Shopgirls (23 page)

‘Oh, Matron, Florrie’s got her share money!’

‘What about it?’

‘But are these things really money?’

‘Of course they are really money, as I keep on telling you silly girls, and now perhaps you’ll believe it.’

‘But I have got thirty of them! Fancy me worth thirty pounds!’

The young woman then ran off in tears.
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Florrie and some of her girlfriends might have succeeded in cashing in their share promises, but the depression of the early 1920s affected upmarket stores badly, including Peter Jones, which made a loss in both 1921 and 1922. Old John Lewis helped out his son with a cash injection, but there was no dividend to pay out to the shop assistants, now ‘partners’, for another few years. Unperturbed, Spedan Lewis pursued his radical agenda. He had a second ‘big idea’. During the war he had realised that, due to the extraordinary working conditions, it had become acceptable – ‘the thing’ – for professional and better-educated men unable to join up to work in a shop, but only a particular type of shop: ‘a shop, of course, of a certain status and Peter Jones came within that line.’
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Now he wanted to apply the same thinking to educated women. Shopwork for women was no longer associated with trashiness and prostitution. Nevertheless, for the daughters of upper-middle-class families it was considered ‘infra dig’ to work in a shop – it was just not what a respectable young lady did, particularly not if they were one of the few to have gone on to further education. Yet it was precisely these women Spedan set his sights on.

Letters were sent out to the women’s colleges at Cambridge University and Oxford University, as well as Bedford College, London and Royal Holloway College, asking for a list of their top female graduates. Spedan offered these women jobs as ‘learners’, on the selling floor and as buyers, with the same pay as the male buyers. One such learner was Beatrice Hunter, who after leaving Oxford had worked in the civil service during the war and had become a factory inspector. Like many women, she faced unemployment in the immediate aftermath. One of her letters to a friend in 1922 describes her new opportunity: ‘I am going into trade. I’ve been offered a buyership at Peter Jones, Sloane Square. It’s a cheapish drapers and ladies’ outfitters … The Chairman is the son of John Lewis of Oxford Street … He has a mad stunt of employing University women.’ Beatrice acknowledged that the stunt was risky. ‘The commercial world is very suspicious of outsiders – the idea of taking in completely inexperienced people in responsible positions is quite a new one.’

She was nervous on her first day, as her notebook jottings reveal: ‘Begin at PJ today. Feel as one does at first when trying to speak a foreign language in its own country.’ She was right to be nervous, for many of the old shopfloor hands took ‘a dim view of this new experiment and one heard criticisms from all sides’, according to shopman Robert Bichan. He used to tease the ‘young lady learners’, chanting ‘Boots, boots, boots, boots’ at Beatrice Hunter as she passed by him in the second-hand furniture department carrying six boxes of shoes.

By 1928 there were over seventy learners at Peter Jones, and while some stuck it out for only a few weeks, others were propelled quickly through the ranks to become linens buyers, umbrella buyers and fashion vendeuses. Florence Lorimer was even given £5,000 by Spedan Lewis to fund a far-flung buying tour of Punjab, Kashmir and Afghanistan to purchase antiquities and carpets. In a series of memos Spedan Lewis instructed her to look out for embroidered felt rugs, bedspreads and semi-precious stones, as well as owls and hummingbirds for his personal ornithology collection. She returned with a haul of treasures, whose exotic influence could be traced in a number of fabric ranges.

Beatrice Hunter thrived too. Just a month after she started, she scribbled in her notebook, ‘It’s terrifying to be plunged into full responsibility without any experience at all. I have four shop girls under me from whom I have to conceal my ignorance … After years of working on paper it’s alarming to be so concrete – real money and real shoes and, worst of, real individual customers to cope with.’ Clearly Spedan Lewis was rather taken with her from the start, being ‘awfully nice’ and ‘a real idealist, a wild enthusiast but also a rather sharp business man’. He could also be capricious and mercurial, but she seemed quite to enjoy the rollercoaster of working closely with the chairman, writing, ‘The whole thing, of course, is more like a Musical Comedy than real life, priceless from morning to night.’ It became even more like a theatrical romance when he whisked her off during the working day to play tennis at Roehampton with his brother Oswald, and later proposed. Beatrice became Mrs Spedan Lewis in October 1923, just a year after she started working at Peter Jones.
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Together they had three children and from 1929 to 1951 Beatrice served as vice-chairman of the Partnership.

