Shopgirls (21 page)

Extraordinarily enough, this challenging time was just the moment that another retailer chose to begin implementing one of the most radical experiments in shopwork. In 1864, Somerset draper John Lewis had opened a small store at 132 Oxford Street, selling silk, wool and haberdashery. A highly principled, irascible man, Lewis had built up his business through five decades of sheer hard work. Now an old man but still going strong, John Lewis had been unperturbed by the arrival of Selfridges, realising that the new kid on the block would bring extra custom to Oxford Street and confident that the John Lewis policy of good value for money and a wide assortment of stock would stand up to the new competition. Unlike other stores who were rattled by the American arriviste, Lewis did not increase his advertising budget and simply stuck to his tried-and-tested business methods. To keep prices down for his customers, he had always worked to a significantly smaller profit margin than his competitors, taking just 25 per cent profit on selling price, while most other drapers took 33 per cent. The policy worked; the store was profitable and if the enterprise came across as at all old-fashioned, so be it, felt the elderly John Lewis.

Unfortunately for his shop assistants, Lewis treated them with the same tenacious rigour. And Philip Hoffman, in his role as officer of the National Amalgamated Union of Shop Assistants, Warehousemen & Clerks, clashed with the proprietor time and again. In his autobiography Hoffman painted an eloquent picture of the man Lewis had become. This ‘remarkable man’ represented for Hoffman ‘much of the worst type of employer in the rugged, rather shameless individualist past of the Victorian and Edwardian era’.
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According to him, Lewis had grown tyrannical and eccentric, ‘a fearless, obstinate man’, who forced younger customers to use the stairs in his store rather than the lift if he felt they were fit enough, and was particularly fussy about his female employees’ dress. Young women were to be all in black with high white collars kept up without wire supports. This was not only frightfully old-fashioned, but also an uncomfortable and impractical method of collar-management; he also particularly disliked seeing blonde curly hair – let alone redheads – on his shopfloor.
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When prowling his store, he sometimes took instantly against a certain saleswoman or salesman, asking them a couple of questions about their length of service and then saying, ‘You have been here too long. Go to the Counting House and get your money.’
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Some shop assistants actively avoided applying for jobs there, explaining, ‘They’re rotten payers.’ Even Lewis’s son Spedan described his father as ‘the captain of a big ship much under-engined and with those engines much under-fuelled’, whose staff were underpaid and undermotivated. They received but ‘a bare living, with very little margin beyond absolute necessaries’ and had none of the advantages that staff at enlightened stores were starting to enjoy: no sick pay, pension provision, staff amenities or playing fields. Spedan Lewis described the management system as ‘ruthlessly close-fisted’.
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In May 1909 Spedan Lewis, then aged twenty-three, had been riding his horse on Rotten Row in Hyde Park. The horse had shied and Spedan had fallen off, seriously injuring himself, with one of his lungs severely punctured. For the next two years, he was effectively an invalid, undergoing a series of chest operations, struggling to recover and requiring long periods of rest. Spedan was a romantic, visionary young man, much influenced by his politically engaged mother, Eliza Baker, one of the few women to attend university in the 1870s, obtaining a pass degree from Girton College, Cambridge, in history and political economy.

Spedan owned a quarter share of John Lewis; his younger brother, Oswald, had sold his own quarter share back to his father, so that John Lewis senior at this point possessed three quarters of the business. The long months of recuperation gave Spedan ample time to reflect on his father’s lifework and his own few years’ experience of retail. He had been shocked to discover the enormous discrepancy between the annual profit of the John Lewis store and the annual pay sheet for staff, who were earning very low wages. Spedan, Oswald and their father enjoyed the income of about £26,000 a year; the staff wage bill for a workforce of just over 300 came to around £16,000 a year.
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Even fifty years later, when the extremes of rich and poor in society were less polarised, Spedan Lewis said in a radio broadcast, ‘It is all wrong to have millionaires before you have ceased to have slums.’ He was not against capitalism, but in 1957, and probably even more so in 1909, Spedan felt that ‘The present state of affairs is really a perversion of the proper working of capitalism.’
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From his sickbed, Spedan dreamt up a new model of business enterprise, ‘the notion of the John Lewis Partnership’, as he termed it, a notion that would ultimately prove so successful that it is still influencing business and government thinking today.
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He wanted to overturn the quasi-feudal relationship between proprietor and staff, establishing instead a kind of professional partnership between all ranks of store workers, such as that enjoyed by lawyers and stockbrokers. In his autobiography he lyrically described his concept thus: ‘Partnership is justice. Better than justice, it is kindness. It is harmony with what some people call the Nature of Things and some the Will of God.’
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On his recovery, Spedan swapped his quarter share of John Lewis for total control of Peter Jones on London’s Kings Road, which John Lewis senior had acquired a few years earlier. Peter Jones was to be Spedan’s testing ground.

