Revolution on the Floor Shopgirls: The True Story of Life Behind the Counter

On the 16th of November 1898,

Harrods department store in London was packed with journalists

and well-heeled customers.

The crowd had gathered to experience a technological marvel -

Britain's first moving staircase.

Some of those who took tentative steps onto the device

were so overwhelmed by the experience,

they had to be revived at the summit with smelling salts and Cognac.

Breathless reporters described the escalator as a magic carpet,

like something out of a fairy tale.

It may have been only 40 feet long,

but the enchanted staircase was transporting customers and staff

away from the old-fashioned drudgery of the Victorian shop floor.

It was a thrilling vision of the future,

a taste of what was to come as the new century dawned.

Shopping was entering the modern world

and shopgirls were definitely on the up.

This is the story of how the lives of our shop workers

were revolutionised in the early 20th century.

It's the tale of the arsonist shopgirl

who silenced the Prime Minister...

Gladys and two other Suffragettes went to the theatre

and attempted to burn it down.

..the American entrepreneur who tore up the rule book...

Harry Selfridge wanted the staff to feel that they were

serving their friends, equals.

He never allowed any grovelling.

..and the daring shop worker who ended up a Cabinet minister.

Is it a good policy to have cheap labour

which leads to the individual woman worker such misery?

Most of all, it's the story of how shopgirls found their voices,

no longer content to be just servants of the shop floor.

Instead, they were becoming a respected workforce,

professional young women at the heart

of the nation's blossoming love affair with shopping.

At the dawn of the 20th century, nearly a quarter of a million women

were working behind the counters of Britain's shops.

Their life may have appeared glamorous and shop work light,

but the reality was very different.

Surprisingly, it was a 21-year-old shop assistant's craving

for a fish supper that helped reveal the truth.

Margaret Bondfield arrived in London in 1894.

She had £5 in her pocket

and high hopes of getting a good job in one of the big stores.

But even with seven years' experience in shops in Brighton,

it took Margaret a difficult three months to find work.

So a fish supper was a well-deserved treat.

Bondfield had quickly learned that the big city's bright lights

blinded people to the grim realities of shop work.

Long hours, low pay

and the strict Victorian system of compulsory living-in

meant the proprietors owned most of the shopgirls' waking moments.

Many shopgirls were servants in all but name.

Her chips were wrapped in newspaper

and as Margaret tucked in, a letter caught her attention.

It was from the Secretary of the New Union of Shop Assistants,

who was urging his fellow workers to band together to combat

the wretched conditions of their employment.

It was a call to arms,

and this young shopgirl was ready for a fight.

Founded in 1891, the National Union of Shop Assistants

was part of the wider struggle for workers' rights

that was gathering pace in Britain.

The fledgling union, which often convened here in East London,

aimed to expose the injustices faced by shop workers.

But it was finding it hard to attract members.

Margaret Bondfield's moved to London,

she's finally found a job, she's seeing the darker side of shop life.

Then she joins the union.

Was that quite a risky thing to do?

It was, absolutely,

because in many ways shop assistants weren't expected to join unions.

They were subject to potential dismissal were they to join.

So it was quite a risk for her to take.

What kind of activities did she get involved with once

she was in the union?

Well, she begins writing for them on what life in the shop

was really like, under the pen name Grace Dare.

The name unites these two qualities of her character,

grace on the one hand and that kind of daring as well.

She sounds like some heroine from a magazine of the time.

Exactly. Definitely. She would have been fined, of course,

for using candlelight in her dormitory room.

So she's an undercover reporter for the union? Wow.

In a sense, yes.

She said she was writing these articles for two years

and no breach of rules was ever reported by any of her roommates.

Where else do her writings appear?

Well, she worked compiling reports that then informed a series

in the Daily Chronicle in 1898,

a series called Life In The Shop, and this piece here describes

the living conditions and working conditions of the shop assistants.

"At seven, the getting-up bell rings and the assistant's day begins.

"Basins and cold water are provided in each dormitory as a rule,

"the assistants finding their own soap and towels.

"At eight, the bell summons the first breakfast party

"to a meal of often weak tea and bread and butter.

"Half an hour is allowed for dinner.

"The meal is eaten in haste,

"and liable to be interrupted at any moment.

"Eight o'clock is considered an early hour to shut,

"and nine is not uncommon.

"Then at 11 o'clock, the door of the institution is shut.

"A quarter of an hour, the gas in the dormitories is turned out."

Lots of people thought it was quite a glamorous profession,

but Margaret saw the grittier side.

They are under the tyrannical rule of the shop walker

as many of these pieces recount.

And so they're quite terrified of losing their jobs at any moment

for breaking one minor rule or another.

There were hundreds of rules that would be posted

that they had to follow.

And they could lose pay for breaking these rules, couldn't they?

