Authors: Pamela Cox
His own shopgirl, Harriet, however, suffered. The police had warned the whole family – they had four young children by now – not to go out at night, and Harriet frequently received threatening letters warning her to expect her husband’s sudden death. That November was indeed a pivotal moment for the Whiteley family, and not just in reputational terms. The store’s profits for 1876 were an astonishing £66,000; yet for the next decade they would only decrease. Britain had hit a recession, caused by over-production at home and decreasing exports and protectionism abroad. In order to weather it, stores all around the country had to sharpen up their act, or go down.
By the spring of 1877, the outcry against the Universal Provider had, according to the
Bayswater Chronicle
, died away, partly because ‘Mr Whiteley’s “Cheap meat” sensation’ had ‘drawn more people to Westbourne Grove, and made the place a better mart than ever’.
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However, it was not simply the whiff of a scandal that had lured customers into the area. The shopkeepers that had not been driven out by Whiteley had upped their own games, offering bargains, sprucing up their interiors and focusing more on enticing window displays. One of them was quoted as saying that Whiteley was ‘better for all of us. He makes Bayswater a grand market for all of us except the old-fashioned.’
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And this was not simply a local phenomenon. One of the principal national responses to the recession was to try to enlarge the home market for consumer goods: shopkeepers were looking for new customers and bigger sales. In the decade that followed, Whiteley’s multi-department store no longer looked so unusual. All over the country, shops and co-operatives were expanding into larger emporia. The iconic stores that we know and love today were taking a recognisable shape: Jenners of Edinburgh and Bennetts of Derby, Austins in Derry and Allders in Croydon, Debenhams, and Fraser Sons & Co., later renamed House of Fraser.
It was a change felt not only in the commercial and industrial hubs, but in rural market towns and seaside resorts, in northern industrial suburbs and provincial capitals. And there was a certain grocer’s in central London that was fast growing into what would, in time, become the most famous department store in the world: Harrods. At this point Harrods was but a minnow in comparison to great factory-style stores like Whiteley’s. Unlike most of the department-store proprietors, with their backgrounds in the drapery trade, Henry Charles Harrod had started off running a handful of groceries. He first opened his grocer’s at the famous location in Knightsbridge, west London, in 1851, with just one room, two assistants and a messenger boy. The area was dominated by the Knightsbridge Barracks and had had a notorious reputation, but after the Great Exhibition of 1851 across the road in Hyde Park, it started to improve rapidly. Harrods rode the wave of gentrification, so that by the late 1870s it was a smart store with food, perfumery, stationery and flower departments, employing around one hundred shop assistants.
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The need for staff was great. Even though the vast majority of shops in Britain were still single traders or smaller establishments employing just a handful of assistants – the emerging department stores still represented less than 1 per cent of retail trade
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– the actual number of shops was increasing exponentially all over the country. In 1875 there were just under 300,000 shops; it is estimated that over the next thirty years this number doubled.
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No wonder the local papers were full of advertisements for shopworkers. And the main reason why proprietors were recruiting ‘Young Female Shop Assistants’? Not only were there thousands of ‘superfluous women’ in need of work, as highlighted by the census and the Langham Ladies, but these women came cheap – they were significantly less expensive to employ than the men. A shopgirl in the 1870s received two thirds or even just half of the salary of a young male assistant. Typically in this period a shopgirl might receive £25 a year, while her male counterpart would take home £40. It was this single factor that galvanised the shopocracy into fighting against all the other bars to employing women in shops. The concerns about respectability and gentility; the worries that women weren’t physically strong enough or professional enough to work on the shopfloor, these all went out the window as soon as the monetary benefits became clear. In this regard, these male shopkeepers had become the unlikely allies of the early feminists.
