by Pamela Cox
From the start, the co-op movement forged a particularly strong connection with female customers, who, across the social scale, kept a sharp eye on everyday costs. While female workers remained marginal in most trade unions, female consumers flocked to become co-op members. They also carved out their own distinctive niche within the movement: the Women’s Co-operative Guild. By the turn of the century, the Guild was one of the largest women’s organisations in the country. Its twelve thousand members debated everything from food prices and family planning to women’s work and pay. A much more radical foremother of today’s Mumsnet, its kitchen-table politics had a profound effect on wider social debate. Led by a charismatic duo, Margaret Llewelyn Davies and Lilian Harris, the Guild was invited to serve on many parliamentary panels and inquiries, on topics from maternal health to divorce reform. Some called it ‘the trade union for wives and mothers’.23 Margaret Bondfield, who later joined the Guild, admitted that she ‘heard more sound common-sense from those women’ than she had heard ‘in much more learned assemblies’. They didn’t ‘beat about the bush’ but went ‘straight to the heart of the matter’.24
While Bondfield herself was lifting the lid on private retailing, the Women’s Co-operative Guild began to investigate working conditions in their own Co-op stores, suspecting that they were exploiting their many female workers. In the late 1890s, Lilian Harris surveyed 104 outlets employing 1,662 shopgirls and her first impressions were favourable: ‘The women and girls have an hour for dinner, half an hour for tea and, as a rule, they go out for meals.’ Looked at in the round, however, Harris found that Co-op shopgirls seemed to face the same challenges as those behind the counter elsewhere, working long hours for low pay, albeit with a longer meal break.25 The Guild began to lobby the leaders of the Co-operative Wholesale Society on the matter, but to little avail.
It also began an intriguing experiment in shop-based social work. In 1902, Margaret Llewelyn Davies moved to Sunderland to help set up a new Co-op store with a difference. As one of Cambridge University’s first female students, Llewelyn Davies had no shopkeeping experience herself. Undeterred, she saw it as a way of bringing co-operatism to the very poorest.26 The store was on Coronation Street in one of the city’s most deprived wards. Llewelyn Davies turned it into a People’s Store that not only sold ‘cheap, nourishing food’, including hot soup for a penny and hot pease pudding for a ha’penny, but also offered a savings bank, a library, a meeting hall and social events. In addition to the normal shop assistants, the People’s Store employed two live-in social workers from the Women’s Guild. Known as the ‘store ladies’, they visited local families in their homes and also kept a desk in the shop next to the grocery area, from where they managed the savings bank and dispensed advice on budgeting, debt and much besides. The experiment was inspired by ‘settlement houses’ that had been set up in east London and Manchester some years before as a practical way of promoting self-improvement through outreach work. The Sunderland initiative had a promising start. Four hundred people attended its opening tea and one visiting reporter later described it as a ‘mission to help people to help themselves’, starting from their ‘homeliest needs’. There was ‘no patronage, no church, no charity’, but instead ‘a real neighbourliness and absolute social equality’.27 This rather rosy picture disguised growing tensions, however, between the Sunderland Co-op Society, which was funding the store ladies’ activities, and the Women’s Guild. After two years, the ladies resigned on the grounds that they were being ‘unduly interfered with’ and the project came to an end.
