Shopgirls (35 page)

Two sets of identical twins, (left to right) Michelle Hellier, Nicole Hellier, Susy Young and Rosie Young, who worked as shopgirls at Biba, Kensington, west London. Photographed in September 1966.

‘This is your Company’, from the first pictorial style Annual Report produced by Woolworths, distributed to employees and shareholders, March 1958.

Many wonderful people made this book possible. Lauren Bennie is a tenacious and talented researcher and we owe her a very great deal. We would like to thank those who believed in the idea from its inception, especially Sarah Rigby, Georgina Capel, Anita Land, Julian Alexander, Liz Warner, Lisette Black and Walter Iuzzolino. The book accompanies a BBC Two series made by betty and we are also indebted to all those who shaped each of the three episodes and lifted this story to the screen.

Lise Shapiro Sanders’ book on shopgirls inspired us from the start. Anna Davin very generously shared her thoughts and research notes on nineteenth-century life and gave us many early leads. Many other academics shared valuable ideas, including Geoffrey Crossick, Leonore Davidoff, Peter Gurney, Sean Nixon, Lynne Pettinger, Laura Ugolini, Amanda Wilkinson and Mike Winstanley.

A host of archivists and curators helped us to unearth the experiences of shopworkers from within their amazing collections. In particular we’d like to thank Laura Outterside (Sainsbury’s), Hannah Jenkinson (Marks & Spencer), Judy Faraday (John Lewis Partnership), Sebastian Wormell (Harrods), Janet Foster (Selfridges), Jane Holt (London College of Fashion), Celia Joicey (Fashion & Textile Museum) and Polly Russell (British Library, Social Sciences) for their time, expertise and enthusiasm.

Our book research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (with particular thanks to Bruce Jackson) and the University of Essex. Our editor at Hutchinson, Sarah Rigby, kept us to a tight schedule and offered incisive comment and tireless support throughout. The British Library was a working haven, providing obscure texts, musical scores, digitized newspapers, a calm space and great cake.

Personal thanks from Annabel Hobley

I would like to thank the circle of support that has helped me with my children and home during the creation of this book and TV series, particularly wonderful grandparents John Hobley and Frances and Stephen O’Malley, and also Julia Frommhold. Also part of the circle are Emma Benson, Christopher Hobley and Rahila Hobley, Nicholas Hobley and Roberta Natalucci, Edward O’Malley, Frederike Helwig, Gordon Scott, Marie Hiller and Gloria Curpan. I have been inspired in her intellectual rigour by my mother, Uta von Tschurtschenthaler-Hobley – tragically no longer with us – and by my father, John Hobley, in his fascination for the minutiae of business, local history and working lives. Very special love and thanks to my husband, Thomas O’Malley, for his constant love and support, for his belief in me and for teaching me how to shop.

Personal thanks from Pamela Cox

Huge thanks and much love, as ever, to everyone who has kept me smiling and kept the domestic show on the road over the past year, especially my partner and trusted critic, Bill Hayton, and our children, Tess and Patrick Hayton; my sisters, Gill Knight and Alison Johnson; my parents, Allan and Maureen Cox; my parents-in-law, Alec and Pat Hayton, and my colleagues and friends at the University of Essex.

  
1
.  ‘Romantic Freak of a Glasgow Girl of Sixteen’,
Glasgow Daily Herald
, 20 July 1861.

  
2
.  Hudson, Derek, ed.,
Man of Two Worlds: The Life and Diaries of Arthur J. Munby, 1828
–
1910
, London: John Murray, 1972, vol. 8, 2 June 1861, pp.192–204.

  
3
.  
Victorian Townscape: The Work of Samuel Smith
, compiled by Michael Millward and Brian Coe, London: Ward Lock, 1974.

  
4
.  Geoffrey Crossick, social historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain and Europe: research conversation with Pamela Cox.

  
5
.  John Copeman & Sons,
Copeman’s of Norwich 1879–1946
, Norwich: Jarrold & Sons, 1946, p.23.

  
6
.  Lee Holcombe,
Victorian Ladies at Work: Middle-Class Working Women in England and Wales, 1850–1914
, Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1973, p.104.

  
7
.  John Tallis,
London Street Views 1838–40
and
1847
, London: London Topographical Society, 1969.

  
8
.  Francis Wey,
Les Anglais Chez Eux
(
A Frenchman Sees the English in the Fifties
), London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1935.

  
9
.  Lady Jeune, ‘The Ethics of Shopping’,
Fortnightly Review
, vol. 63, January 1895, p.123.

10
.  Ibid., p.124.

11
.  William Ablett,
Reminiscences of an Old Draper
, London: S. Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1876, p.9.

12
.  Lise Shapiro Sanders,
Consuming Fantasies: Labor, Leisure, and the London Shopgirl, 1880 –1920
, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006, p.24.

13
.  Obituary of Jessie Boucherett,
The Times
, 21 October 1905.

14
.  ‘Association for Promoting the Employment of Women’,
English Woman’s Journal
, vol. 4, September 1859, p.57.

15
.  Ibid.

16
.  Ibid., p.56.

17
.  ‘On the Obstacles to the Employment of Women’,
English Woman’s Journal
, vol. 4, February 1860.

18
.  Simon Gunn and Rachel Bell,
Middle Classes: Their Rise and Sprawl
, London: Phoenix, 2003, p.18.

19
.  Quoted in Holcombe,
Victorian Ladies at Work
, p.4.

20
.  Thomas Austin Bullock,
Bradshaw’s Descriptive Guide to Manchester & Surrounding Districts
, Manchester: Bradshaw & Blacklock, 1857, p.57.

