Shopgirls Read online

  Where Cape & Co. employed around a hundred people within its shops, some of Britain’s biggest department stores employed nearly ten times as many. Within fifty years of opening, Harrods in London, Bainbridge’s in Newcastle, and Kendal, Milne & Faulkner in Manchester each employed over a thousand workers.4 Large workforces like these were divided and ruled through even stricter hierarchies. Here, the new service sector had much in common with the world of domestic service. Servants in large country houses were organised into very particular ranks, with the butler and housekeeper at the top, the cook, lady’s maid and valet in the middle, parlour maids, kitchen maids and footmen further down and tweenies, or ‘between-stairs maids’, scullery maids and hall boys at the very bottom. Department stores organised their ‘servants of the counter’ in a similar fashion. Escaping domestic service did not necessarily mean an escape from ‘knowing your place’.

  In these large flagship stores, men still ruled the show as managers, floorwalkers, buyers and supervisors. The top shopfloor position that could be held by a woman was that of head of a department, usually ladieswear, and she was responsible for her senior and junior assistants. Behind the scenes in the increasingly specialised back offices, however, new opportunities were being created. When Ida Fowle was hired by Charles Harrod in 1885, she was taken on as ‘second ledger clerk’, working in a small team of just six. Within five years, her world and the whole of Harrods’ back office operation had been transformed. She was promoted to chief ledger clerk and placed in charge of a staff of more than four hundred. She remembered this period as ‘sensational’, with the business expanding ‘by leaps and bounds’ and its Brompton Road buildings ‘growing up around us year by year’.5

  Two decades after Ida’s appointment, a large percentage of Harrods’ colossal staff of five thousand were women. They not only worked on the shopfloor and in Ida’s ledger department but also in its bank and estate agency, its hair and manicure salon, chiropody court, writing room and ladies’ club room.6 The store’s Grand Restaurant employed cooks, pastry chefs and waitresses to service the first generation of ladies that lunched. Tucked away out of sight and far behind Harrods’ many counters, still more shopgirls beavered away in back-room roles as clerks, sewing hands and packers. In many ways, the singular term ‘shopgirl’ hardly does justice to the range of jobs – from the glittering to the gritty – on offer at retail’s top end.

  As in the country house, a store’s hierarchy served more than one purpose. For those young women who worked hard and upon whom their seniors smiled, a graded pecking order held the promise of promotion. It provided a pay scale stretching from most junior and least skilled to the most senior and highest skilled. And it also kept staff at all levels in line by dispensing discipline down a chain of command across the entire store. Apprentices answered to junior assistants who answered to senior assistants who answered to floorwalkers, and so on. Many stores – large and small – also had extremely strict rules and imposed harsh penalties upon those who breached them, ranging from warnings to fines and even to instant dismissal. Fines, for example, could be imposed for being late, giving the wrong change, sitting down on the job, returning late from a break, dropping or breaking something, talking or laughing with fellow workers, conversing in staff corridors, and even allowing a customer simply to leave without making a purchase, or ‘taking the swop’ as it was known.7

  William Whiteley, typically, operated one of the most notorious disciplinary systems. By the 1880s, the Universal Provider’s store employed nearly five thousand staff, who he apparently patrolled ‘like a rearing lion’.8 His revised staff rulebook, issued in 1886, contained no less than 176 separate rules and potential offences. There was to be no gossiping, no loitering, no noise, no leaving early, no insolence to superiors, no bad language, no fighting, no liquor, no standing on chairs, no toiletries in shop, no leaving without a superior’s permission. For good measure, rule 176 covered ‘any mistake not before mentioned’. Anyone breaking these rules could expect to pay a hefty fine, from sixpence – the cost of a week’s supply of tobacco – for insolence towards a shopwalker or failing to obtain permission from the counting house before placing an order, to one shilling for bringing matches onto the premises and a staggering two shillings and sixpence – around a quarter of a week’s wages for a female assistant on £20 per year – for charging up the same goods twice. Whiteley was rumoured to keep monies forfeited in fines for his own personal extravagances, but he more likely ploughed them back into the business once they had been processed by his separate ‘fines department’, which itself required seven clerks to handle the volume of work.9 The most unfortunate or recalcitrant workers found that they had no wages to collect at all at the end of the week or month, because they had all been lost in advance. For some this degree of discipline was too much, and they left for other jobs as soon as they were able.