Absolutely, so they'd be fined for putting flowers in bottles

in their dormitory rooms or wearing a flower on their dress

more than three inches.

-Sure. Or failing to make a sale.

-Absolutely.

So behind the facade, life's quite grim.

I think their lives were very monotonous,

so the monotony of the food in the living-in situation is emphasised,

every day the same thing.

And in the shop, life was monotonous and routine,

everything very regularised,

winding and unwinding ribbons, the same kinds of activity.

But these actions are not necessarily purposeful actions.

They're meant to convey the impression of busyness.

"It is de rigueur to make a show of occupation.

"The ribbons can be wound and unwound.

"The stock boxes can be gone through again.

"When madam and her daughters enter,

"they must feel the clutter of activity that says buy, buy, buy."

The Victorian shopgirl seemed just a cog in the commercial machine.

Without Margaret Bondfield's explosive exposes,

we'd know very little about the lives of Britain's shopgirls

towards the close of the 19th century.

Her reports for the Daily Chronicle brought the misery of

shop assistants' conditions right into middle-class homes

and it was hard to ignore the unpalatable truth.

Margaret's writings kick-started campaigns

to improve shopgirls' lot, but it would be a long haul.

It was one thing exposing the problems to the public,

it was quite another persuading shop assistants

that they should rally together and stand up for themselves.

750,000 men and women worked in the nation's shops,

but a mere 2,000 were members of the union.

So in 1898, Bondfield, now a union official,

set off across Britain on a recruitment drive.

Many shop assistants were wary of speaking to her.

Countless employers banned union membership

and the assistants were scared of being sacked.

But it wasn't just fear that deterred shop workers

from signing up for the union.

Margaret Bondfield felt that her fellow shopgirls

either couldn't be bothered to join the union or, worse still,

they thought it was somehow beneath them.

These are some despatches from the road from her tour published

in the Shop Assistant Union journal,

and you can just hear her exasperation.

Here's an image of Margaret addressing a rather sparse crowd

in Bristol and her text explains the poor turnout.

"Ye Gods! What a miserable thing it is

"that any class of workers need to be cajoled to a meeting

"by sugar plums in the shape of a bishop or a garden party."

Really what she's saying is these workers think

they're a cut above the miners, mill workers and dockers,

that they're too good for the union.

Margaret signs off her report by saying how much

she detests their pretence of gentility.

You can almost feel the scorn burning off the page.

Bondfield returned to London, down but not out.

For the next decade, she continued to fight for better conditions

in privately owned shops, chipping away at the problems she'd exposed.

But concrete and far-reaching change was on the horizon for shopgirls,

care of a group who did pull together.

This is the Co-operative Store of Annfield Plain, County Durham.

It used to be five miles down the road, but it's been rebuilt,

brick by brick, here at Beamish Living Museum.

Today's Co-operative Movement has its origins in 1840s' Rochdale.

A group of weavers and other local traders

were fed up with having to buy from profiteering shopkeepers

who sometimes fiddled the scales or disguised rotten food,

and decided to fight back by opening their own store.

The tradesmen realised that if they clubbed together

and bought goods directly from suppliers, they could then

sell them on to their own customers at a fair and honest price.

It would be a new type of shop, mutually beneficial to them all -

a co-operative.

By setting up their own shop and dealing with their own suppliers,

the weavers wanted to take control of their living costs.

Their philosophy was that working people should

improve their lives through self-help, but their dream

was nothing less than the creation of a new fairer, social order.

More co-operative stores quickly took off in working-class areas.

By the early 20th century, the Co-op had grown in a commercial giant,

with its own wholesale society, almost 1,500 shops

and thousands of shopgirl employees.

The shop assistants who stood behind this counter were selling

a cornucopia of delights - homeopathic cocoa, macaroon toffees.

Lots of different herbs and spices.

As well as more everyday items, tea, coffee, custard powder.

And next door in the drapery,

they sold all kinds of household fabrics for bedding,

curtains and clothing, but much more besides,

hats, shoes, corsets. my favourite, Reform underwear.

It was everything you could want and all under one roof.

Of course, plenty of privately owned stores had honest shopkeepers

and stocked an extensive range of goods too.

But the monumental difference between the Co-op and other shops

was that before you could buy these products,

you had to be a member of the Co-op.

That meant that, as a customer, you were a co-owner of the business

and entitled to a share of the profits.

And those profits were paid to you through the quarterly dividend,

or divvy.

It made for a new relationship between shop assistants

and their customer owners.

The Co-op's customer owners looked very different

to most Victorian proprietors.

Mainly working class,

they included many housewives who did the daily shop.

But if the owners were different, the conditions for Co-op shopgirls

were all too similar to those of other shop workers.

They were underpaid and overworked.

Thankfully for them, one group of Co-op members took up their case.

The Women's Co-operative Guild

was a movement of the Co-op's female customers,

ordinary working-class women who came together

to discuss the issues of the day.

