by Pamela Cox
From the late 1880s, well-heeled women had flocked to Whiteley’s, Harrods, Jenners, Kendals and the rest for their social scene as much as for the shopping. They could meet friends, style gaze, watch the world go by and, in the more adventurous establishments, enjoy the occasional – and, at the time, highly daring – mid-morning glass of wine and a biscuit. From the late 1950s, their great-granddaughters and their friends made a beeline for boutiques. If you could get through the door, you could make the free coffee last a while, hang out and, if you looked the part, maybe pick up an invitation to a party later. Their unique fusion of fashion, art, design and music came to define new British bohemianism. They were Britain’s fragmented answer to Andy Warhol’s Factory.
Diana Dawson, working at Quant’s Bazaar, lapped it up. So did her genuine friends. She recalled that they ‘would come in to gossip and giggle, though we tended to shut up when Mary walked in’. The neighbouring boutiques and coffee bars, sometimes combined in one venue, were the ‘haunts of the Chelsea Set during the day’. In the evenings, the action switched to local pubs, particularly ‘the Markham, round the corner from Bazaar, or the Pheasantry’, where ‘you went to find out where the nearest party was’, following the sound of Paul Anka records, ‘armed with a bottle of cheap red wine and some cigarettes’.16
Boutiques came with their own distinct soundtrack. And they didn’t just play records, they also played host to the singers and bands that made them. According to Rave, Sandie Shaw was a regular at Hem and Fringe, while Lulu favoured the Victoria and Albert. The Pennyhapenny Boutique was owned by members of the band The Pretty Things. And Apple’s founder, the model Jenny Boyd, found that being the sister-in-law of a Beatle did her business no harm: her sister Patti was married to George. At Top Gear, John Lennon was known to ‘sit on the window sill and put 78s on the old record player’, while Mick Jagger kept accounts for ‘all his girlfriends’ there, but ‘stopped paying the bills’ after each break-up. Quorum’s catwalks were in a league of their own. Choreographed by Ossie Clark, they broke with every couture convention, with models moving down the runway to Hendrix, The Doors and the Velvet Underground. These ‘happenings’ attracted A-listers and rising talent – musicians, journalists, photographers, artists, aristos and assembled hangers-on. The store played another intriguing but less well-known part in British music history. Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett dated Lindsay Corner, one of their shopgirls, and one Dave Gilmour was their van driver.17
Outside the central London bubble of King’s Road, Carnaby Street and Kensington, boutiques blossomed in other cities across Britain. In Manchester, new stores linked to new bands and new celebrities flourished. In 1965, Tony Bookbinder opened Pygmalia in Back Pool Fold, a small alley a few blocks from Kendals on Deansgate. He was the drummer with Billy J. Kramer’s band The Dakotas and his younger sister, Elaine, was breaking into the British blues scene under her stage name Elkie Brooks. Nearby, shop assistant Christine Shipley worked at Contrary in Barton Arcade, selling ‘maxi coats with trousers to match, wet look tops, hot pants, split knee velvet trousers, maxi dresses and lurex tops’ to ‘great customers’, including younger members of the cast of new soap Coronation Street. On the city’s real Bridge Street, Britain’s best-known footballer, George Best, opened his Edwardia store in 1969, selling trademark menswear. In Nottingham, young designers Janet Campbell and Paul Smith set up The Birdcage in an old tailor’s shop. For Campbell, like so many other young entrepreneurs, it was all an experiment: ‘None of us had any formal training in retailing, or worked in a shop before, so nobody knew the “right” way to do it … I employed a girl called Valerie because she’d got the right sort of hair.’ The big difference was that the set-up was, for Campbell at least, ‘completely classless’, attracting ‘girls who worked in banks, students, offices – and rich girls, too’.18
