Authors: Pamela Cox
Like the clergyman, Clementina Black believed that the answer lay in paying a living wage: ‘Only by setting a barrier to the downward trend of wages can we hope to remedy that kind of poverty which is produced not by the vice, the drunkenness or the idleness of the sufferers but by their industry, patience and abstinence.’ In her view, this barrier needed to ‘take the shape, as in trade union action it does, of a minimum wage; but, for the unorganised, the minimum wage must be enforceable by law’.
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She wanted the rates to be set by new ‘trade boards’, each serving a specific industry. These would be based on a successful Australian model, much debated by Edwardian politicians, where employers and workers’ representatives would sit down together to agree fair wage scales and working conditions.
Trade boards duly took off. They were strongly promoted by a young Winston Churchill, then president of the Board of Trade and working alongside Chancellor Lloyd George in Asquith’s radical Liberal government. Vociferous in most matters, Churchill held characteristically firm views on the minimum wage, declaring it a ‘national evil that any class of Her Majesty’s subjects should receive less than a living wage in return for their utmost exertions’. Without it, and especially in the sweated trades, he warned that ‘the good employer is undercut by the bad and the bad by the worst’ and that ‘where these conditions prevail you have not a condition of progress, but a condition of progressive degeneration’.
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Unfortunately for shopworkers, it proved more difficult to set up trade boards for retailers because their shops were just so diverse, ranging from the tiny tobacconist’s kiosk to the family corner shop to the huge department store. But all was not lost. The drive for a minimum wage for shop assistants – or, at least, male assistants – was first led by the co-op union. In 1907, the Amalgamated Union of Co-op Employees started a campaign on the issue and within three years, five hundred local co-op societies had agreed to implement minimum wage scales for men. But only eight had agreed to do so for women. The Women’s Co-operative Guild was having none of it. They insisted that women’s pay be placed on the table too. A new round of Guild investigations, building on those conducted by Lilian Harris in the 1890s, revealed a woeful picture which shamed an organisation that prided itself on its fairness. A manageress in one Co-op store that took £400 per week earned just thirteen shillings a week herself. A twenty-year-old female assistant with three years’ experience was taking home just eight shillings a week, having started out on a paltry five shillings.
Led by Margaret Llewelyn Davies, the Guild kept up the pressure in one of the most important of its many projects. She put it to the men at the top of the co-op that an adult woman such as the store manageress simply couldn’t survive on thirteen shillings a week. Another Guild member, Mrs Wimshurst from Lewes, put it another way at her local district conference in 1909. The co-op movement ‘ought not to make it compulsory for girls to marry if they did not want to’, she said, adding that girls ‘were often compelled to marry because the wages they received were so low that they felt compelled to accept the first offer from a decent man’. The Lewes delegates, almost all of them wives themselves, laughed heartily at this while resolving to win greater independence for their daughters and granddaughters. Their efforts paid off. By 1911, sixty local societies had established new minimum wage rates for women, and two years on, 250 had done so.
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This was a pivotal moment. Most trade unions were still unsettled by the very idea of self-supporting women and the threat they posed to the male breadwinner wage. The Women’s Guild was helping to change their minds.
Inspired by the co-op’s example, the shop assistants’ union embarked on a new battle for a minimum wage while stepping up its old battle against living-in. The two issues were inseparable. As long as they were required to live in, assistants would never be paid a living wage. But at what level should that wage be set in the sprawling and diverse world of shops? Union official Philip Hoffman wrote that early investigations to establish who was being paid what revealed ‘an utterly confused and anarchic state of affairs’.
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The union’s effort to cut through the confusion came in the form of a modest green booklet published in 1910, which set out a new list of suggested minimum rates, organised by trade and location. A London grocer would pay more than a provincial grocer but less than a London draper, for example. The rates would also vary according to age and experience, typically with pay rises when staff reached seventeen, twenty-one and twenty-eight years of age. Predictably, the proposed new system preserved an old tradition: men were still to earn more than women at every level, although women’s rates would be raised.
