by Pamela Cox
That night, the shop assistants’ union met the Army & Navy directors, and after seven hours of negotiations the directors agreed to put the wage demands to the Industrial Court. This new tribunal had been set up that same year in order to arbitrate in industrial disputes. There was great hope among the Army & Navy shop assistants that this tribunal would back them in a momentous ruling for shop assistants around the country. So on the last day of the year, the union invited seven thousand shop assistants to the Albert Hall to hear the Industrial Court ruling read out. Hoffman claimed it was the largest gathering of shop employees ever seen. ‘They cheered everybody and everything, for they were in a cheerful mood.’ They cried ‘Shame!’ during the opening speeches, when they heard about the paltry wages of a London saleswoman with three years’ service and those of a twenty-year-old shop model. Then they fell silent as the tribunal award was read out, their silence soon turning to joy as the result was announced: a huge 35 per cent increase for those over twenty-one, and fixed minimum wages, a forty-eight-hour week and improved holidays. It had been worth hiring out the Albert Hall, for the effects of this award spread around the country, with wage increases reported across the board.
Despite this triumph of collective action, John Lewis, now aged eighty-four and with a full white beard and whiskers, slightly stooped but still going strong, had no truck with the ‘accursed trade unionists’, as he called them.5 Like other proprietors, Lewis initially agreed to pay increases with fixed minimum wages, as well as shorter hours, longer holidays and sick pay. But then he started sacking staff and engaged new employees on condition that they didn’t join the union.6 Lewis was summoned to the Industrial Court, where he was represented by his barrister son, Oswald Lewis, and advised to comply with his initial agreements. But Lewis senior simply ignored the court ruling. In a last-ditch attempt to change his mind, a deputation of staff was sent to meet their boss. A buyer, a shopwalker, a shopboy and a shopgirl, Hilda Canham, were told by Lewis that he ‘feared neither God nor Devil’ and wouldn’t budge on the matter. So that May Monday morning in 1920, the first day of the Silk Department sale, 400 John Lewis employees went out on strike, including the char ladies. Claiming to be amazed at the action, Lewis railed against the ‘vapourings of the accursed trade unionists’ that caused such mischief.7
Shopgirl Hilda Canham, seven years in John Lewis’s employment, became the heroine of the strike. She ‘radiated energy and enthusiasm’, according to the Daily Mail, telling their reporter that she had seen trouble coming for a long time.8 ‘The Island of Lewis’, ‘The Battle of Oxford Street’, ‘John Says Nothing,’ screamed the supportive newspaper headlines, with Hilda’s photograph as the ‘girl in brown’ splashed beside them. Shop assistants from other stores supported their fellows, with Harrods’ and Army & Navy store staff contributing £300 per store to the strike fund and the Wholesale Textile houses £250. Theatres sent complimentary tickets, music hall artists volunteered to give concerts and even Queen Mary made sure her contributions were popped into the Oxford Street collection boxes. The striking staff were astonished and overwhelmed by such support. They needed it, for this one was to be a long haul.
Miss Bobbie Stirling had travelled from the north of Ireland to find work in John Lewis’s juvenile department. She was one of the two hundred shopgirls who lived in and who were now out on strike, and at first Oswald Lewis tried to talk each of them round to returning to work. In spite of her precarious situation, Stirling stood up to Oswald Lewis with spirit according to Hoffman’s account:
‘Do your parents understand the steps you have taken in this matter?’ Lewis asked.
‘Yes, they are quite aware. I have explained the whole matter to them,’ Stirling replied, composed.
‘You’re very silly – a young girl like you with no friends in London. If this strike lasts out, what are you going to do?’