  Whiteley had good reason to ban matches. His store suffered a series of damaging fires in the 1880s. The London press speculated that disgruntled assistants were exacting very direct revenge. The Pall Mall Gazette ran a large feature in 1887 asking, ‘Why is Whiteley’s so often burned down?’ It included an anonymous letter from a former employee hinting at staff collusion. He or she had left Whiteley’s five years previously when the ‘number of fines was only 99’ but was aware that this had since increased dramatically. Being fined was bad enough but being publicly shamed was worse: ‘Not content with fining you, your name and department are posted on a large green baize board in the dining-hall, like you see convictions posted at the Metropolitan and other railway stations.’10 Other correspondents defended the Universal Provider and suggested that competitors could be to blame. The real culprits were never identified.

  For shopworkers, the discipline didn’t end with the working day because many were required to live in, usually above the shop or close by. This suited shopkeepers for two reasons: it allowed them both to keep wages low and to ensure that staff stayed on the straight and narrow. The living-in system was reinvented on an industrial scale to accommodate retail’s growing army of young workers. In 1891, 450,000 shopworkers lived in – well over 60 per cent of the total number of shopworkers listed in the census taken that year. Over the previous decades, many shopkeepers had expanded their businesses by employing the daughters of respectable families. As a result, they were under pressure to provide respectable lodgings because where a girl slept at night was crucial to her good character.

  Luckily for shopkeepers, ‘respectable’ was a very elastic term. And they certainly stretched it. Some provided decent lodgings that may well have been a vast improvement on the more humble family homes some girls had left behind. Staff at F. Cape & Co. lived above the Oxford store, where their accommodation was made up of shared bedrooms, a day room with piano and a dining room where all staff took their meals. Lodgings like these were modelled on servants’ quarters in large private houses. While the lower floors of the St Ebbe’s Street store were ruled by The Firm, the upper floor was ruled by the housekeeper, complete with a set of jangling keys. It was she who kept a sharp eye on the assistants and the maids: Henry Lewis brought his Methodist morals into all corners of his workplace.

  Many other lodgings, however, were far less homely. They were dank, overcrowded and horribly unhygienic. One young shopgirl left her job in a Baker Street store in 1898 after just two days, having found that twenty-three assistants were sharing three rooms and that she was expected to share a bed with two others.11 Draper’s boy Philip Hoffman had an even worse experience. He remembered his first horrendous night living-in, at the age of fourteen, at Samuel Lewis’s Holborn Silk Market:

  I found myself along with half-a-dozen other young shavers in a small dirty room. The ceiling was very low. Walls and ceilings were bare, grimy and splotched. The boys hunted for bugs on the wall, cracking them with slipper heels. They lifted up their nightshirts and asked will this pass? Will this pass? I thought my sensitive heart would break. I sobbed through tha
t dismal night.12

  The young Margaret Bondfield faced conditions that were equally testing. After leaving the lovely Mrs White’s drapery establishment and her stitching of baby frocks, she lived in at several of the big drapery houses in Brighton and London. She remembered the struggle she faced just to keep clean, with some housekeepers allowing a jug of hot water and foot-bath only once a week. Margaret recalled in her memoir that she and some of her friends ‘made up our minds that we would have at least one hot bath a week’. This meant sprinting straight from the shop to the public baths on the one night when they stayed open late. They used to ‘make a dash the moment the shutters were down and run at full speed for about half a mile’, reaching the baths ‘in time to have exactly quarter of an hour to undress, bath and dress again before the attendant had to turn us out’.

