Singled Out (46 page)

‘And be a Universal Aunt?’

Second thoughts and maybes were not part of Gertie’s nature. She stayed up

late, composing her letter to the family solicitor. Before putting it into the morning post, she read it through and realized she had found her need and her answer.

Gertie set up the first office of Universal Aunts in the back room of a

bootmaker’s at  Sloane Street. She immediately advertised for a helper.

Miss Emily Faulder responded. ‘Why don’t you apply?’ her widowed

mother suggested to her, adding dismissively, ‘After all, you are not fitted for anything else.’ Miss Faulder was also in her mid-thirties; marriage had passed her by, and with the post-war husband shortage she had no prospect

of it. But she had been her military brother’s hostess in Hyderabad; she had helped to bring up five younger siblings and loved children and animals, and she was a lady. She was perfect Aunt material. Gertie and Emmie

referred to each other as Miss Maclean and Miss Faulder for the rest of their working lives together.

Now that Gertie had an office, an assistant, a table, a chair and a notebook, it only remained to advertise her company’s services, and the following notice duly appeared in
The Times
:

(LADIES OF IRREPROACHABLE BACKGROUND)

The timing was perfect, and soon the telephone line was buzzing with

enquiries from clients and applicants. This was not the opening women

with business, professional or academic qualifications were looking for, but it was the perfect outlet for intelligent, capable ladies with all the auntly virtues: good health, time to spare, maturity and a can-do attitude. Though not all the Aunts were single, a large number of Surplus Women fitted that

description. Emmie took interview notes on her applicants and filed them

in a card index. They make revealing reading:

Age .

Young and sporty. Knows all about ‘footer’ and white mice. Guaranteed not to
The Magnificent Regiment of Women


nag. Can slide down banisters at a push. This lady will be one of our most popular Aunts and be in great demand.

Age  (verging middle)

Understands cricket and foreign stamps as she has five brothers. Not much else.

There will be a waiting list of preparatory school boys.

Thirties (late)

Can play Halma, Snakes & Ladders and tell moral stories. No doubt has a selection of modesty vests or chiffon roses for the front of her lower necklines.

Universal Aunts now established the reputation that it has never since

lost, for ‘
Anything on a business basis
’. The Aunts were superb child-carers, and soon became a common sight at railway stations, clutching the hands of small, labelled children in blazers and caps as they escorted them to the right school train. But the Aunts were also unfazed by requests to buy Christmas presents, organise manicures, find flats, entertain at children’s

parties, catalogue libraries, pack for trips abroad, obtain theatre tickets and shop for everything ‘from a hair-pin to a Moth aeroplane’. One Aunt was sent to meet the . at Paddington and escort a monkey to its new home

in Kent. Another one had a mongoose to lodge with her for a week while

its owner was abroad. Aunts were employed to make up fourths at bridge,

purchase corsets and organise fire extinguisher tests. Aunts who could speak foreign languages took guided tours up the Rhine or rescued stranded travellers. Upper-class Aunts stood guarantor for American debutantes who

wanted to be presented at Court. The agency gave advice too: How did

you join the Freemasons? How did you sue your solicitor? When you had

to pay off your gambling debts, how did you sell your diamond brooch?

Universal Aunts knew the answers to all such questions; they were the

lifestyle consultants of the s.

By the end of the decade Gertrude Maclean had transformed herself into

a successful businesswoman, but she had also transformed the lives of large

numbers of ‘irreproachable’ spinsters. These were the single women who,

in a previous life, might have been condemned to what Osbert Sitwell

described as ‘the most degrading profession in the world’, that of lady

help, paid to devote herself with dumb patience to the caprices of some

cantankerous old party in a seaside town. Women of this type were too

energetic to do nothing, but too unqualified and too class-conscious to

make their unaided way on the competitive coalface of modern commerce.



Singled Out

Many of them found their need and their answer with Universal Aunts.

They won the love of children and the gratitude of grown-ups. The

unmarried ones among them were valued and respected in a way many of

them had never expected to be. War had broken down the drawing-room

doors; and the genteel spinster who found a role outside them was not

easily tempted back inside.

Unquestionably, life for a single middle-class woman in the s had

more to offer than at any previous time, and those women were eager to

grasp at opportunity. In
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
, Muriel Spark celebrates the energy, idealism and sheer zeal of the Surplus Woman: There were legions of her kind during the nineteen-thirties, women from the age of thirty and upward, who crowded their war-bereaved spinsterhood with voyages of discovery into new ideas and energetic practices in art or social welfare, education or religion . . . They went to lectures, tried living on honey and nuts, took lessons in German and then went walking in Germany; they bought caravans and went off with them into the hills among the lochs; they played the guitar, they supported all the new little theatre companies; they took lodgings in the slums and, distributing pots of paint, taught their neighbours the arts of simple interior decoration; they preached the inventions of Marie Stopes; they attended the meetings of the Oxford Group and put Spiritualism to their hawk-eyed test.

For the middle-class single with some money, self-sufficiency and feelings

of usefulness were often their own reward.

