Shopgirls (15 page)

Margaret Bondfield was quickly enlisted by the union to help to swell its ranks. She faced an uphill battle. Where matchgirls had led, shopgirls were reluctant to follow. Their long hours left little time for anything else, let alone activism, and living-in usually put them out of unionists’ reach. Bondfield recalled running the gauntlet in several shops. Trying to ‘avoid the shopwalker, or anyone who looked managerial’, she would seize her chance and distribute her union leaflets until she was ‘ordered out’. One irate grocer ‘read a leaflet, tore it up and stamped on the bits’, shouting, ‘“Union indeed! Go home and mend your stockings!”’ If she did succeed in sparking a shopworker’s interest, Margaret faced further challenges in trying to arrange a follow-up conversation. Calling again during business hours was very risky as it ‘might mean the sack for the assistant’. A meeting might instead be ‘fixed up after the shop was closed, in a café, or even on the pavement’.
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But it wasn’t only logistical difficulties that deterred shopworkers from joining their union. It was often their personal politics, or lack of them, and their apparent sense of superiority over other workers. This exasperated activists like Margaret beyond measure. She gave vent to her frustrations in her scathing report of a nationwide recruiting tour that she undertook in 1898. The Berkshire town of Reading was one of the worst offenders. There, ‘most assistants have time to enjoy a little social life after business and they do not trouble themselves to think of the thousands who haven’t’. They were neither aware of, nor concerned by, the precariousness of their own positions: ‘they are satisfied with their present conditions; they do not realise that
they are not fixtures.
’

Still, Margaret was prepared to accept that some workers needed, as she herself had, to have their eyes opened to the union cause, which attracted ‘much prejudice’. Though Gloucester was a more positive prospect – Margaret judged that ‘in this compact little town it should not be difficult to organise every shop worker’ – Bristol was another matter entirely. Her inside-sources told her that ‘a lion’ was ‘in the way’ in the shape of a twin tyranny: first, ‘that employers would instantly dismiss anyone known to join the union’ and second, ‘that assistants will never be organised because they are snobs’. This was too much for Margaret. She poured scorn on workers who needed to be ‘cajoled to meetings by sugarplums in the shape of a bishop or a garden party!’. Such people would ‘be better outside our ranks’ and the local branch should devote its energies to those who ‘detest their pretences of gentility as much as I do’.
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Shopworkers who thought themselves too good for a trade union had an overinflated and misplaced sense of their own importance that belied the fact that they were, in her words, a ‘forgotten and negligible class’. Those who thought they were anything more should wake up and realise that to the ‘throng of thoughtless purchasers’ they were ‘often less than nothing’.
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Harsh words indeed.

When it came to ‘class psychology’, Margaret thought that shopgirls were even more flawed than their male counterparts. They were especially snooty, not only towards other working girls but also to some of their female customers. The disdain she had complained of in customers could work both ways, it seemed: ‘Gentility, elegance, and inflexible regard for appearances, mark the shop assistant. The woman who goes shopping in the West-end will be eyed with cold disdain by the young ladies if she is badly dressed. There is an air about the assistant which suggests a certain status and independence, a professional chic which is inherent to the calling.’ She saw their chic as a sham and one cause of the ‘gulf that yawned deep’ between the shallow assistant and the more solid artisan.
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Their ‘false gentility’ needed to be ‘weeded out’, felt Margaret. Only then could shopworkers take their place as ‘self-respecting working class people’.
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Even if a shopgirl could overcome these flaws and muster the courage, inclination and time to sign up to a union, she faced further challenges. Most unions, even the new ones, were run by men for men. As a result, the relationship between women and unionism was never an easy one. The earliest organisations had been set up to fight for a family wage for male breadwinners – a worthy cause, but one which was to drive a lasting wedge between the longer-term interests of male and female employees. It was difficult for the unions to justify the promotion of female workers’ rights when the majority of their membership feared that women would undercut men’s wages. On top of this, they were increasingly concerned that women might muscle in on their skills. Indeed, the Trades Union Congress was itself set up in 1868 in part to ensure that working men could be saved the indignity of having to send their wives and daughters out to work to make ends meet. Over thirty years later, when Margaret Bondfield attended her first TUC conference in Plymouth in 1899 as assistant secretary to the shop assistants union, she was the only female delegate in the hall.

