Shopgirls (12 page)

A young woman’s looks were scrutinised intensely when she first applied for a job. ‘Crib-hunting’ was the term given to looking for work. A young woman in need of a new position would scour the advertising columns of the morning papers for details of the newest vacancies. Then she toured the firms, traipsing through town, appearing on time at the allotted hour only to wait in a long queue of similar-minded, similarly dressed young women. One applicant described what usually happened next:

‘What department do you want?’ demanded the engager.

‘Lace,’ I replied.

‘Too short,’ was the answer, ‘good morning.’

‘Am I too short for any department?’ I inquired desperately.

‘You are, I said good morning!’
²⁶

She held out a little more hope for the next place – at least she was more thoroughly examined.

‘Just turn round will you? Let’s look at your hair. That’s all right; thought it was short. Now take off that jacket thing, and let’s see how you look in your business dress. H’m! Not so bad.’

Only once the applicant had passed the looks test did the engager get down to business, quizzing her about what salary she expected. She dolefully explained the usual endgame: ‘Very often I’m afraid we end by begging to be taken on in the mean little shops that only put a card in the window.’

As the century drew to a close, even more emphasis was placed on appearance when a new beauty queen emerged among the so-called shoppies: the house model. The trend had taken root in Paris, at the instigation of Charles Worth, the father of haute couture. A Lincolnshire man, Worth started out in the London drapery trade, working at Messrs Swan & Edgar’s, a silkmercer’s and costumier’s emporium on Piccadilly. He moved to Paris in 1846, took a job at a French draper’s and married draper’s assistant Marie Vernet, a
demoiselle de magasin
, who modelled shawls, mantles and bonnets in store. He soon asked his wife to take her modelling one step further: he wanted her to model a dress. And so Marie Vernet became arguably the world’s first professional model. But this was just the start: Worth established his own dressmaking business in Paris, at 7 rue de la Paix, which became the internationally famous House of Worth, and as his artistic genius began to get recognised, orders flew in from the royal houses of Europe. Worth introduced the concept of fashion shows four times a year, his collections modelled by his wife and other
demoiselles
. When Charles Worth died in 1895, the House of Worth was taken over by his two sons.

The House of Worth’s every innovation was carefully noted across the Channel. British couture houses and dressmakers also took to showing dresses on house models, who wore stiff black undergarments and laced boots in order to preserve propriety. The buyers for Liverpool stores Bacon’s, Cripps and De Jong’s, all of them on Bold Street, which was known as ‘the Bond Street of the north’, would go to London several times a year and buy a selection of sample gowns. They would advertise their return in the
Liverpool Mercury
and place a discreet card in the window announcing that they were ‘Showing at 2.30 p.m.’ At the appointed hour one of the shopgirls would act as mannequin to model the latest London fashions. Liverpool customer Miss Stevenson Jones recalled, ‘The lady assistant might say, “Would you like the bodice so-and-so”, or “What kind of trimmings would you like?” And then you would choose your material; the young men would bring suitable materials for you.’ After choosing her preferred fabric, Miss Stevenson Jones would attend three separate fittings and then receive her new dress a fortnight later.
²⁷

In London, Lucile – born Lucy Christiana Sutherland – was the capital’s most notorious couturiere. In her autobiography she scoffed at ‘the plainest of girls’ chosen as mannequins by her more conservative competitors. ‘Even the most nervous mamma could safely take her son with her to the dressmaker’s when temptation appeared in such unalluring guise.’
²⁸
Lucile firmly believed that dresses should be shown in motion, that the movement of fabric on a live person was far more appealing and comprehensible to clients than a dress displayed on a headless wooden dummy or stuffed with tissue paper.
²⁹

But fabric in motion wasn’t enough for Lucile. She wanted to push the boundaries of modelling way beyond anything Charles Worth in Paris or old Mr Cripps in Liverpool would have considered acceptable. Lucile’s plan: to ramp up the sex appeal. She recruited her own corps of ‘glorious, goddess-like girls’, choosing her first six young women, full-busted and with long limbs, from the working-class areas in south London. She sent them to her own hairdresser and taught them how to walk elegantly by balancing books on their heads. She changed their names: Susie became Gamela and the other girls from Bermondsey and Balham were transformed into Dolores, Phyllis, Florence and Hebe. The photograph in
Sketch
magazine of her ‘Beautiful Mannequins’ shows sensually draped young women more voluptuous than today’s catwalk models.