It became huge with thousands of members all over the country

and it developed a distinctive brand -

no-nonsense, kitchen-table politics.

In Runcorn, Cheshire, the Guild is still going strong.

Has everybody paid?

Just like today,

the early Guild members discussed a huge range of topics,

from housekeeping tips to social issues,

to ways of supporting each other.

As it would have been Mable's 95th birthday,

all the ladies gave a toast in her favourite drink, sherry.

The Women's Co-operative Guild began in the 1880s. How did it start?

The real reason it was set up was to help women who,

as you can imagine at that time, were ill-educated,

they had just gone from their own family home into being married.

So it was to try and encourage them and come along to somewhere

where it was quite safe and secure in a women's only environment

where they didn't judge one another,

because they were all in the same boat.

In 1899, the campaigner, Margaret Llewelyn Davies,

became General Secretary.

How does she change things?

She wanted to try and get them to campaign for,

not only for themselves, but for women as a whole.

She was interested in welfare benefits for small children,

maternity care for mothers, and also divorce reform.

But her most famous one, of course, is for the minimum wage.

-It seems very early.

-It does. It does.

And at the time, that was sort of 1910, but at the time,

she preferred actually to call it a living wage, because she felt

the women weren't actually living on the salaries that they were getting.

OK. And what kind of campaign did she bring forward on that?

Well, they set out this petition

and it was a petition to the Co-operative Wholesale Society

and they campaigned for minimum living wage for 14 and upwards.

And as each year they grew older, they were supposed to be,

they wanted an increment until they got to the age of 20.

'At the start of the century, a 20-year-old Co-op shopgirl

'typically earned just 12 shillings a week,

'scarcely enough to pay her rent and buy the bare necessities.

'Eggs would have been a luxury.

'Her male counterparts often earned double,

'taking home 24 shillings a week.'

And did they succeed in the campaign?

Yes, they did, absolutely.

Do you know 12,000 women actually got the minimum living wage?

-So they get a pay rise?

-20 years old...

They got a pay rise and it's 17 shillings a week.

-Which at the time is...

-For them was a great deal of money, yes.

Women had campaigned for the rights of women and won.

Now with their new living wage,

the Co-op workers of 1912 became the first group of British shopgirls

to enjoy the sweet taste of greater independence.

The Co-op became more than just an employer.

In many parts of the country, it became a way of life.

Eileen, did you work in a Co-op shoe factory?

-Yes, I did.

-OK, when was that?

When I was 14, which was about, what?

1938.

And who else worked in the Co-op, did you work? Yeah, OK.

What did you do?

I worked in the grocery part.

-OK.

-Yeah, it was pretty hard work really

because there was no trolleys or anything like that, you was

having to carry cases of, you know, cans of beans and what have you.

I think that's why we're all riddled with arthritis.

-It was hard work, but we did laugh.

-Yeah.

I mean, even the butter you used to have, you know,

use the butter pat and wrap it and everything was done by hand.

Well, what do you think the Co-op meant to people at the time

that you were working there?

They were brought up with the Co-op, really, wasn't it?

And it was like a community, wasn't it?

-It was, yeah, yeah.

-Yeah.

-And if you worked in the Co-op, were you a member of the Co-op?

-Yeah.

-OK.

-You opened up with, was it a shilling?

-Yeah.

That's right, because that's how you got your share book, isn't it?

You had your own number and you got your dividend, didn't you?

At the end of the year.

-And that was in cash or in...?

-Cash, yeah.

And you used to all go and line up at the end of the year, didn't you?

To go and get your divvy.

-And you saved it for Christmas, didn't you?

-Yeah, yeah.

-I've got my card.

-And still money on it.

-Is there?

-Yes.

-Cash it in!

I don't know where to take it to.

It's 97 pence on this.

They owe you 97 pence.

They do owe me 97 pence and it'll be from 1976.

You should take it along and see what happens.

The Co-op helped to raise the bar for workers' rights

in an era of national reform.

Before the end of 1912, the Liberal Government had

ushered in improvements for many workers, including miners,

factory employees and even for staff in privately owned shops.

By 1912, many shop workers had won a minimum wage,

but also shorter hours.

This is a photograph of the employees of Kendal Mill,

Manchester's most famous department store.

They've been given the day off to celebrate

the passing of the Shop Act and they look pretty happy about it.

This woman in the front's got a very broad smile.

Now it was against the law for shop staff to work for more

than six hours without a meal break.

But most popular of all,

they were given an early closing day which brought the working week down

to five-and-a-half days, certainly steps in the right direction.

Political activists may have been dragging shop assistants

out of Victorian drudgery, but they weren't the only ones.

Across the Atlantic, American industry was in the throes

of an industrial and technological revolution.

Whether in the steel mills or in Sixth Avenue stores,

the buzz words were efficiency and productivity.

