stage further, linking his real family with the wider corporate family, and making Harriet and the children attend performances of the shop’s Amateur Dramatic Club.43 All the while, however, his behaviour in private belied this public image: as we shall see, he started sampling other shopgirls after Harriet
.
Still, a Leicestershire farmer’s family such as Eliza’s, or tradesmen’s families in Newcastle, keen to ensure a respectable position for their daughters, must have been reassured by the high civic status of many store proprietors, and by the fact that ‘living-in’ was a form of chaperonage, supposedly a surrogate family. On top of this, the actual work appeared genteel, professional and highly enjoyable. Dealing in ribbons, bonnets, kid gloves and silk scarves in an attractive-looking shop trumped shift-work in Haslam’s cotton mill in Colne or parlour maid duties in Southport. ‘To be aside those huge plate-glass windows, with beautiful new things on every side, and well-dressed people coming in and out all day, what a delightful life a London shop-girl must lead!’ Or so the dream of glamorous shoplife was described in a young woman’s journal.44
It was also cleaner and less obviously physically demanding than factory work or service – a young woman’s hands remained white and soft, not rough and calloused, and there were fewer industrial accidents. Shop assistants had to be cleanly and neatly dressed, usually in plain black with no jewellery or adornment, so as to remain in the background and not distract from the merchandise. Most assistants had to buy their own clothes, as Eliza Close explained to Munby: ‘We have to dress nicely for the shop, of course, but he doesn’t like us to be too smart.’45
This public veneer of gentility was further built up by the way shop assistants spoke. Addressing the customers was an art, an exercise in polite, soft-spoken deference, however tricky or rude the customer might be. There were hours of ‘standing and smiling and serving’ as one London shopgirl put it.46 Munby commented from the point of view of a gentleman obsessed with speech and dialects that shopgirls’ ‘habits of speech come midway between the dignified reserve and fastidious delicacy of a lady and the honest bluntness and crude vulgarity of a servant’.47 In stores located in upmarket areas, the shop itself – the actual interior – was a space where lower-class shop assistants came into contact with higher-class clientele; working women and men with ladies. It was a space where different classes met, talked, interacted – even touched. For many middle-class and upper-class ladies, the only other such cross-class interactions they had was with their servants at home. Nevertheless, the counter still acted to separate shopkeepers and shop assistants from their customers. It was a physical barrier between those serving and those being served.
By the 1870s, the new wave of shopgirls were not only daughters of farmers and clerks, like Eliza Close, but also middle-class women who had to support themselves and whose fears about ungenteel shopwork the Ladies of Langham Place had sought to dispel. They even advertised their services in the local papers:
Wanted by a young lady, an engagement in any light business as Saleswoman. Good reference. Address B. 16 Brunswick St., Barnsbury N.48
The number of shop assistants spiralled upwards from mid century onwards, with the number of women shopworkers increasing at an astonishing three times the rate of men.49
Society hostess Lady Jeune welcomed them with joy, feeling that no shopman could ever fully understand a female shopper’s dilemmas or desires. In her experience female assistants were much quicker than men at grasping the shopper’s many conflicting pressures and vanities. ‘They can fathom the agony of despair as to the arrangement of colours, the alternative trimmings, the duration of a fashion, the depths of a woman’s purse, and more important than all, the question of the becomingness of a dress, or a combination of material, to the would-be wearer.50
Like Lady Jeune and Jessie Boucherett, many customers and proprietors now agreed that women were ‘naturally’ better suited to selling goods to women – but some still believed them incapable of heavy work or professional processing. This meant that shopgirls were generally welcomed in haberdashers’, drapers’ and milliners’, as well as fancy goods shops, tobacconists’, confectioners’, stationers’ and the new multiple stores, but they continued to be excluded from many other trades, raising the hackles of the Langham Circle. Women’s education was poor, so any job that required long and expensive training, such as at a chemist’s or a druggist’s, was unlikely to be open to women. ‘Rough’ trades like butchery, fishmongery and ironmongery were excluded on physical grounds. Shops catering only to gentlemen, their outfitters, hatters and bootmakers, did not hire women. And shops with expensive stock, like jewellers and booksellers, stuck to hiring shopmen, perhaps for fear of loose-fingered women.51
Some individual proprietors in the more ‘genteel’ trades were also still set against hiring women. Charles Digby Harrod had taken over the running of Harrods from his father and throughout the 1870s he refused to recruit women, claiming that shopmen were more efficient and more loyal to the family firm. In 1885, much later than his competitors, he finally cracked, hiring Ida Annie Fowle and two other women as clerks in the counting house. She theatrically described her male colleagues’ reactions on her first day: ‘Several of the junior members of the staff peered round showcases to see the “beauty chorus” arrive.’52 Miss Fowle proved to be resilient, tactful and considerate and was soon put in charge of the Sales Ledger Section. Harrods’ profits at £12,500 in 1890 were a mere fifth of what Whiteley had earned fifteen years earlier. But all this was set to change. As Harrods boomed, Miss Fowle’s band of female clerks grew ever larger and became known as ‘Fowle’s Chicks’.53 She was to preside over her brood for a record-breaking thirty-six years’ service, helping a flood of women pursue their dream of entering the ‘lighter’ areas of shopwork. And she witnessed what happened to these young women’s dreams when they were confronted with the harsh realities of life around the shopfloor.
