In Mine Own Heart

by Alan Marshall

  ‘Is that Mr Halberg? … Righto.’

  He lowered his voice and spoke softly into the phone, his tone that of a conspirator.

  ‘Hey, listen! How’d ya like to get that crop of yours back for fifty quid? … Yes … Look, you don’t know me … It’s on the level, I tell ya … Yes, I did the job … It’s all right. It’s all there … No, that’s the figure … Well, you could send a truck to Rundle Street, couldn’t ya … Yes, that’s where I am. Near the Modern Shoe Company … No, not in the street. He could follow me in the truck … All right … Now, look, give him the money … All right. About twenty minutes … Righto … Goodbye.’

  He replaced the receiver on the stand.

  ‘I knew he’d jump at it,’ he said, and for the first time he smiled. ‘He needs a few extra quid the same as the rest of us.’

  He relaxed for a moment and looked at the floor.

  ‘You seem to be making out all right,’ I said.

  ‘I’m battlin’ through,’ he said as he stood up. ‘Got a box of matches on you? I’m out.’

  It was a fulltime job to these men; it was a sideline to others.

  By Mr R. J. Arnold, the buyer of a large Sydney retail store, dishonesty was regarded as shrewdness and efficiency.

  Mr Arnold demonstrated all the obvious attributes of efficiency as a buyer immediately I met him. He sat opposite me at my table, clothed in confidence. He smiled in bursts of geniality, spoke with enthusiasm, was lavish with compliments, told the latest vulgar story, hinted at large follow-up orders provided the prices for the order he held in his hand were right.

  He suggested I visit him when next I went to Sydney. He knew all the night clubs over there.

  Mr Arnold’s expression when he mentioned Sydney night life suggested the existence of joys beyond description in the glorified cafes he patronised, and it would be ‘on him’.

  O generous Mr Arnold with his made-in-England shoes!

  ‘Now let us get down to business,’ he said.

  Mr Arnold had three hundred pounds to spend, cash in seven days, five per cent discount.

  Now, the price.

  I began costing the shoes he would buy. Labour first … In 1927 the labour cost of a pair of shoes was 3/rod, now it was 2/o½-d. This was due to men like Mr Arnold who would push labour costs still lower if they could.

  For Mr Arnold’s benefit I dropped the halfpenny. It made no difference to the wages of the men and girls labouring in the factory nor could it make any difference to the speed of their work. Their tired hands could give no more.

  And we needed this order. Fulsham had instructed me to land it at any price.

  I cut each item in the costing down to a minimum. I did not include the five per cent discount. I cut the overhead.

  Finally the prices were complete. I handed Mr Arnold a slip of paper upon which they were listed.

  ‘That’s the best we can do,’ I said. ‘You won’t get them cheaper anywhere else.’

  He studied the paper and nodded.

  ‘Good. These seem all right. I’ll give you the order at those prices.’

  He changed his tone. ‘Now.’ He folded the paper and placed it in his pocket. ‘What do I get out of it—ten per cent?’

  For a moment I was nonplussed. I had little experience with buyers from big firms—the Modern Shoe Company ran their own chain of stores—and my immediate reaction was the conviction that here was a man whose custom should be avoided rather than encouraged.

  ‘I haven’t made any provision for commission,’ I said firmly.

  ‘You haven’t got to make provision for it,’ he said sharply. ‘That’s my cut. It comes off the price. It’s not added on to it.’

  ‘If we have to pay you ten per cent I’ll have to add it on,’ I argued.

  ‘Those prices are as high as I’m prepared to go. I can get the same shoes at those prices at a dozen factories over here. They’re howling for trade. And I could get my ten per cent too.’

  ‘It’s not usual …’ I began lamely.

  ‘Not usual, be damned!’ he said contemptuously. ‘Over in Sydney the office boy who goes out to get the pies for the typists’ lunches gets a halfpenny a pie from the shop where he buys them. That’s business. It’s time you woke up over here. Now what about it? Do I get it or not?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Right, I’ll get it somewhere else.’

