by Pamela Cox
Mrs Jupp was one of the outriders: trained as a shopgirl, trained as a buyer, and using her merchandising, business and international experience – as well as her thoroughly modern personal taste – to set up her own store. Her customers in the 1930s clearly enjoyed the fruits of her experience; the question was, whether such city-centre shops could survive the bombings and crises of another war.
A Shopgirl in an Oxford Street store, London, conducts business as usual, despite her shop’s windows having been blown in by bomb blasts from German air raids, c.1940.
CHAPTER 7
KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON SHOPPING
At 16.30 on Monday 26 April 1937, the first German bomber aircraft flew over Guernica, dropping twelve bombs onto the Basque town. For the next two hours, wave after wave of Luftwaffe and Italian fascist air force bombers dropped explosive bombs, hand grenades and incendiaries, accompanied by fighter planes strafing the town with machine-gun fire. War correspondent George Steer, reporting on the Spanish Civil War for The Times, was at the scene. His eyewitness report was published two days later, setting the tone for the shock and outrage which reverberated the world over. ‘The Tragedy of Guernica’ was his headline, ‘Town Destroyed in Air Attack’. He wrote, ‘The raid on Guernica is unparalleled in military history’, describing how ‘heavy and incendiary bombs wreck the houses and burn them on top of their victims’. News crews arrived to film the devastation, capturing haunting images of silhouetted house walls, despairing survivors pulling at mountains of rubble and nuns scurrying into still-smoking ruins.
Steer’s message was clear: the Nazis were directly involved in this attack, and their capacity and appetite for bombing both military and civilian targets was strong. Britain had already lived through German Zeppelin air raids on its cities during the First World War; Guernica strengthened fears that much worse was to come. But this time round, the government was determined to be prepared. The Committee for Imperial Defence, the forerunner of the wartime Ministry of Information, came up with a grisly estimate that in the event of war with Nazi Germany there would be 1,800,000 casualties on British soil, a third of them fatal, three million refugees and most of London would be destroyed within the first two months. So the Air Raid Wardens’ Service and the Women’s Voluntary Service were created: voluntary civilian organisations that were to protect and help the population during air raids. With the first Air Raid Precautions posts set up in shops, offices and homes, the ARP wardens’ initial tasks were to register the population in their sector and to help establish blackout precautions. The wardens and WVS learnt first aid and basic firefighting. And from the very start, Britain’s shopworkers were roped in to contribute to the Air Raid Precautions already under way.
There was fear and urgency in the air. At Woolworths, by now one of the biggest chains with over six hundred branches across Britain, stores and warehouses were examined to identify basements that would be suitable as air-raid shelters. The John Lewis Gazette soon claimed that they had the best-prepared shops and staff in the country: they had covered the roofs with fire-resistant material and were instituting regular ARP drills. At Marks & Spencer the chief ARP officer Ralph Salaman produced a manual which spelt out the procedure in case of emergency: staff to use tin helmets, customers to move away from windows, skylights and entrances, newly trained first-aiders to be on standby. Under the gathering clouds of war, normal business rivalries were suspended. Salaman also organised ‘the Chain Gang’, whereby Marks & Spencer teamed up with its high-street competitors, Woolworths, Boots, British Home Stores and Lyons, agreeing to share staff canteens and restrooms in the event of air-raid damage. And in the years ahead, the Chain Gang pact would indeed be put into action.
Being prepared, however, ran much deeper than laying down fire-resistant roofing. ‘Business as usual’ had been the motto at the start of the last war but it had led to rampant price inflation, instability and food riots. There was to be no rerun of that chaos this time around. In a series of moves, which retrospectively seem quite breathtaking in their boldness, the government effectively became the nation’s shopkeeper. Every level of the supply chain, from overseas shipments to inland distribution to store delivery, came to be directly run or directly influenced by the government. On the flipside, demand was controlled too, through rationing and price fixing. The Board of Trade stated the explicit aims of its rationing policy as being that ‘every member of the public would be able to obtain a fair share of the national food supply at a reasonable price’.1 It sounds a pretty straightforward policy, but what lay ahead politically, economically and emotionally was to challenge every element of that deceptively simple statement. ‘Every member’, ‘fair share’, ‘national food supply’ and ‘reasonable price’ – standing by these commitments was to prove nigh on impossible. And with shop assistants at the vanguard of implementing rationing and stock-taking, they were effectively being roped into becoming the enforcers of government war policy.