  Margaret was also horrified by routine harassment. During Brighton’s Race Week, her lodgings became a magnet for local lads trying to pay late-night visits. She remembers that they ‘knocked at our ground-floor windows and tried to pull them down’. Not being ‘that kind of girl’, she and the other occupants managed, often after a struggle, to slam and bolt the windows. The experience frightened Margaret deeply. All she knew of sex ‘was the shaming gossip of school girls’. She may have known how to make beautifully ornate baby clothes, but the making of actual babies was a completely different matter: ‘I felt hot all over if I saw a pregnant woman, because one was not supposed to know anything about a baby until or unless it appeared – and as a result of marriage.’13 Occasionally, similar stories made it into the newspapers. Under the headline ‘Disgraceful Affair at Cardiff’, The Drapers Record revelled in the tale of ‘two gentlemen of good position’ who broke into the female lodgings of Howells department store late one night, where thirty women were asleep. Some shopgirls were so frightened that they locked themselves into their bedrooms, while others alerted the authorities. On being arrested, the men claimed that they thought the lodging house a brothel.

  Some of the larger department stores seemed to offer a better deal. Indeed, many of them took living-in to new heights. Nestled in their roof lines were dormitories, with rows of small, ornate windows, where many of their staff spent their nights. As payrolls expanded, proprietors bought up local premises and converted them. Many of Whiteley’s female assistants lived in two cul-de-sacs close by, in a modicum of comfort. Bedrooms were shared by up to three girls and furnished with feather beds, a washstand and a chest of drawers. Every morning they dashed to the store, some wrapped in shawls, to be sure to be there for breakfast, served at eight o’clock sharp.15

  Living-in conditions may have been more comfortable in the larger stores, but workers certainly paid for the privilege. Fines, not unique to Whiteley’s, resulted in yet more ‘deductions’ being made for transgressions at their lodgings – for being untidy, leaving the gaslight on, or entertaining visitors, especially of the opposite sex.16

  It was no wonder that the living-in system was a major source of grievance for shopworkers. Staff that lived above or near the shop were, of course, on hand around the clock. Store owners took full advantage of this, with many opening early in the morning and closing late in the evening, leading to notoriously long hours. By the mid nineteenth century gas lighting had spread to streets and to stores. Henry Mayhew lyrically chronicled the metropolis at night, calling the sight a delightful ‘fairy charm’: ‘Far as the eye can see, stretch the jets of gas, brilliant as gems, in long and charmed vista. Within the shops, innumerable gas-jets light up the wares of the merchant, or the products of the manufacturer, with the lustrous shimmer almost of sunshine.’17 Late-night shopping, made possible by gas lighting, long hours and customer demand, was a Victorian invention.

  In fact, there were no fixed closing times. Store owners often refused to pull down their own shutters until they were certain that their rivals had done the same. Many lived above the shop themselves and saw little distinction between home and work. When she was working at a small shop on Commercial Road in London’s East End, the young Margaret Bondfield was sent out by her employer late in the evening ‘to scout around and see if the shops over the way showed any sign of closing; if they did, we too would hastily and gladly put down the shutters’.18 This meant that shopworkers could frequently work as many as eighty to a hundred hours each week, for up to fifty-one weeks of the year.

  One shopgirl described her punishing daily routine to Cassell’s Magazine. She worked in ‘a large shop’ employing nearly a hundred other women. Her long shift started at eight in the morning with a half-hour dinner break at noon after which ‘the standing and smiling and serving’ began again for a further eight hours with only a short tea break in the middle.19 The ‘standing and smiling’ might have looked effortless – indeed, this was part of the vital illusion that shopping was a ‘pleasure’ and never a chore – but in reality it could be a daily endurance test.

  The first organised campaigns to counter this gruelling timetable had already begun in the 1840s with the Early Closing Association. Led by Victorian philanthropists – a steely mix of prominent charity workers, churchgoers, professionals and politicians – the association campaigned to shorten shop opening hours and, in particular, to put an end to Sunday trading. With the growth of towns and cities, the number of small traders had mushroomed and many were opening all hours, to cater for working-class customers whose own jobs demanded very long hours, including on Saturdays. It was these traders that the association had in its sights. Their campaign was successful in establishing some voluntary early closing agreements between shopkeepers, and half-holidays for assistants. But these improvements were limited. Local agreements like these quickly fell apart when just one shopkeeper opted out and they were no substitute for government legislation, which had begun to regulate other industries. Since the early 1800s, at least ten Factory Acts had famously limited working hours in selected industries and workshops; however, this legislation only benefited a fraction of the country’s total workforce and mostly applied to women and children in textiles. Millions remained outside its scope, including shop assistants.