‘A Portable Shop Seat’: this was the suggested solution of The Girl’s Own Paper to the problem of standing upright for long hours with no rest, known as ‘The Standing Evil’, 1880.
CHAPTER 2
SERVANTS OF THE COUNTER
Margaret Bondfield was one of Britain’s feistiest shopgirls and the story of her extraordinary life, from rural beginnings in Somerset to becoming Britain’s first female Cabinet minister, is deeply revealing. At the start of her career, she too was part of this new wave of pioneering young women who saw shopwork as the chance to chase a dream of independence and glamour, or simply a straight income.
Bondfield loved her apprenticeship at Mrs White’s exclusive drapery establishment in Hove, Sussex. She was just fourteen when she started there in 1887, and didn’t return home for five years, though in her autobiography she declared that she had ‘no regrets’: she relished the opportunity to earn her own living. At Mrs White’s, Margaret was treated as a member of the family, learning the detailed needlework skills needed for brides’ trousseaux and babies’ layettes. ‘It was a period when “liberty” frocks became the rage, and I spent hours at a window, around which a passion flower mysteriously bloomed, smocking lovely silks for babies’ frocks.’1
But Mrs White’s was the only place she was ever happy. When she moved on to take up junior roles in big Brighton drapery houses, the teenage Margaret was shocked to the core. She found the living conditions appalling, the hours exhausting, the rigid hierarchy difficult to deal with. And the moral challenges confronting a young woman in a busy town were frightening.
Margaret was not alone. The thousands of young women now flocking into shopwork were discovering a reality far harsher than they had imagined. By the 1890s, there were a quarter of a million shopgirls in Britain. Though they were still outnumbered by over half a million female textile workers and well over a million female domestic servants, their numbers were growing fast.2 There was no stopping the ‘girling’ of shopwork.
Girls like Margaret had been called in as a new type of worker for a new kind of shopwork. The old art of shopkeeping was undergoing a total transformation. In the past, a skilled shopkeeper had presided over all aspects of his business, from buying in goods to selling on to customers. Nelson Foster had been king of his own small castle – his family grocer’s and draper’s in Wisbech. Bu
t the new world of late Victorian shopwork demanded that a series of ever more specific tasks be undertaken by a growing army of ever more task-specific employees. By the 1880s, even small stores like Foster’s were employing cashiers or book-keepers alongside their regular assistants. William Ablett recalled in his Reminiscences of an Old Draper that his store had traditionally employed just two buyers – a ‘drapery buyer’ for furnishing fabrics and heavier goods and a ‘fancy buyer’ for smaller, lighter goods. By the time he finished his memoir in 1876, the store had expanded and so had its specialist staff, which now included ‘glove buyers’, ‘lace buyers’ and ‘hosiery buyers’ among others.3 Choosing suppliers, selecting and storing goods, preparing them for display, promoting them, pricing them and, most important of all, persuading customers to actually purchase them were becoming distinct activities as commerce of all kinds became more complex.
This new division of labour was taken to a whole new level by the first generation of department stores. The shop owned by Methodist draper Faithful Cape in Oxford was a prime example. Mr Cape had set up his small store in the 1860s in the St Ebbe’s district of Oxford, a mixed area catering to both working-class and professional sections of Oxford society, and having little to do with the famous university. By the end of the century, F. Cape & Co. had expanded to nos. 28 to 32 St Ebbe’s Street, and also had branches in Little Clarendon Street, Cowley Road and Church Street. It now sold everything from ladies’ corsets and children’s hats to hosiery, haberdashery, lace, baby linen, sheeting, blankets, quilts, shoes and furnishings.
When Cape retired in the early 1890s, a new owner – fellow Methodist Henry Lewis – took over with his three sons, who were employed as buyers. Tom bought gloves, scarves and lingerie, Russell bought cotton goods and menswear, and Edmund bought mantles, the outer cloaks favoured by the well-to-do. Together, they were known as ‘The Firm’ and they ran a staff of nearly a hundred workers within the stores, in addition to providing employment to many more messengers, delivery men and suppliers beyond the shop walls. Henry, Edmund, Tom and Russell had their desks on the shopfloor, in order to keep a beady eye on all activity both behind and in front of the long, mahogany sales counters. The hierarchy at Cape’s was strict. Directly below ‘The Firm’ in seniority were the floorwalkers (also known as shopwalkers), who acted rather like sergeant majors, patrolling departments and imposing discipline and fines; they were often obsequious to customers while simultaneously bullying junior staff. Next came the senior assistants, then their juniors, who were also known as ‘improvers’. At the bottom were the apprentices, porters and messengers.