We are not downhearted

‘Nothing is impracticable for a single, middle-aged woman with an income

of her own,’ wrote Sylvia Townsend Warner. Living in caravans on honey

and nuts was a luxury available to women with incomes. The campaigner

Florence White, however, spoke for the poor spinster, dispossessed and

inarticulate. She spoke for women like Miss Cox, a forty-eight-year-old

cook in a factory, whose mother had died when she was sixteen and who

had brought up her family of seven, then gone out to work herself. She

spoke for Miss Barlow, a fifty-six-year-old print-worker who had been

made redundant and was then told she was too old to apply for another

job. She spoke for the thousands of factory workers and mill-girls, growing

older in northern towns, whose drudgery supported our industry, but

whose unjust plight remained disregarded by the government. There were

women who lived in back-to-back houses and had worked for the same

The Magnificent Regiment of Women



mill or factory from dawn to dusk for fifty years. And at the end of those

decades of servitude they won the right to a fifteen-shilling pension. There were sick women in their forties and fifties who dared not visit the doctor in case they lost their jobs, women made redundant refused employment

because they were too old, single women with dependent families to look

after, women weary, hungry, lonely and broken in health who had to keep

working without holidays year after year, unable to retire and collect their pension before they were too careworn to enjoy it. Florence White spoke for these women, and she wanted their voices to be heard.

At . on the morning of  June  a train drew in to Keighley station.

Gathered waiting on the platform, the excited crowd poured into its coaches.

In every window posters had been pasted: RESERVED: SPECIAL

TRAIN FOR SPINSTERS. The Keighley Branch of the National Spinsters Pensions Association soon settled in for the six-and-a-half-hour journey to Kings Cross, a slow progress as it stopped en route to fill up further with Branch members from across the North of England. At Shipley, Bradford, Leeds, Wakefield and Sheffield they piled on, laden with bags and banners,

the slogan ‘Spinsters Pensions’ or ‘Pensions at ’ conspicuous on badges and sashes decorating their collars and sleeves. The mood was exhilarating. On arrival in London, Miss Florence White was met by a police escort, and led

her army of spinsters en masse to the Kingsway Hall in Covent Garden. There

programmes of the day’s events were on sale, d each. As every Branch

arrived, they were applauded, until the auditorium was full to bursting with thousands of spinsters. Florence White rose and went to the podium.

Sir Kingsley Wood, Conservative Minister of Health, was Florence’s

target. Despite deputations from the NSPA, Sir Kingsley still refused to

make any concessions to their demands for pensions for spinsters at the age

of fifty-five. The cost would be prohibitive, he said. ‘Sir Kingsley says No, we say Yes!’, ‘We are not downhearted, but determined’, ‘A Fair Share for All’, read the banners. An eloquent speaker, Florence also directed her

anger at the unfairly privileged war widow. Those who had had the luck

to be married – even if only for a day, as in some cases she was able to cite, before their husbands went back to the Front and were killed – could find themselves comfortably off for the rest of their lives. How unjust was that

to the millions of women who, but for the war, might also have been

married, and were now left unprovided for by the state?

After speeches in Kingsway Hall a uniformed brass band assembled and

accompanied the spinsters in a four-abreast procession to Hyde Park. To

the tune of ‘God Bless the Prince of Wales’ they marched through the

London streets singing:



Singled Out

Come Spinsters, All Attention

And show that You’re alive,

Arise demand your pension

When you are fifty-five.

There is no earthly reason

To wait another day,

If you will get together

Unitedly and say

We Spinsters call attention

To show that we’re alive.

Demand we all our pension

When we are fifty-five.

No detail of organisation had been left to chance by the meticulous Miss

White. The capital knew they were coming. ‘No matter where we went

on streets or around corners,’ remembered one of the Keighley branch

members, ‘we had everyone’s applause, old and young. We passed a few

hospitals and at each window the nurses would be cheering and waving

and groups of maids would be on the doorsteps.’ At Hyde Park the press

cameras were waiting and the movement’s top orators took the platform,

followed by celebrity star Norah Blaney, who performed a ditty specially

composed by her partner Gwen Farrar:

We spinsters are a happy lot

And do the things we should,

We should be far happier

If only Kingsley Wood.

Till late that night the northerners were free to roam London; for many of

them it was their first time in the capital, and they made the most of it,

sight-seeing, glorying in the pubs and restaurants and the bright lights. The train back to Bradford left at . a.m., and many had to travel yet further before getting back home in time for a weary breakfast. It had been a grand day for the Cause.

*

Well before the war the early feminists had shown it could be done. The

struggle for the vote had started in , when Millicent Fawcett founded

the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. This was succeeded in

 by the Women’s Social and Political Union, started by Mrs Pankhurst

The Magnificent Regiment of Women



and her daughters, who set a precedent for activism in pursuit of the vote.

The leaders of the suffragette movement and their followers campaigned

by fair means and foul to gain recognition for their cause; to this end

windows were broken and stones thrown, churches and politicians’ homes

were fire-bombed, works of art vandalised; most famously Emily Wilding

Davison became a martyr when she died from her injuries after throwing

herself under the King’s horse on Derby Day, . Other militants were

cut free from the railings to which they had chained themselves, imprisoned

and, in a number of cases, aggressively forcefed.

When war broke out in  Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst called

on their supporters to repudiate violence, and patriotically to support the

government in every possible way. This proved a winning card. The

politicians who in February  passed the Representation of the People

Act, giving the vote to property-owning women over thirty, did so partly

in recognition of the vital role played by women workers in munitions

factories and on farms, but also partly because after four years of war the

last thing they wanted was a return to militancy on their doorstep. The

events of the  Russian revolution offered a fearsome precedent. As it

happened, the Act failed to enfranchise most working-class women – the

munitions workers and landgirls who had done such sterling service – and