Having agreed their preferred wage floors, the union now faced an uphill struggle to persuade shopkeepers to adopt them. Hoffman was in the front line. He criss-crossed the country, visiting store after store, persuading assistants to stand firm until their demands were met. His first victory was at Staffordshire draper’s McIlroy’s of Hanley in 1911. Its staff of eighty-four, mostly young women and almost all living in, were paid between two and eight shillings a week. With the new and momentous agreement in place, their pay more than doubled. Those under twenty-one now earned 7s 6d and those over twenty-one earned seventeen shillings. They now had to meet their own living costs, but most were all too happy to do so, much preferring to have their own money in their own pocket. News soon spread across town and a group of assistants at a rival Hanley draper’s, Teeton’s, walked out on strike in an effort to win a similar deal. The strike lasted two weeks and was described by Hoffman as ‘very bitter’ because some staff refused to join, claiming that they were ‘perfectly satisfied with their wages’. The strikers prevailed. Teeton’s matched McIlroy’s minimum wages.
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Spurred by the gathering momentum, Hoffman sped down to south Wales, where dissent was growing, especially in drapery. In Llanelly, he worked with the assistants of David Evans to abolish living-in. Moving on to Merthyr Tydfil, he helped organise a strike at Roger Edwards and Co. It quickly snowballed, becoming the focal point of a much bigger debate and culminating in a ‘huge procession through town, with bands and banners looking gay and splendid in the sunshine’. The procession was bound for the local football ground, where the crowd was addressed from the grandstand by the local MP. It helped, of course, that the MP was Keir Hardie, a giant of the Labour Party and its leader until 1908. Hardie also ran a radical newspaper,
The Pioneer
, which devoted generous column inches to the cause. The whole affair had mixed results for Hoffman himself, however. Vilified by the town’s shopocracy as ‘that bloody German’, he was successfully sued for libel by incensed octogenarian Mr Edwards, who took issue with
The Pioneer
’s reporting of the case. Financially ruined, but undeterred, Hoffman found love in Merthyr, marrying one of Edwards’ striking young shopgirls, a Miss Morgan. Edwards stood his ground, but not for long. Within a few months, Hoffman was able to claim that living-in had now been ‘almost swept away from south Wales’.
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Momentous as these events were, the reality was that a minimum wage was not an equal wage. It was still the norm for young female employees – across all industries – to leave paid work when they married and this was a significant factor behind the holding down of all women’s wages. And although groups like the Women’s Cooperative Guild and the Women’s Industrial Council were remarkably effective, their members were still denied the vote and, with it, access to the kind of political power that would force further change. By the 1910s, suffrage campaigns to change all that had been running for nearly fifty years. From the late 1890s, the movement had been led by Millicent Garrett Fawcett’s National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), a group more commonly known as the ‘suffragists’, who favoured peaceful and patient lobbying. But in 1903 a more militant group – the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) – was formed by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters. Dubbed ‘suffragettes’, initially by a mocking
Daily Mail
, they believed that the time for talking was over and began taking direct action. They called their new campaign ‘Deeds not Words’. By chaining themselves to railings, setting fire to pillar boxes and burning down public buildings and the empty homes of politicians, the suffragettes courted arrest and publicity. Many of those imprisoned as a result used hunger strikes to protest against their being classified as criminals rather than political prisoners.
Though their actions shocked many, public support for the principle of votes for women was strong, particularly from the middle classes, but also reaching across the social scale. Early documentary film shows local suffragist groups being cheered as they paraded through the streets, often as part of traditional fundraising, May Day and Whitsuntide processions. In Crewe, for example, they marched as part of a pageant to raise money for the local hospital, behind stilt-walkers, marching bands, a harlequin parade and a fencing display.
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Canny shopkeepers had long realised that they could cash in on this public support and an extremely beneficial two-way relationship between shopkeepers and suffrage activists had evolved, making them rather cosy, if unusual, bedfellows. Many store owners profited from selling suffragist fashions and merchandise but, more significantly, they also paid to advertise in the suffragist press, all too aware that this gave them access to affluent, influential middle-class consumers. Journals and magazines like
The Vote, The Suffragette
and
Votes for Women
regularly carried adverts from stores such as Swan & Edgar, Burberry’s, Derry & Toms, Selfridges and many more. This generated vital revenue for suffrage campaigners, who repaid the favour in order to secure it.
The Vote
explicitly called out to its readers to ‘support those advertisers who support us’, and each journal published ‘shopping guides’, effectively lists of stores advertising with them, encouraging its readers to shop there. This in turn directly influenced the fashions of the time.