In the summer of 1906, Owen Owen,

founder of Liverpool's biggest store,

returned home from a two month fact-finding trip to North America.

Standing on the deck of his Cunard liner, Owen's head was buzzing,

full of visions of things he'd seen across the Atlantic.

In New York, he'd seen a shopping paradise,

stores like Macy's, Bergdorf and Goodman, Rothschild & Co,

were bigger and better than anything in Britain.

They were cathedrals of commerce, and they were going all out

to make their customers want more and spend more.

Liverpool may have been one of Britain's most prosperous cities,

but it had nothing on shopping American style.

So when he arrived home, Owen Owen recorded his thoughts about

this brave new commercial world and the role shopgirls played in it.

Lisa, your great-grandfather went to America in the early 20th century,

what kind of things stood out for him?

He was interested in absolutely everything.

The fact that the shop assistants,

they had to produce enough sales to cover their salaries.

-Wow.

-It was very different to here.

And if they didn't, they would be kicked out without a quibble.

And if they arrived a few minutes late for work in the morning

because they all lived out, they didn't live-in,

which he was used to here, they would not be allowed in the store

and they would be docked a half or a whole day's wage.

So although there's more personal freedom, no living-in,

no fines, there's an incredible attention to their performance.

And, as he sums up here, "System, system, system."

It's all about the system, the micro-management

almost of the employers, the employees are working to targets,

-sales targets week by week, very, very early on.

-Yes, yes.

So this is a slick, automated, very modern way of doing business.

What else does he like about the American stores?

The size of the stores, which completely fascinated him.

There are no medium-sized stores and

the immense sum spent on advertising which really quite shocked him.

You could spend about £500 just on natural flowers for a display.

No expense spared?

No expense spared, even, "An avenue of singing-birds."

So it's the size, it's the advertising, it's the display,

-the design.

-Yes.

-Overall, he's wowed by the experience.

Yes, it comes through in everything.

"It has indeed been a revelation to me

"the way business is done this side.

"Many of the ideas are those I've nearly all my life been

"trying to put into force, but less effectively than I should have done.

"As it is, these ideas have come too late

"and sometimes I wish that I'd not come to America at all."

Owen Owen died before he could implement the American ideas

he'd admired so greatly - the advertising,

the selling techniques and the new attitude towards shop assistants.

But down in London, a charismatic American was poised

to launch his own brand of the US system

and for some shopgirls, life was going to get a whole lot better.

Early on the 15th March 1909, hidden by a curtain,

some window dressers were finalising a display,

the likes of which Britain had never seen.

At exactly 9am, a bugler started playing

and the curtains were drawn back to reveal one of the most

spectacular windows displays London had ever seen.

Instead of these windows being crammed wall-to-wall with stock,

elegant mannequins stood in front of exquisitely painted backdrops.

It was just a taste of what was to come on the opening day

of London's newest department store.

Selfridges.

The self-made millionaire, Harry Gordon Selfridge

was a man with a mission, to drag British retailing

and the lives of its shop workers firmly into the modern world.

In less than a year,

he constructed England's largest, most luxurious store.

An 80-foot-high emporium that aimed

to reinvent British shopping and service and to do so in style.

Selfridges is now such a fixture on Oxford Street,

it's hard to imagine the sensation it caused when it first opened.

Newspaper headlines hailed a new era of shopping, describing

the eager crowds and thousands of women besieging the West End.

Not only that, thousands of shop assistants queued up to work here.

Customers were enticed by the idea

they'd no longer be harangued to make a purchase.

This store was specifically designed to allow them to browse

and buy at will.

And staff would be liberated from oppressive Victorian ways.

Above all, there'd be no compulsory living-in

with its institutional dormitories, poor food and lack of freedom.

But Harry Selfridge's masterstroke lay in recognising that the skills

of Britain's shopgirls had yet to be fully tapped.

He set out to transform his shopgirls from

servants of the counter to highly trained, confident young women.

To find out more about Harry Selfridge's ambitions for his staff,

I'm meeting Lindy Woodhead...

in the Champagne Bar, of course.

So it's a new start, a new kind of shop,

how does this philosophy translate onto the shop floor?

I think to explain Selfridge's philosophy, Pam,

you have to look at Selfridge himself.

And he was American,

so coming over to England full of very imaginative ideas,

to bring those ideas into a situation

that had been much more formal.

So he wanted the staff to feel that they were serving their friends,

equals, he never allowed any grovelling.

And when you think how class bound British society was at that time,

-this is remarkable.

-Utterly extraordinary.

Let's talk about training, what kind of things did they have to do?

Well, the first thing is that he instigated,

and I think the most important,

he instigated a two-year management training course.

What topics did the lectures cover?

They were very...there was a lot of diversification in these lectures.

We've got some sheets here.

We've got, for example, here's a mathematics one.

