Authors: Virginia Nicholson
I liked the atmosphere of the City. I liked the excitement of negotiating what to me then were large deals. The first large amount I handled alone was $,
of City of Westmount bonds . . . I resolutely found a buyer, pushed the whole transaction through in a few hours, took ½ per cent commission for my Company, and felt thrilled – never was sky so blue or sunshine so golden as on that day . . .
When war broke out in Thorold went back to Canada, and the
other directors joined up, leaving Gordon in sole charge of the office.
She was then at the peak of her energies, aged thirty, without family
commitments. Her work in that wartime office honed and perfected her
abilities; she was there fourteen hours a day, seven days a week. When the
men came back in the ship was in better shape than when they had
left, and every single man had a job waiting for him, at an increased salary.
Characteristically, Thorold picked a fight with her immediately on his
return; the storm broke over a disagreement on profit-sharing. Minutes
before he sacked her, Gordon resigned. She came down with appendicitis
and retreated into a nursing-home – paid for by Thorold. And it was there,
Singled Out
while having her stitches removed, that she met the woman who was to
share her life, Dr Helen Boyle.
The year was the next turning point in Gordon’s career; which
now became meteoric. Years in the City had bought her much goodwill;
her closest friend in Thorold’s company was Sefton Turner, and together
they now managed to find backing to launch their own financial company.
‘Of course we were an ‘‘outside House,’’ because the Stock Exchange, like
the Church – God and Mammon – refuses to admit women.’ Seven years
later their Corporation bought out Thorold himself.
[Starting] in two rooms with two typists, by it employed people. It has lived to see three of its largest and long-established competitors all collapse in the – slump and after, while it still modestly flourished. We emerged from the slump with our modest capital and reserves intact, while others wrote wads off their balance sheets.
Gordon’s venture flourished. She travelled extensively, building up her
business interests on the Continent, seeing South America, Africa, the East.
Money became plentiful. After the years of scrimping and saving, she took
herself off to Bradley’s and indulged her latent love of clothes: soft beige, cream and silver-grey outfits draped in fox furs gave her tall, handsome figure resonance and sophistication. After purchasing a capacious residence
in Bedford Park, she spent thousands on having it fitted with luxuries:
central heating, hot and cold running water in every room, a state-of-the-art bathroom with a heated towel rail, and rose-coloured carpets. ‘Rose-coloured carpets, that was another dream of mine . . . Where does one pick up these notions of ultimate luxury? Anyway, rose-coloured carpets were
mine.’ And there she lived with her Siamese cat and kittens, enjoying each
spring the happiness of seeing the early almond blossom bloom in her
suburban street. In the opening lines of her memoirs, written aged fifty-nine in the middle of a second world war, Gordon felt able to reflect: I’ve had a glamorous, romantic life since I was twenty. I’ve travelled over half the world. I’ve had a career that has seemed to me incredibly lucky. My income, and I’ve never had a sixpence I haven’t earned, has risen from £ a week to – at its height – a steady £, or £, a year. Have I ever been in love? Always. In love with life, people, projects, things, thought. Always in love, always some star on the horizon.
*
Business Girls
Gordon Holmes had many setbacks on the road to achieving her ambitions.
Determination and self-belief were her allies; her lack of interest in marriage and motherhood cleared the path towards her goals. And the timing of the – war was critical in giving her the opportunity to display her
abilities, single-handedly running Thorold’s office. In this respect Gordon
was able to look back on that great convulsion of international conflict and see it as a time of radical change in the fortunes of women. As the leading feminist Millicent Fawcett pronounced in : ‘The war revolutionised
the industrial position of women – it found them serfs and left them free.’
At the beginning of the twentieth century less than per cent of women
had jobs. It is important to understand how alien and unpalatable the general public found women in the workplace – unless that workplace was the scullery, kitchen, laundry, nursery or, of course, that romantic cul-de-sac, the teaching profession. The generally held view was that a woman earning her living was doing so as a temporary shift while waiting for a husband to
turn up. Since women’s work was not seen as permanent, no efforts were
made to reform pay or conditions. The unlucky ones who never married
and had to spend their lives working in ill-paid and exploitative jobs were
to be pitied or ignored.
Women like Gordon Holmes carving out careers for themselves were so
unusual that they excited astonishment, baffled admiration or blank condemnation. Ambitious women like her were anomalous, deviant, unloved: ‘A woman who is loved has no need for ambition. She leaves that to her sisters
whom fate has cheated of their due . . .’ wrote a lady commentator in the
Daily Mail
in . Not that there were many openings for the ambitious woman at that time; broadly speaking, the range of acceptable jobs a woman could do was limited to domestic service, factory work, retail, teaching,
nursing, clerical work. Few women trained for any sort of job, taking up
occupations they had learnt at their mother’s knee, such as needlework or
laundry-work. Upper-and middle-class women did not work at all. They
were trained in accomplishments that could never earn them a living: speaking Italian, embroidering dressing-table sets, playing the harp. It was a point of honour for a husband to be able to keep his wife as a useless ornament.
Working-class women aspired to become supported wives like them, and
to keep house. When they married, per cent of women gave up work.
*
Victoria Alexandrina Drummond was born into the kind of privileged background in which she would have been expected to stay under her parents’
roof until her wedding day. Her father, Captain Malcolm Drummond, was a
Singled Out
high-ranking retainer in the Royal Household and Victoria, born in ,
was named after her godmother, the Queen. Like Gordon Holmes, she
was ambitious and talented. She was also lucky in reaching adulthood at
exactly the point when she could turn Britain’s shortage of skilled workers
to her own advantage.