21
.  For extended discussion, see Erica Rappaport, ‘“The Hall of Temptation”: Gender, Politics and the Construction of the Department Store in Late Victorian London’,
Journal of British Studies
, vol. 35, no. 1, January 1996, pp.62–4.

22
.  ‘Success in Business: How the Late Mr Whiteley Made his Fortune’,
The Daily Chronicle
, 25 January 1907.

23
.  Linda Stratmann,
Whiteley’s Folly: The Life and Death of a Salesman
, Stroud: Sutton, 2004, p.25.

24
.  
London Magazine
, vol. 9, September/October 1902, pp.189–92.

25
.  ‘A Commercial Eutopia’,
Essex Weekly News
, 3 November 1876.

26
.  Rappaport, ‘The Hall of Temptation’,
Journal of British Studies
, vol. 35, pp.58–83.

27
.  Robert Storch (ed.),
Popular Culture and Custom in Nineteenth-Century England
, London: Croom Helm, 1982, p.74.

28
.  
Bayswater Chronicle
, 11 November 1876 (known as the
Paddington, Kensington, and Bayswater Chronicle
until 1875).

29
.  ‘More Whiteleyana! Cheap Meat!’,
Bayswater Chronicle
, 10 March 1877.

30
.  ‘Local Gossip’,
Bayswater Chronicle
, 26 March 1881.

31
.  Harrods,
A Story of British Achievement: 1849 –1949
, London: Harrods, 1949; and Bill Lancaster,
The Department Store: A Social History
, London: Leicester University Press, 1995, p.22.

32
.  Lancaster,
The Department Store
, p.195.

33
.  Holcombe,
Victorian Ladies at Work
, p.104.

34
.  Hudson,
Man of Two Worlds
, vol. 12, 22 February 1862, p.142.

35
.  Ibid, vol. 8, 2 June 1861, pp.192–204.

36
.  Hudson,
Man of Two Worlds
, vol. 8, 2 June 1861, pp.192–204.

37
.  Thomas Darlington (ed.),
Memoir of Emerson Muschamp Bainbridge of Newcastle-on-Tyne
, Edinburgh: R & R Clark, 1893, pp.15–16.

38
.  Lancaster,
The Department Store
, p.181.

39
.  1882 [C 3183] Report of the Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops to Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for the Home Department, for the year ending 31st October 1881, p.35.

40
.  Peter Sell and Gina Murrell,
Flora of Great Britain and Ireland
, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, vol. 4, p.78.

41
.  Lancaster,
The Department Store
, p.31.

42
.  Christopher Hosgood, ‘“Mercantile Monasteries”: Shops, Shop Assistants, and Shop Life in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain’,
Journal of British Studies
, vol. 38, no. 3, July 1999, pp.324–5.

43
.  
The Drapers Record
(26 Nov. 1875, 1 Feb. 1878, 8 Feb. 1878), quoted in Hosgood, ‘Mercantile Monasteries’, p.345.

44
.  ‘Life Behind the Counter’,
Young Woman
, January 1893, p.128.

45
.  Hudson,
Man of Two Worlds
, vol. 8, 2 June 1861, pp.192–204.

46
.  ‘Women Who Work Behind a Counter’,
Cassell’s Magazine
, vol. 9, 1874, p.349–51.

47
.  Hudson,
Man of Two Worlds
, vol. 12, 22 February 1862, p.142.

48
.  
City Press
, 20 August 1870.

49
.  Holcombe,
Victorian Ladies at Work
, pp.18, 106: between 1861 and 1911 the number of female shopworkers increased by 319 per cent, the number of male shopworkers by 118 per cent.

50
.  Jeune, ‘The Ethics of Shopping’,
Fortnightly Review
, vol. 63, p.126.

51
.  Holcombe,
Victorian Ladies at Work
, p.107.

52
.  Miss Fowle, March 1921, miscellaneous unmarked box of short histories at Harrods Store Archive, quoted in Erika Rappaport,
Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End
, Chichester: Princeton University Press, 2000, p.201.

53
.  ‘Miss Fowle’,
Harrodian Gazette
, vol. 3, no. 6, 4 June 1915, pp.14–15.

  
1
.  Margaret Bondfield,
A Life’s Work
, London: Hutchinson & Co., 1948, p.24.

  
2
.  John Benson,
The Working Class in Britain 1850 –1939
, London: Longman, 1989, p.24; Elizabeth Roberts,
Women’s Work 1840 –1940
, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988, p.34; 1891 census report for England and Wales.

  
3
.  William Ablett,
Reminiscences of an Old Draper
, London: S. Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1876.

  
4
.  Bill Lancaster,
The Department Store: A Social History
, Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1995, p.126.

  
5
.  Miss Fowle, March 1921, miscellaneous unmarked box of short histories at Harrods Store Archive, quoted in Erika Rappaport,
Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End
, Chichester: Princeton University Press, 2000, p.201.

  
6
.  Anna Davin, ‘City Girls: Young Women, New Employment, and the City: London, 1880 –1910’, in Mary Jo Maynes, Birgitte Soland and Christina Benninghaus (eds.),
Secret Gardens, Satanic Mills: Placing Girls in European History, 1750 –1960
, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.

  
7
.  Lee Holcombe,
Victorian Ladies at Work: Middle-Class Working Women in England and Wales, 1850 –1914
, Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1973, p.114.

  
8
.  Lancaster,
The Department Store
, pp.130–1; Jan Whitaker,
The Department Store: History, Design
,
Display
, London: Thames & Hudson, 2011, p.31.