Shopgirls

by Pamela Cox

  1970 was proving to be a watershed year for British women in other ways. In February, an event at Ruskin College in Oxford would take the fight for equal rights well beyond women’s wage packets. Back in the nineteenth century, artist and social critic John Ruskin had celebrated the dignity of labour and sought to open up more opportunities for working-class men. Now the college named in his honour hosted a very different kind of meeting: Britain’s first National Women’s Liberation Conference.

  The event had come about rather by accident. A few weeks beforehand, a mature student named Sally Alexander had booked college rooms for a conference on women’s history. Mother to a young daughter, and a former stage manager, she’d gone to university after her divorce in 1968. Like many others, however, she was increasingly frustrated by the way that history was written and taught. Traditional history books were still dominated by accounts of the power struggles of royal courts, politicians and parliaments. And while some social historians were starting to study the lives of ordinary people, or ‘history from below’, they were principally interested in writing the story of working men, rather than that of their wives, mothers, sisters and daughters – or, indeed, women who had proven themselves on their own terms. Sally had been particularly exasperated by the sidelining of women’s experience at a recent Ruskin history conference, not least because that event was run by the otherwise radical History Workshop group, at the vanguard of the new focus on social history. When young history lecturer Sheila Rowbotham had suggested the group’s next meeting might cover women’s history, the mostly male crowd had ‘roared with laughter’. Sally and Sheila were taken aback but, with the help of several others, got on with organising their own meeting.

  It quickly became apparent to them that little had been written about the recent history of women’s working and social lives. Undeterred, they decided their meeting would address the position of women in the present day instead. With a small group of co-organisers, they invited some speakers, put out some leaflets and waited. Rowbotham recalls that they were expecting ‘perhaps a hundred people’. In fact, five hundred showed up, some with their babies and young children. ‘Everybody arrived with their sleeping bags on Friday night, which was turmoil.’ Somehow, they wrangled a rapid overspill from Ruskin into the Oxford Union’s hallowed debating chamber, described by Rowbotham as ‘an extraordinarily stiff environment that was meant to produce male orators who would become prime ministers’. She remembered ‘being really scared of speaking in that room’.27

  Over three days, the National Women’s Liberation Conference debated a whole host of subjects, from the family, sex and motherhood to women’s work and pay. For them, these issues were inextricably linked. The reason why most women found themselves restricted to doing certain kinds of jobs – most of which, like shopwork, were quite poorly paid – was that at some point in their lives many would have to juggle earning cash with caring for kids. While some women relished that arrangement, others felt increasingly trapped.

  From the outset, the organisers of the Ruskin event were acutely aware of the need to reach out to ordinary working women. To that end, they invited Audrey Wise, trade unionist at USDAW, to give a platform speech. Wise was then in her mid thirties. She had grown up in Newcastle and like so many of her generation, she ‘married young’, at the age of eighteen, and ‘just fitted in jobs mostly part time’ around her small children, working as a ‘shorthand typist, insurance agent, market researcher’, which she regarded as ‘going-round-knocking-on-doors type jobs – definitely not a career’. She had joined USDAW when she ‘got a job canvassing catalogues’. From then on things changed. She quickly rose to become branch secretary and then, long before the Ruskin conference, an active supporter of the Ford strikers. She would go on to become a Labour MP and a prominent voice in this new wave of women’s rights debates. Speaking at an equal rights rally in a rainy Trafalgar Square before all this, in 1969, she’d been struck by the quiet determination of the mostly female crowd: ‘These women on this wet day … tipping their umbrellas back so they could see you … drinking in every word.’ Many had travelled across the country to be there and Wise gleefully imagined the kinds of responses from husbands shocked to hear that their wives were ‘going to London’: ‘how can we afford it? What about the dinner, who will look after the children?’ A man, thought Wise, would ‘simply say, “I’m going on a demonstration.” Full stop.’28

  Like Margaret Bondfield before her, Wise was a socialist first and a feminist second. She’d been invited to Ruskin to talk about women and trade unions and although she stuck to the brief, she argued that the only way of improving the lives of working women was to improve the lives of all working people. She remembers that many in the audience found her line ‘quite hard going’ and that the encounter certainly ‘wasn’t cosy’. But she ‘enjoyed the weekend’ and ‘went away very friendly to it all’, above all, ‘thrilled at the size of it’.29 She later took part in debates on the Working Women’s Charter – a set of proposals that proved too challenging for the TUC, among others.30

