Shopgirls (4 page)

‘Caste’ is a strong word to use; to our modern ears it is associated more with Indian social hierarchies than British ones. However, this particular concern over losing caste was very real, and specific to the middle classes of Victorian Britain. What is actually meant by ‘middle class’ is hotly debated even today; but by the 1850s a named and identified category of people had emerged, of manufacturers, merchants and professionals, distinct from the aristocracy on the one hand and the working classes on the other. The term ‘middle class’ had come into use in the first half of the nineteenth century, taking over from ‘middle ranks’ or ‘the middling sort’. By mid century the middle classes were defined politically, religiously and culturally; they were typically moderate reformers, Nonconformists, and with a belief in the importance of cosy domesticity, hearth and home.
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And they were the most direct beneficiaries of the wealth of the Industrial Revolution.

One result of this increasing wealth was a complete redefinition of the role and duties of the middle-class lady of the house. Daily work such as spinning, weaving, preparing food and even childcare fell away. The new money paid for servants to take up the chores and childcare inside the home; and it paid for dressmaking and goods to be purchased outside the home. Indeed, for women in this category, work came to be seen as demeaning. ‘Respectability’ was central to the social codes governing middle-class life in the mid century, and respectability for middle-class women, married or unmarried, meant a life of leisure. The phrase ‘working lady’ had rapidly become a contradiction in terms. One woman observed acutely, ‘A lady, to be sure, must be a mere lady and nothing else. She must not work for profit or engage in any occupation that money can command.’
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‘A mere lady’ had her world strictly defined: her place was inside the home, the private realm, with her vocation being marriage, motherhood and managing her household, including her servants. Large parts of public life were closed off to her; she was not to go out without a suitable chaperone, including for social visits or shopping. Under such social strictures, it was no wonder that gentlewomen forced by circumstance to ‘work for profit’ were seen to be lower caste. They were pitied: women who worked as governesses or teachers were often described as ‘distressed’ or ‘decayed’ and a great deal of charitable effort went into helping them. Harriet Martineau herself, who lived from her writings, had been expressly forbidden as a girl by her mother ever to be seen in public holding a pen. Needlework yes, penwork no.

Martineau and Boucherett’s exhortation that middle-class women discard such social anxieties was heard by the political and cultural elite. The engine of change that broke down prejudice, however, came from elsewhere. Surprisingly maybe, the shift was generated by shopkeepers themselves. For in this economic boom time, they were in dire need of more staff. Not only was the number of shops on the increase, but new types of shops were emerging, including co-operative retail societies, ‘multiples’, which were later called by the American term of ‘chain store’, and the first department stores – though they were never known as such in the nineteenth century. Nelson Foster in Wisbech in 1851 had been reading the runes – his store was already a draper’s and grocer’s combined – but many other small-scale traders lost out in this new era, forced to close down or simply engulfed by the new, larger-scale stores.

The visionaries, those entrepreneurs who grasped the new opportunities, were men like Messrs Kendal, Milne and Faulkner in Manchester and the flamboyant chancer Mr Whiteley in London. All four had served apprenticeships and all four went on to fulfil the apprentice’s dream by setting up their own businesses.

Manchester then was not simply a hothouse of production, the world’s first and greatest industrial city – ‘Cottonopolis’ and ‘Warehouse City’ as it was dubbed in newspapers and novels. It was also a centre of consumption: with its intercity railway and horse-drawn omnibuses criss-crossing the city from its heart to its suburbs, half a million people could now easily access Manchester’s city centre. Deansgate was a crowded shopping street, catering both to its poorer working-class residents, with pubs and raucous food markets, as well as to a richer clientele who patronised the specialist traders. Kendal, Milne and Faulkner, all trained up in textiles, had worked together in Watts Bazaar when they decided to set up shop together as a drapery on Deansgate in the 1830s. By the middle of the century, they were calling themselves ‘General drapers, silk mercers, &c., the Bazaar’. Then the expansion began: first they absorbed the two shops next door, an eating house and a hosiery business, under their banner. Then they took on more lines of goods, including upholstery, furniture, carpets and mourning outfits. Then
Bradshaw’s Descriptive Guide to Manchester & Surrounding Districts
in 1857 recorded the effect of a new extension, admiringly describing its elegant Italian-style architecture as ‘no inconsiderable addition to the street embellishment of the city’.
Bradshaw’s
lists the four entrances giving access to this vast block. ‘We believe it is one of the largest drapery establishments in England. It is, indeed, of leviathan dimensions.’
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Leviathan indeed.
Bradshaw’s Guide
even provided a lovely little illustration of the enlarged store, showing horses, carts and busy shoppers outside. Not only was Kendal, Milne & Faulkner now one of the most extensive emporia in Manchester, it was one of the most expensive too. It easily equalled the largest stores in London in terms of its size and the quality and range of goods on offer. What it did not offer, however, was notoriety. This was being provided in spades by fellow draper William Whiteley in Bayswater, west London.