  I was glad when he left. It was after five o’clock and I had another job to do. I took a large key from a hook on the office wall and walked out on to the street. A shout from a group of children gathered at the far end of the factory welcomed me.

  At the rear of the factory were two high galvanised-iron gates that opened into a small back yard. The rubbish from the factory was piled here ready for the Council dustman to load it on his dray and cart it to the tip.

  One corner was reserved for a special kind of rubbish. Waste pieces of leather from the cutting of soles was swept into bags and piled in this corner by the workmen.

  Each evening when the factory machines were silent, ragged children with bare feet and dirty faces pulled their billy carts up back alleys and streets to wait patiently at the back gate for its distribution.

  They were waiting for me now.

  Their meals were cooked over these scraps of leather, their thinly-clad bodies were warmed by it, the air above their homes was tainted by the smell of its burning.

  They called it ‘Collingwood Coke’.

  14

  A pronounced decline in business ethics began in the thirties. Prior to the depression a pride in the honesty of their dealing was an attribute possessed by many business men manufacturing consumer goods. Shoddy products were the exception rather than the rule; skill in disguise was not so highly developed.

  The moquette upholstery on suites of furniture did not then conceal the wood of packing cases, shoes did not come apart when subjected to the softening processes of mud and water and garments were stitched to last.

  Speed-up systems had not been developed to an extent that in later years affected the quality of manufactured goods. Monopolies and combines had not yet rolled like a submerging wave over the minor firms that stood in their way.

  With the engulfing advance of the take-over companies were to come new ethics in which the individual business man would be freed from moral responsibility to those he served. His conscience would be at peace, dishonest practices that enriched him would be those of a disembodied company. Dishonesty was not the dishonesty of men when practised by an abstraction.

  The battle for business survival had always been fought with ruthless purpose but till the thirties some obligation to the people was still recognised.

  Now was begun a conditioning of the people to a gradual acceptance of a state in which the most they could pay was demanded for the least they would accept. This was normality.

  Human values swiftly changed. Trading practices that once would have roused unbelief and angry indignation were now shrugged aside as part of an inevitable pattern of living in a competitive world.

  The rot that began on top moved down to corrupt salesman and artisan. Those whose god was money saw in nefarious business practices the road that led to power and wealth.

  All people were affected by these changing values in human relationships, not only those who accepted corruption as part of the business world but those who fought it. The latter group, the trade unions, the advocates of socialism, were strengthened by the very forces that would have swept them aside.

  Inside the Modern Shoe Company, workers, gripped by the prevailing fever, their honesty rendered futile, began ‘knocking off’—the euphemism for thieving—the shoes they made. It was their answer to the theft of their security, the exploitation of their bodies’ capacity to labour.

  ‘We’re all in it; to hell with them.’

  And the company launched into its final agonies on a faith in deceit and corruption to save it.

  I was walking through the factory, col
lecting some sample shoes to deliver round the Modern Shoe Company’s chain of retail stores on my weekly visit of inspection, when I noticed Mr Correll, a supervisor, putting some dabs of iodine inside the women’s kid shoes he had stacked on the bench in front of him.

  The piece of cotton wool he used to do this bore a wet brown stain from the iodine he had poured upon it from the bottle at his side.

  ‘What’s the big idea?’ I asked him.

  ‘It helps to sell them,’ said Correll. ‘Women buy them like hot cakes as soon as the salesman opens the lid and they get a whiff of the iodine.’

  I took one of the shoes in my hand and looked inside it. Just above the curve of the arch three V-shaped openings had been punched in the insole, revealing an underlay of red flannel.

  The underlay did not continue down the shoe as the glimpse of red flannel suggested. Only a patch of the material was used and it was pasted directly beneath the cuts.