At first, nothing much happened. In the early summer of 1939, two months before war was declared, a documentary crew was filming in the offices of The Times in Printing House Square, London.2 The paper reported on the Eton versus Harrow cricket match at Lord’s, the Court Circular brought titbits from the London Season, and the Foreign Telephone Room received news from a Himalayan climbing expedition and from Washington, where a US senator argued in favour of neutrality in the coming war. The advertising was still full-page. After the declaration of war in September 1939, the headlines changed, but the mood of anxious waiting did not. Doris was working as a draper’s assistant at Madam Burton’s in Newport on the Isle of Wight when war broke out. Years later, she remembered quite clearly how ‘it took a long, long time for it to make any difference actually to the trade’. She was then twenty-one years old and explained why it took time for her and her fellow shopgirls to take in the new reality. ‘Things were still coming in quite regularly in the drapery shop and as far as I could see there was no difficulty in the goods arriving.’ Doris concluded, ‘It was the very early days of the war, it hadn’t made that impact on shopping.’3
Christmas was particularly strange. There were no ‘1,800,000 casualties’ or ‘destroyed’ cities. Yet nobody quite trusted the quiet. The government ordered the compulsory closing of shops at 6 p.m. except for one late night a week, while the chancellor of the exchequer encouraged people to save as much as possible and not to make frivolous Christmas purchases. With such clear exhortations to hunker down, people bought fewer clothes and began stockpiling dried, preserved and canned foodstuffs. The tinned food departments in Woolworths stores were particularly busy with ‘canny’ customers buying up stock; the old Scottish word took on a whole new nuance.
But then, Blitzkrieg. On 10 May 1940, Nazi Germany started its massive offensive on the Western Front, its army units attacking France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. Neville Chamberlain resigned and when Winston Churchill addressed the House of Commons for the very first time as prime minister, he called for ‘Victory – victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.’ With the Allied retreat from France and the evacuation at Dunkirk, Churchill saw Britain as standing alone against Hitler, the only nation defending not just its own country but the whole of Christian civilisation against the ‘abyss of a new Dark Age’.4
Twelve days later, Luftwaffe boots were treading on British soil. Germany invaded the Channel Islands, with Jersey becoming Feldkommandantur 515. Supplies from Britain ceased entirely; the Channel Islands were now part of the German Reich. The Nazis changed the time from GMT to Central European Time and made everyone drive on the right-hand side of the road. Betty Yvonne Costard was a young shopgirl when the occupation started, working in a baby-wear shop in Jersey’s capital, St Helier. She remembered being very frightened and crying when the Germans arrived, having heard terrible things about how the German army had mistreated the civilian population in Poland. Bet
ty was ‘saying to my mother all the time, we should have gone away, we should have gone’. In spite of her fear she ventured out to look at the German soldiers on guard in front of the general post office, discovering to her surprise that they were ‘only men, we didn’t know what to expect’. After a while the fear ebbed as it became clear that there were rules and regulations, and Betty realised she was not going to get raped. Instead she noticed that the soldiers went shopping.5
‘They emptied the food shops, and came into the little shops. They bought baby things, presumably for their wives back home,’ Betty explained. The new shoppers were well mannered and paid for what they wanted, but within weeks most of St Helier’s stores were extremely low on stock. This included the Channel Islands’ largest department store, de Gruchy. De Gruchy had been trading in St Helier since 1810 and was run by a board of directors and general manager Arthur Harvey. Before the war Arthur Harvey, an aggressive and skilled businessman, had overhauled de Gruchy’s still-Victorian working practices – and its building. He had replaced the original shop fittings, ladders and steps and had insisted that in-house buyers be told what the turnover and profits were, so that they could make more informed, strategic decisions. His eye had fallen on the fashion department, where some of the shopgirls were rumoured to be on the take. He immediately issued spot checks as they were leaving, and caught one shopgirl red-handed as she tried to walk out wearing nine pairs of knickers.6
Now faced with the Nazi buying spree, which was decimating their stock levels, Arthur Harvey and the board decided that they must stay open regardless. They felt it was their patriotic duty to serve the community and to keep their loyal staff employed, but also to make sure that the premises were not requisitioned by the occupying force. So Harvey joined up with the other St Helier traders to form a committee, of which he was elected chairman, and went to see the Kommandant. Much to the shopkeepers’ surprise, the Kommandant understood the problem. He agreed to issue shopping permits to his officers, without which they couldn’t buy anything.
The shopping permits successfully slowed down the rate of Nazi purchases. Nonetheless, the Germans had quite a good go at requisitioning de Gruchy, piece by piece. Demands for motor vehicles, the chairman’s horse, banqueting glasses, portable cold rooms and carved Wehrmacht crosses all had to be met. The restaurant was taken over to store German uniforms and ammunition. Soon, de Gruchy was running at a loss for the first time in its history. Staff wages had to be cut, and the store could stay open just two days a week.
Back on the mainland, though housewives had no Nazi soldiers as rival shoppers, their household duties had rarely been so difficult. Sponsored by the Ministry of Information, film-maker Ruby Grierson shot a short dramatised documentary called They Also Serve, dedicated to the ‘Housewives of Britain’. In the film, main character Mrs Anderson, known as ‘Mother’, has a son at the front, a working daughter and a husband on night shift; Mother spends her day dealing with her myriad duties, including picking vegetables, mending the blackout and going shopping. The final lines read, ‘Housewives of Britain, Thank-you for Your Courage and Your Help.’7 Shown in cinemas around the country as a prelude to Hollywood escapist movies and British war films, They Also Serve clearly positioned housewives as patriotic heroines. Their daily food shop and tasks around the home were also a form of war work, or so went the propaganda.
