Shopgirls (14 page)

Horace Rayner had murdered William Whiteley. He then tried to commit suicide, shooting himself in the right eye. But he was still alive and was taken to St Mary’s Hospital, where he told the casualty surgeon, ‘I am the son of Mr William Whiteley. I have shot Mr Whiteley. I have shot myself and have made a mistake. Give me something to make me sleep away, there’s a good boy.’
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Five suffragettes hold a broken window in its frame, with Adela Pankhurst on the far left, following the chaotic ‘War on Windows’ in 1912, when over 270 shop windows were smashed.

Grace Dare lived up to her courageous nom de plume. Going undercover to expose shopworkers’ scandalous conditions, she took the fight for their rights to the top. In fact, Grace Dare was none other than Miss Margaret Bondfield. In 1896, at the age of twenty-three, Margaret was already a seasoned shopgirl, having worked her way up from draper’s apprentice in Hove to positions in a series of high-class shops in London. She had become a secret member of the National Union of Shop Assistants, which was founded in 1891, an affiliation forbidden by her employers. She missed church on Sundays, her only day off, to attend union meetings. But she was far more than simply a secret union member. She was a spy. In 1896, she began penning a series of bold articles with the aim of stirring up the world of shopkeeping, aimed at exposing the exploitative conditions of shopwork. Margaret recalled how she would wait until her room-mates were asleep and then ‘stealthily, with the feeling of a conspirator, knowing I was committing an offence for which I could be heavily fined, I would light my half-penny dip, hiding its glare by means of a towel and set to work on my monthly article’.
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Bondfield’s fierce sense of social justice had begun at home. She was born the eleventh child of Anne and William Bondfield, but in spite of the size of their brood, they hadn’t neglected Margaret. A Somerset textile worker, William had instilled in his daughter a strong sense of the dignity of work and a belief in women’s rights. When Margaret left home to work many miles away in Sussex, she struck up an unusual and powerful acquaintance with one of her well-heeled Hove customers, Louisa Martindale. Mrs Martindale was a prominent reformer with a passion for women’s freedom. Always keen on finding practical steps forward, she held open house for local shopgirls every other Sunday. The event had in fact begun as an open house for isolated and often poorly paid governesses, offering them a chance to unwind and make friends. Martindale’s daughter, Hilda, recalls that her mother had then extended the event on alternate weeks to ‘another set of women whom she began to think were also oppressed – shop assistants’. She remembers that ‘[a]mong these came an eager, attractive and vividly alive girl of sixteen, Margaret Bondfield’. The girl was ‘not happy’ and ‘needed sympathy’ and was just as ready as the governesses ‘to talk when she found her hostess really wanted to listen’. Margaret was spellbound by Mrs Martindale, whom she later described as ‘a most vivid influence in my life, the first woman of broad culture I had met, she seemed to recognise me and make me recognise myself as a person of independent thought and action … she put me in the way of knowledge that has been of help to many score of my shop mates’.
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When Bondfield moved to London in search of better prospects, she was further primed for politics. Ever eager to improve herself, she signed up for an evening class studying the poet Robert Browning, little knowing that she would soon sign up for much more besides. One of the other members of the class belonged to the Women’s Industrial Council, an organisation newly set up by Clementina Black in 1894 to improve the lives of working women. Black was a socialist and the daughter of a Brighton solicitor. Like other members of the Council, she was critical of the philanthropy so beloved by other middle-class reformers, believing that lasting social change first required solid changes in the law. In the evening class, Margaret’s new friend persuaded her to assist the Council as an undercover agent. How exactly their discussions segued from Browning’s verse to covert operations will have to remain a mystery; Bondfield in her autobiography is simply matter-of-fact about this highly unusual conversation, one that was to change the course of her life and propel her into politics.

Mrs Gilchrist Thompson, a leading light of the Council, explained that a scheme was ‘hammered out’ whereby Margaret undertook to spend two years investigating shop conditions. At her ‘own discretion’, she was ‘to obtain engagements in various shops and to stay long enough to judge of the conditions’. She started in ‘a high-class shop (but one of the worst, as we believed)’, but ‘as her references grew shorter, she descended the scale of the shopping world’. She was thus, quite knowingly, ‘ruining her future in her own profession for the sake of the well-being and safety of girls unknown to her’.
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Margaret proved to be the perfect spy. As Grace Dare, she documented squalor and exploitation behind the counter, her assumed character reminiscent of the courageous heroines dashing across the pages of the new girls’ magazines. As well as providing first-hand evidence for a 1898 Women’s Industrial Council report, her revelations were published in the union journal,
The Shop Assistant
, and were also reworked by the popular
Daily Chronicle
newspaper in a series promising to reveal the true ‘life of shops’. The series covered everything from hiring to firing. It showed that when young women went ‘cribbing’, or job hunting, they had to be prepared for some pretty probing scrutiny about their personal lives. In one large West End drapery house, ‘Grace’ was interviewed by two men – one of the owners and one of the buyers. They asked about her prior experience, as expected, but also interrogated her about her parents, her brother and her politics. Her height and figure clearly gave cause for concern: ‘She’s very short!’ At the end of interview, ‘Grace’ was asked, ‘What is the very lowest salary you will take?’ and told to write this down on a piece of paper as those kinds of figures, unlike the applicant’s physical attributes, were never openly discussed in store.
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Grace’s notes also record how struck she was by the contrast between customers’ attitudes in the East and West Ends. In the East End, ‘although the hours were long, the relationship of server and customer was much more human … We could help to make five shillings go as far as possible in value. We would hear all about the joys and sorrows of the family, and get glimpses of brave hearts under the most sordid exterior.’ It was a different story in the West End, where ‘very rarely were we regarded as other than the lackeys to wait upon the customers as did their domestic servants.’ Sometimes these customers were charming, ‘as only cultured people can be charming’. However, they were often blunt and imperious. Grace recalled one incident ‘when a very fine lady was extremely rude to me. I was not in a position to answer back; I just looked at her. She went as far as the door, and then came back, and said with disarming frankness: “I am bad-tempered today. I will have those stockings.”’ Grace’s astonishment was not at the woman’s rudeness, which she and others routinely encountered, ‘but at her recognition of it’.
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There was some light relief. Sale weeks were hard work for the staff but also afforded some amusement as well as sheer bemusement. Grace and her fellow shopgirls were astounded to watch their social superiors almost come to blows:

