Shopgirls (26 page)

Now faced with the Nazi buying spree, which was decimating their stock levels, Arthur Harvey and the board decided that they must stay open regardless. They felt it was their patriotic duty to serve the community and to keep their loyal staff employed, but also to make sure that the premises were not requisitioned by the occupying force. So Harvey joined up with the other St Helier traders to form a committee, of which he was elected chairman, and went to see the Kommandant. Much to the shopkeepers’ surprise, the Kommandant understood the problem. He agreed to issue shopping permits to his officers, without which they couldn’t buy anything.

The shopping permits successfully slowed down the rate of Nazi purchases. Nonetheless, the Germans had quite a good go at requisitioning de Gruchy, piece by piece. Demands for motor vehicles, the chairman’s horse, banqueting glasses, portable cold rooms and carved Wehrmacht crosses all had to be met. The restaurant was taken over to store German uniforms and ammunition. Soon, de Gruchy was running at a loss for the first time in its history. Staff wages had to be cut, and the store could stay open just two days a week.

Back on the mainland, though housewives had no Nazi soldiers as rival shoppers, their household duties had rarely been so difficult. Sponsored by the Ministry of Information, film-maker Ruby Grierson shot a short dramatised documentary called
They Also Serve
, dedicated to the ‘Housewives of Britain’. In the film, main character Mrs Anderson, known as ‘Mother’, has a son at the front, a working daughter and a husband on night shift; Mother spends her day dealing with her myriad duties, including picking vegetables, mending the blackout and going shopping. The final lines read, ‘Housewives of Britain, Thank-you for Your Courage and Your Help.’
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Shown in cinemas around the country as a prelude to Hollywood escapist movies and British war films,
They Also Serve
clearly positioned housewives as patriotic heroines. Their daily food shop and tasks around the home were also a form of war work, or so went the propaganda.

They had their work cut out. The first rationing of food, namely butter, bacon and sugar, had been introduced at the start of 1940 by the Ministry of Food and was proving fiendishly complex to implement. Even before the war began, five million ration books had been printed; now every family had to register with a local shop, in effect committing themselves to using that particular shop for buying their rationed goods. Which shop to choose was a matter of heated debate; some families preferred their local corner shop, hoping for preferential treatment regarding unrationed items. Others went for big grocery chains where they could obtain most goods under the same roof. Sainsbury’s certainly banked on this, putting up posters listing five reasons why it was wisest to register with them. Number one: ‘You can obtain all rationed, registered and “free” provisions, groceries and meat under one roof. No rushing about in black-outs and winter weather.’
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For shops, the paperwork for each registration was complicated: separate counterfoils had to be detached for each member of the family, names and addresses checked, and then a card-file register updated with detailed records. At Sainsbury’s on Watney Street in Stepney, east London, manager William Guest and his shop assistants were overwhelmed with local customers unable to work out how to deal with their ration books. The Sainsbury’s staff simply couldn’t keep up and ultimately referred the problem to their head office at Blackfriars in the City of London. Sainsbury’s was now the nation’s largest grocery concern and they needed to stay on top of the Ministry of Food’s rationing regulations and frequent changes, so they set up their own rationing department at head office. And it was on a certain Miss Potter’s desk in the rationing department that William Guest’s plea for help landed. Guest recalled how the very next day a taxi drew up on Watney Street and out stepped Miss Potter with some of her clerical staff. They loaded the ration books into the taxi, ‘returning 24 hours later with a perfectly ordered filing system and several thousand ration books immaculately filled in’.
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The man in charge of the Ministry of Food – indeed the man who
was
the Ministry of Food in many housewives’ eyes – was Frederick Marquis, Lord Woolton. Here was a man who knew about shopkeeping, having run Lewis’s department store in Liverpool before the war (not to be confused with the John Lewis Partnership). And it was arguably down to his marketing and organisational flair that there was neither food rioting nor starvation in the Second World War. For the risk was there. Before the war Britain had imported an astonishing 75 per cent of its foodstuffs by ship, including 90 per cent of its flour and cereals and over 50 per cent of its meat.
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Now, as mainland Europe was occupied and the Battle of the Atlantic raged with German U-boats torpedoing British supply ships, imports plummeted and food started to become scarce. While the Land Army and every allotment holder started to dig for Britain to increase home production, the remaining foods were rationed one after another. Meat and preserves came next, then tea, margarine and cooking fats in July 1940 and cheese the following year.