They had their work cut out. The first rationing of food, namely butter, bacon and sugar, had been introduced at the start of 1940 by the Ministry of Food and was proving fiendishly complex to implement. Even before the war began, five million ration books had been printed; now every family had to register with a local shop, in effect committing themselves to using that particular shop for buying their rationed goods. Which shop to choose was a matter of heated debate; some families preferred their local corner shop, hoping for preferential treatment regarding unrationed items. Others went for big grocery chains where they could obtain most goods under the same roof. Sainsbury’s certainly banked on this, putting up posters listing five reasons why it was wisest to register with them. Number one: ‘You can obtain all rationed, registered and “free” provisions, groceries and meat under one roof. No rushing about in black-outs and winter weather.’8
For shops, the paperwork for each registration was complicated: separate counterfoils had to be detached for each member of the family, names and addresses checked, and then a card-file register updated with detailed records. At Sainsbury’s on Watney Street in Stepney, east London, manager William Guest and his shop assistants were overwhelmed with local customers unable to work out how to deal with their ration books. The Sainsbury’s staff simply couldn’t keep up and ultimately referred the problem to their head office at Blackfriars in the City of London. Sainsbury’s was now the nation’s largest grocery concern and they needed to stay on top of the Ministry of Food’s rationing regulations and frequent changes, so they set up their own rationing department at head office. And it was on a certain Miss Potter’s desk in the rationing department that William Guest’s plea for help landed. Guest recalled how the very next day a taxi drew up on Watney Street and out stepped Miss Potter with some of her clerical staff. They loaded the ration books into the taxi, ‘returning 24 hours later with a perfectly ordered filing system and several thousand ration books immaculately filled in’.9
The man in charge of the Ministry of Food – indeed the man who was the Ministry of Food in many housewives’ eyes – was Frederick Marquis, Lord Woolton. Here was a man who knew about shopkeeping, having run Lewis’s department store in Liverpool before the war (not to be confused with the John Lewis Partnership). And it was arguably down to his marketing and organisational flair that there was neither food rioting nor starvation in the Second World War. For the risk was there. Before the war Britain had imported an astonishing 75 per cent of its foodstuffs by ship, including 90 per cent of its flour and cereals and over 50 per cent of its meat.10 Now, as mainland Europe was occupied and the Battle of the Atlantic raged with German U-boats torpedoing British supply ships, imports plummeted and food started to become scarce. While the Land Army and every allotment holder started to dig for Britain to increase home production, the remaining foods were rationed one after another. Meat and preserves came next, then tea, margarine and cooking fats in July 1940 and cheese the following year.
Part of Lord Woolton’s genius lay in recognising that his job was not simply to implement rationing. It was also to win over the shoppers and housewives who had to live with the consequences. When they walked into Sainsbury’s or the corner grocery store, housewives were now confronted with a much smaller selection of goods, rationed or unrationed. Favourite brands disappeared as factories were forced to consolidate their different lines – the 350 pre-war brands of biscuit were reduced to just twenty. And some branded packaging was simply eliminated, so that soft drinks appeared under labels like ‘Orange Squash, SW 153’. Although ‘Mother’ in the documentary film stoically put up with these constant changes and long queues, others were less sanguine.
Woolton went on the offensive with a press, radio and film blitz to inform and woo British housewives. He broadcast on the radio about the need for food control; his ministry sponsored ads with the slogan ‘Food is a munition of war. Don’t waste it’, and coined the phrase ‘the Kitchen Front’. Potatoes and carrots were a great source of nutrition, the ministry trumpeted, and offered recipes for dishes such as ‘Pigs in Clover – a novel way with baked potatoes and sausage’. Woolton Pie, however, a stodgy mix of parsnips, turnips, carrots and potatoes covered in white sauce and pastry, proved almost inedible. His offensive worked; one Dorchester housewife explained, ‘Lord Woolton was always so sympathetic and if he could not give us more butter he added an extra ounce to the margarine. We all trusted and loved him.’11
Since the outbreak of war, all men between the ages of eighteen and forty-one had been liable to conscription. As the men were successively called up, staff numbers in retail plummeted, ju
st as they had in the Great War, so those shop assistants selling the butter, margarine and other foodstuffs were more and more likely to be women. Mrs Sheppard applied for a job at Sainsbury’s in April 1941; the firm’s correspondence was explicit as to why they needed her services. ‘Dear Madam, You are aware that we have already lost a large number of our male employees,’ the letter from Alan J. Sainsbury began. ‘As the call-up of men continues, women with aptitude and enthusiasm will be called upon in increasing numbers to take on greater responsibilities.’ Alan Sainsbury invited Mrs Sheppard for interview, and within a few weeks she became relief manager in the Woking branch.12