  In 1873, things looked like they might be about to change. Liberal MP, banker and amateur naturalist Sir John Lubbock proposed that the Factory Acts be extended to shops. His Shop Hours Regulation Bill, sponsored by a new campaign group, the National Early Closing League, proposed that the working hours of women, apprentices and children be cut to ten and a half per day. Lubbock was already a household name: it was thanks to him that bank holidays had been introduced two years previously, referred to by many as ‘St Lubbock’s days’. He had been a strong supporter of the Factory Acts but thought it very unfair that shopworkers were not covered. He noted the absurdity of factory inspectors sometimes having to walk through a shop, right past assistants working eighteen-hour days, in order to climb the stairs to enforce legislation protecting those producing the goods on sale.20 Lubbock also seemed impressed by his more personal dealings with the shopworker class. He was a passionate public speaker, giving regular lectures on the natural sciences to literary and scientific societies as well as to working men’s associations. Shop assistants, ever eager to better themselves, were often in his audience.

  Many middle-class commentators agreed with his message – that workers should seek self-improvement – but not with his methods. One vociferous opponent was Jessie Boucherett, now a veteran member of the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women. In a letter to The Spectator, she argued that Lubbock’s bill would ‘throw women out of work’ because shopkeepers, particularly those in poor areas who wanted to stay open for long hours, would have to hire male assistants. If they were to close early, as Lubbock advised, they would lose vital custom and, just as troubling for Boucherett, deprive other working women of their only chance to shop. As she put it, ‘The servant-girl goes out in the evening, after the late dinner or supper of her master and mistress, to make her purchases; the charwoman goes out after her day’s work is done
, and she has put her children to bed and given her husband his supper; the woman or girl employed all day in handicraft or in manufactory goes out after she has had her supper and changed her dress.’ It followed that ‘at nine o’clock the shops are still busy, busier indeed than in the middle of the day’.21

  Others shared her concerns. Another Spectator correspondent feared that enforcing Lubbock’s bill would require the creation of ‘a number of new offences’, ‘a crowd of fresh officials’ and a new inspection regime ‘of an exceptionally inquisitorial and offensive kind’. He invited readers to ‘imagine every shopkeeper in the kingdom who employs a woman being liable to the domiciliary visits of an inspector at any hour of the day or night!’22 In the event, most MPs agreed and the bill was shelved. Nevertheless, it marked an important staging post in a national debate about shopwork and trading hours that would run and run to the present day.

  The question of whether women’s bodies were physically suited to the demands of shopwork, or indeed any kind of paid work, would also run and run. In rejecting Lubbock’s bill, MPs had decided that, compared with factory work, shopwork ‘could hardly be considered fatiguing, much less unwholesome’.23 Supporters of regulation now set out to prove them wrong, in print and in the lecture halls. In 1878, The Times ran a series of letters on ‘the standing evil’, exposing the ‘suffering’ of shop assistants and ‘domestic slavery in the West End’. Seats for customers had long been part of the furniture in the more fashionable stores, from mahogany high chairs at the ribbon counter to the occasional softer fauteuil in the dressmaking department. But for shopgirls themselves it was a different story. Shopkeepers demanded that their assistants stand eagerly at the ready, obligingly alert to a customer’s every whim. Customers themselves felt affronted if ever they encountered a shopgirl sitting down. In one of the letters to The Times, Dr Arthur Edis, obstetrician and assistant physician at Soho’s Hospital for Women, intervened on behalf of the ever-ready shopgirl. He wrote of ‘a most cruel and pernicious custom that exists in nearly all … large millinery and drapery establishments’ and of young women unable to ‘endure the fatigue and discomfort caused by this incessant standing’. He called on shopkeepers to do two simple things: provide their assistants with seats and, most importantly, allow them to use them. In the meantime, The Girl’s Own Paper had its own suggestions. One ingenious but invidious one was that a dainty device rather like a shooting stick might be discreetly sewn onto the back of a shopgirl’s bustle. A sketch portrays two smiling, perfectly attired shopgirls demonstrating the use of the device, apparently inspired by a similar one used by Alpine shepherds.24 More of a perch than a proper seat, it was a perfect illustration of the shopgirls’ social position as servants of the counter.