Shopgirls (6 page)

By the 1870s, the new wave of shopgirls were not only daughters of farmers and clerks, like Eliza Close, but also middle-class women who had to support themselves and whose fears about ungenteel shopwork the Ladies of Langham Place had sought to dispel. They even advertised their services in the local papers:

Wanted by a young lady, an engagement in any light business as Saleswoman. Good reference. Address B. 16 Brunswick St., Barnsbury N.
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The number of shop assistants spiralled upwards from mid century onwards, with the number of women shopworkers increasing at an astonishing three times the rate of men.
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Society hostess Lady Jeune welcomed them with joy, feeling that no shopman could ever fully understand a female shopper’s dilemmas or desires. In her experience female assistants were much quicker than men at grasping the shopper’s many conflicting pressures and vanities. ‘They can fathom the agony of despair as to the arrangement of colours, the alternative trimmings, the duration of a fashion, the depths of a woman’s purse, and more important than all, the question of the becomingness of a dress, or a combination of material, to the would-be wearer.
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Like Lady Jeune and Jessie Boucherett, many customers and proprietors now agreed that women were ‘naturally’ better suited to selling goods to women – but some still believed them incapable of heavy work or professional processing. This meant that shopgirls were generally welcomed in haberdashers’, drapers’ and milliners’, as well as fancy goods shops, tobacconists’, confectioners’, stationers’ and the new multiple stores, but they continued to be excluded from many other trades, raising the hackles of the Langham Circle. Women’s education was poor, so any job that required long and expensive training, such as at a chemist’s or a druggist’s, was unlikely to be open to women. ‘Rough’ trades like butchery, fishmongery and ironmongery were excluded on physical grounds. Shops catering only to gentlemen, their outfitters, hatters and bootmakers, did not hire women. And shops with expensive stock, like jewellers and booksellers, stuck to hiring shopmen, perhaps for fear of loose-fingered women.
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Some individual proprietors in the more ‘genteel’ trades were also still set against hiring women. Charles Digby Harrod had taken over the running of Harrods from his father and throughout the 1870s he refused to recruit women, claiming that shopmen were more efficient and more loyal to the family firm. In 1885, much later than his competitors, he finally cracked, hiring Ida Annie Fowle and two other women as clerks in the counting house. She theatrically described her male colleagues’ reactions on her first day: ‘Several of the junior members of the staff peered round showcases to see the “beauty chorus” arrive.’
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Miss Fowle proved to be resilient, tactful and considerate and was soon put in charge of the Sales Ledger Section. Harrods’ profits at £12,500 in 1890 were a mere fifth of what Whiteley had earned fifteen years earlier. But all this was set to change. As Harrods boomed, Miss Fowle’s band of female clerks grew ever larger and became known as ‘Fowle’s Chicks’.
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She was to preside over her brood for a record-breaking thirty-six years’ service, helping a flood of women pursue their dream of entering the ‘lighter’ areas of shopwork. And she witnessed what happened to these young women’s dreams when they were confronted with the harsh realities of life around the shopfloor.

‘A Portable Shop Seat’: this was the suggested solution of
The Girl’s Own Paper
to the problem of standing upright for long hours with no rest, known as ‘The Standing Evil’, 1880.

Margaret Bondfield was one of Britain’s feistiest shopgirls and the story of her extraordinary life, from rural beginnings in Somerset to becoming Britain’s first female Cabinet minister, is deeply revealing. At the start of her career, she too was part of this new wave of pioneering young women who saw shopwork as the chance to chase a dream of independence and glamour, or simply a straight income.