The National Amalgamated Union of Shop Assistants was unusual in that although women made up only around 10 per cent of its membership, they occupied many of its senior positions. A young woman named Agnes Pettigrew, a former Glasgow shopgirl, was appointed as its first full-time female organiser in the 1890s. She was already a veteran activist, having helped to organise Scottish shoemakers. A fellow Glaswegian, Mary Macarthur, would become another of the union’s leading lights. She was just twenty-three and had worked as a book-keeper in her father’s drapery business, one of the first generation of girls to have attended Glasgow High School for Girls. She admitted that she’d gone along to her first union meetings to scoff, but was unexpectedly impressed by what she heard.
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Duly converted, she signed up and rapidly rose up the ranks, quickly becoming the first woman on the national executive in 1903. She was nurtured and supported in all this by Margaret Bondfield. When Mary first moved south, she lived at Margaret’s London flat and stayed for three years, a kindred spirit who became a lasting soulmate. At the time it would have been very difficult for the two women to have had any kind of open relationship, should either have desired it, but one of Margaret’s early biographers believed Mary to have been ‘the romance of her life’.
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Women like Margaret, Mary and Agnes certainly helped to put shopgirls on the political map, but they remained the exception. The majority of Britain’s female workers did not join the new unions. There was, however, an alternative organisation to which thousands of women were drawn: the co-operative movement. It had been born half a century earlier, in the 1840s, when a group of local flannel weavers formed the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society, clubbing together to open their own small shop in Toad Lane. Known simply as ‘The Store’, at first it sold a small range of essentials – butter, sugar, flour, oatmeal and candles – but its aims were anything but modest. In the past, the scales had been tipped in favour of shopkeepers, with unscrupulous traders overcharging customers, fiddling weights and adulterating drink. By setting up their own shop and dealing with their own suppliers, the Rochdale Pioneers took control of their living costs. The Society met weekly in the Weavers’ Arms pub just down the road to go over the books. The monumental difference between this shop and others, however, was that its customers had to be members of the Society too. And as members they shared both profits and responsibility for decision-making. This was a new kind of business – one owned and operated by its members, for its members.

The idea took hold. The ‘Rochdale principles’ were quickly adopted by other working-class communities across Lancashire and Yorkshire – and eventually around the world. By the 1860s, the Cooperative Wholesale Society, as it was now known, had truly broken the mould of British shopping and shopkeeping. It bought in bulk from wholesalers, and therefore far more cheaply than individual shopkeepers were able to, and sold the goods in its own outlets. People who wanted to shop there had to become a member of the Society, just as the original Pioneers had done. Prices were fixed and the stores accepted cash payment only, never offering credit. These innovations alone meant that Co-ops came to be forever associated with the ‘better sort’ of working-class families, those who were paid regular wages and didn’t need to put things on the slate to get by. Members were rewarded with a generous quarterly dividend: the more you bought, the bigger the divi. In some stores, this amounted to a real-terms price cut of nearly 20 per cent.
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But this was not just about discounts. Co-operatism as a whole aimed for nothing less than moral renewal through everyday shopping. George Holyoake, one of its most prominent supporters, painted a picture of an average Saturday evening in the Rochdale store:

Toad Lane on Saturday night, while as gay as the Lowther Arcade in London, is ten times more moral. These crowds of humble working men, who never knew before when they put good food in their mouths, whose every dinner was adulterated, whose shoes let in the water a month too soon, whose waistcoats shone with devil’s dust, and whose wives wore calico that would not wash now buy in the markets like millionaires, and, as far as pureness of food goes, live like lords. They are weaving their own stuffs, making their own shoes, sewing their own garments, and grinding their own corn. They buy the purest sugar, and the best tea, and grind their own coffee. They slaughter their own cattle, and the finest beasts of the land waddle down the streets of Rochdale for the consumption of flannel weavers and cobblers.
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In Holyoake’s view, the free market would never match up. As he put it, ‘When did competition give poor men these advantages? And will any man say that the moral character of these people is not improved under these influences?’ The moral model at stake was perhaps best summed up through that well-known nineteenth-century soundbite: self-help. The idea was simple: even the poorest could make a better life for themselves and their families through self-discipline and self-improvement. Fortune would favour the prudent and the prudent would look for fair prices. Two years before Samuel Smiles’ best-selling book on the subject appeared in 1859, Holyoake published
Self-Help by the People
, his own account of the Rochdale experiment. This was picked up by leading social commentator John Stuart Mill in his
Principles of Political Economy
, seen by many as a new kind of manual for a new kind of industrial society.