William Whiteley started out quite humbly in Wakefield, serving seven years as an apprentice draper, but he had no plans to stick around the Yorkshire market town. Aged nineteen, he went down to London to visit the Great Exhibition of 1851 in the specially built Crystal Palace, and later claimed that the
Works of Industry of All Nations
, particularly the trophy displays of arts, raw materials from the colonies and working machinery, inspired in him a vision of a truly modern department store. Released from his indenture in 1855, he returned to the capital, landing jobs in London’s drapers’ and haberdashers’ and managing to save the £700 needed for his first premises.

1863 was an auspicious year to open up in Bayswater. This area of west London had been a lower-class residential neighbourhood until the aristocracy built mansions overlooking Hyde Park; in mid century, developers began to construct middle-class terraces and squares nearby. Then, on 10 January 1863, the Metropolitan Underground Railway was opened – the Tube, the world’s first underground railway. It directly linked the area with the City, using steam locomotives to haul its gaslit wooden carriages from Paddington Junction to Farringdon, and was a significant incentive for prosperous middle-class families. As were the puff pieces in
The Landlord’s and Tenant’s Guide
, describing the area’s ‘detached family mansions, stately gentlemen’s residences, and villas, with large gardens and lawns in front and at the rear’.
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For shopkeepers, it was risky to trust this seeming gentrification. Bayswater was still bordered by slums and working-class neighbourhoods and the main thoroughfare, Westbourne Grove, was dubbed ‘Bankruptcy Avenue’ because shops came and went so frequently. Many had been set up by assistants who dreamt of having their own businesses – and those dreams were dashed more often than not. Whiteley even described it as ‘the worst business street in London’.
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Nevertheless, attracted by the low rent, the adventurous still tried their luck and soon the Grove was lined with milliners’ shops, drapers’, grocers’, tobacconists’, ironmongers’ and house agents. Bayswater was on the brink of a social and commercial face-lift, and Whiteley’s Haberdasher’s at 31 Westbourne Grove was to be the driving force behind this.

‘What an ordeal it was for a young girl!’ exclaimed Harriet Sarah Hill years later, describing the very first exhausting years as one of Whiteley’s first two shopgirls when the business was still young. ‘We lived at the top of the house … and how well I can remember times without number sitting on the bottom stair holding a candle while he put up the shutters at night. Sometimes I could barely keep my eyes open, I was so tired.’
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Still, those first years can’t have been completely joyless, for Whiteley had his eye on this particular assistant from the start: Harriet and William were married four years later with Harriet giving birth two months after their wedding. ‘I was a good wife to him. How I worked for the man, slaved for him,’ Harriet Whiteley recalled. ‘My husband was always fond of a special custard which I would make for him with my own hands. If anyone else made it he wouldn’t eat it.’ Yet their marriage was not to be a happy one: its dramas hit the headlines again and again over the next thirty years, and its end would be both tragic and obscure.

In the early years of their marriage, Whiteley was very much focused on building his business. Some years later he wrote a bombastic article in the
London Magazine
, entitled ‘How to Succeed as a Shopkeeper’, with practical tips for ‘earnest young fellows’ going into business, typed up in handy boxes.
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Don’t disappoint your customers.