Bondfield loved her apprenticeship at Mrs White’s exclusive drapery establishment in Hove, Sussex. She was just fourteen when she started there in 1887, and didn’t return home for five years, though in her autobiography she declared that she had ‘no regrets’: she relished the opportunity to earn her own living. At Mrs White’s, Margaret was treated as a member of the family, learning the detailed needlework skills needed for brides’ trousseaux and babies’ layettes. ‘It was a period when “liberty” frocks became the rage, and I spent hours at a window, around which a passion flower mysteriously bloomed, smocking lovely silks for babies’ frocks.’
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But Mrs White’s was the only place she was ever happy. When she moved on to take up junior roles in big Brighton drapery houses, the teenage Margaret was shocked to the core. She found the living conditions appalling, the hours exhausting, the rigid hierarchy difficult to deal with. And the moral challenges confronting a young woman in a busy town were frightening.

Margaret was not alone. The thousands of young women now flocking into shopwork were discovering a reality far harsher than they had imagined. By the 1890s, there were a quarter of a million shopgirls in Britain. Though they were still outnumbered by over half a million female textile workers and well over a million female domestic servants, their numbers were growing fast.
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There was no stopping the ‘girling’ of shopwork.

Girls like Margaret had been called in as a new type of worker for a new kind of shopwork. The old art of shopkeeping was undergoing a total transformation. In the past, a skilled shopkeeper had presided over all aspects of his business, from buying in goods to selling on to customers. Nelson Foster had been king of his own small castle – his family grocer’s and draper’s in Wisbech. But the new world of late Victorian shopwork demanded that a series of ever more specific tasks be undertaken by a growing army of ever more task-specific employees. By the 1880s, even small stores like Foster’s were employing cashiers or book-keepers alongside their regular assistants. William Ablett recalled in his
Reminiscences of an Old Draper
that his store had traditionally employed just two buyers – a ‘drapery buyer’ for furnishing fabrics and heavier goods and a ‘fancy buyer’ for smaller, lighter goods. By the time he finished his memoir in 1876, the store had expanded and so had its specialist staff, which now included ‘glove buyers’, ‘lace buyers’ and ‘hosiery buyers’ among others.
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Choosing suppliers, selecting and storing goods, preparing them for display, promoting them, pricing them and, most important of all, persuading customers to actually purchase them were becoming distinct activities as commerce of all kinds became more complex.

This new division of labour was taken to a whole new level by the first generation of department stores. The shop owned by Methodist draper Faithful Cape in Oxford was a prime example. Mr Cape had set up his small store in the 1860s in the St Ebbe’s district of Oxford, a mixed area catering to both working-class and professional sections of Oxford society, and having little to do with the famous university. By the end of the century, F. Cape & Co. had expanded to nos. 28 to 32 St Ebbe’s Street, and also had branches in Little Clarendon Street, Cowley Road and Church Street. It now sold everything from ladies’ corsets and children’s hats to hosiery, haberdashery, lace, baby linen, sheeting, blankets, quilts, shoes and furnishings.

When Cape retired in the early 1890s, a new owner – fellow Methodist Henry Lewis – took over with his three sons, who were employed as buyers. Tom bought gloves, scarves and lingerie, Russell bought cotton goods and menswear, and Edmund bought mantles, the outer cloaks favoured by the well-to-do. Together, they were known as ‘The Firm’ and they ran a staff of nearly a hundred workers within the stores, in addition to providing employment to many more messengers, delivery men and suppliers beyond the shop walls. Henry, Edmund, Tom and Russell had their desks on the shopfloor, in order to keep a beady eye on all activity both behind and in front of the long, mahogany sales counters. The hierarchy at Cape’s was strict. Directly below ‘The Firm’ in seniority were the floorwalkers (also known as shopwalkers), who acted rather like sergeant majors, patrolling departments and imposing discipline and fines; they were often obsequious to customers while simultaneously bullying junior staff. Next came the senior assistants, then their juniors, who were also known as ‘improvers’. At the bottom were the apprentices, porters and messengers.