Part of Lord Woolton’s genius lay in recognising that his job was not simply to implement rationing. It was also to win over the shoppers and housewives who had to live with the consequences. When they walked into Sainsbury’s or the corner grocery store, housewives were now confronted with a much smaller selection of goods, rationed or unrationed. Favourite brands disappeared as factories were forced to consolidate their different lines – the 350 pre-war brands of biscuit were reduced to just twenty. And some branded packaging was simply eliminated, so that soft drinks appeared under labels like ‘Orange Squash, SW 153’. Although ‘Mother’ in the documentary film stoically put up with these constant changes and long queues, others were less sanguine.

Woolton went on the offensive with a press, radio and film blitz to inform and woo British housewives. He broadcast on the radio about the need for food control; his ministry sponsored ads with the slogan ‘Food is a munition of war. Don’t waste it’, and coined the phrase ‘the Kitchen Front’. Potatoes and carrots were a great source of nutrition, the ministry trumpeted, and offered recipes for dishes such as ‘Pigs in Clover – a novel way with baked potatoes and sausage’. Woolton Pie, however, a stodgy mix of parsnips, turnips, carrots and potatoes covered in white sauce and pastry, proved almost inedible. His offensive worked; one Dorchester housewife explained, ‘Lord Woolton was always so sympathetic and if he could not give us more butter he added an extra ounce to the margarine. We all trusted and loved him.’
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Since the outbreak of war, all men between the ages of eighteen and forty-one had been liable to conscription. As the men were successively called up, staff numbers in retail plummeted, just as they had in the Great War, so those shop assistants selling the butter, margarine and other foodstuffs were more and more likely to be women. Mrs Sheppard applied for a job at Sainsbury’s in April 1941; the firm’s correspondence was explicit as to why they needed her services. ‘Dear Madam, You are aware that we have already lost a large number of our male employees,’ the letter from Alan J. Sainsbury began. ‘As the call-up of men continues, women with aptitude and enthusiasm will be called upon in increasing numbers to take on greater responsibilities.’ Alan Sainsbury invited Mrs Sheppard for interview, and within a few weeks she became relief manager in the Woking branch.
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Women also started taking on traditionally male professions within the retail industry; Grace on the Isle of Wight moved from a confectioner’s to a pork butcher’s. ‘I took the place of someone who had joined the Royal Navy.’ Grace explained how machinery and tasks usually out of bounds for women were suddenly unproblematic: ‘Of course we came into using choppers and boning bacon and various things, cleaning all the machines.’
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The problem that many shops had, however, extended further than the loss of their shopmen. Many shopgirls were leaving too. Conscription for women started in December 1941 for single women and childless widows aged twenty to thirty, but from the very beginning of the war women had been leaving shopwork in droves to volunteer for more obviously patriotic work. Doris on the Isle of Wight left Madam Burton’s drapery. As she put it so succinctly, ‘I had to do something other than being a draper’s assistant.’ She felt she had to contribute to the war effort, ‘especially after Dunkirk when we were really fighting for our lives, never knew when the church bells might go which meant Herman the German had arrived’. Doris went to work at the Saunders-Roe plane factory in East Cowes. ‘I went from fitting out ladies for their dresses and hats to fitting out parts of aeroplanes.’
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She enjoyed her factory work as much as being a shopgirl, but her factory colleague Annie didn’t. Annie only left her Woolworths’ position for Saunders-Roe ‘because it was the best money’.
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Throughout the raging hot summer of 1940, in the Battle of Britain, the German Luftwaffe attacked British shipping, airports, radar stations and landing strips – two thousand Luftwaffe fighter planes versus just six hundred from the RAF. Once Hitler realised he was failing to wipe out the British air force, however, he switched tactics and began bombing city centres. First in his sights were Liverpool and Birmingham. Then the Blitz intensified: on 7 September London experienced its first and last mass daylight raid, heralding the start of fifty-seven consecutive nights of bombardment. Thousands of children, mothers, patients and pensioners had been evacuated in the preceding months and now thousands more Londoners left the city for the comparative safety of the country. But most stayed behind.