  Back at Ruskin, the landmark conference had ended with a session that opened a whole new question: ‘Where are we going?’ All those attending voted unanimously to support four demands: equal pay; equal education and opportunity; twenty-four-hour nurseries; free contraception and abortion on demand. Inspired by the US civil rights movement, they also agreed to channel their energies into a new Women’s Liberation Movement. The ‘women’s libbers’ were roundly ridiculed by much of the press, many politicians and the wider public for wanting this kind of equality and freedom. They would attract outright hostility, however, when they pulled off one of their most audacious stunts. On 20 November 1970, around fifty demonstrators disrupted the Miss World contest at the Royal Albert Hall. This was the television highlight of the year, watched by over twenty million viewers. Protestors, including Sally Alexander, heckled the startled-looking finalists as they disembarked from their coach, shouting, ‘Shame on you!’, ‘We’re not beautiful or ugly, we’re angry!’ and ‘Welcome to the world’s largest cattle market!’ They brandished banners declaring, ‘Beauty contests degrade women’ and berating the ‘Poor cows’ taking part. Inside the venue, they silenced equally startled hosts Michael Aspel and Bob Hope with football rattles and flour bombs.

  At the time, many commentators saw the Miss World protest as clear evidence that feminists were sexually repressed men-haters. In fact, they embraced women’s sexuality. Many devoured the books of Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer and Erica Jong and, even if they didn’t agree with every line, encouraged women to explore their own bodies and find their own sexual pleasures. What they objected to, very vehemently, was not only the continuing economic inequality that kept them dependent on men and marriage, but also their treatment as passive ‘sex objects’ who existed to please others. As one of their posters pithily put it: ‘YES to mini-skirts, NO to mini-wages.’ Many of those who disrupted the Miss World contest would happily wear bikinis on the beach and were devotees of Bazaar, Biba and art-school chic – and saw no contradiction in that. For them, there was a world of difference between women running their own businesses and creating styles that made their customers feel more visible and powerful, and a beauty contest in which women paraded in swimwear at the behest of men in bow ties.

  The media decried the Miss World protest and accused the Women’s Liberation Movement of going way too far. More radical political groups, however, had been preparing to take things much further. They set their targets high, aiming at nothing less than capitalist consumer society itself. ‘Never had it so good’, with its easy money and beautiful shops, its new fashions and endless household appliances, had a darker side. And certain underground groups were set on exposing it. In the early hours of the day of the Miss World contest, one of these groups had planted not a flour bomb but a small explosive device in a BBC broadcast van parked outside the Albert Hall. It went off, damaging the vehicle but causing no injuries. The incident
was not widely reported, mostly because the authorities wanted to starve those suspected of being responsible of publicity. The group in question was the Angry Brigade.

  The Angry Brigade was a small band of young men and women who had dropped out of university, determined to challenge post-war authority. Like many of their generation, they had been radicalised by the mass student protests in Paris in 1968 (their name was inspired by French activists Les Enragés) and by struggles against the Vietnam War, the nuclear arms race and the political leaders who presided over these. Their views were forged by a heady mix of Marxism, anarchism and a fair amount of cannabis, but above all by one of the era’s most ardent critics of consumerism, French thinker Guy Debord. Debord’s book The Society of the Spectacle had first appeared in 1967 and informed the thinking of some of those who had led the Paris protests. His argument was simple: people’s relationships with each other in modern society had become badly distorted by consumer culture. They were mesmerised by the pursuit of money and the things they could buy to the point where social life was no longer about ‘living’ but only about ‘having’. For Debord, all this was a dangerous illusion, ‘a spectacle’ generated by mass culture – through its shops, magazines, adverts and films – promising idealised lifestyles that could never be truly attained and which were, in any case, empty.31

