by Pamela Cox
Some shop assistants actively avoided applying for jobs there, explaining, ‘They’re rotten payers.’ Even Lewis’s son Spedan described his father as ‘the captain of a big ship much under-engined and with those engines much under-fuelled’, whose staff were underpaid and undermotivated. They received but ‘a bare living, with very little margin beyond absolute necessaries’ and had none of the advantages that staff at enlightened stores were starting to enjoy: no sick pay, pension provision, staff amenities or playing fields. Spedan Lewis described the management system as ‘ruthlessly close-fisted’.40
In May 1909 Spedan Lewis, then aged twenty-three, had been riding his horse on Rotten Row in Hyde Park. The horse had shied and Spedan had fallen off, seriously injuring himself, with one of his lungs severely punctured. For the next two years, he was effectively an invalid, undergoing a series of chest operations, struggling to recover and requiring long periods of rest. Spedan was a romantic, visionary young man, much influenced by his politically engaged mother, Eliza Baker, one of the few women to attend university in the 1870s, obtaining a pass degree from Girton College, Cambridge, in history and political economy.
Spedan owned a quarter share of John Lewis; his younger brother, Oswald, had sold his own quarter share back to his father, so that John Lewis senior at this point possessed three quarters of the business. The long months of recuperation gave Spedan ample time to reflect on his father’s lifework and his own few years’ experience of retail. He had been shocked to discover the enormous discrepancy between the annual profit of the John Lewis store and the annual pay sheet for staff, who were earning very low wages. Spedan, Oswald and their father enjoyed the income of about £26,000 a year; the staff wage bill for a workforce of just over 300 came to around £16,000 a year.41 Even fifty years later, when the extremes of rich and poor in society were less polarised, Spedan Lewis said in a radio broadcast, ‘It is all wrong to have millionaires before you have ceased to have slums.’ He was not against capitalism, but in 1957, and probably even more so in 1909, Spedan felt that ‘The present state of affairs is really a perversion of the proper working of capitalism.’42
From his sickbed, Spedan dreamt up a new model of business enterprise, ‘the notion of the John Lewis Partnership’, as he termed it, a notion that would ultimately prove so successful that it is still influencing business and government thinking today.43 He wanted to overturn the quasi-feudal relationship between proprietor and staff, establishing instead a kind of professional partnership between all ranks of store workers, such as that enjoyed by lawyers and stockbrokers. In his autobiography he lyrically described his concept thus: ‘Partnership is justice. Better than justice, it is kindness. It is harmony with what some people call the Nature of Things and some the Will of God.’44 On his recovery, Spedan swapped his quarter share of John Lewis for total control of Peter Jones on London’s Kings Road, which John Lewis senior had acquired a few years earlier. Peter Jones was to be Spedan’s testing ground.
Things did not go well at first. Peter Jones had been performing badly before the outbreak of war and now, in spite of extraordinary trading conditions and reduced opening hours, Spedan chose this moment to launch the first stages of his new scheme. First on his agenda was to improve staff living conditions. The store had been constructed out of a number of dwelling houses on the Kings Road; while the shopfloor had been knocked open, the upstairs staff bedrooms were still dingy, dangerous, separate quarters. Spedan had the passages knocked through, got hot and cold running water installed and improved general hygiene. He expanded the living quarters for female staff and effectively ended the strict and obligatory living-in regime by removing all rules restricting personal freedoms for those over twenty-one.45 For shopgirls under twenty-one, the hostel matron still played a parental role. Eating facilities were also renovated. Shopman Robert Bichan joyfully described the new-look dining room with ‘interesting pictures on the walls, colourful curtains, black and red Tudor tile pattern linoleum’. The kitchen was modernised too, with piping hot food served by neatly uniformed waitresses.46
Secondly, and most importantly for the majority of staff, Spedan significantly improved pay, keeping pace with inflation. In 1915 he also started the ‘Committees for Communication’, what he termed his ‘one really new idea’, though it was not unlike Selfridges’ Staff Parliament. His aim was to bridge the gulf between the managers and the managed; to this end, several times a year fifteen staff representatives in each committee met a senior manager – often Spedan himself – to discuss whatever was on their minds. Spedan discovered that at first they were shy and hadn’t much to say. ‘I used hastily to start a discussion upon something or other and keep it going for twenty minutes or so,’ he said, but as the idea caught on he did not need to take the lead any more. Spedan knew his reforms would be dismissed as ‘merely utopian, an unpractical lavishness that was hopelessly unsound business’, but he stuck with them.47
Tudor patterned flooring, increased pay, refurbished living quarters, better food and giving staff a say in the business seemed like financial suicide to most other proprietors, who were battening down the hatches, including John Lewis senior. Indeed, Spedan’s high spending was making staff costs spiral, with the pay sheet doubling in three years. But by the middle of the war, Peter Jones’ finances had begun to pull through, with turnover growing year on year. Spedan was hopeful that his reforms would win out.
