Shopgirls (24 page)

The Great War, with its temporary rise in working-class wages, had already given housewives in industrial cities a taste for buying home furnishings. Liverpool housewives, for example, had not only bought furniture beyond what was absolutely necessary during the war, some had even stretched to buying unpractical items, such as a piano.
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The
Daily Mail
Home Exhibition (now the Ideal Home Show) was held annually at Olympia in London, its aim to encourage women to buy and use new household technologies and products. The annual catalogues were attractively bound books entitled
The Ideal Labour-Saving Home
, with prints of award-winning idyllic suburban houses on the front cover. Inside they were packed full of advertisements for ‘Labour-Saving Devices which solve the problem of domestic drudgery’,
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such as Thor electric washing machines and Daisy vacuum cleaners, and they gave advice on the entire spectrum of household fixtures and appliances, from stainless-steel cutlery to plastic flooring.

Chain stores and co-operative societies like Littlewoods, Marks & Spencer, Woolworths, Home & Colonial and British Home Stores now mushroomed in cities but also on suburban and provincial high streets, bringing such novel home furnishings and household devices within reach of lower-middle-class and some working-class families. And it wasn’t just household goods that were more affordable; previously housewives had sewn or knitted the majority of their families’ clothes, but now ready-to-wear swept the high street and affordable fashion as we know it today was born. Ready-to-wear had already existed for a century, but it had been associated with poor quality and poor tailoring. The looser-fitting, less complex women’s fashions of the interwar years, combined with the advent of revolutionary new fabrics such as rayon, meant that ready-mades underwent a revolution in this period. Vera May Ashby worked as a teenage shopgirl in Witham, Essex, and years later she remembered the shift quite clearly: ‘I saw the fashions change … you know, to the silk underwear and ready-made slips. The old corsets went out of fashion, those that laced up at the back.’
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Gradually, the shopping experience was becoming democratised. For chain stores and co-operatives were not simply breaking new ground by making goods affordable to a wider customer base. A handful of forward-looking chain-store managers even started reshaping the shopping etiquette which had predominated for over half a century.
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Large-scale retailing in spacious new stores was a boom industry in the interwar years, growing at a faster rate than many other trades. The market share of what was technically known as the ‘variety’ chain stores, that is, stores offering a wide variety of goods on open display (M&S, Woolworths, British Home Stores, Littlewoods), rose from less than 3 per cent in 1920 to nearly 20 per cent by 1938.
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This was a staggering growth rate. The shopgirls employed in these new enterprises not only sold modern consumer goods; they were trained differently too. Customer service was taking on a new meaning. Instead of leaping forward to assist or even lambast hesitant shoppers, assistants now had to keep a discreet distance from their clientele, passively waiting to be approached. Deference had by no means disappeared yet; it was simply less obtrusive than before. As a customer you could now easily find your way to the underwear and hosiery department without being guided by a member of staff; once you got there the goods were more openly displayed, with clearly marked low prices and descriptions. You no longer had to wait for a shopgirl to unearth a single item from behind a counter; independent of her, you could now touch and feel the Wolsey men’s vests and long underpants, weighing up the merits of unshrinkable flannel against pure cotton.

