Shopgirls (2 page)

Another television drama,
The Paradise
– based on Zola’s novel but set in the 1870s in a northern English town – takes young Denise Lovett on a similar journey, moving from her uncle’s dowdy draper’s to the new department store down the road, eventually rising to become a head of department. These romanticised ‘rags to riches’ storylines were ripped apart by comedians French and Saunders in their own
House of Eliott
sketches, with the couture house mercilessly parodied as the ‘House of Idiot’. The sketches were harsh but fair. In reality, although some shopgirls lived the dream and rose to the top, many others did not. An earlier 1970s sitcom was closer to the mark: one of the running jokes in
Are You Being Served?
was that poor Miss Brahms would never get ahead in ladieswear at Grace Brothers so long as the gorgon Mrs Slocombe lived and breathed.

All this has made it hard for us to think of shops, whatever their size, as serious workplaces. Shops were distinct from the workshops, sweatshops, mills, factories, farms, mines and docks, where ‘real workers’ spent their working day. They were the places where the goods that those workers had produced were ‘merely’ displayed and sold. This helps to explain why shopworkers themselves, both male and female, from the very beginning struggled to gain status, despite taking pride in their jobs. It also helps explain why the real, rather than the fictional, history of their working lives has been overlooked, despite their huge numbers. Theirs doesn’t seem – at first glance – to be a courageous history.

Yet shops have always been about more than shopping. They are sociable places where, for generations, customers have come not just to buy but also to see and be seen, to catch up with friends, gossip and watch the world go by. They are places where creativity sparks and passions fly. Because they trade on trust, assistants have continually to find new and inventive ways to attract, keep and reward their customers. At the same time, of course, they are always ready to squeeze a profit from those same customers. Shopgirls have long been at the heart of these everyday dramas. Their work has always been about more than just selling. As Virginia Woolf suspected, shopgirls and their stories are a powerful part of our shared – sometimes heroic, sometimes shameful – social history.

Shopgirls in the 1890s at Marks and Spencer Ltd. Shopgirls had to provide their own black dresses as uniform, leading to a variation in dress and collar styles.

‘Romantic Freak of a Glasgow Girl of Sixteen’ – so read the headline on an extraordinary newspaper story about one young person who was desperate to break into shopwork. In July 1861, the
Glasgow Daily Herald
reported that a young man had answered a provision dealer’s advertisement, displayed in the shop window, and was duly hired as a shop assistant. All went well for the first few days, ‘the lad giving rather extra satisfaction’. Then the landlady of the lad’s lodging house visited the provision dealer and ‘lo and behold! He was told that his young, active shopman, instead of being of the
masculine
was of the
feminine
gender.’ The supposed shopman tried to deny it, but finally confessed to being a young girl of sixteen. Her employer promptly sacked her; he only employed men and wasn’t about to give jobs to women, let alone a cross-dressing ‘romantic freak’. The unnamed sixteen-year-old was clearly a girl with spirit, desperate to earn her own living, so much so that she pulled off the trick a second time, landing a situation in another shop, again disguised as a man. On being discovered yet again, she was sent back to live with her parents. The
Herald
reporter hoped she would never abandon her parental home again, except when married and in ‘her proper position as a daughter of Mother Eve’.
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That same year, farmer’s daughter Eliza Close was a little more successful than our courageous sixteen-year-old: she found work as a shopgirl in London. In Arthur Munby’s account of meeting her in Hyde Park one June evening, Eliza comes across as a cheerful, though perhaps naive, young woman. Munby is a notorious figure today: a Victorian civil servant and writer whose fetishistic interest in working women was partly, though not solely, sexual. He took a forensic, anthropological approach to understanding the minutiae of working-class women’s lives, collecting photographs of servant maids, pit lasses, acrobats and fishergirls. He sketched these objects of his fascination, wrote a book on the tombstone epitaphs of servants and kept diaries cataloguing his hundreds of encounters with these women, sexual and social. The fragile manuscripts, with page after page of closely written entries, record his evening conversation with Eliza as they sheltered from a shower together, under a tree: ‘I found she was ready to tell me all I wanted to know about the life of the shop.’

Eliza enjoyed her shopwork, preferring it to living in the country – ‘so solitary’ was her complaint. Munby found her black silk gown and pretty green and white bonnet tasteful ‘but beyond her class, as times go’. He implied that Eliza was dressing above her station, her colourful bonnet a little fanciful for a shopgirl, who would normally be dressed completely in black with a white collar. Munby was always obsessively alert to the gradations of status and class. She painted him a picture of life in the shop, ruled by the employer she called ‘the master’ and ‘our old gentleman’, and of sharing work and living quarters with seven other assistants, four men and three women. Their lives were shop-bound, with working hours from eight in the morning until nine at night and Eliza exclaiming, ‘You don’t go out of the shop all day except downstairs for meals.’
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Munby didn’t quite understand why Eliza Close preferred working in this closed, restricted world to ‘the freshness and freedom of a farm’; he dismissed her preference nonchalantly as ‘the foolishness of half-educated girls’. Among other poorly educated girls Munby wouldn’t have understood are Henrietta Woodward, aged seventeen in 1861, Georgina Bathurst, aged sixteen, and Sarah Lord, aged just fifteen, all three serving their apprenticeships at Stoddart’s drapery store in the centre of the little town of Witney in Oxfordshire. We know from the census of 1861 that Sarah came from a village just three miles away, while the other two came from further afield, Wiltshire and Staffordshire. Sarah’s father ran a small farm of 106 acres with his large family, and Sarah was the only one of her siblings to leave farming. But otherwise we know little about these teenagers, for Stoddart’s drapery has not survived, let alone the girls’ apprenticeship papers. They are likely to have been indentured to Stoddart’s for three to seven years, receiving no wages.