Whether drawn by the divi and its discounts, or by loftier promises of moral renewal, or both, customers flocked to the new Co-ops. In some places in the north-west, like St Helens, more than half the town’s population became members. Understandably, traditional local traders were rattled and they hit back hard. Traders’ Defence leagues and associations sprang up around the country from the 1880s onwards. They tried everything to stem the proliferation of co-operatism, from urging their own customers and suppliers to boycott Co-op stores, to financing anti-co-op candidates in local elections. They campaigned for ‘fair trade’ and ‘fair profit’ and accused Coops of overcharging unsuspecting customers with prices that were fixed deliberately high. The St Helens Traders’ Defence Association published a guide on ‘How to fight the Co-op’, which was promoted through the national
Tradesman and Shopkeeper
journal. One of its recommendations was not to employ any shop assistant with personal or family connections to the Co-ops. Holyoake was scornful. To him, these shopkeepers were the ‘pigmies of commerce’.
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There was no stopping co-operatism. It was becoming a colossus of commerce. By 1881 over half a million people, largely in the north of England but increasingly beyond, had joined nearly one thousand local societies, which had a combined turnover of £15.4 million per year. Thousands of people were employed by the movement, in its dairies, bakeries and factories as well as in its new banks and insurance offices and, of course, in its stores. Here, product ranges were expanding dramatically too. You could now buy everything from your weekly groceries to ‘Integrity’ underwear and ‘Holyoake’ boots, and you could even fit out your home with Co-op furniture. The better-off were also beginning to get a taste for co-operatism, through what would become a high-street fixture. The first Army & Navy Store on Victoria Street, London, was started by a group of former officers in 1871, initially specialising in imported wholesale port and sherry. It soon branched out into good-value golf clubs, guns, leather goods and cigars, alongside household staples. This was co-operatism with a conscious touch of class and it proved an instant and enduring hit.
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From the start, the co-op movement forged a particularly strong connection with female customers, who, across the social scale, kept a sharp eye on everyday costs. While female workers remained marginal in most trade unions, female consumers flocked to become co-op members. They also carved out their own distinctive niche within the movement: the Women’s Co-operative Guild. By the turn of the century, the Guild was one of the largest women’s organisations in the country. Its twelve thousand members debated everything from food prices and family planning to women’s work and pay. A much more radical foremother of today’s Mumsnet, its kitchen-table politics had a profound effect on wider social debate. Led by a charismatic duo, Margaret Llewelyn Davies and Lilian Harris, the Guild was invited to serve on many parliamentary panels and inquiries, on topics from maternal health to divorce reform. Some called it ‘the trade union for wives and mothers’.
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Margaret Bondfield, who later joined the Guild, admitted that she ‘heard more sound common-sense from those women’ than she had heard ‘in much more learned assemblies’. They didn’t ‘beat about the bush’ but went ‘straight to the heart of the matter’.
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While Bondfield herself was lifting the lid on private retailing, the Women’s Co-operative Guild began to investigate working conditions in their own Co-op stores, suspecting that they were exploiting their many female workers. In the late 1890s, Lilian Harris surveyed 104 outlets employing 1,662 shopgirls and her first impressions were favourable: ‘The women and girls have an hour for dinner, half an hour for tea and, as a rule, they go out for meals.’ Looked at in the round, however, Harris found that Co-op shopgirls seemed to face the same challenges as those behind the counter elsewhere, working long hours for low pay, albeit with a longer meal break.
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The Guild began to lobby the leaders of the Co-operative Wholesale Society on the matter, but to little avail.