So the students would have had to do percentages,

rather technical I would have thought here,

and fashion, all aspects, of course.

-I love this one - gloves.

-A lecture on gloves.

-Gloves, of course, were the absolute essential accessory.

-Yes.

No woman could go out or would go out without gloves and a hat.

And therefore her gloves and the care of them,

how to put them on, using talcum powder to put them on,

all of these things mattered tremendously.

And these are notes written by staff at the time.

Absolutely. And these are the lectures to the students.

"We are students in a business which gives us the opportunity of learning

"in a way provided by no other firm of its kind

"on this side of the water."

Are you sure that wasn't dictated to them?

It's too good to be true.

But it is true and it is wonderful.

Other department stores across Britain

were also providing training

but Selfridge boasted loudest about his professionalised shopgirls.

Though not everyone was impressed by the firm's modern methods.

Outspoken author GK Chesterton believed big businesses

like Selfridges were destroying the livelihoods of the little shopkeeper

in towns and villages across Britain.

And in 1912, he took up his pen to battle against what he perceived

as the damaging new city culture.

Chesterton attacked big shops.

In a piece in the Daily News, he railed against awful,

interminable emporia that seemed to him to be an idea of hell.

Now many people then and now might agree with him,

but what was more troubling was the way he directed his vitriol

so specifically against the shopgirls.

He says, "When you look at the dress model, the mannequin,

"you think that some shopgirl has had her head cut off.

"When you look back at the real shopgirl

"you feel inclined to do the same to her."

Chesterton's beloved small town shops were still largely staffed

by male assistants with women more visible as housewife customers.

But it was a very different picture in the big city stores.

So it's unsurprising that, for Chesterton,

the increasingly independent shopgirl

came to embody the ills of the modern world.

Chesterton probably wasn't expecting that any of these shallow shopgirls

would reply, but 180 of Selfridges' female staff

wrote a letter to the Daily News and they demanded it be published,

"In justice to ourselves and all women employed in similar businesses

"upon whom the stigma of contempt has been laid."

And they go on, "We're proud to say that we feel as women workers

"we have in our ranks some of the brightest intelligences

"associated with commerce."

It's a really strong statement, full of self-confidence

and self-belief from the staff of Selfridges.

Their self-belief wasn't just coming from the training

they were getting in the work place.

When they wrote that letter, the streets of Britain's cities

were thronging with women going out to work,

to shop and to demand the vote.

# Shout, shout

# Up with your song

# Cry with the wind

# For the dawn is breaking... #

By 1912, the Suffragettes, led by Emmeline Pankhurst

had tired of peaceful demonstrations and turned to militancy,

arson, bombing

and a campaign to smash the windows of London's major stores,

such as here at Swan & Edgar in Piccadilly Circus.

And here in the East End of London was one of the key bases...

'And one of Selfridges' shopgirls was ready to step out

'from behind the counter and on to the front line.'

Laura, who is Gladys Evans?

Well, Gladys Evans was a shop assistant at the age of 15,

and by 1908, when she was in her early 30s,

she was employed by Selfridges to prepare for the grand opening

of their big new store on Oxford Street.

So she was a Suffragette as well. What kind of things did she do?

After her long day working behind the counter,

she then went off to start organising for votes for women.

And in particular she's recorded as having focused on

trying to recruit other shop assistants.

She would have been saying, "We need the vote,

"because we need to improve our daily lives as women workers."

OK. And Suffragettes were becoming more militant around this time.

How did the authorities, the police respond to this militancy?

With great brutality.

And it's in response to this intensification of police brutality

and state violence against the Suffragettes

that Gladys Evans feels that she needs to take a risk herself,

undertake an act of very serious militancy.

And what did Gladys do?

She travels to Dublin because the Prime Minister, Asquith,

who was notoriously unsympathetic to the Suffragettes,

was going to be visiting Dublin.

And the day before he was about to give a very important speech

in the Theatre Royal, Gladys and two other Suffragettes

went to the theatre and attempted to burn it down.

-So this is before Asquith arrives at the theatre?

-Yes.

To stop him being able to speak, they thought they would burn it down.

I mean, it was a pretty serious act, it's a fire-bomb attack.

What happened next?

Gladys Evans and her friends, her comrades are arrested

and given incredibly harsh sentences.

-Gladys is given five years...

-Wow.

-..penal servitude.

So even in terms of the very harsh treatments given to Suffragettes,

this is an excessively long sentence.

Did anyone try to help her?

The Women's Social and Political Union organised a mass petition

calling for her release,

and they also planned a letter writing campaign

to put pressure on the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.

And so the employees at Selfridges are getting up a petition

to the Lord Lieutenant and some young businesswomen are agitating

among the shop assistants' union to get resolutions passed

condemning the harsh sentence.

So she became a very important figure for shop assistants?

Yes. I mean, she's a martyr for the cause.