  On the white leather insole of the shoe, just above the heel, the words ‘Doctor Baddock’s Arch-support Shoes. Andrew Bentley, Sole Distributor’, were stamped in letters of gold.

  Andrew Bentley was one of our best customers.

  ‘But haven’t we called this shoe “Doctor Martin’s”?’ I asked.

  ‘We call it “Doctor Martin’s” in our own shops,’ explained Correll. ‘We had to think of another name for Bentley’s order. They are our best selling line.’

  ‘Who thought of the iodine?’

  ‘Fulsham.’

  ‘Do you dab it down near the toe?’

  ‘Yes. Where they can’t see it. It’s the hospital sort of smell that sells the shoe.’

  ‘This is the shoe that has a big sale among women with rheumatics, isn’t it?’

  ‘My word! They think the red flannel is good for rheumatics. Then the smell makes it seem good for anything that’s wrong with your feet.’

  I left him to drive round the company’s retail stores in which Doctor Martin’s shoes were displayed, the name giving hope to those who with painful steps entered the door. I had to check the takings of each store, pay the wages of the salesgirls, question the managers …

  In my pocket were slips of paper detailing the commissions I had added to the wages of a number of salesgirls. Their earnings for the week had seemed to Mr Fulsham to be unnecessarily high.

  The salesgirls increased their weekly wages by selling ‘spiffs’, the name given to inferior or damaged shoes that, under ordinary circumstances, would have to be sold at a loss.

  A red sticker was placed on the boxes of the spiffs to distinguish them from those shoes that were undamaged. If a salesgirl sold a spiff at the price prevailing for a standard shoe she was awarded sixpence and this amount was added to her wages.

  Some star salesgirls earned up to ten shillings a week in spiffs. Trained to deceive, they became experts in persuasion and customers bought these faulty shoes with confidence.

  I questioned Mr Furness, the manager, about the high number of spiffs he was discovering in the stock sent him by the factory, with a resulting increase in commission earned by his salesgirls.

  ‘Well,’ he explained, raising his hands in a gesture suggesting acceptance of the inevitable. ‘What can I do! There’s an increasing number of shoes being sent in by the factory with uppers of a most inferior grade. Many are damaged—knife cuts, broken stitching … Customers notice these things. I have a range of white buck ties here made of leather that won’t last a week. It takes a good girl to sell those shoes at the price asked for the original higher grade.

  ‘I have been training my girls to get rid of the bad stuff first. We can’t afford to be left with a stock of inferior footwear. The only way to do it is to offer the girls an incentive to try and pass the damaged and inferior shoes on to the customer. They get paid to do this and it is marvellous how they succeed.

  ‘I have two girls here who never sell a customer a good shoe. That is why their wages have gone up. If I didn’t do this, what would happen? The girls would concentrate on selling the faultless lines because it is easier and I would be left with a stock of worthless shoes that in the end would have to be jobbed out at a sacrifice.’

  ‘I see,’ I said and the words did not seem to have originated in my mind but in my mouth. They were meaningless.

  ‘Now what about the “overs”?’ I continued. ‘One of the girls has earned a pound extra in this way.’

  ‘Well, the “overs” scheme was introduced by Mr Fulsham following the lead of other Melbourne retail shoe stores.’

  ‘I know that,’ I said, ‘but what I want to know is how one of your girls came to earn a pound extra in this way.’

  ‘Well, that girl is our star salesgirl. I trained her myself. She often sells shoes at half a crown over the listed price. For that she gets sixpence. Those she sells for five shillings over, she gets one shilling and so on. Last week she sold two pairs of shoes for a pound over the correct price. She got eight shillings out of that deal.’

  ‘A pound over!’ I exclaimed. ‘What was the correct price of those shoes?’

  ‘Well, they were samples that came from the factory to be sold at twelve and sixpence a pair.’

  ‘And she sold them for thirty-two and sixpence?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What type of person bought these shoes?’

