Shopgirls (33 page)

Apple’s assertion brings the shopgirls’ story full circle. Over the past 150 years, shopgirls have defied firm categorization, performing as servants, specialists, muses, models and much more besides in their everyday encounters with customers. These were young women with spirit and vim: from the pioneering wave of shopgirls entering drapery stores in Southport and Stourbridge in the 1860s to the Selfridges’ “businesswomen”, and arsonist suffragette Gladys Evans, from impoverished chain-store assistants stealing stockings in the 1930s to Chili Bouchier’s journey from Harrods small ladies’ department to star of the silver screen; and from the raw courage of Miss Austin during the Blitz to the Biba girls’ glamorous embodiment of a hip brand, and Dorothy Owanabae selling cosmetics for black skin.

These women were all at the forefront of social change. Shopgirls have always been on the cutting edge – either in modernizing stores, with drapery and fashion leading the way, or sometimes more reluctantly dragged into the modern world in the grocery trade through technological and commercial advances, such as canning, refrigeration and self-service. Today, shopgirls continue to be key players in the constant reinvention of commerce, either as active agents or as embodiments of the new, reflecting the constant shifts in our consumer society. Take a trip to any kind of store – down the road, out of town or online – and you’ll still see all this played out before you. Britain’s shops, and the people who work in them, are doing nothing less than helping shape our sense of who we are, who we’d like to be and what we want from life.

Shops on Cornhill, Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, including Foster’s drapery holding a ‘selling out’ sale, Bellar’s grocery, Baxter’s chemist and the Post Office. Nelson Foster is likely the man standing on the left and postmaster, Mr Goward, the man on the right. Photographed by Samuel Smith, 6 September 1854.

View of the magnificent three-storeyed fabrics hall in Jenner’s department store, Princes Street, Edinburgh. Photographed by Henry Bedford Lemere at the store’s re-opening in 1895.

Shoppers inside the Burlington Arcade, Mayfair, London,
c
.1910.

The staff of Anderson and McAuley’s department store, Belfast, in the early 1900s.

The ‘foundling’ heroines of
The Shop Girl
musical comedy in costume, 1895.

A sketch of ‘Miss Bondfield On Tour’ – addressing a meeting of shop assistants in the St. George’s Hall, Hull – from
The Shop Assistant Journal
, July 1898.

The notorious case of Miss Cass, a shopgirl arrested on Regent Street, London. As pictured in the
Illustrated Police News
, July 1887.

The lively goings-on at Whiteley’s, as drawn in a comic penny paper from 1887.

‘The Delights of “Living-In”’, as depicted in
The Shop Assistant Journal
, March 1901.

On 16 November 1898, Harrods unveiled a technological marvel: Britain’s first moving staircase.

A Marks and Spencer Ltd stall – ‘Admission Free’ – 133 Grainger Market, Newcastle, 1 December 1906.

Selfridges window display in its opening week, March 1909, showing just a few elegant mannequins rather than piles of stock as below.