by Jacky Hyams
So, Betty finished school on the Friday and started work the following Monday. Her mother had arranged everything, as she knew the family for whom Betty would be working.
The pay was half a crown (2 shillings and 6 pence) a week, starting at around 7am and finishing around 6pm, with a half-day on Saturday and Sunday mornings free. ‘The family had a drapers’ shop – in the front room of their house – but they sold all sorts of things.’
Betty liked the baby, ‘a real little doll’. She would get him up in the morning, wash him, dress him, feed him and take him out for a walk in a big boat pram.
The day war broke out in September 1939 was certainly a most unhappy memory.
My mother was crying, she’d lost a brother in the First War. There was an aerodrome a few miles away and we knew they were constructing a brand-new arsenal [a Royal Ordnance munitions factory] at Bridgend because my brother Jack was already working there, helping to build it. He’d worked in quarries but once word got round that the arsenal paid better money than the quarries, off he went to work there.
The new Bridgend munitions site had been chosen because it was remote from other areas vulnerable to enemy bombing, yet reasonably close to three major ports and had a plentiful supply of unemployed labour.
Betty continued to look after the baby for the next eighteen months. Then she switched to another childminding job, this time looking after two children in the next village, a live-in job with a farming family – until the workload got too much.
I just left, went home and stayed there. Then one day, my sister Mary said: “They’re taking on youngsters at the arsenal” and my ears pricked up. Mary was already working there and she had money to spend – which I didn’t.
The money was good – £2 a week, a lot more than I’d been getting. I had so little from the childminding, I’d walk home from the first job to save thruppence [3d] to put towards things I’d save up for, like clothes.
At first, Betty worked in the textiles section of the huge arsenal, the largest single-site munitions factory in the UK, employing 40,000 people. Initially, she worked on a sewing machine, making workers’ uniforms, turbans, waistcoats and trousers.
At the age of eighteen, she was transferred to the filling section. Here, the work was dangerous: making pellets for propellant, using different types of powdered explosive. Moving to pellets, however, meant shift work and a fatter wage packet. Later on, she would help assemble rockets, fitting the nose cones onto the projectiles.
In an area like Bridgend, which had known serious hardship through the 1920s and 1930s, wartime was as tough as it was elsewhere, yet for younger women like Betty it brought a regular wage packet they could never have earned in peacetime.
‘I don’t care what anyone says, the main reason Bridgend was so popular with everyone working there was the money. A few of the girls at the arsenal were bringing home more money than their fathers – though they didn’t dare tell them.’
Like Betty Nettle, Joyce Storey left school, at Kingswood, near Bristol, at the age of fourteen. She too found herself being shoehorned into her first job in 1931 via a friend of her mother’s called Lottie, who ran a local drapery store. Lottie had some relatives, a family running a modest shop, who needed live-in help.
Lottie made much of the job, glossing it over so that it sounded the chance of a lifetime. I was to receive five shillings a week – she mentioned the five bob first. She was quite right – I had never had five bob in the whole of my life. My duties would be simple, she said, merely helping in the house, with a bit of cooking and light cleaning. There was a little girl to be fetched from school, but I would be very happy there; she just knew that I would get on with her brother Harold and his wife, and of course I would get good food, the best.
My mother made me a blue velvet holdall with brown bone handles. She also made me a flannelette nightie and a skirt with two warm blouses. I started my duties the following Monday.
Harold was tall and freckly and he had a boyish face. He respected his customers and wanted only to do the best by them, so he had a friendly and pleasing manner. His wife was different: she also was tall and slim but with a haughty attitude. She looked down on me now, and although her smile was as bright as a 60-watt lamp, I could tell she was asking herself if this tiny slip of a girl could get through a rota of duties she had in mind for her. She quickly made a decision and spoke to me.
‘I shall require you to help with the preparation of the meals, the washing-up and clearing away. There will, of course, be a certain amount of cleaning to be done and I shall allocate your various duties daily. I have a daughter who needs to be fetched from school and you will be required to play with her until bedtime. There will be a small amount of mending and sewing to be done, but shall we give it a trial, say, for a month? See how we get on?’
She then showed me a little box room that contained a bed and a small bedside cabinet, but outside on the landing was a cupboard which she said I could use to hang my things and a shelf above was also at my disposal. The cupboard had a musty smell.
I found nothing difficult in the work I had to do in the days that followed. I loved the little girl and read to her and played with her for hours. Only one thing worried me: I came down one morning to find that Mrs Collins had put a duckboard [a slatted wooden board, placed to form a path over muddy ground] to stand on to start the washing. The big tub stood on a long bench. Even with the duckboard, I could hardly see over the top and the heat and steam made me feel hot and faint. At home, I might have helped turn the mangle [a mechanical laundry aid consisting of two rollers to wring out water from clothes] or held the sheets and helped my mother hang things on the line, but I had never actually had to do all the washing by myself. All done by hand, of course: shirts, overalls, tablecloths, towels, sheets, the lot. That night I fell into bed sick with exhaustion.