In 1900 Lucile staged the very first catwalk parade. She invited Princess Alice, Lily Langtry and the Duchess of Westminster. ‘I shall never forget the long-drawn breath of admiration that rippled round the room as the curtains parted slowly and the first of my glorious girls stepped out onto the stage,’ Lucile recalled. Her show was a runaway success: she was showered with congratulations and – more importantly – dress orders. From then on, Lucile’s shows were more theatrical, more distinct than those of any of her competitors. She used ramps, curtains, lights and music to create a distance between the spectators and the mannequins; she was signally offering up her Hebes and Gamelas to be gawped at. The models themselves became the talk of the town, with customers coming to Lucile’s parades out of curiosity to see the models as well as the clothes.

Then Lucile encouraged men to attend as well as women, which was still highly unusual, and gave her gowns erotic names such as ‘Elusive Joy’, ‘Incessant Soft Desire’ and the sensational ‘Red Mouth of a Venomous Flower’, modelled by a young woman clad in bright scarlet. The
Bystander
magazine reported on a later show, recording the effect on the gentlemen in the audience, whom the journalist listed as ‘certain flâneurs of Bond Street, various loafers familiar to the Carlton “lounge” and celebrated Piccadilly-trotters’. These gentlemen gazed on suggestively, with easy insolence. ‘They were invited to stare and smile, and they did. But there was something remarkably offensive in their way of doing it.’
³⁰

The same year as her first catwalk parade, Lucile married Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon. As Lady Duff Gordon, Lucile became England’s first titled modiste and could now approach American heiresses marrying into the British aristocracy, the so-called ‘dollar princesses’, on an equal footing – which did wonders for her sales. Not all the men attending the fashion parades can have been that offensive, for all of Lucile’s original models married ‘above their station’: Dolores married millionaire art-collector Mr Tudor Wilkinson; Phyllis wed the American Mr Jesse Franks, also known as ‘the Wall Street Wizard’; Florence married into Scottish aristocracy; and Hebe ended up as a chatelaine in a castle outside Paris.
³¹
What Lucile’s memoir does not record is whether any of her later models stepped out with her gentlemen customers but were never proposed to, becoming mistresses rather than wives.

Lucile’s ‘glorious girls’ were the goddesses in the showroom firmament but inevitably there were soon hundreds of demi-goddesses, as bigger establishments increasingly hired young women who could venture out from behind the counter to model as occasion required. This heightened the sense that the counter and the showroom provided a legitimate, at times highly sexualised, meeting place between men and women of different classes.

The line between what a shopgirl was actually selling – the goods or her own body – sometimes became blurred. This reputational twilight for shopgirls did not brighten for decades; even in the first years of the twentieth century the same anxieties and accusations were being aired. In 1909 the radical Nonconformist minister Reverend Reginald Campbell went public with his theory that fashionable London stores were a major source of vice. At a meeting of shop assistants at the Champion’s Hotel, he didn’t mince his words. ‘In some West-End shops young women are paid such a miserable wage that they are expected, and, indeed, encouraged, to eke it out by the selling of their bodies.’ In Reverend Campbell’s eyes, it was the combination of low pay and glamorous surroundings that proved so insidious. ‘It is no doubt true that love of fine clothes, luxury or pleasure, has been the ruin of many girls, shop assistants, as well as clerks or domestic servants.’
³²

Reverend Campbell had thrown down a gauntlet at the shopocracy; he offered to give evidence in court against any establishment where immoral activity could be found. The shopkeepers responded to Campbell’s challenge with alacrity. A reporter from
The Drapers Record
had been present at the hotel meeting, and he duly reported Campbell’s speech. The following months saw a war of words between Reverend Campbell and the Drapers’ Chamber of Trade, which accused Campbell of libel, slander and sensationalism. The Bishop of London sided with Campbell. Lloyd George, by then chancellor of the exchequer, had major political backers among Welsh department-store owners, so he sided with the proprietors.
³³
Campbell and the Bishop never came up with the necessary hard evidence, so, in this particular skirmish, the shopocracy won.

