Shopgirls (18 page)

On 1 March 1912 the WSPU ratcheted up their ‘Deeds not Words’ campaign by some margin. Hundreds of suffragette supporters launched the extraordinary, chaotic two day campaign nicknamed the ‘War of the Windows’. Dressed in their team colours of white, purple and green, they rushed through the streets of London, from the Strand to the West End, smashing and breaking shop windows of famous stores with stones and toffee hammers, while suffragettes in provincial centres followed suit.
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Among them were Kate and Louise Lilley, daughters of the suffrage-supporting owner of Lilley and Skinner. The militants targeted famous names such as Burberry’s, Barkers, Swan & Edgar, Harrods, D.H. Evans and Regal Corset, but also scores of smaller shops, causing damage to more than 270 premises. They distributed handbills printed by the Women’s Press to the gathering crowds, justifying their violent actions; they accused store owners of passivity, of not using their political clout. ‘You, a prosperous shopkeeper, have had your windows broken,’ the handbill began, and then explained why: ‘You as voters and businessmen have enormous influence’. The suffragettes called on the shopkeepers to use this leverage to encourage MPs to support women’s right to vote. The suffragette leaflet also contained a threat, warning the proprietors that if they didn’t get behind the proposed Conciliation Bill, they might lose their all-important female consumers: ‘You can get on very well without Mr Asquith or Mr Lloyd George, but you can’t get on without the women who are your good friends in business.’
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The fallout from the window attacks was dramatic for the suffragettes – and considerably less dramatic for the proprietors. Over two hundred suffragettes were arrested and many were charged with window smashing,
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resulting in three months’ imprisonment for some.
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Store owners were left scratching their heads, for their windows had been smashed by the very women whose journals and political activities many were directly funding. In business terms, it didn’t make sense to respond with equal ferocity. So the proprietors simply shrugged their shoulders, repaired their windows, paid a little more lip service to the political aims of the movement and went on advertising.

One proprietor had got off more lightly. Harry Gordon Selfridge’s very public support for the WSPU meant that his expansive display windows were largely spared. He had literally tied his colours to the mast, one of the first to fly purple, white and green flags when Mrs Pankhurst was first released from prison in 1909. However, one of his former shopgirls would test his support to its limits.

Gladys Evans joined Selfridges in 1908, having worked in shops from the age of fifteen. Her father was a wealthy stockbroker and one of the proprietors of
Vanity Fair
magazine. She was a suffragette. While at Selfridges, she devoted all her spare time to the furtherance of the cause, selling the magazine
Votes for Women
in all weathers. In November 1910, she was among those beaten and arrested by police in the notorious Black Friday confrontation, when hundreds of WSPU members protested against the deliberate stalling tactics of Prime Minister Asquith and his Commons supporters. She emigrated to Canada in 1911 but returned the following year with a steely determination to step up the fight. When she heard about the imprisonment of her fellow suffragettes following the window-smashing attacks, she was radicalised further. In July 1912, she and three others followed Asquith to Dublin, where he was due to speak on Home Rule. The group lay in wait for his carriage as it crossed O’Connell Bridge and, as it drew near, threw through its window a hatchet wrapped in a message that read ‘symbol of the extinction of the Liberal Party for evermore’. It missed Asquith but injured one of his travelling companions. Gladys and the others then headed for the Theatre Royal where Asquith was due to speak the next day. Determined to sabotage the event, they launched a burning chair from an interior balcony into the orchestra pit and also succeeded in setting fire to the cinematograph box and causing a minor explosion.

The women were detained at the scene and soon appeared at a Dublin court charged with ‘having committed serious outrages at the time of the visit of the British Prime Minister’. Gladys was found guilty of conspiring to do bodily harm and damage property. She and another of the four were sentenced to five years’ penal servitude, the first time any suffragette had received such a severe penalty. She went on hunger strike in protest and, in another first, became the first suffragette to be force-fed in Ireland.
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Back at Selfridges, 253 employees signed an open letter addressed to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, ‘respectfully’ requesting ‘a remission of the sentence’ on the grounds that ‘the offence for which the prisoner was convicted was her first offence against the law’ and noting ‘her high character, to which we can all testify’. Her offence was ‘committed with no criminal intent, but from a political motive, namely as part of an agitation to obtain the enfranchisement of women’.
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In the end, Gladys was released early from prison on health grounds by authorities anxious to prevent her from dying and thereby becoming a political martyr.

For all this, enfranchisement remained an elusive prize. In their fury, suffragettes ramped up their militancy. In the first seven months of 1914 there were 104 acts of arson carried out by suffragettes, including the burning down of Great Yarmouth’s Britannia Pier and the destruction of the Bath House Hotel in Felixstowe. The most infamous attack on property came when Mary Richardson slashed the
Rokeby Venus
in the National Gallery.
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Nonetheless, a few days after the declaration of war in August 1914, the suffragettes called a halt to their militant actions and set out to support the war effort. It was the social upheavals of war that finally brought about change. The 1918 Representation of the People Act gave the vote to all men over twenty-one and to all women over thirty who were householders, wives of householders, occupants of property worth £5 a year or graduates of British universities. Most shopgirls and thousands of other young women would have to wait another decade before Bondfield and the Adult Suffrage Society achieved their goal of universal suffrage – votes for all adults.

But in other respects, much had changed for shopgirls since Bondfield had scribbled her first secret reports by candlelight, under the bedcovers in the 1890s. Thanks to her daring exposés, and the efforts of ground-breaking unions and co-operative and women’s movements, as well as the support of more enlightened shopkeepers, the harshness of shoplife was beginning to soften. This was a time when shopgirls – as young workers and young women – began to demand more for themselves. But it was also a time when shopkeepers and customers began, in turn, to demand more from the shopgirls as Britain’s consumer culture became ever more sophisticated.