Peter Jones’ shop assistants, provided with regular hot meals in the renovated dining room, were sheltered from many of the harsh realities of city life on the home front. Loss of supplies from continental Europe meant that food stocks were running low, and as a little girl, Dorothy Bouchier experienced first-hand what this meant. She would later work at Harrods, but in her autobiography some of her most enduring girlhood memories are of wartime hunger. ‘We didn’t seem to be getting enough to eat,’ she wrote, describing how her family hardly managed to survive on her father’s low wages as a corporal in the Royal Engineers, even when supplemented by her mother’s dressmaking work. ‘This undernourishment caused problems,’ she felt, for when she cut or grazed herself, the wounds would fester. She recalled chaotic neighbourhood scenes as someone shouted down the road, ‘There are some oxtails at the butchers!’ or ‘There’s coal at the depot!’ Everyone would rush outside, often arriving too late to get hold of the new supplies.48
In fact, the government’s War Emergency Committee had attempted to control the distribution and pricing of food and necessities, but few of their regulations had been implemented. With food prices rising by 87 per cent in the first two years of the war, food riots soon broke out. Socialist campaigner Margaretta Hicks described them as ‘mad raids’ often carried out by women who were ‘frenzied by the loss of relatives through the war’ and by ‘the gassing of soldiers, and the fearful fighting’. Hicks was sympathetic, but only to a degree: ‘It is dreadful, but smashing a few shops only makes things worse.’49
Apart from highly erratic and often non-existent supplies, retailers had another urgent problem to worry about: staffing levels. With three million men on the front in 1915, the government had woken up to the fact that they needed to mobilise women. David Lloyd George said, ‘Without women, victory will tarry,’ and propaganda posters called out, ‘Do your Bit, Replace a Man for the Front’. Women of all ages who had never before worked in shops entered retail in their thousands: for the first time ever there were more shopgirls than shopmen.50 They started to take on jobs traditionally reserved for their male counterparts: at Peter Jones, Spedan Lewis began hiring women as the all-important buyers, while at Peter Robinson’s, women drove the delivery vans, wearing smart grey uniforms. Harrods even retrained some of its female staff to become carriage attendants, the commissionaires who welcomed customers on the pavement in their distinctive uniforms, so that the famous ‘Green Men’ became ‘Green Women’. Firms like Sainsbury’s went on a recruitment drive, preparing a blank letter to be filled in by each branch manager, which read:
‘Madam, If your parents reside within half a mile of our _____ Branch, and you are not less than five feet six ins. in height; and not under 19 years of age, please call here between ____ and ____ tomorrow presenting this letter. Do not call at any other time. Yours truly, for J. Sainsbury.’51
Winifred Griffiths was nineteen years old when war broke out, working as a housemaid in Oakley, Hampshire. Her mistress released her so she could answer a local call-out from the co-operative stores; they wanted to train up young women as replacements for the male grocery assistants who had joined the forces. For the first few days Winifred had to stay in a back room bagging up sugar and lump sugar. She was first let out to help at the grocery counter on one of the busiest times of the week, Friday evening. ‘I was so bewildered that I am afraid I made a fine mess of things,’ she wrote in her unpublished autobiography. ‘When trying to serve customers I did not know where things were kept, nor yet had I memorised all the prices. I had not yet acquired the knack of making tidy packets for goods like dried fruit, rice and tapioca … To crown all, most customers expected their goods to be done up in a large paper parcel.’ Things soon improved for Winifred, as she made friends with two other new girls, Jennie and Daisy, who had been drafted in from Yorkshire and Somerset. Together they went to evening classes, or the cinema on their half day, or to church on Sundays.
