Shopgirls

by Pamela Cox

  Women also started taking on traditionally male professions within the retail industry; Grace on the Isle of Wight moved from a confectioner’s to a pork butcher’s. ‘I took the place of someone who had joined the Royal Navy.’ Grace explained how machinery and tasks usually out of bounds for women were suddenly unproblematic: ‘Of course we came into using choppers and boning bacon and various things, cleaning all the machines.’13

  The problem that many shops had, however, extended further than the loss of their shopmen. Many shopgirls were leaving too. Conscription for women started in December 1941 for single women and childless widows aged twenty to thirty, but from the very beginning of the war women had been leaving shopwork in droves to volunteer for more obviously patriotic work. Doris on the Isle of Wight left Madam Burton’s drapery. As she put it so succinctly, ‘I had to do something other than being a draper’s assistant.’ She felt she had to contribute to the war effort, ‘especially after Dunkirk when we were really fighting for our lives, never knew when the church bells might go which meant Herman the German had arrived’. Doris went to work at the Saunders-Roe plane factory in East Cowes. ‘I went from fitting out ladies for their dresses and hats to fitting out parts of aeroplanes.’14 She enjoyed her factory work as much as being a shopgirl, but her factory colleague Annie didn’t. Annie only left her Woolworths’ position for Saunders-Roe ‘because it was the best money’.15

  Throughout the raging hot summer of 1940, in the Battle of Britain, the German Luftwaffe attacked British shipping, airports, radar stations and landing strips – two thousand Luftwaffe fighter planes versus just six hundred from the RAF. Once Hitler realised he was failing to wipe out the British air force, however, he switched tactics and began bombing city centres. First in his sights were Liverpool and Birmingham. Then the Blitz intensified: on 7 September London experienced its first and last mass daylight raid, heralding the start of fifty-seven consecutive nights of bombardment. Thousands of children, mothers, patients and pensioners had been evacuated in the preceding months and now thousands more Londoners left the city for the comparative safety of the country. But most stayed behind.

  Mrs Jupp, who ran Jupp’s delicatessen on Kensington High Street, decided to brave it out, feeling she had a duty to help feed her London customers, staying put even after her son was evacuated. Shops began to close at 5 p.m. in order to allow staff time to get home before the bombing began. In the famous documentary London Can Take It!, American journalist Quentin Reynolds laconically recounted the tale of eighteen hours in the life of the London Blitz, starting in late afternoon.16 As Londoners entered their air-raid shelters at nightfall, footage of darts games was intercut with searchlights in the night sky, shots of sleeping grandparents with bombed buildings up in flames. The next day, Londoners picked themselves up, housewives brushing broken glass from their front steps, working men in suits carefully winding their way through rubble heaps on their way to work, even though their normal bus was upended and the Tube bridge was in a state of collapse. Quentin Reynolds drawled, ‘London manages to get to work on time, one way or another’, pointing out that ‘in the centre of the city, the shops are open as usual. In fact, many of them are more open than usual’, while showing a smartly dressed shopgirl stepping through a shattered display window straight into her store.

  The documentary certainly captured something of the Blitz spirit. Off camera, defiance and bravery were shown in myriad ways too: shop assistants faced with severe bomb damage at a branch of Woolworths, which had stores throughout Germany too, put up a sign which read, ‘This is nothing! You ought to see what the RAF have done to our Berlin branch.’ There was a certain humour too in the blackout accessories on sale at Selfridges. The department store offered a whole range of merchandise aimed at increasing human and canine visibility in the pitch-black nights. They ranged from white raincoats to luminous flower brooches, and even stretched to little blackout coats for dogs.17

  But most people could spare not a moment’s thought for accessories. On 18 September Miss Katherine Austin, secretary to the staff manager at John Lewis Oxford Street, was on duty for the eleventh night in a row, part of a team ‘mothering’ two hundred evacuees in the basement. Some were local residents, others John Lewis partners, in other words staff, and many were ‘terribly nervy’ on account of having lost their homes. On top of this the Langham Hotel close by had been bombed the previous night.18 Then at midnight the first direct hit struck John Lewis. Miss Austin’s first reaction was confusion. ‘I put my trousers on back to front – I was very annoyed because it must have wasted a quarter of a minute.’ Miss Austin started to try to evacuate her flock when the second bomb landed. She had a moment of sheer panic. ‘I could have sworn that the walls in front were going to collapse. It was a curious feeling: it was not so much seen as felt – as though someone had put far too much into a cardboard hat-box and you know it must give way.’