In Barnsley, 23-year-old Rita Britton decided she wanted a piece of the action. She wasn’t an art student and had no famous friends, but in 1967 she quit her job in a local paper mill, where she’d worked since she was fifteen, borrowed £500 from her dad, rented a dank basement in town and created what would become a legendary store – Pollyanna. With few connections, she jumped in at the deep end. She remembers starting off ‘with just two rails of stock from Mary Quant’. Her dad, a lorry driver, had helped her out there, too: ‘I can remember my dad coming home at six in the morning after a double shift and driving me down to London. He’d park outside Mary Quant, sleep in the car, drive me back to Barnsley and then go back to work.’ She adds, ‘Incidentally, I remember the people at Mary Quant serving me tea and cucumber sandwiches with no crusts. I thought: “They must be incredibly hard up.”’19 Britton pressed on: ‘I rang up Ossie Clark from a call box at the end of my Gran’s road and he agreed that I could buy from him.’20
Not surprisingly, the young-blood boutiques rattled the old department stores. Those that had survived the war now faced a challenge from within retail’s own ranks to renew their cultural edge for a new generation. Some stores, however, relished the challenge. In the early 1950s, Woollands department store in Knightsbridge was struggling. In its pre-war heyday, it had successfully catered for a servant class whose mistresses shopped a few streets away at Harrods and Harvey Nichols, but now it found itself stuck in an Edwardian time-warp. Its fortunes were turned around in 1961, however, when a young manager named Martin Moss succeeded in bottling some boutique magic by opening the first 21 Shop in pride of place on the ground floor. Moss had gone back to the drawing board, bringing in Terence Conran and interior design students from the Royal College of Art to strip out the stuffy sales space and give it a more open feel. In a bold move, he also promoted Vanessa Denza, a 22-year-old Woollands shopgirl, to the position of fashion buyer for 21. Denza whisked new styles straight from art-student studios to her shopfloor. Among them was a daring needle-cord women’s trouser suit designed by Marion Foale and Sally Tuffin. Denza recalls, ‘In 1961 you didn’t wear trousers. That’s when I started buying in a lot of trousers from France. I used to go over to the factories and hand pick what I needed.’ In another break with store tradition pioneered by boutiques, she rapidly accelerated turnover by only running a few styles for a short time rather than buying in bulk for an entire season. If customers blinked, they would miss the chance to buy. Fast fashion was born.21
Woollands’ owners, the Debenhams Group, seized the opportunity and sold Moss’s successful concept of an in-store boutique to others. By 1965, there were four new 21 Shops: three in their Marshall and Snelgrove stores in London, Birmingham and Manchester and one in Williams and Hopkins in Bournemouth. Other stores were quick to follow the model of 21. In 1966, Selfridges launched Miss Selfridge as its own boutique brand. The following year, the brand was occupying its own premises in Croydon, Brighton, Regent Street and Brompton. Boutiques were branching out and moving slowly but surely towards the mainstream or, as some would claim, towards their own demise.
Meanwhile, on the high streets the chain stores were also learning fast. The story of one – Chelsea Girl – is particularly telling. For all the hype, the real Chelsea set and the real Chelsea look were still exclusive and expensive. According to Twiggy, a suburbanite catapulted to stardom in this new world, Bazaar and the rest of the better-known boutiques were only ‘for rich girls’. Quant had once claimed that boutiques had helped to push ‘snobbery out of fashion’ and that in her shop ‘you will find duchesses jostling with typists to buy the same dresses’. They may have aspired to the same look, but a Quant pinafore featured in Vogue in 1960 cost sixteen and a half guineas, almost three weeks’ wages for an average office girl.22 Step forward Chelsea Girl – a ‘new’ chain that was in fact a bold rebranding of a much more sedate one. Lewis Separates had been a well-known interwar family clothing business and had itself grown out of the family’s original stores, which had sold groceries and then knitting wool. In 1965, alert to the money to be made from Quant’s Chelsea look, owner Bernard Lewis bit the bullet and rebranded, laun
ching across the country in local high streets. Art-student style immediately became more accessible and more affordable. It was a pivotal moment. Traditionally, the quality of a shop’s goods had been guaranteed by the trusted family name above its doors. Now, young customers would only buy clothes where they sniffed style.