In prison, Gladys went on hunger strike

and was brutally and forcibly fed.

After 58 days,

the Government granted temporary release on grounds of ill-health.

She never returned to prison.

In August 1914, Britain declared war on Germany.

The Suffragette leaders brokered a deal with the Government.

In return for an amnesty for their political prisoners,

the Suffragettes would cease their violent acts

and help mobilise women to the war effort.

And women's war work would transform Britain's work places,

not least its shops.

By September 1914, just a month into the conflict,

the Draper's Record had published a list of the thousands of shop men

who'd answered the Government's call to arms.

Here are just some of them.

175 from Selfridges, 106 from Whiteleys,

20 from Eaden Lilley in Cambridge, right down to the smaller shops,

three from Dust and Co in Tunbridge Wells.

For the shopgirls left behind,

it was a chance to show what they were made of.

The declaration of war threw British retail into a head spin.

Many stores were forced to close as shop men turned soldiers and headed

for the front lines, and jittery investors withdrew their backing.

But grocery stores had to deal with a huge upsurge in custom

as people panic bought food as prices rocketed.

The problem was, unlike drapers and department stores,

the staff in grocery shops had, up to then,

remained overwhelmingly male.

Stores like Sainsbury's quickly realised they needed women

to serve on their front lines and started a recruitment drive.

This news reel entitled Lady Grocers

shows just a few of the women who stepped into shop men's shoes

for the first time during the war.

Sainsbury's new leading ladies

had to learn all the basics of grocery work from scratch,

how to advise customers...

..how to tackle the cheddar...

..and how to carve the ham.

By 1915, some of Sainsbury's stores were entirely,

and successfully, staffed by women and boys too young to enlist.

As the war dragged on, more and more women replaced male shop workers.

By 1916, 2,000 men from Harrods had answered the call to arms...

..some 70% of eligible staff.

All these men had gone away to fight,

-where did that leave the women in the store?

-The beginning of the war,

women were finding new roles from when the men had left.

One of these was as a commissionaire at the doors to Harrods,

opening the doors and hailing cabs for customers.

Harrods, the green men, because of their green uniform,

are already very well-known by this stage, so now we have green women,

so you get women coming in as drivers delivering in Harrods vans.

So here's one in her smart uniform

and here's a photograph taken about 1916/1917 with her van

and her porter on the rounds in London I think.

That's wonderful, isn't it?

And she's looking rather pleased with herself.

-Yes, hands in her pockets.

-Yeah.

And was it just in the workplace,

or were there other ways in which life changed for women in the store?

Well, women were also moving into sports activities

which they haven't tried before.

So we get to 1917

and we've got the Harrods Ladies Football Team in their kit.

That is superb. Who did they play?

They were playing Sterling Athletic,

who were a team of munitions factory...

a lot of women were working in the munitions factories.

And the write-up in the Harrodian Gazette is by one of the players,

"Then came us, yes, the Harrodian team of all the talents,

"looking charming in white sweaters and caps and green shorts.

"Where we made the mistake was not to turn out in football boots but as

"this was our maiden attempt at the game, we naturally lacked much."

What was the score?

8-2 against the Harrods girls.

So they go back to get some more practice.

What happened when the men came home?

When the war ended the men came back, they got their jobs back,

so the women van drivers and the women commissionaires disappeared.

But I think the perception of women in the store

had changed fundamentally.

Women had learnt to drive.

Women had learnt to drive and they'd also been in those positions

and that could never really be taken away from them.

They could never go back to where they'd been before.

You can see if you look in,

this is August 1917 in the Harrodian Gazette, "Gone are the prejudices

"and restrictions hitherto prevailing against female labour.

"She enters on the same footing as her brothers."

So the war has really brought a transformation

to the status of women.

In November 1918, the war ended.

Soon the soldiers came home to their families and old jobs.

The returning shop assistants demanded better working conditions

and they got them.

By early 1920, many shop owners had agreed to a 48-hour week.

Many, but not all.

In April 1920, a rebellion broke out here in Oxford Street.

400 shop workers walked out on their 84-year-old boss, Mr John Lewis,

for breaking a promise to improve their pay and conditions.

The strikers described him as a "gnarled old oak"

refusing to move with the times.

John Lewis hit back, denouncing the accursed trade unions.

Lewis had founded his shop on Oxford Street in 1864

and remained firmly entrenched in his Victorian ways.

Living-in, low pay

and a culture of austerity defined his management style,

providing value for the customer was the bottom line

and if that meant penny-pinching with the staff, so be it.

One of the strikers, shopgirl Hilda Cannon,

became the dispute's poster girl,

helping to rally huge public support,

and it came from all quarters, from West End theatres

to staff at rival Harrods and even from the Queen herself.

Described as grey eyed and soft voice,

but possessing any amount of grit, Hilda was a new kind of shopgirl,

who was happy to step out and speak up.