Meanwhile, outside the world of the co-op, two thirds of Britain’s 750,000 shopworkers were still living in, and arguments for scrapping the system altogether were mounting. The first public protest on this issue was led by shop assistants at Whiteley’s. Not for the first time, Whiteley’s proved to be a game changer. In 1901, six years before the proprietor’s murder, a group of its male assistants took the dramatic step of parading along Oxford Street with sandwich boards advertising a mass meeting against living-in. One of their main complaints was that living-in was ‘unmanly’. While it gave them a roof, it deprived them of much else, including a social life, higher pay and the chance to marry; also, by preventing them from owning or renting property, it excluded many from the right to vote. The parade was a call to arms. Philip Hoffman was a former Whiteley’s worker from a German migrant family who had become a leading activist in the shop assistants union. He remembered that ‘It roused London all right, especially drapery London.’ The protest meeting was held at Westbourne Park Chapel and was presided over by radical preacher Dr John Clifford. It was packed, with ‘hundreds turned away’, and, according to Hoffman, sparked a wave of ‘protest meetings and demonstrations all over the country’.28
Although powerful, the wave broke, leaving little lasting change in its wake. Another started to swell in 1907, however, as MPs debated legislation seeking to address the scandalous fact that many workers in all kinds of industries were still losing a significant slice of their wages through fines and other deductions. Once again, shop assistants testified to the trials of living-in. This time, the protest meetings inspired by their accounts spilled over not just into demonstrations but into strike action, starting in south Wales and spreading to other areas. In July 1907, twenty-four workers walked out of Daniels and Co., a draper’s in Kentish Town in north London. For Hoffman, these events were turning points. By then he was a veteran shopwork reformer. He’d shared numerous platforms with Margaret Bondfield, including at a mass rally in Trafalgar Square attended by over five hundred assistants in support of the 1904 Shops Bill, which attempted to enforce more extensive early closing. Hoffman saw the 1907 protests as nothing less than ‘a revolt … the first open rebellion of shopworkers against the ancient thralldom’.29
After sixteen weeks and much supportive press coverage, a settlement was reached that began to dismantle Daniels’ long tradition of living-in. Anxious not to lose their staff to more progressive competitors, leading stores, including Grose Brothers, Debenhams and Derry & Toms, followed suit and began to allow male assistants, at least, to live out. But shopgirls were still generally required to live in. Employers continued to argue that this protected their moral welfare. Margaret Bondfield cut through this old line: if they were ‘to become useful, healthy women’ and, in time, ‘healthy wives and mothers’, they needed, as a matter of urgency, to ‘begin to live rational lives’.30 Shopgirls didn’t need cosseting; they needed independence, shorter hours and better pay. Bondfield’s own campaigns literally took a dramatic turn in 1908, when she was asked by writer Cicely Hamilton to advise on a new play. In the first scene of Diana of Dobson’s, five shopgirls undress for bed above a Clapham drapery store. The curtain rises on a dormitory ‘in darkness except for the glimmer of a single gas jet turned very low’. As the jet is turned up, it reveals ‘a bare room [with] very little furniture except five small beds ranged against the walls – everything plain and comfortless to the last degree’.31 According to Bondfield, ‘it was the real thing, with boxes under the bed, clothes hanging up on hooks, the general dinginess’.32 Less real was stage heroine Diana’s temporary escape from her life as low-paid shopgirl, courtesy of a surprise inheritance and a Swiss holiday adventure.
The fictional Dobson’s didn’t offer much in the way of staff entertainment. But many real stores were making conscious efforts to up their game in this respect, perhaps in recognition of the fact that their young assistants were starting to expect more from life. Staff clubs and social events became increasingly common from the late nineteenth century. For many shopworkers, they were probably more memorable – and a lot more fun – than union meetings.
In Oxford, Cape & Co. overhauled its entertainments, offering a sports club with swimming, football and cricket teams and becoming well known for its annual outings – bus trips to Windsor, steam-launch jaunts on the rural Thames. Every February, like many other stores, it held an annual stock-taking party, theirs in t
he Cadena Café in Cornmarket Street with games, dances and recitals performed by staff, including manager Henry Lewis and his sons. In Newcastle, Bainbridge’s ran staff Bible groups but much besides, including concerts, a choral society and evening lectures on scientific and literary themes. Selected assistants at Owen Owen’s large Liverpool drapery enjoyed weekend breaks at Welsh beauty spots Penmaenmawr and Plas Mariandir at the proprietor’s expense. Many Co-op stores prided themselves on being ‘more than a shop’ and offered staff and customers ‘food for the mind’ in the form of clubs, classes, debates, dances and days out.33
The social side of store life meant a lot to shopworkers. Until the 1920s and 30s, paid holidays were rare. Union calls for their working week to be cut to sixty hours were discussed at length in parliamentary wrangles over the 1911 Shops Bill, but the relevant clause was itself cut in the end.34 The only significant measure that made it through into law was compulsory half-day closing one day a week. Workers therefore had little time or money to get away for any length of time, making the day trips and annual outings all the more important.