Things did not go well at first. Peter Jones had been performing badly before the outbreak of war and now, in spite of extraordinary trading conditions and reduced opening hours, Spedan chose this moment to launch the first stages of his new scheme. First on his agenda was to improve staff living conditions. The store had been constructed out of a number of dwelling houses on the Kings Road; while the shopfloor had been knocked open, the upstairs staff bedrooms were still dingy, dangerous, separate quarters. Spedan had the passages knocked through, got hot and cold running water installed and improved general hygiene. He expanded the living quarters for female staff and effectively ended the strict and obligatory living-in regime by removing all rules restricting personal freedoms for those over twenty-one.
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For shopgirls under twenty-one, the hostel matron still played a parental role. Eating facilities were also renovated. Shopman Robert Bichan joyfully described the new-look dining room with ‘interesting pictures on the walls, colourful curtains, black and red Tudor tile pattern linoleum’. The kitchen was modernised too, with piping hot food served by neatly uniformed waitresses.
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Secondly, and most importantly for the majority of staff, Spedan significantly improved pay, keeping pace with inflation. In 1915 he also started the ‘Committees for Communication’, what he termed his ‘one really new idea’, though it was not unlike Selfridges’ Staff Parliament. His aim was to bridge the gulf between the managers and the managed; to this end, several times a year fifteen staff representatives in each committee met a senior manager – often Spedan himself – to discuss whatever was on their minds. Spedan discovered that at first they were shy and hadn’t much to say. ‘I used hastily to start a discussion upon something or other and keep it going for twenty minutes or so,’ he said, but as the idea caught on he did not need to take the lead any more. Spedan knew his reforms would be dismissed as ‘merely utopian, an unpractical lavishness that was hopelessly unsound business’, but he stuck with them.
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Tudor patterned flooring, increased pay, refurbished living quarters, better food and giving staff a say in the business seemed like financial suicide to most other proprietors, who were battening down the hatches, including John Lewis senior. Indeed, Spedan’s high spending was making staff costs spiral, with the pay sheet doubling in three years. But by the middle of the war, Peter Jones’ finances had begun to pull through, with turnover growing year on year. Spedan was hopeful that his reforms would win out.