  Plenty of young people were starting to reject consumerism and the ‘meaningless’ world of work that fed it. Instead, thousands celebrated an alternative hedonism, embodied by the free festival movement that sometimes came with free food, drink, drugs and love. The Angry Brigade understood all that but wanted to push things further. They took Debord’s philosophy fiercely to heart. Their early interventions were non-violent – they cranked out posters, pamphlets, communiqués and political tracts on Roneo duplicators and distributed these around the north and west London squats where they lived. They worked with runaways, the homeless, black migrants and others left behind by the post-war consumer boom. But they were also influenced by the increasingly violent tactics adopted by other radical groups, such as Baader-Meinhof in Berlin and The First of May Group, who were taking direct action against General Franco’s ongoing and brutal dictatorship in Spain. Accounts of precisely what the Angry Brigade did and why are deeply conflicting but they did begin to plant small bombs of their own, at the Miss World contest, and also in the offices and homes of civil servants and politicians, judges and other ‘high pigs’; among these were employment secretary Robert Carr, Attorney General Sir Peter Rawlinson, and John Davies, the secretary of state for trade and industry, all of whom were involved in a controversial Industrial Relations Bill seeking to rein in the unions. Then, on May Day 1971, they set their sights on a completely new type of target: the Biba boutique and its shopgirls.

  On that day, Biba’s founder Barbara Hulanicki had ‘managed to drag’ husband Fitz to Antiquarius, the antique market on Kings Road. He was unhappy to be away from the shop on a busy Saturday afternoon. Leaving her at a stall, he went to make a quick call to ask shopgirl Irene if everything was all right:

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s fine, but there has been a bomb scare.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Fitz.

  ‘Well, this geezer said we had ten minutes to go before it went off, and then he rang again and said we had five minutes.’

  ‘Do as I say, Irene,’ said Fitz. ‘Blow smoke into the fire alarm to make it go off and clear the shop.’

  With that, Barbara recalls, a white-faced Fitz came running back to her, ‘stuffed some money into my hand for a taxi and said, “Now don’t worry, there’s a bomb in the shop,” and shot off’. By the time she reached the shop herself, she remembers that ‘crowds of customers were out on the pavement and so were all the staff. I couldn’t see Fitz. Someone said the bomb had gone off. I died a thousand deaths before I reached the front door.’ Inside, she discovered first of all that no one had died, despite the fact that there had been well over a thousand shoppers in the store just minutes before. Fitz and the manageress were inspecting the damage. Half of the basement had been demolished and a security guard slightly injured. Thousands of pounds’ worth of stock had been ruined. And almost just as much had been stolen – ‘stuffed up jumpers and into bags’ by fleeing customers.32

  Hulanicki was in shock. And deeply confused as to why anyone might bomb her store. Then in Communiqué #8, published in The Times, the Angry Brigade explained their ‘rationale’.

  All the sales girls in the flash boutiques are made to dress the same and have the same make-up, representing the 1940s. In fashion as in everything else capitalism can only go backwards – they’ve nowhere to go – they’re dead. Life is so boring there is nothing to do except spend all our wages on the latest skirt or shirt.

  Brothers and Sisters – what are your real desires? Sit in the drugstore, look distant, empty, bored, drinking some tasteless coffee? Or perhaps BLOW IT UP or BURN IT DOWN. The only thing you can do with modern slave-houses – called boutiques – is WRECK THEM.33

  In this rhetoric, shopgirls like Irene and Elly were not liberated young women working towards counter-cultures of their own, but zombie agents of capitalist consumerism working in modern slave-houses. For the Angry Brigade, the ‘flash boutiques’ and their shopgirls were symbols of everything that was wrong with modern life. They peddled impossible dreams that only served to distract and divide people. Salesgirls were ‘dead’ because they and their goods belonged to a world that was heading for an abyss. Half a century before, G.K. Chesterton had come to a similarly vitriolic conclusion, though from a very different political starting point. For him, it was department stores, rather than boutiques, that symbolised the mesmerising emptiness of early twentieth-century consumerism. He had also turned his fire on shopgirls, presiding over their ‘awful interminable emporia’, and even fantasised about decapitating them. For all her lowly economic status, the shopgirl exercised enormous and enduring symbolic power. She seemed to embody consumerism and all the conflicting passions bound up with it – desire, envy, guilt and pleasure. She stood at the gateway between goods and those who might buy them – a temptress, whether in a demure black silk dress or a daring mini-skirt.