Where Cape & Co. employed around a hundred people within its shops, some of Britain’s biggest department stores employed nearly ten times as many. Within fifty years of opening, Harrods in London, Bainbridge’s in Newcastle, and Kendal, Milne & Faulkner in Manchester each employed over a thousand workers.
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Large workforces like these were divided and ruled through even stricter hierarchies. Here, the new service sector had much in common with the world of domestic service. Servants in large country houses were organised into very particular ranks, with the butler and housekeeper at the top, the cook, lady’s maid and valet in the middle, parlour maids, kitchen maids and footmen further down and tweenies, or ‘between-stairs maids’, scullery maids and hall boys at the very bottom. Department stores organised their ‘servants of the counter’ in a similar fashion. Escaping domestic service did not necessarily mean an escape from ‘knowing your place’.

In these large flagship stores, men still ruled the show as managers, floorwalkers, buyers and supervisors. The top shopfloor position that could be held by a woman was that of head of a department, usually ladieswear, and she was responsible for her senior and junior assistants. Behind the scenes in the increasingly specialised back offices, however, new opportunities were being created. When Ida Fowle was hired by Charles Harrod in 1885, she was taken on as ‘second ledger clerk’, working in a small team of just six. Within five years, her world and the whole of Harrods’ back office operation had been transformed. She was promoted to chief ledger clerk and placed in charge of a staff of more than four hundred. She remembered this period as ‘sensational’, with the business expanding ‘by leaps and bounds’ and its Brompton Road buildings ‘growing up around us year by year’.
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Two decades after Ida’s appointment, a large percentage of Harrods’ colossal staff of five thousand were women. They not only worked on the shopfloor and in Ida’s ledger department but also in its bank and estate agency, its hair and manicure salon, chiropody court, writing room and ladies’ club room.
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The store’s Grand Restaurant employed cooks, pastry chefs and waitresses to service the first generation of ladies that lunched. Tucked away out of sight and far behind Harrods’ many counters, still more shopgirls beavered away in back-room roles as clerks, sewing hands and packers. In many ways, the singular term ‘shopgirl’ hardly does justice to the range of jobs – from the glittering to the gritty – on offer at retail’s top end.

As in the country house, a store’s hierarchy served more than one purpose. For those young women who worked hard and upon whom their seniors smiled, a graded pecking order held the promise of promotion. It provided a pay scale stretching from most junior and least skilled to the most senior and highest skilled. And it also kept staff at all levels in line by dispensing discipline down a chain of command across the entire store. Apprentices answered to junior assistants who answered to senior assistants who answered to floorwalkers, and so on. Many stores – large and small – also had extremely strict rules and imposed harsh penalties upon those who breached them, ranging from warnings to fines and even to instant dismissal. Fines, for example, could be imposed for being late, giving the wrong change, sitting down on the job, returning late from a break, dropping or breaking something, talking or laughing with fellow workers, conversing in staff corridors, and even allowing a customer simply to leave without making a purchase, or ‘taking the swop’ as it was known.
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William Whiteley, typically, operated one of the most notorious disciplinary systems. By the 1880s, the Universal Provider’s store employed nearly five thousand staff, who he apparently patrolled ‘like a rearing lion’.
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His revised staff rulebook, issued in 1886, contained no less than 176 separate rules and potential offences. There was to be no gossiping, no loitering, no noise, no leaving early, no insolence to superiors, no bad language, no fighting, no liquor, no standing on chairs, no toiletries in shop, no leaving without a superior’s permission. For good measure, rule 176 covered ‘any mistake not before mentioned’. Anyone breaking these rules could expect to pay a hefty fine, from sixpence – the cost of a week’s supply of tobacco – for insolence towards a shopwalker or failing to obtain permission from the counting house before placing an order, to one shilling for bringing matches onto the premises and a staggering two shillings and sixpence – around a quarter of a week’s wages for a female assistant on £20 per year – for charging up the same goods twice. Whiteley was rumoured to keep monies forfeited in fines for his own personal extravagances, but he more likely ploughed them back into the business once they had been processed by his separate ‘fines department’, which itself required seven clerks to handle the volume of work.
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The most unfortunate or recalcitrant workers found that they had no wages to collect at all at the end of the week or month, because they had all been lost in advance. For some this degree of discipline was too much, and they left for other jobs as soon as they were able.