Winifred left the Co-op for a new position in a grocery called Walkers, where she was to be trained up to take the place of a young man about to leave for the front. Much to her consternation, not only did he leave but so did his boss. ‘So that after only two or three months of training, as against several years that an old-time apprentice would have had, I found myself in charge of the provision side in a very busy store, where we sold thirty sides of bacon a week.’52
Other young women, though, stood little chance of promotion. Grocer Mr Headey, who had had difficulty before the Great War with his one female cashier, Miss Owen, among his twelve male staff, was drafted from Tonbridge to run a large grocery store in Reading which employed twenty-two people. Twenty of the twenty-two were women. It was to prove another unhappy experience. His son recalled how Mr Headey senior disapproved heartily of the female shop assistants. Matters came to a head when one of the women made a mistake, selling a customer powdered borax instead of ground arrowroot. There was ‘a hell of a to-do’ and she rushed into the girls’ restroom crying, the other female assistants hurrying after in order to comfort her, leaving the huge shop empty of staff. Mr Headey promptly sacked the lot. He then had to restaff, hiring any kind of man he could get hold of, ‘old joshers’ including a man with a club foot and another who had left the army on account of his religion.53
Of course, it wasn’t just in retail that women were stepping into roles traditionally occupied by men. Industrial, clerical, agricultural and transport jobs were suddenly open to them too. Pathé Gazette newsreels, which were shown in the newly built, hugely popular picture palaces, had titles like Navvies in Skirts, Zoo’s First Woman Keeper and While Mother Works. Over the course of the war, the number of women in employment increased by more than 1.5 million.54 Women became land girls, tram-drivers, firefighters and prototype policewomen. They heaved coal, built airships and worked behind the front line in France. Thousands also stepped up to do one of the most dangerous and highly lucrative jobs of all: munitions work.
At its height, the Woolwich Arsenal in south-east London was the biggest munitions factory in Britain. Some thirty thousand women walked through the massive wrought-iron gates for each twelve-hour shift. Among them were thousands of ex-shopgirls, attracted by significantly higher pay and a certain independence away from the shopfloor managers. The most difficult jobs they were trained to take on were bomb-making and chemical processing. The women who came into direct contact with sulphur were nicknamed the canaries, as the chemical turned their skin yellow: a far cry from the clean white hands, neat dress and gentility of the counter assistant. What’s more, the munitionettes occasionally had a discreet drink together in the pub after work, before returning to their lodgings on the bus, moving about the city unchaperoned.55 The strict, petty rules of the living-in system must have felt part of a different universe.
Now that they were experiencing working life with good wages, increased training and promotions, regulated hours, controlled working conditions and often workplace childcare, women joined unions as never before. There was a staggering 160 per cent increase in female union membership across all unions during the war. Female shop assistants in stores as well as co-operatives were part of this trend, with both the shop assistants’ union (the NAUSAW&C) and the co-operative workers union (the AUCE) seeing huge rises; the AUCE went from having 7,000 female assistants on its books to over 36,000. Some shop-owners still forbad union membership, but in other stores, particularly in the bigger co-operatives and department stores, a large part of the workforce was now unionised. This gave union officer Philip Hoffman more bargaining power than ever, which he was to exercise in the turbulent times ahead.
‘Shopgirl As Strike Leader’: Hilda Canham and the strike committee during the John Lewis & Co. strike, May 1920.
CHAPTER 6
STRIKE!
After the armistice, with 900,000 British and Empire members of the armed forces dead and thousands more wounded, the weary veterans returning home faced not only the flu pandemic, but also very insecure job prospects. The staple industries such as cotton and coal mining that had earned Britain its nickname of the ‘workshop of the world’ were in decline, as Britain’s industrial and trading dominance was challenged by Germany and the USA. Now that the war was over, this decline was exposed and unemployment shot up.