However, it is difficult to get a clear picture of shop salaries, even among women workers, because of the large number of factors involved. Shopgirls’ pay depended on the status and location of the shop – a London Regent Street store offered substantially more than Nelson Foster’s in Wisbech. Wages also reflected each shop assistant’s exact role within the store, from apprentice to junior assistant, from senior assistant to floorwalker. In addition, shop assistants often received commissions on sales, but employers usually deducted fines at source. For example, Eliza Close, the young woman interviewed by Arthur Munby in Hyde Park, received less than £20 a year, plus board and lodging. Munby, with his eagle eye for detail, noted in his diary the effect the differing salary grades had on women and the clothes they wore when walking through London on a Saturday afternoon: ‘They seem to be of two classes, generally, elegant milliners and shopwomen, earning good wages and affecting the dress and style of ladies, and needlewomen and prentice girls, whose clothes are of fashionable cut but worn and poor.’
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Typically for Munby, he admires them all: ‘The number of fair faces and tall good figures in both of these classes is remarkable.’
Eliza Close was quite aware that her fellow shopmen earned better salaries than her – ‘the men get a deal more than us’ – but she also recognised that she earned more as a shopgirl than as a servant, saying, ‘It’s much better than service.’
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Despite the commercial imperative and the desire of women like Eliza to move into shopwork, the shopkeepers still had quite a job on their hands to break down the social barriers to employing this plentiful cheap source of labour. While Jessie Boucherett and the early feminists felt that the main social concern about shopwork – its supposed lack of respectability – should simply be dismissed, the wilier members of the shopocracy across the country had more concrete tactics. The original model for apprenticeships, which saw apprentices living as part of the family above the shop, was based on an ideal of benevolent paternalism. Young apprentices like Nelson Foster’s assistant in Wisbech, John Batterman, were regarded as members of the household, sleeping, eating and socialising in a domestic setting. Shop proprietors now adapted this paternalistic model to their growing businesses, increasing the number of live-in staff. The message they were sending was clear: we are in charge of the welfare of our young shop assistants, we can protect your sons and daughters from physical and moral harm, we will keep them respectable. ‘Eliza, what ’ud your father and mother say to me if I didn’t keep an eye on you?’ asked Eliza Close’s master, who lived alongside his seven assistants in rooms above his drapery.
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The old gentleman, who came from Harborough in Leicestershire just like Eliza, refused to let her go to dancing rooms, made sure she went to church and frowned on any joking with young men.
Like this old gentleman, many proprietors were genuinely motivated to play the role of benevolent paterfamilias – often because of their own Christian beliefs. Emerson Muschamp Bainbridge, founder of Bainbridge’s in Newcastle, was a force of nature, his activities ‘volcanic’ according to his fellow Tyneside store-keeper J.J. Fenwick.
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Bainbridge led from the front and demanded a willing subservience from his employees. Both Bainbridge and Fenwick were staunch Wesleyan Methodists; Bainbridge preferred to recruit Methodist assistants and, despite his authoritarianism, he was comparatively generous. At a time when working hours were still extremely long, Bainbridge allowed his staff time off as follows: ‘one evening a week for courting purposes and two if they go to prayer meetings regularly’. James Howell was the founder of Howells department store in Cardiff (now rebranded as House of Fraser); he too was a devout Methodist, instituting evening hymn sessions in the men’s dormitory.
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Other proprietors recruited directly from religious institutions, such as Roman Catholic schools, hiring school-leavers as apprentices and keeping the local priest on hand to communicate with and monitor the welfare of his former pupils. One large draper with thirty apprentices took them all from local Sunday schools; he knew the family background of each and felt he could mould his apprentices, being ‘of the opinion that an employer can make his hands what he likes’.
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Religion and concepts of morality imbued all aspects of Victorian life – private and also public – in ways difficult for many of us to fathom today. These store proprietors in Manchester and Newcastle, in Derry and Southend, were shaping a public role for themselves as embodiments of civic pride. Religiously and politically active, they emerged as influential figures in the growing Victorian cities. As well as a shopman, Joshua Allder in Croydon was a Nonconformist, elected onto the local Board of Health and Croydon County Council. Charles Jenner not only founded and expanded the oldest department store in Scotland but also became the first director of the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh – perhaps galvanised by the deaths of his own children – and was a philanthropist, patron of the arts and man of science, investigating plants and giving his name to a grey-felted thistle and an alpine moss.