  But her training and pluck soon kicked in. Miss Austin ushered the shelter’s occupants into the staff dining room as fire swept through the building. Duty manager Captain Burnett tried to close the fire doors to prevent the blaze spreading, but to no avail. Gradually all two hundred people were evacuated and sent from basement shelter to basement shelter, looking for space, all the way down Oxford Street westwards to Selfridges. They were safe. But the next day it was clear that John Lewis Oxford Street, the powerhouse of the whole business, was all but destroyed. Spedan Lewis sent every employee in the Oxford Street branch a postcard the next day, letting them know that their pay would be ready for collection on Friday as normal, and he tried to find temporary positions for them in his other branches. However, the John Lewis partners claimed they received a rather frosty, snobbish reception at Peter Jones, whose existing staff accused the new lot of ‘incessant rudeness’.19

  As the bombing campaign widened to industrial cities and coastal port towns, hundreds of shops were directly or indirectly damaged by bombs and fire. From Marks & Spencer in Coventry to Woolworths in Devonport and Lewis’s of Liverpool – Lord Woolton’s own store – the destruction was immeasurable. Each morning shop assistants woke up not knowing whether their workplaces would be standing at all. Woolworths even drew up detailed diagrams for ‘Establishing a Temporary Store’ and sent the plans round to their district managers. All that was needed was three walls that were still structurally intact. ‘Remove debris and charred fixtures, wash and whitewash,’ and by the time it had a corrugated sheet roof and a splash of blackout paint on the front, you were in business again.20

  Those who really suffered from the destruction of British cities and the stringent government food controls were the smaller shops. Mastering the new jargon of permits, allocations, basic periods, datum lines, entitlements and points was all very well if you had a Miss Potter in your head office concentrating on making sense of it all. As a small shopkeeper with just two shopgirls for staff, the headaches of extra bureaucracy, goods’ shortages and changes in the established network of local suppliers – on top of dealing with sometimes frightened, confused and hungry customers – was often too much. In Leeds, for instance, 25 per cent of the small shops closed down between January 1940 and December 1941;21 in Glasgow the figure was the same.

  Once the Utility clothing and furniture schemes were introduced, with their CC41 logos standing for Civilian Clothing 1941, the bureaucratic burden on shopkeepers and their assistants grew ever heavier. The Utility schemes set standards and prices for material, furniture and consumer goods, rationing the products and aiming at maximum economy and practicality. Every person was issued initially with sixty-six coupons a year for clothing, and there was a set number of coupons per item. A woollen dress required eleven coupons, a nightdress just six. But the exact details of the system were constantly being amended by the Board of Trade. Thus two coupons might get you ‘women’s non-woollen legless knickers’ initially, but after June 1942 this allocation was amended to ‘women’s non-woollen knickers and panties with side lengths not e
xceeding 18.5 inches’.22 And each year of the war the total number of coupons allowed per person was reduced, so that by 1945 you were issued with just twenty-four.

  For small shops struggling to make ends meet and to retain their staff, the temptation to make a little money on the side must have been great. There was a lively black market throughout the war, with thieves breaking into shops, factories, warehouses and lorries to steal goods. ‘Did it drop off a lorry?’ became a well-used expression. There was also an active trade in ration coupons. Some were counterfeit. Others were legal, but since customers were allowed to ‘bank’ their coupons with their shopkeepers, trusting the retailer to calculate and tear them out correctly, many retailers had control over stacks of coupons, which some abused. Certain shopkeepers turned into coupon dealers, buying clothes coupons from poorer working-class customers and selling them on to middle-class customers, raking in a tidy profit along the way.23