Mrs Jupp, who ran Jupp’s delicatessen on Kensington High Street, decided to brave it out, feeling she had a duty to help feed her London customers, staying put even after her son was evacuated. Shops began to close at 5 p.m. in order to allow staff time to get home before the bombing began. In the famous documentary
London Can Take It!
, American journalist Quentin Reynolds laconically recounted the tale of eighteen hours in the life of the London Blitz, starting in late afternoon.
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As Londoners entered their air-raid shelters at nightfall, footage of darts games was intercut with searchlights in the night sky, shots of sleeping grandparents with bombed buildings up in flames. The next day, Londoners picked themselves up, housewives brushing broken glass from their front steps, working men in suits carefully winding their way through rubble heaps on their way to work, even though their normal bus was upended and the Tube bridge was in a state of collapse. Quentin Reynolds drawled, ‘London manages to get to work on time, one way or another’, pointing out that ‘in the centre of the city, the shops are open as usual. In fact, many of them are more open than usual’, while showing a smartly dressed shopgirl stepping through a shattered display window straight into her store.

The documentary certainly captured something of the Blitz spirit. Off camera, defiance and bravery were shown in myriad ways too: shop assistants faced with severe bomb damage at a branch of Woolworths, which had stores throughout Germany too, put up a sign which read, ‘This is nothing! You ought to see what the RAF have done to our Berlin branch.’ There was a certain humour too in the blackout accessories on sale at Selfridges. The department store offered a whole range of merchandise aimed at increasing human and canine visibility in the pitch-black nights. They ranged from white raincoats to luminous flower brooches, and even stretched to little blackout coats for dogs.
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But most people could spare not a moment’s thought for accessories. On 18 September Miss Katherine Austin, secretary to the staff manager at John Lewis Oxford Street, was on duty for the eleventh night in a row, part of a team ‘mothering’ two hundred evacuees in the basement. Some were local residents, others John Lewis partners, in other words staff, and many were ‘terribly nervy’ on account of having lost their homes. On top of this the Langham Hotel close by had been bombed the previous night.
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Then at midnight the first direct hit struck John Lewis. Miss Austin’s first reaction was confusion. ‘I put my trousers on back to front – I was very annoyed because it must have wasted a quarter of a minute.’ Miss Austin started to try to evacuate her flock when the second bomb landed. She had a moment of sheer panic. ‘I could have sworn that the walls in front were going to collapse. It was a curious feeling: it was not so much seen as felt – as though someone had put far too much into a cardboard hat-box and you know it must give way.’

But her training and pluck soon kicked in. Miss Austin ushered the shelter’s occupants into the staff dining room as fire swept through the building. Duty manager Captain Burnett tried to close the fire doors to prevent the blaze spreading, but to no avail. Gradually all two hundred people were evacuated and sent from basement shelter to basement shelter, looking for space, all the way down Oxford Street westwards to Selfridges. They were safe. But the next day it was clear that John Lewis Oxford Street, the powerhouse of the whole business, was all but destroyed. Spedan Lewis sent every employee in the Oxford Street branch a postcard the next day, letting them know that their pay would be ready for collection on Friday as normal, and he tried to find temporary positions for them in his other branches. However, the John Lewis partners claimed they received a rather frosty, snobbish reception at Peter Jones, whose existing staff accused the new lot of ‘incessant rudeness’.
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As the bombing campaign widened to industrial cities and coastal port towns, hundreds of shops were directly or indirectly damaged by bombs and fire. From Marks & Spencer in Coventry to Woolworths in Devonport and Lewis’s of Liverpool – Lord Woolton’s own store – the destruction was immeasurable. Each morning shop assistants woke up not knowing whether their workplaces would be standing at all. Woolworths even drew up detailed diagrams for ‘Establishing a Temporary Store’ and sent the plans round to their district managers. All that was needed was three walls that were still structurally intact. ‘Remove debris and charred fixtures, wash and whitewash,’ and by the time it had a corrugated sheet roof and a splash of blackout paint on the front, you were in business again.
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