Such public discussions about shopgirls’ reputations hardly helped their cause. On top of this, conservative thinkers were worried that shopgirls’ morals might be under attack from a wholly different foe. They were concerned about the dangers of loose reading. One of the leading suppliers of what they saw as unedifying reading material was Alfred Harmsworth. Harmsworth was to become a giant of the newspaper world, founder and proprietor of such famous titles as the
Daily Mail
,
Daily Mirror, Observer
and even
The Times
, dominating public opinion through his editorials in a way that no one else managed before or since. He started less illustriously, making his fortune selling cheap weekly papers to the hordes of newly literate boys and girls. School attendance was now compulsory for boys and girls until the age of thirteen, and literacy and numeracy levels across the nation were on the rise. The 1880s saw the first significant wave of Board School-leavers entering the job market and Harmsworth spotted a business opportunity, noting that these establishments were turning out ‘hundreds and thousands of boys and girls annually who are anxious to read’. He saw that they were rejecting the ordinary newspapers; not for them
The Morning Post
: ‘They have no interest in society, but they will read anything which is simple and sufficiently interesting.’
³⁴

Harmsworth was a publishing genius in many respects. He was one of only a handful of publishers who not only noticed this new category of readers but recognised them as a developing market and even helped shape their new identities. He published comics and popular magazines aimed at boys, such as
Comic Cuts, Union Jack
and
Halfpenny Marvel
. He also categorised and targeted the new ‘girl market’. A ‘girl’ in his eyes was not simply a schoolgirl, but encompassed almost any young, unmarried and probably working woman. So his periodicals, such as
Forget-Me-Not
and
Girls’ Friend
, addressed their madcap stories, advice columns, letters pages and advertisements to factory and mill girls, nurses and servant girls, lady guides and flower girls. And, of course, shopgirls.

Forget-Me-Not
ran romanticised, serialised stories of shoplife over several weeks in ‘The Adventures of a Shop Girl’, ‘That Pretty Shop Girl’ and ‘A Little White Slave’. The cast list of each tale often included a plucky shopgirl heroine, her virtuous but poor suitor, a tyrannical shopwalker, a villainous aristocrat and a millionaire’s fortune. They were dramatic tales of mistaken identity and disguise, mysteries and false accusations. They contained lines like, ‘“Miss Raines!” cried Phoebe, “You had better come forward and confess the truth, and not bring dismissal on us all!”’ In the end, wrongs were righted, identities were revealed, working conditions were set to improve and wedding bells rang.

Girls’ Friend
even featured ‘Only a Shop Girl’, which claimed to be the first published work of a real-life talented young shopgirl, portraying her surroundings and everyday struggles ‘with a vividness and truthfulness which will hold the reader spellbound from start to finish’. Other articles in girls’ magazines written by shop assistants described their working life, the hardships of the living-in system and the challenges of querulous customers.

One hot topic featured in
Forget-Me-Not
was ‘The Shopgirl’s Chance of Marriage’. The cheery column was quite positive on this issue, suggesting that shopwork provided ‘special opportunities for meeting eligible members of the opposite sex’.
³⁵
Another edition offered tips on ‘How Shop Girls Win Rich Husbands’, with supposedly first-hand accounts of businessmen from the Midlands and Scotland, country gentlemen and Irish colonials all being very pleased with their shopgirls-turned-wives.
³⁶
Lucile’s gorgeous girls could easily have featured here.

The reality for most shopgirl readers, however, was very different. Courtship, let alone marriage, was extremely difficult to negotiate. Late evening opening hours and the strict living-in regime set up countless logistical barriers to romance. On top of this, most stores had a – written or unwritten – marriage ban, for both male and female assistants. Permission from one’s superior was needed in order to marry and after the wedding most assistants were dismissed. Consequently, a high proportion of shopworkers remained single and the store dormitories were referred to as ‘monasteries and convents’ where ‘the celibate brothers and sisters of the counter’ lived.
³⁷