‘We’ve got plenty of support … I intend to stop out until we all go in together.’9
The strike was indeed lasting out; a notice was issued that those who were living in the John Lewis hostels were not welcome to return: they should either go home or find work elsewhere. Their first problem was food, so the strike organisers made sure that the girls could get their meals at the YWCA headquarters canteen. Then the public rallied and offered them alternative living accommodation. After five long weeks, the striking staff realised that their old proprietor would never give in to their demands. So they called off the strike and simply left the firm; a ‘wise retirement’ said Hoffman, describing it as a ‘defeat which was victory’. The strikers were high-spirited to the end, singing ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’ and ‘Auld Lang Syne’, and within days they were snapped up by stores on Kensington High Street, with the general manager of Pontings phoning up Hoffman to request as many former John Lewis shopgirls as possible for his establishment. ‘I haven’t had such girls come into the trade for years,’ the Pontings manager said.
The battle to win a decent living wage for shopworkers all around the country continued against the backdrop of the economic slump and soaring unemployment, which reached new heights in 1921 with two million out of work. Once again Spedan Lewis picked a difficult moment to launch an expensive project. Just two months before his father’s employees walked out on strike, Lewis had launched the radical profit-sharing scheme that he had been dreaming of for years. In the spring of 1920, his Peter Jones store introduced ‘share promises’ for its employees, which twice a year could be exchanged for a cash dividend. For the first time ever, members of staff were getting a share in the profits and were part-owners in the business. Lewis tried to encourage them to treat the promises as savings, though many wanted the cash immediately. So he ruled that people had to make a good case for cashing them in. Florrie, who worked in the staff kitchen, had a pretty good one: she was unmarried and expecting a child. Spedan’s father would probably have sacked her; instead the younger Lewis sanctioned the cashing in of her £16 holding. Matron in charge of the staff kitchen told him of the ‘flurry of excitement’ that ensued among the girls. One girl ran up to her, exclaiming:
‘Oh, Matron, Florrie’s got her share money!’
‘What about it?’
‘But are these things really money?’
‘Of course they are really money, as I keep on telling you silly girls, and now perhaps you’ll believe it.’
‘But I have got thirty of them! Fancy me worth thirty pounds!’
The young woman then ran off in tears.10
Florrie and some of her girlfriends might have succeeded in cashing in their share promises, but the depression of the early 1920s affected upmarket stores badly, including Peter Jones, which made a loss in both 1921 and 1922. Old John Lewis helped out his son with a cash injection, but there was no dividend to pay out to the shop assistants, now ‘partners’, for another few years. Unperturbed, Spedan Lewis pursued his radical agenda. He had a second ‘big idea’. During the war he had realised that, due to the extraordinary working conditions, it had become acceptable – ‘the thing’ – for professional and better-educated men unable to join up to work in a shop, but only a particular type of shop: ‘a shop, of course, of a certain status and Peter Jones came within that line.’11 Now he wanted to apply the same thinking to educated women. Shopwork for women was no longer associated with trashiness and prostitution. Nevertheless, for the daughters of upper-middle-class families it was considered ‘infra dig’ to work in a shop – it was just not what a respectable young lady did, particularly not if they were one of the few to have gone on to further education. Yet it was precisely these women Spedan set his sights on.
Letters were sent out to the women’s colleges at Cambridge University and Oxford University, as well as Bedford College, London and Royal Holloway College, asking for a list of their top female graduates. Spedan offered these women jobs as ‘learners’, on the selling floor and as buyers, with the same pay as the male buyers. One such learner was Beatrice Hunter, who after leaving Oxford had wo
rked in the civil service during the war and had become a factory inspector. Like many women, she faced unemployment in the immediate aftermath. One of her letters to a friend in 1922 describes her new opportunity: ‘I am going into trade. I’ve been offered a buyership at Peter Jones, Sloane Square. It’s a cheapish drapers and ladies’ outfitters … The Chairman is the son of John Lewis of Oxford Street … He has a mad stunt of employing University women.’ Beatrice acknowledged that the stunt was risky. ‘The commercial world is very suspicious of outsiders – the idea of taking in completely inexperienced people in responsible positions is quite a new one.’