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The Brown family fundamentally reshaped Chester by organising, together with other traders, a policing rota to rid the Chester Rows of ‘rowdies and dissolute women’. The Rows, as the streets around the cathedral are known, have architecturally unique medieval first-floor covered walkways, which in the early part of the nineteenth century were seen as a centre of vice. William Brown’s plan worked: by the 1870s central Chester had blossomed into a middle-class resort, its medieval and neoclassical architecture tempting shoppers to town.
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William and his brother Charles became town councillors; Charles Brown was elected Mayor of Chester six times and his portrait, in oils, in which he sits almost regal in fur-trimmed robes and gold chain, still hangs in Committee Room 1 of Chester Town Hall.
For some, however, the claim to respectability and benevolent paternalism by many of the shop-owners was nothing but a useful ploy, motivated less by Christian and philanthropic values and more by the need to win over the new cheap labour.
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William Whiteley, as always, took the most flamboyant approach, wholeheartedly embracing his public role of genial father figure to his employees and incorporating his actual family into his performance. He was not alone in setting up a range of activities to occupy his shop assistants in their precious leisure hours, such as a brass band, quoits, reading rooms and a rifle volunteer club, all of which were designed to promote a sense of loyalty to the family firm. But he explicitly took the concept one stage further, linking his real family with the wider corporate family, and making Harriet and the children attend performances of the shop’s Amateur Dramatic Club.
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All the while, however, his behaviour in private belied this public image: as we shall see, he started sampling other shopgirls after Harriet.
Still, a Leicestershire farmer’s family such as Eliza’s, or tradesmen’s families in Newcastle, keen to ensure a respectable position for their daughters, must have been reassured by the high civic status of many store proprietors, and by the fact that ‘living-in’ was a form of chaperonage, supposedly a surrogate family. On top of this, the actual work appeared genteel, professional and highly enjoyable. Dealing in ribbons, bonnets, kid gloves and silk scarves in an attractive-looking shop trumped shift-work in Haslam’s cotton mill in Colne or parlour maid duties in Southport. ‘To be aside those huge plate-glass windows, with beautiful new things on every side, and well-dressed people coming in and out all day, what a delightful life a London shop-girl must lead!’ Or so the dream of glamorous shoplife was described in a young woman’s journal.
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It was also cleaner and less obviously physically demanding than factory work or service – a young woman’s hands remained white and soft, not rough and calloused, and there were fewer industrial accidents. Shop assistants had to be cleanly and neatly dressed, usually in plain black with no jewellery or adornment, so as to remain in the background and not distract from the merchandise. Most assistants had to buy their own clothes, as Eliza Close explained to Munby: ‘We have to dress nicely for the shop, of course, but he doesn’t like us to be too smart.’
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This public veneer of gentility was further built up by the way shop assistants spoke. Addressing the customers was an art, an exercise in polite, soft-spoken deference, however tricky or rude the customer might be. There were hours of ‘standing and smiling and serving’ as one London shopgirl put it.
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Munby commented from the point of view of a gentleman obsessed with speech and dialects that shopgirls’ ‘habits of speech come midway between the dignified reserve and fastidious delicacy of a lady and the honest bluntness and crude vulgarity of a servant’.
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In stores located in upmarket areas, the shop itself – the actual interior – was a space where lower-class shop assistants came into contact with higher-class clientele; working women and men with ladies. It was a space where different classes met, talked, interacted – even touched. For many middle-class and upper-class ladies, the only other such cross-class interactions they had was with their servants at home. Nevertheless, the counter still acted to separate shopkeepers and shop assistants from their customers. It was a physical barrier between those serving and those being served.