by Pamela Cox
Apple’s assertion brings the shopgirls’ story full circle. Over the past 150 years, shopgirls have defied firm categorization, performing as servants, specialists, muses, models and much more besides in their everyday encounters with customers. These were young women with spirit and vim: from the pioneering wave of shopgirls entering drapery stores in Southport and Stourbridge in the 1860s to the Selfridges’ “businesswomen”, and arsonist suffragette Gladys Evans, from impoverished chain-store assistants stealing stockings in the 1930s to Chili Bouchier’s journey from Harrods small ladies’ department to star of the silver screen; and from the raw courage of Miss Austin during the Blitz to the Biba girls’ glamorous embodiment of a hip brand, and Dorothy Owanabae selling cosmetics for black skin.
These women were all at the forefront of social change. Shopgirls have always been on the cutting edge – either in modernizing stores, with drapery and fashion leading the way, or sometimes more reluctantly dragged into the modern world in the grocery trade through technological and commercial advances, such as canning, refrigeration and self-service. Today, shopgirls continue to be key players in the constant reinvention of commerce, either as active agents or as embodiments of the new, reflecting the constant shifts in our consumer society. Take a trip to any kind of store – down the road, out of town or online – and you’ll still see all this played out before you. Britain’s shops, and the people who work in them, are doing nothing less than helping shape our sense of who we are, who we’d like to be and what we want from life.
Shops on Cornhill, Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, including Foster’s drapery holding a ‘selling out’ sale, Bellar’s grocery, Baxter’s chemist and the Post Office. Nelson Foster is likely the man standing on the left and postmaster, Mr Goward, the man on the right. Photographed by Samuel Smith, 6 September 1854.
View of the magnificent three-storeyed fabrics hall in Jenner’s department store, Princes Street, Edinburgh. Photographed by Henry Bedford Lemere at the store’s re-opening in 1895.
Shoppers inside the Burlington Arcade, Mayfair, London, c.1910.
The staff of Anderson and McAuley’s department store, Belfast, in the early 1900s.
The ‘foundling’ heroines of The Shop Girl musical comedy in costume, 1895.
A sketch of ‘Miss Bondfield On Tour’ – addressing a meeting of shop assistants in the St. George’s Hall, Hull – from The Shop Assistant Journal, July 1898.
The notorious case of Miss Cass, a shopgirl arrested on Regent Street, London. As pictured in the Illustrated Police News, July 1887.
The lively goings-on at Whiteley’s, as drawn in a comic penny paper from 1887.
‘The Delights of “Living-In”’, as depicted in The Shop Assistant Journal, March 1901.
On 16 November 1898, Harrods unveiled a technological marvel: Britain’s first moving staircase.
A Marks and Spencer Ltd stall – ‘Admission Free’ – 133 Grainger Market, Newcastle, 1 December 1906.
Selfridges window display in its opening week, March 1909, showing just a few elegant mannequins rather than piles of stock as below.
A fine example of a ‘stocky’ or ‘massed’ window display at Marshall & Snelgrove’s, with goods stacked or suspended from floor to ceiling. Photographed the same week that Selfridges opened.
‘London receiving her newest Institution’: a Selfridges newspaper advertisement touting the new store’s dedication ‘to women’s service’, 1909.
Lucile’s fabulous shopgirl models in London, 1912.
Over 200 suffragettes rush through the streets of London smashing shop windows with toffee hammers and other implements in protest, March 1912.
Departmental manageresses, Annfield Plain Industrial Co-operative Society Ltd, Durham, 1920.
One of Harrods’ ‘Green Ladies’ summoning a cab during the First World War.
Women serving in a grocer’s shop during the First World War, taking the place of men who have enlisted in the army, August 1915.
Shoppers outside the Co-operative Society Ltd in East Ham, c.1929.
Woolworths shopgirls struggling to keep up with the Christmas rush, as shoppers crowd to buy novelties and decorations, 14 December 1937.
Shopgirls from Marks and Spencer Ltd, enjoying their time at Dymchurch holiday camp, Kent in 1936.
Firefighters at work in front of John Lewis, Oxford Street, London, the morning after highly explosive and incendiary German bombs caused widespread damage, 18 September 1940.
A former Woolworths shopgirl working in a machine shop during the Second World War.
London’s first self-service ‘help yourself’ store at Wood Green, September 1948. Note the wire baskets and a few shop assistants still on hand to help out.