Joyce had a half-day off every Thursday afternoon: ‘One day I took a walk down Castle Street and then I saw it: a coat with a great fur collar that would make me look like a film star. The more I looked at it, the more convinced I became that I must have it.’
The coat was priced at £2 and 10 shillings. Joyce arranged to pay for it in instalments of 5 shillings a time and once the last instalment was paid, she could collect the coat.
Every Thursday after that, I went to the shop and paid my 5 shillings off. One more payment only now remained and this Thursday, I would be collecting it. I skipped through the bedrooms. I sang as I flipped the duster lightly over the ornaments. The vegetables were ready and standing in salted water and the meat was in the roasting tin surrounded by the potatoes that were to be baked for supper. Lunch was cold meat and salad, which I intended to miss because of wanting to be out on the dot.
At exactly ten minutes to two, Joyce presented herself for her wages.
Mrs Collins hesitated, then looked at her watch. She glanced up at the big clock on the wall.
‘Ah now,’ she said and my heart sank, ‘there is a small job I would like you to do before you go. Then I will have your money ready for you and you can be away. I would like the coal cellar to be washed over. Put the house flannel on the end of the broom, but give it a good sweeping first.’
‘It never occurred to me to refuse her. I just stood there in abject misery, knowing it would mean having to take off all my decent clothes and then afterwards wash before I could go out. It would be three o’clock before I would be out of the house on my precious half-day.
Joyce suddenly became very angry:
I would wash her bloody floor like it had never been washed before. I cannot remember getting the pail or the water but I began to scrub each patch slowly and methodically. I didn’t feel the stone floor tear and ladder the only pair of black silk stockings I possessed. My face was smudged with coal dust and tears; my black dress, where the water had dripped down the front, was stained and filthy. It was only when I came to the final patch that I looked up and swore a terrible oath: ‘This is the last time in my
entire bloody life I will ever be on my knees with my nose to the ground, for I belong up there with my eyes to the light, and walking upright and tall.’
Joyce completed her task and walked upstairs.
Mrs Collins opened her mouth to say something when she saw the state I was in, but took a step backward when she saw the wild glint in my eyes that held the clear message that our paths would never meet again. She held out my five shillings and I passed her without a word. I had worked blindly and solidly for this woman for ten weeks, for a coat I was now going to collect, come hell or high water.
I must have looked a sight with my coal-black face, my stockings all torn and my hair dishevelled and with that dreadful determined look on my face. Even the shop assistant ran to collect the package when I demanded to have it now and not a moment later.
Joyce returned home to Kingswood:
When I opened the door of our sitting room, my mother as usual was on the sewing machine. She watched me fling myself into an armchair and sob, hard sobs that tore at my insides and made it difficult to breathe. She waited until I had quietened down, then with a long sigh she said, ‘I’ll go and make us a nice cup of tea, girl.’
By the mid-1930s, in densely populated urban areas where there were plenty of shops of all kinds, young women found they could easily secure work behind a shop counter – and sometimes move around from job to job.
Marjorie Gardiner was fifteen when she decided to work in millinery, encouraged by her sister-in-law, who had worked in that trade (the wearing of hats by both sexes was at its peak in the 1920s and 1930s, but started to decline in the post-war years).
Marjorie’s first job was in a very small, exclusive shop in the Seven Dials area of Brighton:
I suppose in those days I was very fashion-conscious. The shop window had silk drapes and was dressed with one gown, one hat and a vase of real flowers, beautifully arranged. All was changed every few days and everything had to be of the very best.
There was only Madam and myself as the apprentice. Madam was a lovely lady, very kind and quite young, perhaps in her late twenties. The wage was 2 shillings and 6 pence a week for the first year and 3 shillings and 6 pence thereafter.
Marjorie remained in the job for three years until her employer married a tea planter and went to live abroad. The shop was sold.
I then applied for a post of junior sales assistant in a very high-class millinery establishment. I was chosen out of a number of applicants – Madam had given me an excellent reference – and my new Madam was big and blonde, somewhat in the style of Mae West. I had heard she was a tyrant but it was not easy to get a job and I was thankful for the offer.
This was a different world from Marjorie’s previous job, rigid rules and discipline replacing the relaxed atmosphere she’d known. However, the other girls were friendly, which made a difference.
The shop had two very big showrooms, one downstairs and one upstairs. Above the latter was the workroom, where the head milliner and four girls were kept busy all day, making hats and working on alterations and trimmings. The workroom consisted of the head milliner, two under-milliners and an apprentice whose job it was to run errands, get ribbons and other materials needed for hats being made for customers; she went out in all weathers.
Hats were made in those days from wire shapes or on a varnished wooden block covered by buckram, a kind of net stiffened and dried to the needed shape. Customers who had hats made came in for a fitting before they were completed, as they had to be just what the customer ordered. And the milliners also had to account for their time on the work. Although some hats were made to order or altered by these shop milliners, most hats came from the wholesalers.
The showroom consisted of four or five long counters with hat stands which had to be dressed out each day, with toning coloured hats chosen by the senior assistants, helped by the juniors, who fetched and brushed the ones needed. The apprentices had to bring artificial flowers and feathers for decorating the hats, making them look individual.
