Shopgirls (25 page)

Above all, there was training. Centres were set up in Brixton, Leeds, Manchester and Glasgow to run courses for hundreds of new girls and advanced sales assistants covering topics such as customer service, display, merchandise ordering, till practice, shoplifting and time wastage. Now, instead of Marks’ eulogies on the benefits of scientific management, in-house journals explained that ‘The Human Approach is vital in running a business harmoniously and successfully’. Likely written by Solomon, the article broke down the ‘Human Approach’ into six points, the first being ‘Look after the physical comfort of your girls,’ and the second, ‘Create a friendly atmosphere by cooperating and keeping in close contact with everyone.’ Miss E.B. from Leeds, who had earlier noted the pervading atmosphere of fear, now felt that staff ‘should consider themselves fortunate to be reaping the benefits which were not available to old employees’.
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The new training and welfare system seemed to produce extremely positive results, as staff turnover plummeted from nearly 70 per cent in 1932 to 25 per cent just five years later.
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The staff magazine
Sparks
was now even able to joke about rules and regulations, something that might have caused instant dismissal in earlier times. Hours of work were defined as being ‘from the time you arrive to the time your boy friend calls for you’. Wage increases took into account ‘youth, sex-appeal and any special ability’, while ‘making the best cup of tea for the Manager’ helped chances of promotion.
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In groceries and draperies, department stores and the growing number of chain stores, ‘the manager’ was still highly likely to be male. But with around half a million women now in shopwork and training improving across the industry, an increasingly large proportion of senior staff were female. Some even used the training they had received to start their own businesses. Ethel May Jupp from Epping Forest, Essex, had started out at Sainsbury’s as a twenty-year-old and had been trained up to shop management level. In 1925 she had been hired as a buyer by J. Lyons & Co. in order to establish a delicatessen department, since the famous Lyons Corner Houses had food halls on the ground floor. Lyons sent her to France to gain knowledge of ham processing, salami smoking, truffle hunting and the production of foie gras. She also learnt about American specialities such as Grape-Nuts breakfast cereal. Five years later, now aged thirty-four, Mrs Jupp opened her first business bank account and set up shop herself, initially trading as Mrs Jupp’s Pantry in Bayswater, west London and then simply as Jupp, on Kensington High Street. Specialising in delicatessen and fancy groceries, Jupp’s was heralded in a magazine article as ‘the up-to-date foodstore’ and photographs testify to its state-of-the-art decor, with dark chrome counters and optimistic sunburst motifs above the shop window. They also show off Jupp’s ultra-modern appliance, a large refrigerator, trumpeted in the magazine article as ‘excellent refrigeration ensuring the preservation of all perishable goods’. The formula clearly worked, for the photographs show that shortly before five o’clock, according to the octagonal wall clock, Jupp’s was thronging with ladies jostling at the counters.
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Mrs Jupp was one of the outriders: trained as a shopgirl, trained as a buyer, and using her merchandising, business and international experience – as well as her thoroughly modern personal taste – to set up her own store. Her customers in the 1930s clearly enjoyed the fruits of her experience; the question was, whether such city-centre shops could survive the bombings and crises of another war.

A Shopgirl in an Oxford Street store, London, conducts business as usual, despite her shop’s windows having been blown in by bomb blasts from German air raids,
c
.1940.

At 16.30 on Monday 26 April 1937, the first German bomber aircraft flew over Guernica, dropping twelve bombs onto the Basque town. For the next two hours, wave after wave of Luftwaffe and Italian fascist air force bombers dropped explosive bombs, hand grenades and incendiaries, accompanied by fighter planes strafing the town with machine-gun fire. War correspondent George Steer, reporting on the Spanish Civil War for
The Times
, was at the scene. His eyewitness report was published two days later, setting the tone for the shock and outrage which reverberated the world over. ‘The Tragedy of Guernica’ was his headline, ‘Town Destroyed in Air Attack’. He wrote, ‘The raid on Guernica is unparalleled in military history’, describing how ‘heavy and incendiary bombs wreck the houses and burn them on top of their victims’. News crews arrived to film the devastation, capturing haunting images of silhouetted house walls, despairing survivors pulling at mountains of rubble and nuns scurrying into still-smoking ruins.

Steer’s message was clear: the Nazis were directly involved in this attack, and their capacity and appetite for bombing both military and civilian targets was strong. Britain had already lived through German Zeppelin air raids on its cities during the First World War; Guernica strengthened fears that much worse was to come. But this time round, the government was determined to be prepared. The Committee for Imperial Defence, the forerunner of the wartime Ministry of Information, came up with a grisly estimate that in the event of war with Nazi Germany there would be 1,800,000 casualties on British soil, a third of them fatal, three million refugees and most of London would be destroyed within the first two months. So the Air Raid Wardens’ Service and the Women’s Voluntary Service were created: voluntary civilian organisations that were to protect and help the population during air raids. With the first Air Raid Precautions posts set up in shops, offices and homes, the ARP wardens’ initial tasks were to register the population in their sector and to help establish blackout precautions. The wardens and WVS learnt first aid and basic firefighting. And from the very start, Britain’s shopworkers were roped in to contribute to the Air Raid Precautions already under way.