Selfridges shopgirls stand on duty in front of the store’s modern lift system, 11 December 1922.

On 10 January 1906 the ocean liner
Carmania
pulled away from the Liverpool quayside with 3,244 people on board. The third-class berths were full of emigrants dreaming of a new life in America – Russians, Poles and East European Jews fleeing persecution. The first-class cabins were occupied by Englishmen and -women, Americans and Canadians – and a Welshman and his nephew. Owen Owen of Montgomeryshire was sixty-one, founder of one of the most successful Liverpool drapery stores, a significant investor in London property and other large stores, friend of David Lloyd George (now president of the Board of Trade) and chairman of the Twenty Club, a dining club of influential national retailers. He had money and investments, he was generous to his extensive family and staff, and he contributed regularly to his local Unitarian chapel.

It was a far cry from the insecurity he had experienced as a child. His father, Owen Owen senior, had been a tenant farmer near Machynlleth, moving farms often as his fortunes waned and his family grew. Owen the younger left Wales when he was still a boy and became an apprentice at his uncle’s drapery business in Bath. He was in effect following in the footsteps of the tens of thousands of young men and women from the remoter parts of Wales who set off in search of steady work in England – particularly in London, Manchester and just across the Welsh border in Liverpool.

‘Who can tell what I am now laying the foundation of?’ Owen Owen wrote in his notebook the night he first arrived in Liverpool in 1868, aged twenty. He continued in a rather Shakespearean vein: ‘Is this the time and tide that leads to fortune, or is it a ship sailing on the world-wide ocean, without a compass to guide?’
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It was indeed the former, for Liverpool was where many of Britain’s raw materials were handled and the gateway through which the products of its large hinterland were exported overseas.

Shortly after he arrived in Liverpool, Owen Owen set about establishing his own eponymous draper’s store on 121 London Road, a noisy, busy neighbourhood with lots of pubs and lots of customers. His strategy was to sell goods cheap, survive on minimal profit margins and maintain a rapid turnover. The plan obviously worked: just five years later, in 1873, an advertisement for Owen Owen in a guidebook for north Wales stated that the business employed over 120 people, and that Owen Owen himself had ‘the reputation of being the Proprietor of the Cheapest Shop in Liverpool’.
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Over the next two decades, the store grew and grew, as Owen bought up neighbouring properties and built two staff hostels, watched over by two Welsh housekeepers. In 1899 Owen Owen, like many other retailers, ceased being a family partnership and became a limited company. Lloyd George bought one thousand shares, while local people from Liverpool and north Wales flocked to buy smaller bundles, Miss Elizabeth Morgan of Machynlleth buying a grand total of twenty-four.

Now he had set sail again. Writing to his wife Ellen while off the Irish Coast, he said, ‘I never could have believed it possible to travel at sea in such luxury. How graceful this wonder ship glides through.’ Owen had considerable investments in sixteen North American railways, including Erie Railroad, Pennsylvania Railway and Illinois Central Railway. He was going to inspect them; but above all he was on his way to inspect the manner in which American and Canadian shops went about their business.

If Paris had been the capital of nineteenth-century retail, New York had all the makings of becoming the shopping capital of the twentieth. Around the elite shopping district nicknamed ‘Ladies’ Mile’, famous department stores were swiftly gathering and making their names: Bergdorf Goodman, Lord & Taylor and the gigantic Arnold Constable & Co. among them. Owen was impressed with these vast enterprises, which employed thousands; he understood that ‘the Americans worship size’. North of Ladies’ Mile was Macy’s, which had over one million square feet of floor space and more than three thousand employees, and this was the store that Owen studied in detail. He was fascinated by its physical workings, by the building’s structure, the layout of departments, the refreshments on offer. He was concerned that these emporia had expanded too quickly and were at risk of fire or collapse but marvelled at the modern engineering he found inside: ‘Electric Band elevators are common for 1, 2 or 3 floors and Macy’s have revolving stairs. The revolving stairs are more used than lifts.’

Writing to Ellen from the Waldorf Astoria hotel, Owen confessed, ‘It has been a revelation to me the way business is done on this side: many of the ideas are those I have nearly all my life been trying to put into force.’ For it was not just the new mechanics that struck him but also the ‘Elaborate Methods of Attracting Business’ – so read the headline in
The Drapers Record
, reporting on Owen’s fact-finding trip. Owen was impressed by the American stores’ radically different attitude towards the customer, who was regarded as someone who had to be lured and tempted into buying, with shopping treated not so much as a functional necessity but as a luxury, albeit an everyday one. The stores he visited in New York, Buffalo, Montreal and Toronto spent significantly more on advertising than any comparable store in Britain; they each had an in-house advertising man and Owen felt that their advertisements were ‘singularly convincing. You read – and believe. And then a purchase cannot be far off.’

The aspect of American shopwork that struck Owen most forcibly was ‘System! System! System!’ He explained: ‘No deviation is allowed from it. Next to the dollar, it is their fetish.’
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Every aspect of store organisation was managed through elaborate and fixed methodology, from regular stock-taking to prompt payment of credit. This was part of the wider efficiency craze sweeping American industry, based on the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor. With a stopwatch in hand, Taylor had instituted studies in factories, subdividing manual tasks into different stages and timing each stage. His aim was to increase workers’ efficiency and productivity by finding the ‘one best way’ of performing each task.