Female war workers were made to relinquish their jobs for the returning men – munitions workers were sacked and the Restoration of Pre-War Practices Act in 1919 excluded women from most forms of industrial work. Women were expected to return to their former jobs, like domestic service, textile work and shopwork, and married women were expected to devote themselves to their domestic duties again. As the Ministry of Labour put it, ‘As soldiers return to their homes their wives are reverting to housewifery.’ Shopgirls who had taken the place of shopmen all across the retail trade were also required to step back down as the men returned. Some women missed their war work, its new horizons and camaraderie; others were glad to leave their wartime roles, seeing it as an extraordinary but circumscribed period in their lives.1
In spite of all these women having vacated their temporary positions, there were still simply not enough jobs to go around. Working-class wages crashed and many families suffered extreme hardship. Shopworkers were included in this. Stores throughout the country, from Costigan & Co. in Glasgow to John Lewis in London, had hardly raised their wages since the beginning of the war. At the point the union tested its increased strength, picking up the cudgels from where it had left off pre-war, targeting individual shops with demands for minimum wage scales, longer holidays and trade union recognition.
Despite its co-operative beginnings, one of the very worst offenders in terms of low pay was the Army & Navy Co-operative Society, known as ‘The Stores’, on Victoria Street in London. It was a historic establishment, set in its ways, its huge premises taking up a whole block. Before the war, Edwardian shopper Olivia waxed lyrical about its unchanging reliability. ‘The British Parliament is one institution, the Stores are another,’ she wrote in her Prejudiced Guide to London shopping. It was still a members-only store, where you had to present your membership number on entry, though it is clear that friends would pass their number on to each other. Olivia confessed that one particular membership number served hundreds of friends. ‘Who first gave it away, or to whom it really belonged, no one knew, but they all quoted it assiduously for spun silk underwear, and dreamed of bargains.’2 After eventually getting behind the War Office demands, the Stores had had a good war and profits were up. Yet none of this was being passed on to the employees. Fifty saleswomen in one department were averag
ing a miserly twenty-two shillings a week, which was less than half of what the union felt would be a fair living wage.3
And so, the Great Shop Strike began. With the admirals, generals and commanders of the Stores’ board refusing to increase wages significantly, the largest stoppage in retail trade that the country had ever witnessed was under way. At 6.30 a.m. on 4 December 1919, four thousand Army & Navy employees refused to go to work, with picketing shopworkers acting as sentries round the whole block, making sure their fellow staff did not break ranks. The directors made a brave show of continuing as if everything was normal: the lights were on, including the little gas jets at the entrance doorways where customers could light their cigars and pipes. At opening time, a frock-coated and top-hatted under-manager stood explaining to the few confused customers that the shop assistants were ‘out’. One large, fur-clad lady did not understand the term, according to unionist Philip Hoffman’s account. ‘Out, did you say out? It’s all very strange, very strange indeed. Out! I never heard of such a thing! Just fancy! Out!’ Another customer was insistent that she have her sugar ration, as she had important guests for tea, but the flustered under-manager could not help her either. ‘Sorry, Madam, we don’t know where the sugar is. If you leave your address, we’ll send it.’ She was extremely unhappy with that.4
Much to Hoffman’s delight, the strike became a popular cause, supported by the press and even some shareholders, one lady offering her year’s dividends, another her drawing room for the convenience of the staff. On the second day of the strike Hoffman was summoned to meet Alfred Harmsworth, now Lord Northcliffe, the undisputed chief of the British press establishment. In his private office at The Times, Northcliffe offered Hoffman a cigar and then proceeded to quiz the trade unionist with short, sharp questions. ‘How are your funds? Have they met you yet? Are you going to win?’ Northcliffe, perhaps unexpectedly, revealed an in-depth knowledge of shoplife, gleaned from years of readers’ letters, and pressed Hoffman on whether conditions at Whiteley’s had improved over the years, as well as running through West End shop gossip. He congratulated Hoffman on the modesty of the union’s demands, told him that he himself could not run his papers without the help of the print union, and promised his papers’ support.