Dorothy Bouchier, who had felt so hungry as a child during the war, longed for the glamour of working in a famous department store – she would never have put it as derogatorily as Beatrice’s comment, ‘I’m going into trade.’ As a teenage girl she spent all her pocket money on the pictures, dreaming of becoming a movie star, and what better place to start than at Harrods? She left school aged fourteen in 1923 and followed her older brother, who had landed a job in the estate agency department at the store. Soon Dorothy was working in the sumptuous ‘small ladies department’, selling dresses to women of a petite figure, ‘a step nearer to my heart’s desire’, as she put it in her autobiography. ‘How elegant it was, how perfumed, how glamorous, with lovely dresses on display and beautifully made-up, beautifully coiffured sales ladies standing around in pretty sage green dresses.’
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Wearing just such a green dress, Dorothy was assigned as ‘junior’ to one of the sales ladies. However junior she might have been, she was soon thrown into the limelight when her mother entered her portrait photo into a
Daily Mirror
beauty competition. Dorothy had unruly dark locks and big dreamy eyes and clearly awakened men’s most atavistic instincts. Alerted by the newspaper, the Harrods photographic department took pictures of Dorothy and hung them from the entrance. ‘To be honoured by being displayed at the main entrance of the most famous emporium in the world should have filled me with pride. But it didn’t. I would walk past it with eyes averted.’
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Now fifteen and entering puberty, Dorothy was embarrassed, but the embarrassment did not last long. Soon she started hanging out with a rather fast set of Harrods assistants, including rich young men, sons of store proprietors who were learning the trade at Harrods. After work on a Saturday morning the clique would play rugger and netball at Harrods Sports Club in Barnes, west London, following that with enormous teas and then evening festivities with drinks and dancing the Charleston. ‘Sometimes our high heels would catch in the turn-ups of the boys’ Oxford Bags and we’d all fall in a giggling heap onto the dance floor.’

Soon everyone was in love with everyone else: Dorothy was in love with ‘Slushy’ Freshwater, and a Welsh boy was in love with Dorothy. It was the Welsh boy who nicknamed Dorothy ‘Chili’, and the name stuck. Yet such coursing passions were dangerous in a place like Harrods. ‘They demanded a strict moral code from their employees and anyone with a whiff of scandal about them would be sent packing.’ When Dorothy/Chili excitedly confided in her fellow junior that she had lost her virginity to Slushy the night before, the truth came out and Chili’s mother was summoned to the store ‘to be told that my disgusting presence must be removed from the august house of Harrods’.
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Chili, Slushy and several other colourful characters were given the sack.

Luckily for Chili, the pall of her shame, as she put it, did not waft as far as Kensington High Street, where she was promptly hired by Derry & Toms to model dresses in the model gowns department. By the age of seventeen in 1927, Chili had wangled her way into the movie business, acting first in shorts and then in feature-length silent movies like
Carnival.
Soon she was touted as ‘England’s “IT” Girl’ and she successfully made the transition into talkies. Ahead of her lay the rollercoaster life of a movie star, with its triumphs and failures, its moments of glory and deep personal sorrows.

Another young woman leading a ‘butterfly-life’ in the late 1920s was Flora Solomon, daughter of a Russian gold tycoon, who received £1,000 a month from her father to live on. An heiress with servants to take care of her household and childcare needs, she attended charity committees by day and danced in nightclubs at night. Following the Wall Street crash in 1929, however, the high-life came to a sudden end when her father’s finances hit the rocks and her monthly allowance was stopped. She was widowed soon after and with no income, for the first time in her life she had to make money for herself and her young son. She sold her jewellery, moved to the upper floor of her house, let out the ground floor to her aunt, and found new jobs for her butler and chauffeurs; her maid married her footman, ‘solving that problem’.
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A job was the next thing on the agenda.