Supply the best goods at the lowest possible prices.

Keep cool and don’t lose your temper.

He stated that within a year of opening, he had increased his staff from two to sixteen young women, plus two errand boys. The article was accompanied by a photograph that showed the exterior of the store filling an entire block, with an arrow pointing to one particular shop window. ‘The small blank window represents Mr Whiteley’s first shop, from which his great business has grown.’ They were heady early days.

His article also explained how he came to be known as the U.P., the Universal Provider, who could and did answer his customers’ every need, from the most mundane to the most curious, from birth to the grave – literally, as Whiteley’s had a mourning department selling the most subtle gradations of mourning attire, from faintest mauve-coloured ribbons merely hinting at sorrow, to deepest black cloaks denoting inconsolable grief.

Of course, it was the absurd requests from Whiteley’s customers, loudly advertised by the proprietor, that stuck in the public’s imagination: elephants, second-hand coffins, even wives. ‘Execute it, of course!’ was Whiteley’s response when his staff told him of an order for a pint of live fleas – or so Whiteley claimed. His story goes that he contacted the superintendent of London Zoo and a certain Mr Jamrach, wild beast dealer, requesting them to comb through their monkeys’ fur and send through the proceeds. By the evening a pint jar of live fleas was safely delivered to the troublesome customer.

The store grew at a prodigious rate, swallowing up nos. 31, 33, 35, 37, 39, 41, 43, 45, 47, 49, 51, 53 and 14A Westbourne Grove, as well as nos. 147 and 149 Queen’s Road (now Queensway) over the next decade. The
Essex Weekly News
reported admiringly on the colossus, calling the store ‘this busy hive’ and noting it took fifty people simply to open each morning’s post, which averaged a couple of thousand communications and requests – home deliveries of course being de rigeur in this period.
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Where Harriet Hill and her fellow shopgirl had once been the only staff, there was now an army of two thousand living on the premises, with thousands more living off site. ‘There is a good deal of fun to be got out of business,’ Whiteley admitted.

However, Whiteley’s rapacious acquisitions had destroyed, or at least threatened, the livelihoods of his neighbouring shopkeepers on Westbourne Grove. On Guy Fawkes Day 1876, just two days after the sycophantic article in the
Essex Weekly News
was published, they were out to get him. At lunchtime an angry, raucous parade of shopkeepers marched along Westbourne Grove in a traditional Guy Fawkes procession, making a hideous racket by banging cleavers against marrow bones. At the head of the parade was a gigantic effigy, kitted out as a draper in a conventional frock coat. It was modelled on Mr Whiteley, as was clear to all passers-by. He held a handkerchief in one hand and – here lies the controversy – a piece of beef in the other. The paraders marched Whiteley’s effigy into Portobello Road, then ceremoniously burnt it on a bonfire.
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It was not unusual in Victorian Britain to be so direct and public about a hated local figure: female scolds, wife-beaters and unscrupulous tradesmen were often targeted.
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The next day the local paper shed light on the reasons for the retailers’ anger, under the headline ‘Wholescale Butchery in Bayswater – the Victims’. One victim complained he had witnessed ‘a startling succession of feats in the art of shutting up your neighbour’s shop and driving him elsewhere, but this last daring and audacious feat – this vending of meat and greens as well as silk and satins – overtops them all’.
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It was this combination of handkerchiefs and beef, of selling drapery and foodstuffs, that was beyond the pale for the other shopkeepers in the vicinity. The Guy Fawkes protest was the culmination of four years of pitched battles that had begun when Whiteley had tried to get a liquor licence for a small refreshment room; he had since gone on to open an estate agency and a cleaning and dyeing service, all on the premises.

Whiteley was a complex figure, a man of vision and chutzpah, self-belief and arrogance. He was pushing the boundaries of traditional retail, challenging the conventions of specialist trading – and with great success. Customers poured into his store, eager to open their purses, dismissive of other retailers’ opposition to the Universal Provider. Whiteley was in the process of fundamentally reshaping the shopping experience for British men and women – as well as for the shopgirls that served them.