Votes for Women
proudly claimed that their suffragette colours were
en vogue
for the autumn season: ‘Almost every shop window is showing purple hats and green hats, purple ties and green ties, purple cloth gowns and green cloth gowns in endless variety.’
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Displays of shoes in the windows of Lilley and Skinner were intertwined with suffragette ribbons. At Peter Robinson’s, you could buy white walking costumes designed especially for parades and demonstrations.
At the newly opened Selfridges on Oxford Street, support didn’t stop at hats, ties and walking outfits. Indeed, Harry Gordon Selfridge paid for the publication of the
Suffrage Annual Who’s Who
, which lambasted the traditional
Who’s Who
for excluding scores of high-achieving women.
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His in-store theatre group, the Selfridge Players, performed a play called
The Suffragette
in the West End. Selfridge also allowed his own shopgirls to declare their support for the cause, at a time when many felt they had to hide their political allegiances from their proprietors. It’s not clear how many of Britain’s 366,000 shopgirls – now constituting the third-largest group of female workers, after domestic servants and factory workers – were active suffrage supporters. Certainly, the movement tried to reach out to them. The Cambridge Women’s Suffrage Association opened a committee room and shop in Benet Street, and organised a young people’s suffrage society with drawing-room meetings and garden parties aimed at shop assistants and elementary-school teachers. The Bristol NUWSS held joint events with the Women’s Co-operative Guild and the shop assistants union. The Birmingham WSPU appointed Nell Kenney as their organiser. Nell and her older sister Annie were among the most prominent working-class women in the movement. Both had worked in textile mills and Nell had also worked as a shop assistant. In a November 1907 report for
Votes for Women
, she wrote, ‘I am visiting most of the influential people in Birmingham and surrounding districts’. Like other groups, hers was also holding frequent drawing-room, open-air and factory-gate meetings, as well as addressing different religious groups and women’s co-operative guilds.
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Intriguingly, the Pankhurst family themselves had twenty years of personal experience of shopkeeping. Partly in order to finance their political activities, Emmeline Pankhurst had run fancy-goods shops selling enamelled photo frames, milking stools and art furniture on the Hampstead Road in London, and then at 30 King Street in Manchester. She had dragged in her sister and later her daughters Christabel and Sylvia to help her; none of them liked shopwork. As Christabel later wrote, ‘Sylvia’s artistic gift might adapt her better than me to some phases of the undertaking, especially as her task was mainly to design and paint in a studio, but she, too, was not born for business’.
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In spite of this personal experience of the daily challenges of shopwork and running a small business, and efforts by the wider movement to attract their support, the Pankhursts showed little interest in fighting for shopgirls to be included in the vote. This was a tactical move. Both suffragettes and suffragists were arguing for women to be enfranchised on the same terms as men as set down by the 1884 Reform Act. The Act had extended the vote to adult men who were householders or renting lodgings to the value of £10 a year. This excluded an estimated 40 per cent of British men, including most male shop assistants. Women suffrage campaigners passionately believed that only by demanding that the existing law be extended to include women would they have any hope of smuggling their Bill through Parliament; they knew that thousands would be excluded as a consequence.
Since the vast majority of shopgirls were young and had no hope of meeting the property threshold, they would certainly be excluded. Margaret Bondfield was unimpressed and drove a characteristically hard bargain. She was neither a suffragist nor a suffragette – not because she didn’t support the cause but because she believed it didn’t go far enough. Having moved on from the shop assistants union, she was now chair of the Adult Suffrage Society. Ahead of its time, this Society demanded that the vote be extended to
all
adults regardless of wealth or property. She felt that the suffragettes were selling out the working classes – men and women alike – and went head-to-head with them in a public debate. Sylvia Pankhurst watched her in action, describing her lyrically if rather waspishly: ‘Miss Bondfield appeared in pink, dark and dark-eyed with a deep, throaty voice which many found beautiful.’ But she didn’t engage, on that occasion at least, with Bondfield’s broader argument that the women’s vote should simply be part of a much more radical move towards universal suffrage for men and women of all ages and classes, including shopgirls. Instead, Pankhurst belittled her line, stating that ‘Miss Bondfield deprecated votes for women as the hobby of disappointed old maids whom no one had wanted to marry’.
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