At a dinner party in 1931 she found herself sitting next to Simon Marks. Marks’ father Michael had fled the Jewish pogroms in what was then Russian Poland, and had started as a pedlar and then stallholder in Leeds’ Kirkgate Market. He had called his stall Marks’ Penny Bazaar and since he spoke no English the story goes that the slogan ‘Don’t Ask the Price, It’s a Penny’ came from his attaching this permanent sign to his sales tray.
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After opening other stalls around the north of England, including in Birkenhead, Chesterfield and Warrington, he teamed up with Yorkshireman Tom Spencer and together they opened the first Marks & Spencer Penny Bazaar shop at 63 Stretford Road, Manchester. By the time Michael Marks died in 1907, the company had over fifty outlets, both in city markets and on the high street; the headline read, ‘Pioneer of Penny Bazaars – Death of a Generous Manchester Jew’. A photograph of the stall in Newcastle’s Grainger Market shows broad counters with young shopgirls in attendance; other images document the pride the company already demonstrated in its heritage, the signs above the open-fronted shops proclaiming, ‘Marks & Spencer Ltd, Originators of Penny Bazaars – Admission Free’.
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Simon Marks continued his father’s expansion programme with dynamism, taking the company on to the stock exchange, so that on the night Flora Solomon sat next to him at dinner he was able to reel off an impressive list of 160 Marks & Spencer stores around the country. ‘Now we are going to show what a British company can do,’ he said, explaining that his biggest competitor was Woolworths. Frank W. Woolworth, a farmer’s son from Great Bend, Jefferson County, New York State, had been a pioneer in cheap retailing; his five-and-ten-cent stores, with their bright lights and mahogany counter tops split into sections showing off a wide variety of goods, had taken America by storm. He had spotted potential for expansion in Britain, and fixed on Liverpool’s Church Street for his first experimental premises in 1909, the same year that Selfridges opened. With gold letters on warm red gloss paint, ‘F.W. Woolworth’ was topped with the sign ‘Nothing In These Stores Over 6d’. Prices were low, price tags were clearly displayed, and pic’n’mix was instantly popular. The Woolworth family had gunned for rapid expansion, so that by the time Marks and Solomon were dining, the four-hundredth Woolworths store had just been opened, in Southport.
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This then was the rival chain store that most worried Marks. He explained his plans to move away from the low-cost end of retail, adding that, ‘the days of the “Penny Bazaar” are finished’. It sounds as though Marks was showing off and Flora Solomon certainly wasn’t in the mood for admiring his achievements. Instead, according to her memoir, she attacked him.

‘You know you have a shocking reputation in the country,’ she flung at him.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Your labour conditions are notorious.’

‘But how do you know, Flora? When was the last time you ventured into one of my stores?’

Marks had a point. In her memoir Solomon admitted that she rarely went into shops of any kind and that she had ‘complete ignorance of the industry’, but this didn’t stop her.

‘I have it from Margaret Bondfield.’

Tenacious Bondfield was by now minister of labour in Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government, the first ever woman Cabinet minister and privy councillor. Solomon had friends in the Labour Party and knew of Bondfield’s undercover and political work to improve shop conditions. And so Solomon threw a final grenade: ‘Your company is growing by exploiting its workers.’

Marks apparently quivered with anger. Then he offered her a job. He suggested she might come up with a plan to improve things. Solomon was delighted with Marks’ offer and went to seek Bondfield’s advice. ‘Don’t rush it,’ Margaret warned. ‘Take a good look at the stores first. And if you’re wise you’ll go across to Europe and investigate conditions there. You may pick up some ideas.’
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So Solomon, armed with a letter of introduction from Marks, started her tour of British high streets, until then an alien land to her. She described herself as ‘a fat woman with a heavy accent’, ‘an exotic spectacle’. She was certainly received with suspicion as she questioned shopgirls, interviewed managers and sniffed behind broom cupboards. What she discovered was a country of extreme contrasts. For, in spite of the searing memory of the General Strike of 1926, the ongoing deep recession and ever-increasing unemployment, some parts of the economy were booming. Since the cost of living was falling, those who were actually in work enjoyed increased spending power. Before the First World War, 90 per cent of the population had rented their homes; but now that mortgage regulations had been loosened and planning laws relaxed, private developers had begun building new suburbs, serviced by extensive rail networks, the ‘Metro-land’ of John Betjeman. With optimism, young families were moving out of old urban housing stock, some of it slums, into new semi-detached homes with gardens. The new homes demanded a new type of owner, and so the twentieth-century suburban housewife was born.