The social side of their businesses was also beginning to take on a new significance for proprietors of the larger shops. London’s flagship department stores competed with each other at all levels, including their expanding social package. Harrods’ social programme had a long history that now comprised ladies’ sports clubs with coaching in hockey, swimming and rifle shooting. Staff could write for the Harrodian Gazette and attend lively evening lectures.35 But the store whose own confident motto was Omnia Omnibus Ubique, or ‘Everything for Everyone Everywhere’, found itself facing a tough new challenge in 1908 when Harry Gordon Selfridge, never short of confidence himself, arrived from Chicago to start work on his Oxford Street store. Selfridge’s majestic building went up in record time. A staggering number of young shop assistants queued for jobs, submitting ten thousand applications in the six months before opening. Harrods fought back with a hastily organised Diamond Jubilee in the same week that Selfridges celebrated its Grand Opening in 1909, the first salvo in a rivalry that would run for decades. Selfridge promised a new deal for shop assistants and his elaborate social programme was very much part of this. On top of the usual outings and sports clubs, staff could join the Selfridge Players and Music Society and even have the chance to travel abroad. Selfridge himself saw this as a form of training, proclaiming, ‘Travel is the greatest educator!’ and promptly granting fifty staff an Easter trip to Paris to visit the city’s legendary stores.36
Selfridge knew what he was doing. Times were clearly changing. Workers were starting to demand more for themselves and some employers were starting to invest more in them, not because they were heeding union complaints but because, like Selfridge, they hoped that this would lift performance and profits. They also invested more in their workers because they were required to do so by a new generation of interventionist politicians. In the same year that Selfridges opened, the new chancellor of the exchequer, firebrand David Lloyd George, put his People’s Budget before Parliament, promising a dramatic redistribution of wealth through new tax and social protection schemes. In the face of fierce opposition from the Conservatives and the House of Lords, which forced a general election in 1910, it took a full year for the budget to be passed.
For shopworkers, one of the most important pieces of legislation that Lloyd George’s radical budget enabled was the National Insurance Act of 1911. Before this, if illness or injury prevented you from working, in most cases you simply didn’t get paid. You also had to find the money for a doctor. Many just couldn’t afford to be ill, on either score. The new Act offered a safety net. A shopgirl bought special stamps that she would lick and stick into her insurance book. Her shopkeeper, whether running a corner store or a department store, would also contribute, as would the government. In the event of illness, these could be cashed in. As a national safety net, it was certainly a significant step up from self-help.
The shop assistants’ union was another beneficiary of the new system. It became one of the ‘approved societies’ empowered by the 1911 Act to give out benefits to shopworkers, boosting its profile and its numbers. That said, still only around 13 per cent of all shopworkers had signed up by 1914 and that figure included those working in Co-ops who had joined their own Amalgamated Union of Co-operative Employees.37 Perhaps some of the 77 per cent who remained outside felt their immediate needs had now been taken care of – if not by Lloyd George then by modernising employers. Or perhaps the shopgirls among them simply took the view that as long as women earned so much less than men, they would always have to rely on a future husband to truly safeguard their own prospects.
For women’s low pay remained a major problem. Thousands of women were still stuck in the casualised and sweated industries that supplied many shops – dressmaking, tailoring and blouse-making in particular. Clementina Black and the Women’s Industrial Council stepped in again, this time demanding that they be paid a ‘living wage’. The idea of a living wage, defined by future Labour chancellor Philip Snowden as a wage that would ‘allow the poorest command of the things which keep a human being alive’, was beginning to gather support across the political spectrum.38 The sweated trades and the women working in them became powerful icons of the urgent need for change.