I remember once, two women were quarrelling over a certain article. One holding one end, and one the other. ‘This is mine,’ said No. 1, ‘and this is mine,’ said No. 2. ‘No it isn’t,’ from No. 1. ‘I found it first and I mean to have it,’ from No. 2. At this point the article came in two parts and the two women staggered back. I said gravely, ‘That settles the matter, you can now have a leg each.’ They meekly took up their belongings and disappeared without even a smile.
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Bondfield’s main objective, however, was to capture some of the dire working and living conditions and the flagrant abuses of ‘paternalist’ proprietors. One shocking
Daily Chronicle
report featured the owner of ‘a certain shop in Bradford’ who disposed of diseased meat from his farm by serving it up as supper for his hapless assistants. Worse still, he fined them 2s 6d if they failed to clear their plates. On this occasion, the shopkeeper was taken to court and convicted. Far more commonly, it was the shopworkers who came off worse, such as the assistant who was first fined and then sacked for daring to leave uneaten pork on his plate. Any shopgirl finding herself summarily dismissed like this could face additional dangers. The
Chronicle
asked its readers to put themselves in the shoes of a young woman ‘cast adrift, you and your one corded box, on the streets of London with no friends within call, your home away at a Somersetshire farm or in a Welsh valley, and the few shillings in your pocket not enough to get you there’.
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The fear was, of course, that such unfortunates would end up in prostitution.

Reformers had been documenting the raw deal forced upon many retail workers since the 1860s. Yet nearly four decades later, Grace Dare’s revelations and the
Daily Chronicle
reports still described long hours, low pay, bad food and other horrors of living-in. Individual assistants might have been ‘too timid’ to speak up, but – in the
Chronicle
’s view – it was ‘not slanderous to tell the truth about breakfasts of stale bread and rancid butterine, the watery tea, the pallid chicory decoction which serves for coffee, the crowded, dingy, and ill-ventilated dormitories’.
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Reformers faced an uphill struggle against the shopocracy. Shopkeepers had emerged as a powerful political lobby during the nineteenth century. The wealthier among them had had the right to vote since the 1832 Reform Act and were the first generation of middle-class men to do so. Their politics were complicated, however. On the one hand, many fiercely independent traders loathed outside interference in their private, often family, business affairs. On the other hand, some believed they needed to band together to strengthen their interests by, for example, agreeing standardised closing times. Shopkeepers were broadly united, though, in their suspicion of the emerging labour movement and its calls for the increased and far-reaching regulation of working conditions. The labour movement had been given huge momentum by subsequent electoral reform acts, which had finally begun to extend the vote to many working men. It also took on increasing significance in the face of the volatile economic situation of the late Victorian period: periodic downturns meant that everyday wages frequently struggled, or simply failed, to keep pace with everyday prices, leading workers to look for more radical ways to improve their lot.

The first trade unions had been established earlier in the nineteenth century by skilled workers anxious to defend their pay and traditional craft status in a rapidly industrialising nation. Above all, they wanted to protect their turf against unskilled workers. By the 1880s, however, all this started to change. Unskilled workers themselves began to organise and to flex their labour-market muscle. Indeed, one group of young women made history. On 5 July 1888, around two hundred East End matchgirls walked out of the Bryant and May matchworks in protest at the summary dismissal of one of their workmates. They headed for the Fleet Street offices of the radical newspaper
The Link
in search of its editor, Annie Besant. A few days before, and with the support of fellow activist Clementina Black, Besant had published a damning article on conditions at the firm, exposing its controversial use of poisonous white phosphorous and branding its bosses ‘white slavers’. With Besant’s support, the action escalated and soon another 1,400 women walked out. They surprised everyone by winning their case. Their victory opened a whole new chapter in working-class politics. Thousands of unskilled, casual and sweated workers followed their example. The 1889 dock strike, for example, involved up to eighty thousand dockers, stevedores, warehousemen and casual labourers and brought London ports and their vital global trade to a standstill. This strike, too, was successful and inspired the creation of many new unions.

Among them were the United Shop Assistants Union of London, founded in 1889, and the much larger National Union of Shop Assistants, which was formed in 1891 when eleven shop assistants’ organisations from cities around the country decided to join forces.
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For the first time, shop assistants had access, in theory at least, to trade organisations representing their specific interests. This was a privilege already enjoyed by many of their employers, who were free to join federations of grocers, master bakers, meat traders and shopkeepers, to name just a few.

The two shop assistant unions merged in 1898 to become the National Amalgamated Union of Shop Assistants, Warehousemen & Clerks (NAUSAW&C). It had clear aims: ‘to reduce the hours of labour; to abolish unjust fines; to secure definite and adequate time for meals; to obtain proper supervision of the sanitary arrangements of shops, and the abolition of the living-in system’.
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Shopkeepers were not impressed, however. Many made it clear to their staff that if they joined, they would be shown the door. And perhaps because of this, very few assistants did sign up. By the late 1890s, membership of the National Union of Shop Assistants, Warehousemen & Clerks stood at just 2,000, less than 1 per cent of Britain’s 750,000 shopworkers.
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