Singled Out (23 page)

hopes of betterment on their youngest sister, Monica, who is ruining her

health working as a shop girl. Monica is paid six shillings a week for her

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job at a draper’s, where, as was commonly the practice, she was a resident

employee, expected to do thirteen-hour days six days a week in return for

board and lodging and this small sum. Atrocious hours, under-nourishment

and prolonged standing have brought Monica to the verge of physical

collapse. But their friend Rhoda Nunn appears to offer salvation.

Miss Nunn (portentous name), who has escaped from the treadmill of

teaching by acquiring secretarial training, has now joined her friend Miss

Barfoot in establishing a benevolent school to teach shorthand, typing,

book-keeping and commercial skills. Virginia sets out to persuade Monica

to leave her job at the draper’s and train at Miss Nunn’s school:

‘She will be the most valuable friend to us. Oh, her strength, her resolution! . . .

You are to call upon her as soon as possible. This very afternoon you had better go. She will relieve you from all your troubles, darling. Her friend Miss Barfoot will teach you typewriting, and put you in the way of earning an easy and pleasant livelihood. She will, indeed!’

In the event Monica’s fate is very different; she becomes trapped in a deeply unhappy marriage, and dies in childbirth. The spinster sisters survive and start a school; but Rhoda Nunn is the real heroine of the book. She has a

tumultuous love affair, loving passionately and entirely, and yet Gissing

leaves her at the end unshackled, carefree and optimistic. She will remain

heart-whole and independent, she will start a journal, she will educate

women to become free. Office work has shown her the way.

Shorthand typing was new and fashionable, it was feminine – tinkling

away on a keyboard had maidenly charm – but it also had status. Being in

an office increased your chances of meeting a husband too, and when that

happened, you left. So if marriage was part of your grand plan, you could

rule out any ambitions around getting a ‘top job’. Most offices had a rule

not to employ married women. Of course the flip side of this was the

independence conferred on the ‘business girls’. If you had a decent job,

you didn’t have to get married.

*

That was certainly how Miss Evelyn Symonds saw it. Now nearly  years

old, Evelyn got her first job in ; she was only fourteen at the time.

Her family had taken its share of buffeting by the war; her mother died

when she was ten, her cancer untreated because so many doctors were laid

low by the  influenza epidemic. Her father made a loveless second

marriage to a war widow, and the family of six lived in three rooms in

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Singled Out

Tottenham. For Evelyn work was an escape from unhappiness and domestic

claustrophobia. It was also a source of pride, for Evelyn was employed by

the Post Office, and this made her a Civil Servant. She had no training –

‘just the ordinary three R’s you know’ – but took exams at the age of

sixteen to become a sorting assistant. In essence the job consisted of nothing more than filing. Gradually promoted – she passed her clerical exams second time around, which enabled her to take up a vacancy – she next progressed

to the money order department.

Today Evelyn’s job would be replaced by computerised systems; in those

days the qualities needed by workers like her were the patience and passivity of an automaton. Each day’s work consisted of a stack of postal orders tied into a bundle, which had to be sorted before you could go home. Each

postal order was numbered; the numbers had to be coded and posted

accordingly into a big board with slots. Next door was another room full

of the slots to be pulled out, packed, and resorted into numerical order. If you didn’t complete your stack, you didn’t go home.

After thirty years, Evelyn ended up as executive officer in the Accountant

General’s Department; this entitled her to six weeks’ holiday. She retired

at sixty after forty-five years in the Post Office. ‘I never had to worry about having someone to keep me, because I had a job for life, and a pension. I stayed in that job, and all the people I worked with, we none of us got

married, and we all stayed friends . . . It didn’t occur to any of us that we needed to get married – it didn’t to me anyway. As for boyfriends – there weren’t many around in those days, not of our age group, they’d all

disappeared in the war. But I don’t remember being bothered about it at

all. We used to go on holidays and please ourselves. We had good money,

and I loved my job. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed life, I must admit . . .’

Miss Doreen Potts was another clerical worker of that generation who

spent all her working life in the same job. She lived at home with her

mother and went daily to the offices of Prudential Insurance. ‘It was a good place to work, a solid place. You didn’t have to be particularly clever or anything, so long as you behaved yourself and got on with it. And you

weren’t afraid that you were going to go to bed Saturday night and wake

up Monday morning and find yourself without a job.’ Doreen missed the

boat on marriage, but wasn’t especially troubled by it; she accepted her

mother’s view that her fate was ‘in the stars, dear’. Doreen’s priority in life was enjoyment. She liked to go out with the girls for a few drinks, and she loved dancing – ‘We used to go to the Streatham Locarno . . . My mother

always said to me, ‘‘You don’t want to get married, because you’re enjoying

yourself too much as you are.’’ It was true, I was.’

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In some ways the s and s offered a brave new world to respectable

single women like Evelyn Symonds and Doreen Potts. In her late nineties

Miss Symonds felt that her generation, despite living through a cataclysmic

century, had had the best of everything. ‘We had gracious living, which

you never get now . . .’ She would go walking in the great London parks

with her friends, and end up with a copious tea at Lyons Corner House:

‘. . . a great big plateful of bacon and eggs, a glass of orange juice and a roll and butter, with a waitress, a cloth and a live orchestra – all for two-and-sixpence. People now have nothing like that!’ Such sufficiency

and sense of worth inspire more admiration than pity. And yet her daily

life must have been hard and monotonous at times. What was the everyday

reality? Evelyn and Doreen’s memories, and those of other working women

of their generation, supplemented by the descriptions of contemporary

journalists and authors, help to paint an unvarnished picture of what life

was like for the business girls.