  Other retailers stockpiled surplus stock, which was against the spirit of rationing. Travel writer Eric Newby in his autobiography wrote about the morning he arrived back in London after his release from a prisoner-of-war camp towards the end of the war. Having nothing civilian to wear, he went to Harrods, which had been clothing him from birth onwards. But he had already mislaid his clothing coupons. He was in search of corduroy trousers. In the men’s clothing department he was met by an extremely elderly salesman, who eyed up Newby’s ‘battledress anti-gas’ and sighed. ‘We can’t have one of our old customers without a change of trousers, can we,’ the salesman said. ‘Mum’s the word, but here in Harrods we’ve got more gentlemen’s trousers than there are coupons in the whole of England.’24

  Many small shopkeepers were not deeply corrupt; rather they indulged in practices that had been around for centuries (though exacerbated by the war), like giving short weight and adulterating alcohol. In Featherstone, a mining town in the West Riding of Yorkshire, the high-street stores overcharged for basic foods such as eggs, tomatoes and pork dripping. One local store got hold of chocolates and sweets illegally and sold these coupon-free at a high price.25 These practices were well known, with trade magazines running articles about them and – at the other end of the scale – Sainsbury’s boasting that they were cleaner than clean, their poster encouraging families to register their ration books with the claim that ‘You are assured of “no profiteering”. We guarantee you fair prices and fair dealing.’

  Most shops indulging in a little under-the-counter dealing were just trying to get by. Supplies were erratic and could go up as well as down. The Lend-Lease arrangement with the United States and a similar Canadian scheme meant that it wasn’t only supplies of military equipment and weapons from across the Atlantic that increased substantially in the summer of 1941; mercifully, food shipments were sent over too. On top of this, the British governmental push to produce as much food ‘from our own soil’ as possible was highly successful, with the country on track for increasing the production of wheat by 90 per cent, potatoes by 87 per cent and vegetables by 45 per cent over the course of the war.26 After conscription started for young single women, shopgirl Grace, like many others, joined the Land Army, leaving her butcher’s job in order to do so. Her first task was to build a silo; she had no idea what a silo was. She lived in a hostel with other land girls, which was great fun. ‘We were just acting like a group of girls in our twenties,’ she explained. On the farms they worked alongside German, Italian and Polish prisoners of war. She found the work much harder and filthier than at the confectioner’s or butcher’s shop. She recalled a long list of new skills that she had to master: ‘Hay making, harvesting, threshing, pruning apple trees, picking potatoes, strawberries, sprouts in the frost usually and swedes of course and carrots, stripping and laying a hedge.’27

  Overall, however, food was in short supply, for as the war wore on, regulations were tightened and rations were repeatedly reduced. People were hungry, though, unlike in the First World War, this never resulted in food riots. In the Channel Islands under Nazi occupation, the hunger was particularly acute. Betty Costard switched from selling baby clothes to working in a chemist’s in St Helier. She talked about how in the face of ever-diminishing food supplies her family was ‘making do’ by gathering moss on the beach to make jelly and collecting a few potatoes from their friend, a farmer, hiding them from the Germans in a baby pram. They had very little meat, and fish only if they could catch it, but as the war continued the Nazis even forbad them from going on to the beaches. Betty made parsnip coffee and sugar-beet syrup as a honey substitute. The Red Cross sent parcels, which helped. But the Germans were hungry too, ‘because there was nothing in our shops and they couldn’t touch our Red Cross parcels’.

  At de Gruchy’s, manager Arthur Harvey faced a very different sort of challenge. He fell for a shopgirl named Kay from the store’s fashion department and they married in 1941. They had little time to enjoy wedded bliss, however, for the next year Hitler decided to deport all residents not born on the Channel Islands. Arthur had been born in England. De Gruchy’s board of directors did everything they could to persuade the authorities not to send Arthur away, but to no avail. Arthur and Kay were sent to Internment Camp Ilag VII in Laufen Castle, Bavaria, for the remaining long years of the war. Months later the board received the following letter from Arthur, written in pencil, which described life in the prisoner-of-war camp. ‘All we can do is to sit about on our wooden beds and try to get on each other’s nerves as little as possible. My barracks holds 86, ordinary brick floors, unfinished walls.’ But he wasn’t despairing, just longing for normality to return: ‘We hope that all in the shop are set ready for the great word “go”. Oh for a real job of work, privacy, freedom and the chance to plan for the future.’ He signed off with: ‘We are well and my wife joins me in sending best wishes and a soon happy landing. Yours sincerely, A. Harvey.’28