Why were young women such as these drawn to shopwork? The attractions are not immediately obvious: shop hours were longer than those for factory work, which by the mid 1900s had been curtailed to ten hours a day for women, and the conditions were challenging. What world did these young women hope to enter and what kind of women did they hope to become as shopgirls?

The advertisements in the local newspapers of the day certainly made clear what kind of women the shopkeepers themselves were searching for:

Leeds Mercury
, 22 March 1866:

WANTED, a Young Lady as SALESWOMAN, who understands mantles; one with a knowledge of Millinery; also a good Second Milliner. Apply, stating terms and reference, to M’Kenzie and Wilson, Sunderland.

Birmingham Daily Post
, 29 October 1863:

WANTED, a Respectable FEMALE SHOP ASSISTANT, must Write a good Hand and be quick at Accounts. One who has been accustomed to Business preferred. – Address, 254, Post Office, Stourbridge, stating age and salary.

Liverpool Mercury
, 15 July 1869:

WANTED, as Milliner and Saleswoman, a Young Lady of good character and abilities. Enclose carte. – Booth Brothers, Southport.

‘Respectable’, ‘young’, ‘good character’, ‘knowledge’, ‘abilities’. The spin is clear: shopwork was being advertised as suitable for young women, a proper profession, a job with status. It sounded attractive; no wonder women were rushing to apply.

Moreover, the number of jobs for women in shopwork was increasing exponentially; this was something new. The young women answering these ads in Sunderland, Stourbridge and Southport in the 1860s were unknowing pioneers. They were the first generation of women to enter into shopwork en masse, part of a new wave of female workers breaking into a world that just a decade earlier had been dominated by men. As our Glaswegian shopgirl in disguise recognised, high-street shops in mid-century Britain were largely owned, run and staffed by men, so that the experience of going shopping was quite different from what we know today.

Take a small market town like Wisbech in the Fens, a decade earlier. According to the Post Office directory of 1853, Wisbech was ‘one of the most considerable and thriving towns in the Isle of Ely and Cambridgeshire’; it was ‘lighted with gas’ and boasted ‘an exchange hall and council rooms … a savings bank, a newspaper, cemetery for Churchmen, and another for Dissenters’. It was also home to a dedicated amateur photographer called Samuel Smith. He experimented with the new calotype photographic process, cheaper and more flexible than earlier techniques. This enabled him to photograph his home town with comparative ease and it is through his meticulous documenting of the streets and river that we can catch an accurate glimpse of what a market townscape looked like in the mid 1800s.

Standing in the middle of the cobbled street on Cornhill in his three-piece suit, looking across into the Old Market, Smith recorded the scene.
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Since medieval times, towns across the country had been full of shops, most of them centred on the all-important marketplace that was the main source of fresh food. Some medieval shops had been simply stalls, but there had also been open-fronted townhouses and craftsmen’s workshops, each dedicated to a particular trade. Smith’s photographs reveal that in Wisbech in the 1850s the specialist trader still dominated, though by now most shops had bow-windowed fronts to show off their wares. He persuaded a handful of shopkeepers to stand still for the fifteen long minutes it took to expose his calotype; so we see figures we presume to be Mr McNeil the confectioner, Mr Foster the draper and grocer and Mr Goward the postmaster standing proud, while Mr Goode the saddler, Mr Barley the chemist, Mr Ford the ironmonger, and draper Mr Bellars are out of this particular shot.

The terraced brick houses of the Wisbech shopkeepers conformed to the traditional ‘shop-and-house’ layout, with the shop window taking up the whole ground floor, and the upper floors and cellar serving as storerooms and family living quarters. Theirs were small, family-run businesses dealing in specialised, narrow lines of goods.

Nelson Foster was both draper and grocer. He was a skilled professional, intimately involved in each stage of the shopkeeping process. He knew his suppliers well, he understood quality, he handled the purchasing and storing of his wares, and he monitored the accounts. Like his Wisbech neighbours the confectioner and the chemist, Nelson Foster was also involved in the actual processing of his goods; as a grocer he mixed his own spices, pickled his own chutneys, made sauces, bottled fruit, potted meats, patted butter and above all blended his own tea, tea being very profitable.

All the shopkeepers took a close personal interest in their local customers. Intimate knowledge of customers was vital, for these were the days of credit. The retail world functioned on a flow of credit, with customers buying goods on account, shopkeepers in turn buying off the wholesalers on credit, and finally wholesalers buying off the manufacturers on credit. The whole system relied on a chain of credit. Any break in the flow, any significant non-payment of accounts, spelt danger for the whole chain. Therefore it was of vital importance to Foster to know whether his customers were in work, expecting a child, arranging their father’s funeral or travelling. Shops were centres of local gossip, but seemingly idle chit-chat was vitally important intelligence for these family businesses, for the information fed directly into the shopkeepers’ assessments of their customers’ ability to pay.
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A few hazardous coaching-hours east of Wisbech, in Norwich, Copeman’s grocery was one of the city’s most important stores. It kept meticulous records, in beautifully handwritten Correspondence Books, of the courteous letters between the grocer and his creditors. Even customers who failed to pay promptly were dealt with politely, with Copeman’s apologetically writing that they ‘must request a remittance of the balance by return of post … waiting which we are, Yours respectfully’. After waiting six months for payment, Copeman’s was less respectful: ‘if not paid soon the balance must be
pressed
’. One customer clearly was never going to pay up: ‘Your word has so often been forfeited that we can place no dependence on it whatever.’
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Traders were multi-skilled and most took on a male apprentice for three to seven years. Apprentices were taught their craft and many of these young men nursed dreams of setting up a business of their own one day. They were unpaid but given board and lodging, usually living above the shop alongside the rest of the family.
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