She was nervous on her first day, as her notebook jottings reveal: ‘Begin at PJ today. Feel as one does at first when trying to speak a foreign language in its own country.’ She was right to be nervous, for many of the old shopfloor hands took ‘a dim view of this new experiment and one heard criticisms from all sides’, according to shopman Robert Bichan. He used to tease the ‘young lady learners’, chanting ‘Boots, boots, boots, boots’ at Beatrice Hunter as she passed by him in the second-hand furniture department carrying six boxes of shoes.
By 1928 there were over seventy learners at Peter Jones, and while some stuck it out for only a few weeks, others were propelled quickly through the ranks to become linens buyers, umbrella buyers and fashion vendeuses. Florence Lorimer was even given £5,000 by Spedan Lewis to fund a far-flung buying tour of Punjab, Kashmir and Afghanistan to purchase antiquities and carpets. In a series of memos Spedan Lewis instructed her to look out for embroidered felt rugs, bedspreads and semi-precious stones, as well as owls and hummingbirds for his personal ornithology collection. She returned with a haul of treasures, whose exotic influence could be traced in a number of fabric ranges.
Beatrice Hunter thrived too. Just a month after she started, she scribbled in her notebook, ‘It’s terrifying to be plunged into full responsibility without any experience at all. I have four shop girls under me from whom I have to conceal my ignorance … After years of working on paper it’s alarming to be so concrete – real money and real shoes and, worst of, real individual customers to cope with.’ Clearly Spedan Lewis was rather taken with her from the start, being ‘awfully nice’ and ‘a real idealist, a wild enthusiast but also a rather sharp business man’. He could also be capricious and mercurial, but she seemed quite to enjoy the rollercoaster of working closely with the chairman, writing, ‘The whole thing, of course, is more like a Musical Comedy than real life, priceless from morning to night.’ It became even more like a theatrical romance when he whisked her off during the working day to play tennis at Roehampton with his brother Oswald, and later proposed. Beatrice became Mrs Spedan Lewis in October 1923, just a year after she started working at Peter Jones.12 Together they had three children and from 1929 to 1951 Beatrice served as vice-chairman of the Partnership.
Dorothy Bouchier, who had felt so hungry as a child during the war, longed for the glamour of working in a famous department store – she would never have put it as derogatorily as Beatrice’s comment, ‘I’m going into trade.’ As a teenage girl she spent all her pocket money on the pictures, dreaming of becoming a movie star, and what better place to start than at Harrods? She left school aged fourteen in 1923 and followed her older brother, who had landed a job in the estate agency department at the store. Soon Dorothy was working in the sumptuous ‘small ladies department’, selling dresses to women of a petite figure, ‘a step nearer to my heart’s desire’, as she put it in her autobiography. ‘How elegant it was, how perfumed, how glamorous, with lovely dresses on display and beautifully made-up, beautifully coiffured sales ladies standing around in pretty sage green dresses.’13
Wearing just such a green dress, Dorothy was assigned as ‘junior’ to one of the sales ladies. However junior she might have been, she was soon thrown into the limelight when her mother entered her portrait photo into a Daily Mirror beauty competition. Dorothy had unruly dark locks and big dreamy eyes and clearly awakened men’s most atavistic instincts. Alerted by the newspaper, the Harrods photographic department took pictures of Dorothy and hung them from the entrance. ‘To be honoured by being displayed at the main entrance of the most famous emporium in the world should have filled me with pride. But it didn’t. I would walk past it with eyes averted.’14 Now fifteen and entering puberty, Dorothy was embarrassed, but the embarrassment did not last long. Soon she started hanging out with a rather fast set of Harrods assistants, including rich young men, sons of store proprietors who were learning the trade at Harrods. After work on a Saturday morning the clique would play rugger and netball at Harrods Sports Club in Barnes, west London, following that with enormous teas and then evening festivities with drinks and dancing the Charleston. ‘Sometimes our high heels would catch in the turn-ups of the boys’ Oxford Bags and we’d all fall in a giggling heap onto the dance floor.’