The new approach – or rather lack of approach – proved popular, particularly among suburban customers, who found it less stuffy and formal. The trade journal
Store Management
grasped the importance for the shopocracy of these new social complexities, identifying ‘quick changing social values and shifting boundaries between classes’. It divided society into three social groups: ‘the very rich, the upper middle classes, and a third group comprising the lower middle and artisan classes’. Yet, while admitting that the boundaries between classes were ‘not absolutely clear cut’, it was adamant that ‘you cannot trade with more than one section of the community at a time’.
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Those shopkeepers who did not recognise these shifting social patterns were in trouble. The more progressive department stores recognised that chain stores had become stiff competition, so they poured millions into advertising – a colossal 50 per cent of national advertising revenue in retail came from department and drapery stores in the interwar period even though their goods accounted for only 7.5 per cent of all sales in British shops during that time.
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Some advertisements were clever and funny, like the Harrods ads that printed the refusal letters of famous writers H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and George Bernard Shaw, who had all turned down Harrods’ invitation to contribute testimonials. Arnold Bennett wrote a long, eloquent refusal, explaining how his novel
Hugo
had been inspired by Harrods, how he loved ‘departmental stores’, the ‘picturesque spectacle’ they provided, their window displays, crowds of customers and armies of employees. But ‘with lively regret’ he felt forced to turn down Harrods’ writing offer, for he would ‘lose caste’ – a strong way of expressing his fear that he would be accused of selling out, of losing his independence as a writer.
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Other department stores indulged in publicity stunts, known as ‘tie-ins’, offering pure entertainment in the form of staged events, which proprietors hoped would generate newspaper copy and thus free advertising. John Logie Baird’s very first demonstration of a television set was staged at Selfridges in 1925; the press thought it a mere novelty, though Harry Gordon Selfridge insisted that television was ‘not a toy’. In the 1930s Bentalls in Kingston not only provided a daily ‘Goblin Cabaret’, featuring Marsana the long-necked woman, but also enticed Swedish diver Annie Kittner to jump off a 63-foot-high board into a small pool of water – all inside the store.
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Nonetheless, despite the trend for attention-seeking stunts in the capital, and the democratisation process in suburban chain stores, the majority of the upscale department stores in provincial centres sleepily continued with their Edwardian ways. They assumed that they could trade on reputation alone, doing little to accommodate new types of customers. Photographs and sketches of the interiors of Mawer & Collingham of Lincoln and Bainbridge’s of Newcastle in the 1930s testify to the continuing formality of the shopping experience there. Goods were still inaccessible, dresses and coats untouchable in glass cases, handkerchiefs and scarves shut up in boxes and mahogany drawers. Tall chairs still awaited unhurried customers; no speedy hustle and bustle here, with Bainbridge’s shopgirls waiting patiently behind the counters for their well-to-do clientele.
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Shoplife behind the scenes was still extremely challenging. Certain progressive department stores had been providing staff facilities like restrooms, leisure activities and staff outings since the late nineteenth century. But this had not spread in any significant way to other types of shops, and in the rushed expansion of large-scale retail between the wars, shop assistants’ welfare issues had often been sidelined. Flora Solomon on her tour of ‘the High Streets of towns without number’ noted ‘apathy, condescension and fear’ in all the chain stores she entered, not just Marks & Spencer.
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A Leeds shopgirl, Miss E.B., remembered the complete lack of staff facilities at the time – no dining rooms, restrooms or cloakrooms – with meals being eaten in the stockroom with a stockroom girl parcelling up at one end. She wrote that an ‘atmosphere of fear’ pervaded the place, with girls warning each other that ‘the terrible monster, “The Supervisor”,’ was on the prowl by switching lights off in parts of the shop to signal their approach.
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Some aspects of a shopgirl’s life had got better – since the 1928 Reform Act, those aged twenty-one and over had finally been able to vote; fewer and fewer shop assistants now lived in; and shop assistant wages were improving slightly. But only slightly: women’s wages were still significantly lower than men’s. One shopgirl confessed blushingly to Solomon that if she couldn’t last the week out, she would help herself to the till or pinch a pair of stockings.
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Unemployment was cancerous, climbing to its peak of around three million people out of work in 1933, and since many shopgirls felt that they were lucky to have a job at all, they continued to put up with despotic old-fashioned managers who could sack them on the spot. Others were ruled by versions of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s scientific management and systems theory that Owen Owen had first encountered in North America, and which had now spread to Europe.

At Macy’s in New York, cashier girls, who handled around six hundred transactions a day in a room with a cash tube system, had been captured on film beside a large, fast-moving clock. This enabled time and motion to be measured to the one-thousandth of a minute. These films were then projected in slow motion, the motions broken down and analysed minutely. From this study, it was possible to glean what was the ‘one best way’ of cashiering, and productivity among Macy’s cashier girls duly rose by 25 per cent.
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Such studies were noted in Britain, particularly by the National Institute of Industrial Psychology, whose investigators were hired by the likes of Harrods, R.S. McColl’s, Littlewoods and Marks & Spencer to increase efficiency and productivity in their stores. The NIIP represented the cutting-edge of modern management theory in Britain. At Harrods, for example, the NIIP investigators made studies of hiring policies for sales assistants, supervision techniques and fashion workroom management.