But old John Lewis refused to budge,

so after five weeks Hilda and her comrades gave up on the strike

and landed jobs elsewhere.

Even Spedan, John Lewis's older son,

accused him of being ruthlessly closed fisted.

Spedan was determined to do things different.

He dreamt up a revolutionary vision for the future,

which remains at the heart of the business today.

As a young man,

Spedan had started to think about the John Lewis stores accounts

and had been appalled by the enormous difference

between the shop's profits and the staff payroll.

Spedan, his brother and father together

enjoyed an income of about £26,000 a year,

while the entire staff wage bill came to just £16,000.

To Spedan, this was just plain unfair.

Spedan believed that success should not be achieved

at the expense of his staff, but built on their happiness.

In an extraordinary move,

he decided to hand control of the business to his employees,

making them owners of what would become the John Lewis Partnership.

Spedan kick-started his changes

when he was manager of John Lewis' sister store, Peter Jones.

Judy, what was Spedan trying to do at Peter Jones?

He realised that if he could make the staff more involved

in running the business that the business would

probably become more efficient and more profitable.

And how did he do that?

The biggest hook really, I suppose, to encourage the staff to participate

would have been through things like this.

-Now this is a Share Promise.

-What was the Share Promise?

He couldn't, as his father still owned the business,

give them the dividend directly,

so these were documents which were issued and signed by Spedan Lewis.

-To all staff?

-To all the staff.

And it basically agreed that he would pay them the dividend

as and when he was able to do so.

So they became shareholders in the business?

Yes, that's the first time they become shareholders

-and that's in 1920.

-1920. Was he the first person to do that?

It was really quite radical for them

and I think he had to keep it quite quiet from his father,

because I don't think his father would really have approved too much.

-Oh, really?

-Yes.

-He didn't know?

-Oh, yes.

Spedan was keeping two sets of books at one time

so his father didn't know exactly what he was spending his money on.

I think there's a story here of a young woman

who did want to cash in her shares.

Yes, this is in Spedan's book and he's writing about

one of the girls that was working for him at the time,

and it says in here,

" 'Oh, Matron, Florrie's got her share money!

" 'But are these things really money?'

"The Matron said, 'Of course they're really money,

" 'as I keep telling you silly girls and now perhaps you'll believe it.'

"Whereupon the questioner said,

" 'But I've got 30 of them, fancy me being worth £30.'

"And she burst in to tears."

Because she couldn't believe she was worth £30.

No, absolutely not.

What was his attitude to employing women?

He was incredibly keen on recruiting women, and he thought that women

would add a new dimension to the management structure of the business,

because up until that time most of the managers had been men.

So he doesn't want more of the same shopgirls just serving

on the shop floor, he wants women in more managerial roles and positions?

He was very aware that a lot of his customers were middle-class ladies

and he thought recruiting some of them

would do the business no harm whatsoever.

Who's this one? This is Miss Bowen.

Laura Bowen managed to join the Partnership

and within three years became the general manager of Peter Jones.

At the age of 24?

Yes, yes.

So she was, and as you can see from the press cuttings,

it was really big news in those days.

-"A woman's triumph from university to store's chief."

-Yes, yes.

How about this one? "Miss General Manager,

"important business post for pretty girl student".

-Oh, they still managed to get that little dig in there.

-Yes.

"A pretty, dark-haired girl, Miss Laura Bowen."

All over the country, forward-looking department stores

were starting to promote their shopgirls into management positions.

It sent a positive message to women

looking to get into higher-end shop work.

When you got the job at Peter Jones,

did your friends and family think this was a good place to work?

Well, my mother thought it was marvellous to think

I'd got such a job.

-Well, it was THE store, wasn't it?

-Yeah.

It was. I couldn't believe it myself.

What did your husband think of you working?

Well, he just accepted it, dear.

And what was so appealing about working there for you?

We all seemed to work together.

As you say, the Partnership, we really did work as partners.

Do you think it felt different to other kinds of shop work?

-Oh, yes.

-What made it so great?

We used to get these shares, you see, you got the shares.

-Yes.

-And that.

Did that feel quite special to have the shares?

Well, it did really.

And I think you really felt you was a partner

because you held the shares.

At the time you were working there, Spedan Lewis was the boss,

did you ever meet him?

-I did, yes.

-Did you?

-Yeah.

-What was he like?

-Well, quite a grumpy old man.

-Was he?

Grumpy or not, Spedan Lewis's scheme is still in place today.

Since 1929, every member of the John Lewis Partnership has shared

the responsibilities and the rewards

of being a co-owner through the bonus system.

This is one of those unique moments where, as an organisation,

we share the profits amongst all of us as co-owners.

These partners are gathering in the Oxford Street store,

they're awaiting one thing - the figure that will reveal

what percentage of their salary they'll be receiving as a bonus.

CHEERING

15%, everybody!