The boutique movement and its big store imitators were tapping into a whole new generation of consumers. The post-war baby boom had brought about a massive demographic shift, producing record numbers of teenagers. At the start of the 1950s, there were three million fifteen- to nineteen-year-olds; by the end, there were close to four million. This post-rationing generation now left school at fifteen. They took up jobs in shops, offices, hairdresser’s and hotels, on production lines and in manufacturing. Their living costs were low because most lived at home. Nevertheless, many young workers were desperate to escape family houses they found stifling and parents they found overbearing and out of touch. Marriage still offered one escape route and young workers could afford to get hitched earlier than ever. As a result, the average age at which women married fell from twenty-five in the 1920s to twenty-two by the late Sixties. The sexual revolution wasn’t all about ripping up the rulebook. Rather, it could shore up old social norms, like marriage.
Of those who didn’t head down the aisle, some broke new ground by heading to university. Student numbers doubled in the 1960s, from 100,000 to 200,000, with many admitted to the new ‘plate-glass’ universities – Sussex, Lancaster, Warwick, Kent, York, Strathclyde, Essex and others – that now joined their red-brick predecessors. The Biba shopgirls and their peers also challenged convention by leaving family homes for bedsits and flat-shares with friends as part of a growing number of Likely Lads and Liver Birds. All these groups – young single workers, young marrieds and young students – contributed to a burgeoning counter-culture in Britain that marked one of the most decisive breaks with traditional social values ever seen.
Their younger brothers and sisters were not to be left out. As household sizes shrank, older siblings left home and new housing stock began to rise in war-torn cities and new towns, many younger teenagers gained their own bedrooms – the first generation to do so en masse. Wherever possible, teenagers started to transform their rooms into self-reflecting shrines to football players, pop stars, bands and models. New kinds of teen magazines fuelled these subcultures, particularly among girls. Jackie, FAB, Petticoat and Marty swapped pre-war ‘girl’s own’ adventure stories for fashion features, photo stories and problem pages. Honey, launched in 1960, was aimed at readers who were ‘young, gay and get ahead!’. By 1967, it had nearly a quarter of a million female readers and in an intriguing move from printed page to fixed premises, Honey boutiques briefly appeared as pop-up outlets in regional department stores.23
The teen magazine market was part of a bigger post-war economic transformation. By the late 1960s, 16- to 24-year-olds, were spending over £150 million each year on cosmetics, footwear, knitwear, coats, jackets and suits. And the customers were not just middle class – working-class consumer spending had begun to rise. According to an earlier Financial Times report from the mid 1950s, ‘the middle-class family of today spends £94 a year on clothes, while the average working-class family manages on £54’.24 The bigger point here, however, was that ‘the latter outnumber the middle class by more than 2 to 1’. Smart retailers, even small independents, would always look to find ways to tap into this mass market.
This spending spree was funded by full employment. In stark contrast to the biting unemployment of the interwar years, work had never been easier to find. In 1959 Tory prime minister Harold Macmillan came out with the famous line, ‘Indeed let us be frank about it – most of our people have never had it so good.’ This was a new age of affluence, with rising wages, exports and investment. Unemployment had reached a historic low of just 216,000 in 1955 and then averaged around 2 per cent until the early 1970s. By 1966, retail was employing 1.3 million women or nearly one fifth of the entire female workforce. Many of this generation of shopgirls typically started as fourteen- and fifteen-year-old Saturday girls, most of them still at school. Stores found they needed part-time Saturday assistants once the traditional full-time working week was cut from six days to five, a gradual process that began in the 1930s but was much more widely adopted post-war. Needless to say, Saturday girls were paid a lot less than their weekday counterparts, but for many it was an exciting rite of passage.
Something else was beginning to change, too. Married women, many of them mums in their thirties and forties, began to return to work. Because of such historic low unemployment, many retailers were battling with staff shortages. And as during the Second World War, they turned to married women to fill the gap. Towards the end of that conflict, just as after the First World War, most women who had stepped up into men’s roles in shopwork had been required to step down again. But now, in the 1950s, shopkeepers made their job offer even more tempting to the working mother juggling domestic duties: the shopwork available was on a part-time basis and they had no intention of taking it away from women a few years down the line. Part-time work had been pioneered during the war, but this was now on a different scale altogether.