In 1906, Black worked with the Daily News to organise a shocking exhibition on London sweatshops. It featured real women at work, revealing the speed and skill with which they stitched and sewed, and exposing the pittance they were paid. Black went on to set up the National Anti-Sweating League and to co-write a book introducing well-heeled readers to the women who made their clothes. She and a small team of volunteer investigators tracked down the ‘makers’ – women living in poor areas of south and east London, working from home or in small workshops – and coaxed them into telling their stories. Black described how one woman had shown her an intricately stitched silk blouse ‘composed entirely of small tucks and of insertions of lace’, for which she had been paid just ten pence. The item would be sold in a shop, possibly a leading West End store, for anything between seventeen and twenty-five shillings.39
Some of those interviewed were teenagers, who did not need to live on these pitiful wages because they still boarded with their parents, but others were mothers and widows with dependants who most certainly did. As Black put it, ‘Underpayment, borne gaily enough in girlhood … grows an intolerable burden upon the wife and mother.’ Worse still, ‘she hastens to send out her own girls that their earning may lighten the pressure, and the story begins over again for them’. She added, ‘in a world of clamour the silent and long-suffering are exceedingly apt to be overlooked’.40 But to overlook these women was not just immoral, it was impractical and inefficient, felt Black. She quoted an east London clergyman, admiring the bluntness of his address to his congregation:
When will the ladies with the cheap blouses and the gentlemen with the cheap shirts understand that 6s 11d and 3s 11d are not the prices they pay. They pay those prices plus the difference between the minimum subsistence rate, 12s 4d, and the 6s 4d, the average earnings of a home worker. That same 6s per week multiplied by the number of workers makes a considerable sum, which mark you, has to be met. We think we do not meet it. O! yes we do … How do you pay? You keep a large staff of parsons to raise charitable funds and run clothing clubs and soup kitchens, you keep an army of Poor Law officials, and build costly workhouses and infirmaries, you spend millions on educating children who are too sleepy and overworked to learn when they get to school.41
Like the clergyman, Clementina Black believed that the answer lay in paying a living wage: ‘Only by setting a barrier to the downward trend of wages can we hope to remedy that kind of poverty which is produced not by the vice, the drunkenness or the idleness of the sufferers but by their industry, patience and abstinence.’ In her view, this barrier needed to ‘take the shape, as in trade union action it does, of a minimum wage; but, for the unorganised, the minimum wage must be
enforceable by law’.42 She wanted the rates to be set by new ‘trade boards’, each serving a specific industry. These would be based on a successful Australian model, much debated by Edwardian politicians, where employers and workers’ representatives would sit down together to agree fair wage scales and working conditions.
Trade boards duly took off. They were strongly promoted by a young Winston Churchill, then president of the Board of Trade and working alongside Chancellor Lloyd George in Asquith’s radical Liberal government. Vociferous in most matters, Churchill held characteristically firm views on the minimum wage, declaring it a ‘national evil that any class of Her Majesty’s subjects should receive less than a living wage in return for their utmost exertions’. Without it, and especially in the sweated trades, he warned that ‘the good employer is undercut by the bad and the bad by the worst’ and that ‘where these conditions prevail you have not a condition of progress, but a condition of progressive degeneration’.43
Unfortunately for shopworkers, it proved more difficult to set up trade boards for retailers because their shops were just so diverse, ranging from the tiny tobacconist’s kiosk to the family corner shop to the huge department store. But all was not lost. The drive for a minimum wage for shop assistants – or, at least, male assistants – was first led by the co-op union. In 1907, the Amalgamated Union of Co-op Employees started a campaign on the issue and within three years, five hundred local co-op societies had agreed to implement minimum wage scales for men. But only eight had agreed to do so for women. The Women’s Co-operative Guild was having none of it. They insisted that women’s pay be placed on the table too. A new round of Guild investigations, building on those conducted by Lilian Harris in the 1890s, revealed a woeful picture which shamed an organisation that prided itself on its fairness. A manageress in one Co-op store that took £400 per week earned just thirteen shillings a week herself. A twenty-year-old female assistant with three years’ experience was taking home just eight shillings a week, having started out on a paltry five shillings.