  The Angry Brigade went on to attack more high-profile targets, including the home of William Batty, a director of the Ford car plant. But by December 1972, eight alleged members were on trial, all of them protesting their innocence. Four of them, John Barker, James Greenfield, Anna Mendleson and Hilary Creek, would receive ten-year prison sentences for conspiring to cause explosions.34 The Angry Brigade’s campaign was at an end, but, for better or worse, the consumer culture they had wanted to derail forged ahead.

  Back at Biba, Barbara and Fitz had reopened within days. Like their takings, their plans for the boutique continued to grow, supported by a major deal with property magnate British Land and the Dorothy Perkins chain. In 1973, ‘Big Biba’ took over all seven floors of Derry & Toms’ Art Deco building on Kensington High Street, including its famous roof garden. It was a far cry from the concept of the small, quirky, specialist boutique. Big Biba branched out big time, selling cosmetics, household goods, children’s clothes, sports gear, furniture, paint, wallpaper and stationery, and offering a food hall and restaurant into the bargain.35 It proved to be a step too far: Biba fell victim to recession and a bitter management dispute, closing its doors in 1975.

  Other boutique entrepreneurs fared better in the mainstream market, taking their skills to the high-street chains. Sylvia Ayton went on to become head of design at Wallis. Lee Bender expanded Bus Stop, opening twelve stores around the country by the early 1970s before selling to French Connection in 1979.36 But one store on the King’s Road stuck two fingers up to the mainstream. In 1971, Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren opened Let It Rock, selling Fifties rocker gear, now considered vintage in its own right. Three years later, they moved on from biker leathers to bondage leathers, with added zips, chains and whips. They renamed the shop Sex and hired some new assista
nts, among them Sid Vicious and Glen Matlock. When nineteen-year-old John Lydon walked in one day wearing a slashed T-shirt with the slogan ‘I hate Pink Floyd’, the line-up for McLaren’s band, the Sex Pistols, was complete. Chrissie Hynde, who was one of Sex’s shopgirls along with glowering punk icon Jordan, tried to teach Lydon guitar but soon gave up. McLaren never disguised the fact that he’d created a band that pushed counterculture to new extremes, in part to promote sales in the boutique.

  A cultural world away, many of the grand department stores began to go under. London’s shopping map was being redrawn. As well as Derry & Toms, neighbour Pontings sold up in Kensington. Gamages of Holborn and Gorringes of Victoria did the same and even Whiteley’s, a store that had created so much stir in its day, could only limp on for a few more years. But if some old names were losers in these new times, others emerged as winners. In an era of dramatic takeovers and buyouts, the Debenhams group took over Swan & Edgar on Piccadilly and Marshall and Snelgrove on Oxford Street. House of Fraser became another national powerhouse, absorbing over fifty stores in locations across the country during the decade.37

  New players, large and small, were joining the retail scrum. A change in immigration law in the late 1960s had encouraged the wives and families of many male migrants to settle in Britain while they still could. Asian women arriving from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Uganda and Kenya found work in many areas, but especially on assembly lines, in the garment and textile trades and – perhaps most visibly – in small family-run convenience stores. The Asian corner shop became part of countless shopping landscapes in towns and cities across Britain and, along the way, helped to launch a culinary revolution. These family stores also triggered a lasting change in retail’s ethnic make-up. Until this point, shopwork had been largely ‘white’ work. Earlier generations of migrants from the Caribbean had rarely been taken on behind the counter. The story of this informal but powerful ‘colour bar’ remains fragmented, unrecorded in store archives and revealed only through personal stories like that of Esther Bruce. Esther was shockingly sacked as a seamstress at Barkers department store in Kensington in the early 1930s because a new manager decided he didn’t want ‘coloured people’ working for him. Her Guyanan father and long-standing Fulham resident, Joseph Bruce, was so outraged he complained to his local MP, but to no avail.38 In the decades that followed, other black women seeking shopwork were often told that there were ‘no positions available’;39 others side-stepped discrimination by setting up stores of their own. Dorothy Owanabae, for example, was one of the first to sell cosmetics for black skin in the 1960s from her Kilburn-based business.40 Half a century on, retail now has the most ethnically diverse workforce in the country.