Peter Jones’ shop assistants, provided with regular hot meals in the renovated dining room, were sheltered from many of the harsh realities of city life on the home front. Loss of supplies from continental Europe meant that food stocks were running low, and as a little girl, Dorothy Bouchier experienced first-hand what this meant. She would later work at Harrods, but in her autobiography some of her most enduring girlhood memories are of wartime hunger. ‘We didn’t seem to be getting enough to eat,’ she wrote, describing how her family hardly managed to survive on her father’s low wages as a corporal in the Royal Engineers, even when supplemented by her mother’s dressmaking work. ‘This undernourishment caused problems,’ she felt, for when she cut or grazed herself, the wounds would fester. She recalled chaotic neighbourhood scenes as someone shouted down the road, ‘There are some oxtails at the butchers!’ or ‘There’s coal at the depot!’ Everyone would rush outside, often arriving too late to get hold of the new supplies.
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In fact, the government’s War Emergency Committee had attempted to control the distribution and pricing of food and necessities, but few of their regulations had been implemented. With food prices rising by 87 per cent in the first two years of the war, food riots soon broke out. Socialist campaigner Margaretta Hicks described them as ‘mad raids’ often carried out by women who were ‘frenzied by the loss of relatives through the war’ and by ‘the gassing of soldiers, and the fearful fighting’. Hicks was sympathetic, but only to a degree: ‘It is dreadful, but smashing a few shops only makes things worse.’
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Apart from highly erratic and often non-existent supplies, retailers had another urgent problem to worry about: staffing levels. With three million men on the front in 1915, the government had woken up to the fact that they needed to mobilise women. David Lloyd George said, ‘Without women, victory will tarry,’ and propaganda posters called out, ‘Do your Bit, Replace a Man for the Front’. Women of all ages who had never before worked in shops entered retail in their thousands: for the first time ever there were more shopgirls than shopmen.
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They started to take on jobs traditionally reserved for their male counterparts: at Peter Jones, Spedan Lewis began hiring women as the all-important buyers, while at Peter Robinson’s, women drove the delivery vans, wearing smart grey uniforms. Harrods even retrained some of its female staff to become carriage attendants, the commissionaires who welcomed customers on the pavement in their distinctive uniforms, so that the famous ‘Green Men’ became ‘Green Women’. Firms like Sainsbury’s went on a recruitment drive, preparing a blank letter to be filled in by each branch manager, which read: ‘Madam, If your parents reside within half a mile of our _____ Branch, and you are not less than five feet six ins. in height; and not under 19 years of age, please call here between ____ and ____ tomorrow presenting this letter. Do not call at any other time. Yours truly, for J. Sainsbury.’
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Winifred Griffiths was nineteen years old when war broke out, working as a housemaid in Oakley, Hampshire. Her mistress released her so she could answer a local call-out from the co-operative stores; they wanted to train up young women as replacements for the male grocery assistants who had joined the forces. For the first few days Winifred had to stay in a back room bagging up sugar and lump sugar. She was first let out to help at the grocery counter on one of the busiest times of the week, Friday evening. ‘I was so bewildered that I am afraid I made a fine mess of things,’ she wrote in her unpublished autobiography. ‘When trying to serve customers I did not know where things were kept, nor yet had I memorised all the prices. I had not yet acquired the knack of making tidy packets for goods like dried fruit, rice and tapioca … To crown all, most customers expected their goods to be done up in a large paper parcel.’ Things soon improved for Winifred, as she made friends with two other new girls, Jennie and Daisy, who had been drafted in from Yorkshire and Somerset. Together they went to evening classes, or the cinema on their half day, or to church on Sundays.

Winifred left the Co-op for a new position in a grocery called Walkers, where she was to be trained up to take the place of a young man about to leave for the front. Much to her consternation, not only did he leave but so did his boss. ‘So that after only two or three months of training, as against several years that an old-time apprentice would have had, I found myself in charge of the provision side in a very busy store, where we sold thirty sides of bacon a week.’
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Other young women, though, stood little chance of promotion. Grocer Mr Headey, who had had difficulty before the Great War with his one female cashier, Miss Owen, among his twelve male staff, was drafted from Tonbridge to run a large grocery store in Reading which employed twenty-two people. Twenty of the twenty-two were women. It was to prove another unhappy experience. His son recalled how Mr Headey senior disapproved heartily of the female shop assistants. Matters came to a head when one of the women made a mistake, selling a customer powdered borax instead of ground arrowroot. There was ‘a hell of a to-do’ and she rushed into the girls’ restroom crying, the other female assistants hurrying after in order to comfort her, leaving the huge shop empty of staff. Mr Headey promptly sacked the lot. He then had to restaff, hiring
any
kind of man he could get hold of, ‘old joshers’ including a man with a club foot and another who had left the army on account of his religion.
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Of course, it wasn’t just in retail that women were stepping into roles traditionally occupied by men. Industrial, clerical, agricultural and transport jobs were suddenly open to them too.
Pathé Gazette
newsreels, which were shown in the newly built, hugely popular picture palaces, had titles like
Navvies in Skirts
,
Zoo’s First Woman Keeper
and
While Mother Works
. Over the course of the war, the number of women in employment increased by more than 1.5 million.
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Women became land girls, tram-drivers, firefighters and prototype policewomen. They heaved coal, built airships and worked behind the front line in France. Thousands also stepped up to do one of the most dangerous and highly lucrative jobs of all: munitions work.