October th was Victoria’s twenty-first brithday, and her family
showered her with presents. From her mother she received a silver-mounted
umbrella, a pound note, four packets of socks, three books on how to do
conjuring tricks, and a writing block. Helped by their parents, her brother
and sisters clubbed together to give her a matching fox fur boa and muff, a
box of chocolates and a book. But the best gift of all was from her father,
who, after presenting her with a paintbox and two diamanteśhoe buckles,
took her aside and said, ‘Victoria, now you are twenty-one, you can choose
your own career.’ ‘ ‘‘I’m going to be a marine engineer,’’ I said, but I don’t think he took me seriously.’
It was, however, wartime. For a brief period it was acceptable for women
to do men’s work while the boys were at the Front, so the Drummonds
tolerated what they saw as their daughter’s patriotic willingness to do her
bit, and didn’t stand in her way. By the following October Victoria, clad
in overalls, was ready to take up her apprenticeship at a garage in Perth,
where she was to spend the remainder of the war years cleaning out
gearboxes, dismantling engine parts and sweeping down the shop floor
awash with paraffin. But Victoria had no intention of dropping her career
when peace returned. In she continued her training at the Caledon
Ship Works in Dundee, before taking her first on-board post as tenth
engineer on SS
Anchises
, Blue Funnel Line.
Almost everything about this short account of Victoria Drummond’s
early life is extraordinary, because ninety years ago for a young woman of
her background to propose pursuing a career as a marine engineer would
have been like calmly suggesting she earn her daily bread as a prostitute.
No wonder her father didn’t take her seriously. Had he foreseen that his
daughter would never marry, would spend her life with engine oil under
her fingernails, sailing the world on freighters, convoy ships and tankers,
working in shipbuilding and winning medals for bravery at sea, he would
surely have been speechless.
But the war took away the prospect of a wedding day and wifehood
from two million women and replaced it with a different model of female
existence. The housemaids and shop girls became stokers, tool-setters, ticket clippers, van drivers, landgirls and butchers. The factory workers turned from making silk stockings and tableware to making munitions and vehicle
Business Girls
parts. These women were better paid and better nourished than they
had ever been before. Government departments and committees provided
thousands of jobs for typists and clerks. With decent earnings these women
workers could for the first time afford to live away from the parental roof, in hostels and lodgings. Stay-at-home middle-class young ladies like Victoria Drummond discovered new-found abilities as VADs, volunteers, garage hands, mechanics. Nearly a million extra women were in employment by
. During the war the female workforce was applauded and valued for
its patriotism and can-do attitude. The serfs were liberated.
Temporarily. In and , when the ‘khaki boys’ came marching
home, the market was flooded with men wanting their pre-war jobs back
again. By autumn three-quarters of a million of those women had
been handed their cards. It was back to the kitchen sink for bus conductors, insurance clerks, landgirls and electricians alike. Voices were now raised against the ‘limpets’, ‘bloodsuckers’ and ‘bread snatchers’ who tried helplessly to hang on to their jobs. Public opinion was still stuck in the past.
With the war over, it was time these lazy scroungers returned from their
paid ‘holiday’, rolled their sleeves up and got back to the laundry and the
scullery. If they worked at all, women were supposed to be employed in
low-status jobs, or be supported by men. Married women workers were
reviled for taking men’s jobs while they should be ‘kept’ by their husbands, but single women also bore the brunt of much abuse. They had no dependants, therefore their earnings could only be for ‘pin money’, selfish indulgences, rose-coloured carpets even. These were the ‘superfluous’ women.
It was inconceivable that such women could have financial needs, desires
for independence, ambitions, goals, or imperatives outside the home.
This was, of course, a fallacy. The war had given thousands of women
their first taste of financial autonomy and personal freedom; they were not
going to give it up in a hurry. Nor was it a matter of affording fox furs and central heating. Women on their own had to afford bread and butter, footwear, and a roof over their heads.
During the war, white-collar workers volunteered for the army in greater
numbers than from any other sector. Thus, inevitably, it was bank tellers,
clerks and book-keepers who made up the highest proportion of casualties
in the trenches. Office employers looked to women to replenish their ranks,
and so it was that the business girls multiplied in city offices. For every
Victoria Drummond or Beatrice Gordon Holmes there were a thousand
Singled Out
typists, insurance clerks, lowly civil servants and underpaid secretaries,
looking in vain perhaps for the congruent partners who lay buried in
military graves, but more or less reconciled to their nine-to-five lives,
Weldon’s Ladies’ Journal
() targeted women employees with economical dressmaking advice strap-hanging their way to work, strumming away at their Remingtons in the ‘palaces of commerce’, making do on thirty shillings a week. By
there were half a million female clerks and typists working in the United
Kingdom, and by another , had joined their ranks; the numbers
of women were fast catching up with those of the men.
To begin with, a job in an office had seemed to offer undreamed-of
liberation, and at the end of the nineteenth century girls took up clerical
work in vast numbers; by there were times as many women clerks
as there had been in .
George Gissing’s melancholy ‘New Woman’ novel of ,
The Odd
Women
, revolves around the idea of office work as the route to female deliverance. It tells the story of the Madden sisters, who have come hopelessly down in the world. Virginia and Alice are two entrenched old maids eking out their pitiful existence in Battersea on boiled rice and brandy.
With scrupulous detail, Gissing describes how they almost break under the
strain. Virginia and Alice are starving, trying to live on fourteen shillings and twopence a week between them. With the rent costing half of that, they have only a shilling a day for food between them. They pin their