  ‘Oh … two women who wanted something exclusive! The leather in the shoes was good. We brushed them up a bit and they were perfectly satisfied.’

  ‘Don’t you think such a scheme encourages the girls to be dishonest?’

  ‘Not at all, Mr Marshall. The girls here would never think of keeping any overs they receive.’

  I moved impatiently. ‘Not that.’

  ‘The paying of a percentage on overs encourages the girls to be honest,’ pursued Furness. ‘They know that for every ten shillings extra they obtain, they’ll be paid two shillings. The firm never loses anything by theft under this scheme.’

  ‘No, the firm doesn’t lose anything,’ I said.

  ‘Quite right, Mr Marshall. I have trained all the girls here to be strictly honest in their dealings with the firm.’

  It was true that the firm lost very little money by the thieving of salesgirls but it was suspected by Mr Fulsham that the firm was losing quite a lot of money by the thieving of managers.

  He hired the Justice Investigation Company to investigate declines in shop profits with a view to discovering if it resulted from stealing by managers or staff.

  The Justice Investigation Company was one of those parasitical companies born of the times and was formed to profit on the failure of retailers to comprehend the basic reasons for their declining incomes and imminent collapse.

  Like a patient who loses faith in his doctor and turns to a quack for a cure, so the big retailers were ready to grasp at assurances that it was not a contagion of society’s sickness that was striking them down but the poisoning of their system by the greed of those they employed. It was the stealing of their goods and their money that was weakening them.

  This was the message of the Justice Investigation Company.

  The Justice Investigation Company guaranteed to reveal any defalcations in the shops they were commissioned to visit and also to supply proof of the dishonesty of the persons responsible. For this they charged five guineas for every shop investigated, with a proviso that they were to be paid fifty per cent of any stolen money refunded by those they proved guilty.

  The shoes and other articles they purchased on their visits were returned to the head office together with the dockets made out for their sales. In cases where no docket was given the omission was noted in their report.

  The document that lay on the desk before me was double foolscap size. Printed information was followed by dotted lines upon which in immature handwriting some officer of the Justice Investigation Company had filled in details.

  It was the company’s final report on our Richmond store where a manager named Reg Carlson was
having difficulty in keeping the sales to a level profitable to the Modern Shoe Company.

  I was reading the document before making a report to Mr Fulsham. It bore provision for a detailed description of the salesman or woman who had served the investigator. The employee’s manner and sales ability were commented on; the conversation that occurred between them was given and finally a list of the footwear purchased with prices paid was detailed at the foot of the form.

  The salesman who had attended this investigator was described as a dark, energetic man with a blue tie, tidy appearance and hair brushed straight back. His manner was described as ‘casual’ and it was noted that he gazed at his finger nails while the investigator was trying on a pair of shoes. His conversation was recorded.

  From the description I recognised the salesman as Carlson.

  I took the document to show Mr Fulsham. He was sitting in his office smoking cigarettes which he kept stubbing in the overladen ash tray on the table in front of him.

  He looked tired and dispirited. He was a man whose faith in himself was built on the warmth with which people greeted him, his popularity. When his business was flourishing he was valuable to suppliers and their attitude towards him was one of respect. He was regarded as an honest man, his credit was never questioned.

  The admiration he was accorded was based on his power to make big contributions to the security and wealth of those who sought his trade and now he could no longer exercise this.

  Travellers were beginning to avoid him, manufacturers were apologetic when he rang them about delays in deliveries but the delays continued. He was asked for cash on delivery and this seemed an insult to him.

  He brooded and began avoiding creditors. He was rarely in his office, relying on me to fend off his one-time friends now clamouring for money.

  He became irritable and was quick to discover faulty workmanship in the shoes his foremen handed him for inspection. Where once he accepted with a shrug the petty thefts of workmen he now became enraged, as if in their dishonesty was suddenly revealed to him the reasons for the decline of his business and the painful state of his mind.