Two sets of identical twins, (left to right) Michelle Hellier, Nicole Hellier, Susy Young and Rosie Young, who worked as shopgirls at Biba, Kensington, west London. Photographed in September 1966.
‘This is your Company’, from the first pictorial style Annual Report produced by Woolworths, distributed to employees and shareholders, March 1958.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many wonderful people made this book possible. Lauren Bennie is a tenacious and talented researcher and we owe her a very great deal. We would like to thank those who believed in the idea from its inception, especially Sarah Rigby, Georgina Capel, Anita Land, Julian Alexander, Liz Warner, Lisette Black and Walter Iuzzolino. The book accompanies a BBC Two series made by betty and we are also indebted to all those who shaped each of the three episodes and lifted this story to the screen.
Lise Shapiro Sanders’ book on shopgirls inspired us from the start. Anna Davin very generously shared her thoughts and research notes on nineteenth-century life and gave us many early leads. Many other academics shared valuable ideas, including Geoffrey Crossick, Leonore Davidoff, Peter Gurney, Sean Nixon, Lynne Pettinger, Laura Ugolini, Amanda Wilkinson and Mike Winstanley.
A host of archivists and curators helped us to unearth the experiences of shopworkers from within their amazing collections. In particular we’d like to thank Laura Outterside (Sainsbury’s), Hannah Jenkinson (Marks & Spencer), Judy Faraday (John Lewis Partnership), Sebastian Wormell (Harrods), Janet Foster (Selfridges), Jane Holt (London College of Fashion), Celia Joicey (Fashion & Textile Museum) and Polly Russell (British Library, Social Sciences) for their time, expertise and enthusiasm.
Our book research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (with particular thanks to Bruce Jackson) and the University of Essex. Our editor at Hutchinson, Sarah Rigby, kept us to a tight schedule and offered incisive comment and tireless support throughout. The British Library was a working haven, providing obscure texts, musical scores, digitized newspapers, a calm space and great cake.
Personal thanks from Annabel Hobley
I would like to thank the circle of support that has helped me with my children and home during the creation of this book and TV series, particularly wonderful grandparents John Hobley and Frances and Stephen O’Malley, and also Julia Frommhold. Also part of the circle are Emma Benson, Christopher Hobley and Rahila Hobley, Nicholas Hobley and Roberta Natalucci, Edward O’Malley, Frederike Helwig, Gordon Scott, Marie Hiller and Gloria Curpan. I have been inspired in her intellectual rigour by my mother, Uta von Tschurtschenthaler-Hobley – tragically no longer with us – and by my father, John Hobley, in his fascination for the minutiae of business, local history and working lives. Very special love and thanks to my husband, Thomas O’Malley, for his constant love and support, for his belief in me and for teaching me how to shop.
Personal thanks from Pamela Cox
Huge thanks and much love, as ever, to everyone who has kept me smiling and kept the domestic show on the road over the past year, especially my partner and trusted critic, Bill Hayton, and our children, Tess and Patrick Hayton; my sisters, Gill Knight and Alison Johnson; my parents, Allan and Maureen Cox; my parents-in-law, Alec and Pat Hayton, and my colleagues and friends at the University of Essex.
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bsp; NOTES
Chapter 1: The Girling of Shopwork
1. ‘Romantic Freak of a Glasgow Girl of Sixteen’, Glasgow Daily Herald, 20 July 1861.
2. Hudson, Derek, ed., Man of Two Worlds: The Life and Diaries of Arthur J. Munby, 1828–1910, London: John Murray, 1972, vol. 8, 2 June 1861, pp.192–204.
3. Victorian Townscape: The Work of Samuel Smith, compiled by Michael Millward and Brian Coe, London: Ward Lock, 1974.
4. Geoffrey Crossick, social historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain and Europe: research conversation with Pamela Cox.
5. John Copeman & Sons, Copeman’s of Norwich 1879–1946, Norwich: Jarrold & Sons, 1946, p.23.
6. Lee Holcombe, Victorian Ladies at Work: Middle-Class Working Women in England and Wales, 1850–1914, Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1973, p.104.
7. John Tallis, London Street Views 1838–40 and 1847, London: London Topographical Society, 1969.
8. Francis Wey, Les Anglais Chez Eux (A Frenchman Sees the English in the Fifties), London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1935.
9. Lady Jeune, ‘The Ethics of Shopping’, Fortnightly Review, vol. 63, January 1895, p.123.
10. Ibid., p.124.
11. William Ablett, Reminiscences of an Old Draper, London: S. Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1876, p.9.