Soon everyone was in love with everyone else: Dorothy was in love with ‘Slushy’ Freshwater, and a Welsh boy was in love with Dorothy. It was the Welsh boy who nicknamed Dorothy ‘Chili’, and the name stuck. Yet such coursing passions were dangerous in a place like Harrods. ‘They demanded a strict moral code from their employees and anyone with a whiff of scandal about them would be sent packing.’ When Dorothy/Chili excitedly confided in her fellow junior that she had lost her virginity to Slushy the night before, the truth came out and Chili’s mother was summoned to the store ‘to be told that my disgusting presence must be removed from the august house of Harrods’.15 Chili, Slushy and several other colourful characters were given the sack.
Luckily for Chili, the pall of her shame, as she put it, did not waft as far as Kensington High Street, where she was promptly hired by Derry & Toms to model dresses in the model gowns department. By the age of seventeen in 1927, Chili had wangled her way into the movie business, acting first in shorts and then in feature-length silent movies like Carnival. Soon she was touted as ‘England’s “IT” Girl’ and she successfully made the transition into talkies. Ahead of her lay the rollercoaster life of a movie star, with its triumphs and failures, its moments of glory and deep personal sorrows.
Another young woman leading a ‘butterfly-life’ in the late 1920s was Flora Solomon, daughter of a Russian gold tycoon, who received £1,000 a month from her father to live on. An heiress with servants to take care of her household and childcare needs, she attended charity committees by day and danced in nightclubs at night. Following the Wall Street crash in 1929, however, the high-life came to a sudden end when her father’s finances hit the rocks and her monthly allowance was stopped. She was widowed soon after and with no income, for the first time in her life she had to make money for herself and her young son. She sold her jewellery, moved to the upper floor of her house, let out the ground floor to her aunt, and found new jobs for her butler and chauffeurs; her maid married her footman, ‘solving that problem’.16 A job was the next thing on the agenda.
At a dinner party in 1931 she found herself sitting next to Simon Marks. Marks’ father Michael had fled the Jewish pogroms in what was then Russian Poland, and had started as a pedlar and then stallholder in Leeds’ Kirkgate Market. He had called his stall Marks’ Penny Bazaar and since he spoke no English the story goes that the slogan ‘Don’t Ask the Price, It’s a Penny’ came from his attaching this permanent sign to his sales tray.17 After opening other stalls around the north of England, including in Birkenhead, Chesterfield and Warrington, he teamed up with Yorkshireman Tom Spencer and together they opened the first Marks & Spencer Penny Bazaar shop at 63 Stretford Road, Manchester. By the time Michael Marks died in 1907, the company had over fifty outlets, both in city markets and on the high street; the headline read, ‘Pioneer of Penny Bazaars – Death of a Generous Manchester Jew’. A photograph of the stall in Newcastle’s Grainger Market shows broad counters with young shopgirls in attendance; other images document the pride the company already demonstrated in its heritage, the signs above the open-fronted shops proclaiming, ‘Marks & Spencer Ltd, Originato
rs of Penny Bazaars – Admission Free’.18
Simon Marks continued his father’s expansion programme with dynamism, taking the company on to the stock exchange, so that on the night Flora Solomon sat next to him at dinner he was able to reel off an impressive list of 160 Marks & Spencer stores around the country. ‘Now we are going to show what a British company can do,’ he said, explaining that his biggest competitor was Woolworths. Frank W. Woolworth, a farmer’s son from Great Bend, Jefferson County, New York State, had been a pioneer in cheap retailing; his five-and-ten-cent stores, with their bright lights and mahogany counter tops split into sections showing off a wide variety of goods, had taken America by storm. He had spotted potential for expansion in Britain, and fixed on Liverpool’s Church Street for his first experimental premises in 1909, the same year that Selfridges opened. With gold letters on warm red gloss paint, ‘F.W. Woolworth’ was topped with the sign ‘Nothing In These Stores Over 6d’. Prices were low, price tags were clearly displayed, and pic’n’mix was instantly popular. The Woolworth family had gunned for rapid expansion, so that by the time Marks and Solomon were dining, the four-hundredth Woolworths store had just been opened, in Southport.19