It was a historic and lasting shift. In 1957, only a quarter of shopworkers were part-time. A decade later, nearly a third were, and most of them were women.25 On the upside, it meant that mothers could fit in paid work around their children. The real downside, however, was that their pay, conditions and pensions were generally poor.
This was a sadly familiar cycle. Back in the 1850s and 60s, the original expansion of the retail industry had been based on the girling of shopwork. To a large extent, shopkeepers who wanted to grow their businesses began employing young women because they could pay them less. A century on, and Britain’s success as a maturing retail economy was again built on the cheap labour of its increasingly part-time, and mostly female, workforce. Young female art-and-design students like Quant, Hulanicki, Birtwell and Campbell were breaking exciting new ground through boutiques and everything they stood for. But other young women, including their own shopgirls, sellers and models, were sleepwalking into a lasting low-wage trap.
In the nineteenth century, many girls had opted for shopwork over domestic service because it was better paid. In the early twentieth century this continued to be the case. As their working hours were reduced and new kinds of professional qualifications, such as book-keeping, were introduced, female shopworkers’ wages had improved in comparison to other trades. But by the late 1960s, it seemed that these advances were being slowly but surely eroded. An Earnings Survey conducted in 1968 by the Department of Employment showed that for both men and women, the job of sales assistant was ‘one of the lowest paid in Britain’. Other researchers, writing in the Industrial Relations Journal, would go on to calculate that sales assistants’ earnings had actually fallen in relation to other low-paid workers, most of whom were part of Britain’s post-war servant class: ‘only gardeners, farmworkers and general catering workers, waiters and barmen earned less than salesmen, and only kitchenhands, hairdressers and barmaids earned less than saleswomen. If gratuities were included, the position of sales assistants could be even worse.’26
This was the world of the small private business – the countless shops, salons, pubs, restaurants and hotels that made up the sprawling service sector and which seemed so hard to reform. Unions worked behind the scenes to raise standards but the labour movement as a whole was much more concerned with the bigger beasts of British industry – notably car plants, coal mines and manufacturing. The shop assistants’ union, known from 1947 as the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers, or USDAW, had seen its post-war numbers rise. But the number of female members remained fairly low and the number of part-time members even lower.
Hope for pay equality with men came from a different sector. In 1955, female civil servants had submitted mass petitions and marched in demonstrations trying to force a promise of equal pay. By 1961
they had secured this, as had most female teachers. Outside the private sector, this progress was taking longer – but would ultimately result in a countrywide shift. In 1968, a group of female manual workers fought a famous battle of their own, leading, ultimately, to landmark national legislation on equal pay. In June of that year the sewing machinists at Ford’s car plant in Dagenham, the European centre of the US motor giant’s global operation, walked out. The women worked on the specialised upholstery for car seats. They were incensed by Ford’s regrading of its workforce, which had put them on a lower, unskilled grade while men doing very similar work had been put on a higher, semi-skilled grade. Lower grades meant lower pay. When they walked out, no upholstery meant no finished product and no sales.
Ford’s entire UK production was brought to a halt for three weeks when women at their Halewood plant on Merseyside joined the Dagenham strike. Things might have ended very differently if anyone other than Barbara Castle had been the secretary of state for employment in Harold Wilson’s government. Castle was still only one of a handful of women to have served in the Cabinet. She held personal meetings with the Dagenham machinists and although she wouldn’t support their demand to be regraded as skilled workers, she did back their case for a pay rise. More importantly, she used the strike to win support for a momentous piece of legislation that was extremely close to her own heart: the 1970 Equal Pay Act. At long last, wages would – in theory at least – be determined by the nature of the tasks performed, not the body of the person performing them. Employers were given five years to make whatever changes were necessary to ensure that they offered equal pay for equal work. If bohemianism had been made in Chelsea, then equal pay – which was just as counter-cultural – was made in Dagenham.