*

Salaries were tight in the s; even more so after the  Crash. Thirty

shillings a week was considered a good wage for a female clerical worker

in an office. That meant making decisions about where to live. The girl

who stayed under the parental roof would contribute to the family budget,

but would have to be within walking distance of her job or find fares. Flats might be more convenient, but were expensive and often lonely; tenancies for single women were hard to come by – they weren’t supposed to live

alone, it wasn’t thought respectable, and some landladies clearly suspected

that if they did, it must be on immoral earnings. In , prompted by

the rise in the number of single women, the Women’s National Liberal

Federation called upon government to recognise that spinsters had special

needs in this area. Their secretary, Miss Aline Mackinnon, spoke up for

many like herself: ‘I am an incorrigible spinster, and I think it would bring an enormous amount of happiness to a great many spinsters if they could have their own little homes. I know of dressmakers, cooks, elementary

schoolteachers, and all kinds of people who live in lodgings and who, if

they had a little house of their own and a little bit of garden where they

could get dirty in the evenings, would have an entirely different outlook.’

The government was dilatory, but various utopian bodies, like the Women’s

Pioneer Housing Company, did look out for their needs and started a programme of converting old houses into groups of apartments for independent singles; however, the rents were expensive.

Many working women preferred to live in hostels, because they were

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Singled Out

much cheaper, centrally located, provided breakfast, dinner, laundry facilities and ready company, yet gave one the feeling of independence. Nineteen-year-old Mary Margaret Grieve felt herself to be reasonably well-off when she started her first London-based job as a trainee journalist on
Nursing
Mirror
in . She had £ s a week, and her family supplemented this with another ten shillings, yet even so it was essential to economise. The Grieve parents lived in Glasgow, so staying at home was not an option.

Mary lodged in a hostel in Earls Court. It was a great gloomy mansion

block, but from her minute first-floor cubicle she could just see stars

between the chimney-pots. Hostel life was full of shifts and expedients.

The mean manageress charged threepence for a bath; for this sum the geyser

produced a barely tepid puddle at the bottom of the tub, so the girls clubbed together and bought a length of red hosepipe. This they attached to the hot water tap on the landing, diverting the water supply from a little basin which was normally used for washing stockings and underwear, to just reach the bath at the other end of the corridor.

Stingy rules also prevailed over breakfast. Mary would join the queue

and receive her permitted portion of half a slice of toast, one pat of butter, one minute portion of marmalade and a cup of tea. Seconds were allowed, but nobody had time to queue twice before dashing off to catch the

underground from Knightsbridge. ‘I was slightly hungry all the time I was

on
Nursing Mirror
. . .’ she remembered.

Affording enough to eat is the constant refrain of the business girls. ‘By

far my biggest financial strain was lunch,’ remembered Mary. Normally,

fivepence for a sustaining cheese roll, a glass of milk and a slice of fruit cake at a dairy in Maiden Lane kept hunger at bay, but every so often when finances were very low she would go a little further afield to an unusual

free canteen hidden away on the upper floor of an office block in Kingsway.

Mary suspected that the business girls who frequented this ‘unique feeding

place’ came from ‘an older profession than mine’. Nobody else she knew

seemed aware of its existence, so she was probably right. The procedure

was as follows: as you went in the lady at the entrance handed you a paper

on which was written a biblical text. You seated yourself at a long trestle

with all the other young women, then bowls of a good substantial stew

were passed down the row:

One ate one’s lunch in silence. On finishing each luncher stood up, recited from memory the text on her slip of paper, handed in her paper at the desk and left. No payment was asked.

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I have no idea who ran this admirable enterprise, nor do I know if I was strictly entitled to the hospitality offered . . .

The free stews for fallen women might have been a godsend to Beatrice

Brown and her sister Enid, who worked as typists in central London and

grew to know every nasty tea-shop in the Strand, from the ‘Busy Bee’ to

the ‘Chintz Teacloth’, in their search for cheaper and better lunches. In

vain – ‘they all smelt of sugar and fat and dusty curtains’, and the tables

were so uncomfortably low that you hit your knees when you pulled your

chair in.

Like Mary Grieve and the Brown sisters, Ethel Mannin, who started as

a typist for a big advertising company in London on twenty-three shillings

a week, was always ravenous, always watchful of her purse, making up for

inadequate cheap lunches with sweets and chocolates at her desk. With an

upper limit of ninepence for lunch, she too became a reluctant habitueé of

tea-shops. ‘Through constant usage you grow to hate them all.’ There were

the big noisy popular ones, the quiet arty ones, the cinema tea-lounges and

the risque´ basements appointed with screens and couches for courting

couples. Ethel had been to them all. And always the question was, what

could you ‘run to’? Usually, tea and sardines on toast, a sausage or a Scotch egg; when what you longed for was fruit compote and tinned peach melba at prohibitive prices. Dare you treat yourself ? Would the pert waitresses

despise you if you went cheap? Arty ‘Copper Kettle’-style tea-shops were

exorbitant, their decayed gentlewomen owners charging as much as one-and-sixpence for their ‘home-made’ jams, cakes and cress sandwiches, but cinema lounges were reasonably priced, the tea good and the ambience

cosy.

Ethel Mannin observes everyday life in the s from the inside, and

her detailed accounts of aspects of British society, from clothes to contraceptives, air travel, education, Bright Young Things and the Chelsea Arts Ball, have the ring of truth. One of her essays, ‘Palaces of Commerce’, complains tellingly of the tedium, vexations and frustrations endured by thousands of

female wage-slaves like her, compelled daily to be swallowed up behind

the pitiless glass and concrete fac¸ades of the modern office.

Mannin lamented the ‘Americanisation’ of office life. Open-plan systems,