The financial forecast at the dawn of the 1930s was much more sobering.

The Great Depression hit many British industries hard.

But it was to prove a pivotal moment

in the creation of the modern shopgirl.

It might sound surprising, but the hungry 1930s was also

the moment when the British public shopped like never before.

While traditional heavy manufacturing,

such as shipbuilding suffered,

the new light-industry sector flourished.

Improved mass production techniques made things like

electrical appliances and synthetic textiles available and affordable.

People with jobs and money wanted to buy

and shrewd shop owners were only too happy to supply the demand.

With chains opening up like Boots, Littlewoods, British Home Stores

and Woolworths on every city and suburban high street,

this was truly the dawn of mass consumer culture.

In the inter-war years, the number of chain stores quadrupled.

And some family favourites firmly established themselves

on our high streets.

No longer the preserve of the independent or family owned store,

high streets across the land now drew in increasing numbers

of women workers.

One chain proved particularly popular.

Michael Marks opened his first Penny Bazaar right here

in the centre of Leeds' Kirkgate Market in 1884.

At first, he just sold cheap items, things like darning wool, buttons,

needles and tablecloths and, of course, everything cost a penny.

Then he teamed up with Yorkshireman Tom Spencer

and together they launched a chain of stalls

and later shops that would spread across the whole country.

By 1939, Marks & Spencer was operating

some 40 miles of counter space and employing 17,000 staff.

The secret of M&S's success between the wars was selling fashionable,

good quality, ready to wear clothes at bargain prices.

So-called Mrs Goodwife could get a complete outfit, tennis frock,

blazer, hats, stockings, shoes and, of course, underwear,

all for £1 and a penny.

The class barriers between shopper and shopgirl were crumbling,

as browsing and bargain prices hit the high street.

And selling off-the-peg clothing required the assistants

to learn quite different skills.

If I walked into a Marks & Spencer store in the 1930s,

what would I see?

It must have been like a breath of fresh air for people,

because it was not at all intimidating.

It would have been very well laid out.

Clear ticketing pricing.

You could go and you could touch and feel fabrics and look at sizes

and take things out of their display units.

What kind of fabrics were they using?

In the 1920s and 1930s,

Marks & Spencer started to introduce what were relatively new fabrics

and of those I would say that one of the most important was rayon.

What is rayon?

Rayon is a man-made fabric, and I don't know if you can see,

it has a nice sheen on it.

So of course it was trying to be like silk,

have the qualities of silk but, of course, silk was very expensive.

It sort of revolutionised the availability of clothing,

because you could, you know, in theory,

you could just go on producing more and more and more.

Very many more women found, also,

that it was becoming cheaper to buy something ready-made.

So in a way the balance of power shifted to the customer with

-ready-to-wear and ticketed prices and browsing.

-Yes.

So the sales assistant has to have a whole new role.

There's a manual here, for example,

which talks about training of new staff.

"Approach to customers.

"Most customers like to look around before buying.

"Customers who obviously want to buy and are waiting to be attended

"should be asked, 'Can I help you?' Or a similar question."

So I suppose you let them get on with it to a certain extent.

"Explain to the girl how to display selling points,

"the folding of articles,

"how to build and maintain displays.

"Check that the counter is kept well filled throughout the day

"and that stock is sold in rotation."

Did anything else change for shopgirls at this time?

It's very likely that they were recruited from local areas

and may very well have known the customers that they were serving.

So they're coming from a more similar class background than

-they might have done?

-I think so.

And so that, in a way, is another way of democratising

the whole process of buying clothing and of retail.

Alongside their specialised training in more subtle selling techniques,

Marks & Spencer shopgirls enjoyed new benefits -

rest-rooms, subsidised canteens and even staff holidays.

Other shops were quick to follow suit.

Shopgirls had begun the century vastly out-numbered

and out-paid by their male colleagues,

they had no political voice, few personal freedoms.

Many were locked in at night in institutional dormitories.

Now on the eve of World War II, over 400,000 women were working in shops.

More and more of them had unprecedented access to training

and some were even making it as managers.

It seemed as if anything was possible.

No-one better exemplified this sense of possibility than

former shopgirl Margaret Bondfield, whose undercover reports had

first exposed the hardships of shop life back in the 1890s.

She was elected as one of Labour's first women MPs in 1923

and, in 1929, became Britain's first woman Cabinet minster.

"I just want to say how awfully glad we are that we have a woman

in our second Labour government.

A woman who started life as a shop assistant

and who is today the first woman minister of this Cabinet.

The revolution on the shop floor was gathering speed.

In the next episode,

I'll find out how the shopgirl took centre-stage on the home front,

how she rose to become the embodiment of '60s fashion

and I'll look at the very different influence of another famous Margaret

also steeped in shop life.

Margaret Thatcher.

For the first 18 years of my life,

I lived over the shop which my father owned and ran.