  Back on the mainland, conscription meant that there were soon one million fewer people employed in the distributive trades – retail and wholesale businesses – than before the war.29 With bomb-damaged premises, public transport destroyed and few staff, shops had to be inventive. A handful of firms even decided to try operating with just a skeleton team. The key to this lay in the novel concept of self-service. Self-service had been pioneered in the United States, with the first Piggly Wiggly store opening in Memphis, Tennessee in 1916, and was truly revolutionary. Goods were laid out on open shelves, with customers helping themselves by loading merchandise into the newest shopping accessory: a shopping basket. There were no shop assistants to receive lists and retrieve goods from behind counters; instead, the ‘clerks’ (as they were called in the States) were concentrated at the checkout. The Piggly Wiggly franchise spread rapidly across the USA during the interwar years. British retailers had initially rejected the alien concept, but faced with extreme staff shortages, self-service now looked a little more attractive. So in 1942 the London Co-operatives in Romford experimented with a hybrid system, with certain sections of the shop being completely self-service, while shopgirls were still on hand at the rations counter to help customers with their ration books.30

  Such experiments were, nevertheless, small scale. The key to being able to open the shop shutters each morning still lay in recruiting and retaining flesh-and-blood employees. In order to keep the staff they had happy, many employers softened the rigid discipline they had imposed for decades. Rules regarding make-up and jewellery were relaxed, and shop assistants were allowed a little more freedom of expression in their dress. It was a far cry from Victorian strictures and fines being docked from weekly pay. William Whiteley would have turned in his grave.

  Retailers now turned to those left behind – teenagers, people approaching retirement and above all married women – to fill the vacancies. This signalled the biggest change in shop employment since the arrival of shopgirls in the 1860s and 70s. It was a shift from shopgirls to shopwomen – and an accompanying shift from full-time work to more part-time work. For now the staff who
stood behind the counters of drapers’ shops and grocery stores, of Woolworths and Kendal Milne, were likely to be women with children, women who had domestic and caring duties as well as fire-warden duties and other voluntary-service duties. Here was the craziness of wartime multitasking, where women were workers, mothers, wives and fire wardens all at once. It was a pattern repeated in other industries too: in 1931, 16 per cent of female workers over fourteen were married; by 1943 this had shot up to 43 per cent.31

  The great challenge for these women was how to fulfil all these duties at once, and shopping was a particular problem. Many female workers tried to shop after work or in their lunch hour, which led to enormously long queues and discontent among customers and employers alike. Shopkeepers called on employers to give their staff designated hours in which to purchase all they needed for their families; eventually even the government recognised that this was a good idea. The Ministry of Labour communicated this to the Ministry of Food: ‘It is found that women workers with domestic responsibilities must be given some time off each week to do their shopping.’32

  Of course, the problem of when to shop applied just as much to the shop assistants themselves. Amazingly, firms like Sainsbury’s granted their assistants a ‘shopping time’ allowance of one hour per fortnight – arguably much too little, but a step in the right direction. And big employers’ willingness to be flexible was about to be stretched even further. Just as it looked like the tide of war was starting to turn, with the Allied success of the Normandy landings in June 1944 beating the Germans back in northern France, Hitler unleashed another deadly form of attack. The V-1 flying bombs, vengeance weapons that also came to be known as doodlebugs, were small pilotless aircraft launched from bases in occupied France and Holland. Their targets were London and south-east England. This time, the bombing took place during the day, when everyone was out of their shelters and going about their business in offices, shops, factories, schools and streets. When the rumbling growl of a V-1 engine overhead suddenly fell silent, people underneath knew it was about to dive to earth. They ran for their lives. Schools were closed to protect children and for the duration of that summer, Sainsbury’s allowed its shopwomen to bring their children to work. When lives and profits were on the line, employers found the will and the way to allow women to manage their two worlds of home and work. Unfortunately, if predictably, that flexibility would be much less apparent once the war was over.