The shop opened at 9am, but at 8.30am, a stream of smart young ladies, all dressed in black, filed through the back entrance of the shop and went up the stairs to a shabby cloakroom. Here, we would put a last touch to our hair and faces, took off our outdoor shoes and replaced them with black, high-heeled satin ones. By nine o’clock, the door was open and even in winter remained open through the day, no matter how bitter the weather. The hours were long, 9am to 7pm Monday, Tuesday Wednesday, on Friday night we were supposed to leave at 8pm and on Saturday, 9pm but we were not free even then if there were still customers around.
In those days shop assistants always wore black dresses, mostly black satin in summer and velvet in winter:
A little while later, we were allowed a touch of white, such as a little collar or a frilly front, known as a jabot. No jewellery was permitted, apart from a wristwatch and an engagement ring, if appropriate.
When we were busy, we had to serve two or three customers at a time but however busy we were, as soon as someone came through the doorway, we had to greet her and find her a chair to sit on while she was waiting, apologising for the delay and assuring her she would be attended to as soon as possible. In those days, ‘the customer is always right’ meant precisely that and we were never allowed to forget it.
Millinery for women in mourning made up a big part of the shop’s business, as Marjorie recalled:
Widows’ weeds, a black hat draped with black veiling, were almost compulsory when I first went into the business. Widows wore them to their husband’s funeral with the veil over their faces and continued to wear them for several months afterwards. ‘Weeds’ then went out of fashion but we continued to do a tremendous trade in black hats as everyone who went into mourning wore black, from head to toe. It was only when clothes rationing started in the Second World War that this custom started to die out.
When King George V died in 1936, buyers from everywhere were dashing to buy up every available black hat from the manufacturers as nearly everyone, it seemed, wanted a black hat for his funeral and windows everywhere were draped in black.
When war broke out, Marjorie went to work in another milliner’s. ‘I was now married and continued in my job until the end of the war. Life was now getting easier for shop girls. The hours were not so long and the pay was increasing a little, but it was never very good. Even when I was manageress of a shop my wages, until the day I left, were only £3 a week and commission.’
Maisie Jagger was born in 1922 in Woolwich, South-East London, and grew up in Essex, where her father had bought a house on a new estate.
I was one of five, two boys and three girls. We were a very close-knit family, that’s for sure.
At the top end of our road there were quite a few shops. I left school at fourteen and went straight into shop work. I was never once out of work. I think I worked in every shop near us: a grocer’s shop first, then a shop called Perk Stores, then a shop called Gunners – they had biscuits in tins all along the front of the shop.
I worked on the counter of a fish-and-chip shop and I also worked in a place called Maypole. I can remember the cheese they sold, covered with something like a sack, a type of webbing all around it.
I was quite a friendly girl. You had to get on with everyone in the shop, didn’t you? But I’d also change jobs quickly for a penny or tuppence more a week. By the time war broke out, I was working as a machinist, making haversacks and binocular cases in a big factory.
Whatever I earned went straight to Mum on a Thursday – when I knew she wouldn’t have any money left until Dad got paid on Friday night. In return, I’d get 6 pence a week as pocket money.
Alice Reynolds started her working life at the age of fourteen as a shop assistant in a department store in Hove, East Sussex. Her pay was 25 shillings a week plus a sales commission of 3 pence in the £1.
In 1936, she was increasingly bored at work:
I decided to do something about it. I went to the local labour exchange to
see if there was another job I could do that would be more fulfilling.
The counter clerk said: ‘Have you thought of becoming a nurse?’
‘No.’
‘Take this form and go and see the matron of Southlands Hospital at Shoreham. She’ll be very pleased to see you – she is very short of nurses.’
At Southlands, Alice went to meet the matron.
‘“Good morning,” she said. “Sit down, Nurse.”
‘Now whether she automatically called everyone “Nurse” or whether it was a ploy to help the applicant make up her mind, I didn’t know. But it certainly made up mine!’
The job involved three years’ training: ‘I like the Irish girls best because they can’t run home,’ said the Matron. (Later, Alice discovered that it took the Irish girls all year to save the £5 required for their fare home.)
The work meant living in at the nurses’ home:
From being a nobody, I was now a somebody. I had my own room; hot baths whenever I needed or felt inclined; a blue and white uniform, starched caps and aprons and very good food served in the dining room. Maids brought round dishes of vegetables and there were glasses and jugs of water. It was all very different from home – maids made our beds and cleaned our rooms!
My wages were 25 shillings a month, which also had to cover buying text and exercise books and stockings, but we all managed as everything else was there for us.
My first morning on the wards was strange. Another nurse, Sister Penny, came to my room to help me with my uniform; for a headdress we had a hemstitched bordered cloth, an oblong shape, which, when folded on the long side and pinned onto the hair would be flared out on the head. It was then gathered at the back and pinned with a long safety pin and fanned out into two tails at the back. This made a very fetching headdress! We also wore blue dresses with white aprons, black stockings and black shoes. I felt very smart.