12. Lise Shapiro Sanders, Consuming Fantasies: Labor, Leisure, and the London Shopgirl, 1880 –1920, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006, p.24.
13. Obituary of Jessie Boucherett, The Times, 21 October 1905.
14. ‘Association for Promoting the Employment of Women’, English Woman’s Journal, vol. 4, September 1859, p.57.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., p.56.
17. ‘On the Obstacles to the Employment of Women’, English Woman’s Journal, vol. 4, February 1860.
18. Simon Gunn and Rachel Bell, Middle Classes: Their Rise and Sprawl, London: Phoenix, 2003, p.18.
19. Quoted in Holcombe, Victorian Ladies at Work, p.4.
20. Thomas Austin Bullock, Bradshaw’s Descriptive Guide to Manchester & Surrounding Districts, Manchester: Bradshaw & Blacklock, 1857, p.57.
21. For extended discussion, see Erica Rappaport, ‘“The Hall of Temptation”: Gender, Politics and the Construction of the Department Store in Late Victorian London’, Journal of British Studies, vol. 35, no. 1, January 1996, pp.62–4.
22. ‘Success in Business: How the Late Mr Whiteley Made his Fortune’, The Daily Chronicle, 25 January 1907.
23. Linda Stratmann, Whiteley’s Folly: The Life and Death of a Salesman, Stroud: Sutton, 2004, p.25.
24. London Magazine, vol. 9, September/October 1902, pp.189–92.
25. ‘A Commercial Eutopia’, Essex Weekly News, 3 November 1876.
26. Rappaport, ‘The Hall of Temptation’, Journal of British Studies, vol. 35, pp.58–83.
27. Robert Storch (ed.), Popular Culture and Custom in Nineteenth-Century England, London: Croom Helm, 1982, p.74.
28. Bayswater Chronicle, 11 November 1876 (known as the Paddington, Kensington, and Bayswater Chronicle until 1875).
29. ‘More Whiteleyana! Cheap Meat!’, Bayswater Chronicle, 10 March 1877.
30. ‘Local Gossip’, Bayswater Chronicle, 26 March 1881.
31. Harrods, A Story of British Achievement: 1849 –1949, London: Harrods, 1949; and Bill Lancaster, The Department Store: A Social History, London: Leicester University Press, 1995, p.22.
32. Lancaster, The Department Store, p.195.
33. Holcombe, Victorian Ladies at Work, p.104.
34. Hudson, Man of Two Worlds, vol. 12, 22 February 1862, p.142.
35. Ibid, vol. 8, 2 June 1861, pp.192–204.
36. Hudson, Man of Two Worlds, vol. 8, 2 June 1861, pp.192–204.
37. Thomas Darlington (ed.), Memoir of Emerson Muschamp Bainbridge of Newcastle-on-Tyne, Edinburgh: R & R Clark, 1893, pp.15–16.
38. Lancaster, The Department Store, p.181.
39. 1882 [C 3183] Report of the Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops to Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for the Home Department, for the year ending 31st October 1881, p.35.
40. Peter Sell and Gina Murrell, Flora of Great Britain and Ireland, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, vol. 4, p.78.
41. Lancaster, The Department Store, p.31.
42. Christopher Hosgood, ‘“Mercantile Monasteries”: Shops, Shop Assistants, and Shop Life in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain’, Journal of British Studies, vol. 38, no. 3, July 1999, pp.324–5.
43. The Drapers Record (26 Nov. 1875, 1 Feb. 1878, 8 Feb. 1878), quoted in Hosgood, ‘Mercantile Monasteries’, p.345.
44. ‘Life Behind the Counter’, Young Woman, January 1893, p.128.
45. Hudson, Man of Two Worlds, vol. 8, 2 June 1861, pp.192–204.
46. ‘Women Who Work Behind a Counter’, Cassell’s Magazine, vol. 9, 1874, p.349–51.
47. Hudson, Man of Two Worlds, vol. 12, 22 February 1862, p.142.
48. City Press, 20 August 1870.
49. Holcombe, Victorian Ladies at Work, pp.18, 106: between 1861 and 1911 the number of female shopworkers increased by 319 per cent, the number of male shopworkers by 118 per cent.
50. Jeune, ‘The Ethics of Shopping’, Fortnightly Review, vol. 63, p.126.
51. Holcombe, Victorian Ladies at Work, p.107.
52. Miss Fowle, March 1921, miscellaneous unmarked box of short histories at Harrods Store Archive, quoted in Erika Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End, Chichester: Princeton University Press, 2000, p.201.