There was fear and urgency in the air. At Woolworths, by now one of the biggest chains with over six hundred branches across Britain, stores and warehouses were examined to identify basements that would be suitable as air-raid shelters. The John Lewis
Gazette
soon claimed that they had the best-prepared shops and staff in the country: they had covered the roofs with fire-resistant material and were instituting regular ARP drills. At Marks & Spencer the chief ARP officer Ralph Salaman produced a manual which spelt out the procedure in case of emergency: staff to use tin helmets, customers to move away from windows, skylights and entrances, newly trained first-aiders to be on standby. Under the gathering clouds of war, normal business rivalries were suspended. Salaman also organised ‘the Chain Gang’, whereby Marks & Spencer teamed up with its high-street competitors, Woolworths, Boots, British Home Stores and Lyons, agreeing to share staff canteens and restrooms in the event of air-raid damage. And in the years ahead, the Chain Gang pact would indeed be put into action.

Being prepared, however, ran much deeper than laying down fire-resistant roofing. ‘Business as usual’ had been the motto at the start of the last war but it had led to rampant price inflation, instability and food riots. There was to be no rerun of that chaos this time around. In a series of moves, which retrospectively seem quite breathtaking in their boldness, the government effectively became the nation’s shopkeeper. Every level of the supply chain, from overseas shipments to inland distribution to store delivery, came to be directly run or directly influenced by the government. On the flipside, demand was controlled too, through rationing and price fixing. The Board of Trade stated the explicit aims of its rationing policy as being that ‘every member of the public would be able to obtain a fair share of the national food supply at a reasonable price’.
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It sounds a pretty straightforward policy, but what lay ahead politically, economically and emotionally was to challenge every element of that deceptively simple statement. ‘Every member’, ‘fair share’, ‘national food supply’ and ‘reasonable price’ – standing by these commitments was to prove nigh on impossible. And with shop assistants at the vanguard of implementing rationing and stock-taking, they were effectively being roped into becoming the enforcers of government war policy.

At first, nothing much happened. In the early summer of 1939, two months before war was declared, a documentary crew was filming in the offices of
The Times
in Printing House Square, London.
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The paper reported on the Eton versus Harrow cricket match at Lord’s, the Court Circular brought titbits from the London Season, and the Foreign Telephone Room received news from a Himalayan climbing expedition and from Washington, where a US senator argued in favour of neutrality in the coming war. The advertising was still full-page. After the declaration of war in September 1939, the headlines changed, but the mood of anxious waiting did not. Doris was working as a draper’s assistant at Madam Burton’s in Newport on the Isle of Wight when war broke out. Years later, she remembered quite clearly how ‘it took a long, long time for it to make any difference actually to the trade’. She was then twenty-one years old and explained why it took time for her and her fellow shopgirls to take in the new reality. ‘Things were still coming in quite regularly in the drapery shop and as far as I could see there was no difficulty in the goods arriving.’ Doris concluded, ‘It was the very early days of the war, it hadn’t made that impact on shopping.’
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Christmas was particularly strange. There were no ‘1,800,000 casualties’ or ‘destroyed’ cities. Yet nobody quite trusted the quiet. The government ordered the compulsory closing of shops at 6 p.m. except for one late night a week, while the chancellor of the exchequer encouraged people to save as much as possible and not to make frivolous Christmas purchases. With such clear exhortations to hunker down, people bought fewer clothes and began stockpiling dried, preserved and canned foodstuffs. The tinned food departments in Woolworths stores were particularly busy with ‘canny’ customers buying up stock; the old Scottish word took on a whole new nuance.

But then, Blitzkrieg. On 10 May 1940, Nazi Germany started its massive offensive on the Western Front, its army units attacking France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. Neville Chamberlain resigned and when Winston Churchill addressed the House of Commons for the very first time as prime minister, he called for ‘Victory – victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.’ With the Allied retreat from France and the evacuation at Dunkirk, Churchill saw Britain as standing alone against Hitler, the only nation defending not just its own country but the whole of Christian civilisation against the ‘abyss of a new Dark Age’.
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Twelve days later, Luftwaffe boots were treading on British soil. Germany invaded the Channel Islands, with Jersey becoming Feldkommandantur 515. Supplies from Britain ceased entirely; the Channel Islands were now part of the German Reich. The Nazis changed the time from GMT to Central European Time and made everyone drive on the right-hand side of the road. Betty Yvonne Costard was a young shopgirl when the occupation started, working in a baby-wear shop in Jersey’s capital, St Helier. She remembered being very frightened and crying when the Germans arrived, having heard terrible things about how the German army had mistreated the civilian population in Poland. Betty was ‘saying to my mother all the time, we should have gone away, we should have gone’. In spite of her fear she ventured out to look at the German soldiers on guard in front of the general post office, discovering to her surprise that they were ‘only men, we didn’t know what to expect’. After a while the fear ebbed as it became clear that there were rules and regulations, and Betty realised she was not going to get raped. Instead she noticed that the soldiers went shopping.
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‘They emptied the food shops, and came into the little shops. They bought baby things, presumably for their wives back home,’ Betty explained. The new shoppers were well mannered and paid for what they wanted, but within weeks most of St Helier’s stores were extremely low on stock. This included the Channel Islands’ largest department store, de Gruchy. De Gruchy had been trading in St Helier since 1810 and was run by a board of directors and general manager Arthur Harvey. Before the war Arthur Harvey, an aggressive and skilled businessman, had overhauled de Gruchy’s still-Victorian working practices – and its building. He had replaced the original shop fittings, ladders and steps and had insisted that in-house buyers be told what the turnover and profits were, so that they could make more informed, strategic decisions. His eye had fallen on the fashion department, where some of the shopgirls were rumoured to be on the take. He immediately issued spot checks as they were leaving, and caught one shopgirl red-handed as she tried to walk out wearing nine pairs of knickers.
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