Simon Marks was also a fan. In his weekly bulletins to his store managers, time and again he used the language of this ‘Guiding Principle in Store Management’, explaining that this scientific approach should enable the efficient running of every aspect of the store, from ordering goods to putting them on display, from office routine to stockroom organisation. It also required the ‘tactical use of manpower’, wrote Marks, citing Napoleon. Marks felt that, in terms of staffing, it was ‘no use trying to fit a square peg in a round hole’. A dreamy floorwalker would never make a good manager, while ‘a salesgirl who is mentally slow, whose fingers appear always to be fumbling, is useless on the Gramophone Records counter’.
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Still, an efficient workforce didn’t automatically make a happy workforce. It is easier to record and tabulate sales figures and productivity than it is to measure human emotions. While retailers certainly deemed the NIIP reports a success, what the staff thought went unnoted. What we do know is that Flora Solomon was depressed by what she found on British high streets. As advised by Bondfield, she travelled abroad to Berlin to visit her friends who owned the famous Kaufhaus N. Israel department store. This was the decadent, dangerous capital city that Christopher Isherwood portrays so intensely in his novel
Goodbye to Berlin
. Expertly run by its Jewish proprietors, Kaufhaus N. Israel was one of the largest retail establishments in Europe, employing over two thousand people in its massive block on the Alexanderplatz. The Israels opened their address book for Solomon, enabling her to study stores and clothing factories throughout Berlin. She described Israel as an enlightened employer who impressed upon her the importance of good management. Solomon flew back to London full of ideas; for the Israels, impossibly difficult times lay ahead. In 1932, the Nazi party was already Germany’s largest political party, with Berlin’s bohemianism and Jewish population in their sights. The following year, Nazi stormtroopers called for a boycott of the store, shouting, ‘Don’t buy from Jews!’, and during Kristallnacht the block was ransacked and set alight. Ultimately the Kaufhaus, this emporium of shopping delights, would be ‘Aryanised’ and handed over to non-Jewish owners.

Back in London in 1932, Solomon sketched out a memorandum for Simon Marks about what she felt was wrong with his retail chain, and she included concrete proposals on how to rectify matters. Her central argument was that M&S, along with its competitors, was missing a key element in the treatment of its staff: human dignity. She felt that most stores she had visited ‘were providing work for women and girls under conditions that made it impossible for them to face the public as the female sex desired to be observed – presentable in appearance, relaxed in manner, worthy of respect’. Having delivered her memorandum, she heard nothing for three days. Then Simon Marks made it clear that he endorsed her ideas, and that, provided that she never troubled him personally, she was welcome to roll out her suggestions as a permanent member of staff. ‘It was really happening to me, a purpose in life!’ she rejoiced. ‘Friends were amazed. What was she doing with herself, enlisting as a glorified draper’s assistant?’ Solomon had no such misgivings, throwing herself wholeheartedly into a task she felt was worthwhile, not simply for Marks & Spencer workers, but perhaps for retail employees across the country.

She set up a small crack team, ‘a little resistance movement, ever scheming against heartless company bureaucracy’.
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Despite often encountering resentment from the male managers, her committee worked on persuading each one of them to appoint a welfare officer. They set up restrooms for shopgirls to take a break, particularly important in those stores that were still open-fronted. Marks & Spencer then provided a cheap hot meal each day, plus a cup of tea and a biscuit for a penny. The company built new washing facilities, subsidised canteens and even began offering staff outings and holiday camps. A photograph of Dymchurch holiday camp in 1936 shows ten young women from Windsor’s Marks & Spencer store larking about in a field in mid-thigh bathing costumes, tousled hair and low heels, looking just like carefree schoolgirls.