53. ‘Miss Fowle’, Harrodian Gazette, vol. 3, no. 6, 4 June 1915, pp.14–15.
Chapter 2: Servants of the Counter
1. Margaret Bondfield, A Life’s Work, London: Hutchinson & Co., 1948, p.24.
2. John Benson, The Working Class in Britain 1850 –1939, London: Longman, 1989, p.24; Elizabeth Roberts, Women’s Work 1840 –1940, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988, p.34; 1891 census report for England and Wales.
3. William Ablett, Reminiscences of an Old Draper, London: S. Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1876.
4. Bill Lancaster, The Department Store: A Social History, Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1995, p.126.
5. Miss Fowle, March 1921, miscellaneous unmarked box of short histories at Harrods Store Archive, quoted in Erika Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End, Chichester: Princeton University Press, 2000, p.201.
6. Anna Davin, ‘City Girls: Young Women, New Employment, and the City: London, 1880 –1910’, in Mary Jo Maynes, Birgitte Soland and Christina Benninghaus (eds.), Secret Gardens, Satanic Mills: Placing Girls in European History, 1750 –1960, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.
7. Lee Holcombe, Victorian Ladies at Work: Middle-Class Working Women in England and Wales, 1850 –1914, Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1973, p.114.
8. Lancaster, The Department Store, pp.130–1; Jan Whitaker, The Department Store: History, Design, Display, London: Thames & Hudson, 2011, p.31.
9. Richard S. Lambert, The Universal Provider: A Study of William Whiteley and the Rise of the London Department Store, London: Harrap, 1938, pp.152–3; see also Richard Patterson, ‘The Cost of Living in 1888’, The Victorian Web, www.victorianweb.org/economics/wages4.html (accessed 25 March 2014).
10. ‘Why is Whiteley’s so often burned down?’, The Pall Mall Gazette, 16 August 1887.
11. Holcombe, Victorian Ladies at Work, p.113.
12. Philip Christopher Hoffman, They Also Serve: The Story of the Shop Worker, London: Porcupine Press, 1949, p.24.
13. Bondfield, A Life’s Work, p.25.
14. ‘Disgraceful Affair at Cardiff’, The Drapers Record, 10 January 1887, p.421.
15. Lambert, The Universal Provider, p.75.
16. Holcombe, Victorian Ladies at Work, p.114.
17. Henry Mayhew, The Shops and Companies of London and the Trades and Manufactories of Great Britain, London: 1865, p.5.
18.
Bondfield, A Life’s Work, p.62; also cited in Holcombe, Victorian Ladies at Work, p.109.
19. ‘Women Who Work – Behind a Counter’, Cassell’s Magazine, vol. 9, November 1873, p.349.
20. Mark Patton, Science, Politics, and Business in the Work of Sir John Lubbock: A Man of Universal Mind, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007; R.J. Pumphrey, ‘The Forgotten Man: Sir John Lubbock, F.R.S.’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, vol. 13, no. 1, June 1958, pp.49–58; Ursula Lubbock Grant Duff, The Life-work of Lord Avebury (Sir John Lubbock), 1834 –1913, London: Watts and Co., 1924.
21. Letter to the editor, ‘The Shop Hours Regulation Bill’, The Spectator, 26 July 1873, p.13 (a response to this letter identifies Boucherett as the author).
22. Letter to the editor, The Spectator, 26 July 1873, p.13. See also ‘The Nine Hours Bill and the Shop Hours Regulation Bill’, Englishwoman’s Review, 1873, pp.209–12.
23. Holcombe, Victorian Ladies at Work, p.125.
24. Dr Arthur Edis, ‘Slavery in the West-End’, Letter to the Editor, The Times, 7 November 1878, p.9; Mrs Strange Butson, ‘The Standing Evil – A plea for shopgirls’, The Girl’s Own Paper, vol. 1, 1880, p.612.
25. ‘Lecture at National Health Society on London Shopwomen – Letter to Dr Edis’, House and Home, 29 March 1879, p.10.
26. Joseph Chitty and John Mounteney Lely, The Statutes of Practical Utility, 1235–1895, London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1902, p.809.
27. Thomas Sutherst, Death and Disease Behind the Counter, London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Co., 1884, pp.20–22.
28. Ibid., pp.135–6.
29. Select Committee on the Shop Hours Regulation Bill, Parliamentary Papers, vol. IXX, 1886, p.102.