Authors: Virginia Nicholson
hopes of betterment on their youngest sister, Monica, who is ruining her
health working as a shop girl. Monica is paid six shillings a week for her
Business Girls
job at a draper’s, where, as was commonly the practice, she was a resident
employee, expected to do thirteen-hour days six days a week in return for
board and lodging and this small sum. Atrocious hours, under-nourishment
and prolonged standing have brought Monica to the verge of physical
collapse. But their friend Rhoda Nunn appears to offer salvation.
Miss Nunn (portentous name), who has escaped from the treadmill of
teaching by acquiring secretarial training, has now joined her friend Miss
Barfoot in establishing a benevolent school to teach shorthand, typing,
book-keeping and commercial skills. Virginia sets out to persuade Monica
to leave her job at the draper’s and train at Miss Nunn’s school:
‘She will be the most valuable friend to us. Oh, her strength, her resolution! . . .
You are to call upon her as soon as possible. This very afternoon you had better go. She will relieve you from all your troubles, darling. Her friend Miss Barfoot will teach you typewriting, and put you in the way of earning an easy and pleasant livelihood. She will, indeed!’
In the event Monica’s fate is very different; she becomes trapped in a deeply unhappy marriage, and dies in childbirth. The spinster sisters survive and start a school; but Rhoda Nunn is the real heroine of the book. She has a
tumultuous love affair, loving passionately and entirely, and yet Gissing
leaves her at the end unshackled, carefree and optimistic. She will remain
heart-whole and independent, she will start a journal, she will educate
women to become free. Office work has shown her the way.
Shorthand typing was new and fashionable, it was feminine – tinkling
away on a keyboard had maidenly charm – but it also had status. Being in
an office increased your chances of meeting a husband too, and when that
happened, you left. So if marriage was part of your grand plan, you could
rule out any ambitions around getting a ‘top job’. Most offices had a rule
not to employ married women. Of course the flip side of this was the
independence conferred on the ‘business girls’. If you had a decent job,
you didn’t have to get married.
*
That was certainly how Miss Evelyn Symonds saw it. Now nearly years
old, Evelyn got her first job in ; she was only fourteen at the time.
Her family had taken its share of buffeting by the war; her mother died
when she was ten, her cancer untreated because so many doctors were laid
low by the influenza epidemic. Her father made a loveless second
marriage to a war widow, and the family of six lived in three rooms in
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Tottenham. For Evelyn work was an escape from unhappiness and domestic
claustrophobia. It was also a source of pride, for Evelyn was employed by
the Post Office, and this made her a Civil Servant. She had no training –
‘just the ordinary three R’s you know’ – but took exams at the age of
sixteen to become a sorting assistant. In essence the job consisted of nothing more than filing. Gradually promoted – she passed her clerical exams second time around, which enabled her to take up a vacancy – she next progressed
to the money order department.
Today Evelyn’s job would be replaced by computerised systems; in those
days the qualities needed by workers like her were the patience and passivity of an automaton. Each day’s work consisted of a stack of postal orders tied into a bundle, which had to be sorted before you could go home. Each
postal order was numbered; the numbers had to be coded and posted
accordingly into a big board with slots. Next door was another room full
of the slots to be pulled out, packed, and resorted into numerical order. If you didn’t complete your stack, you didn’t go home.
After thirty years, Evelyn ended up as executive officer in the Accountant
General’s Department; this entitled her to six weeks’ holiday. She retired
at sixty after forty-five years in the Post Office. ‘I never had to worry about having someone to keep me, because I had a job for life, and a pension. I stayed in that job, and all the people I worked with, we none of us got
married, and we all stayed friends . . . It didn’t occur to any of us that we needed to get married – it didn’t to me anyway. As for boyfriends – there weren’t many around in those days, not of our age group, they’d all
disappeared in the war. But I don’t remember being bothered about it at
all. We used to go on holidays and please ourselves. We had good money,
and I loved my job. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed life, I must admit . . .’
Miss Doreen Potts was another clerical worker of that generation who
spent all her working life in the same job. She lived at home with her
mother and went daily to the offices of Prudential Insurance. ‘It was a good place to work, a solid place. You didn’t have to be particularly clever or anything, so long as you behaved yourself and got on with it. And you
weren’t afraid that you were going to go to bed Saturday night and wake
up Monday morning and find yourself without a job.’ Doreen missed the
boat on marriage, but wasn’t especially troubled by it; she accepted her
mother’s view that her fate was ‘in the stars, dear’. Doreen’s priority in life was enjoyment. She liked to go out with the girls for a few drinks, and she loved dancing – ‘We used to go to the Streatham Locarno . . . My mother
always said to me, ‘‘You don’t want to get married, because you’re enjoying
yourself too much as you are.’’ It was true, I was.’
Business Girls
In some ways the s and s offered a brave new world to respectable
single women like Evelyn Symonds and Doreen Potts. In her late nineties
Miss Symonds felt that her generation, despite living through a cataclysmic
century, had had the best of everything. ‘We had gracious living, which
you never get now . . .’ She would go walking in the great London parks
with her friends, and end up with a copious tea at Lyons Corner House:
‘. . . a great big plateful of bacon and eggs, a glass of orange juice and a roll and butter, with a waitress, a cloth and a live orchestra – all for two-and-sixpence. People now have nothing like that!’ Such sufficiency
and sense of worth inspire more admiration than pity. And yet her daily
life must have been hard and monotonous at times. What was the everyday
reality? Evelyn and Doreen’s memories, and those of other working women
of their generation, supplemented by the descriptions of contemporary
journalists and authors, help to paint an unvarnished picture of what life
was like for the business girls.
*
Salaries were tight in the s; even more so after the Crash. Thirty
shillings a week was considered a good wage for a female clerical worker
in an office. That meant making decisions about where to live. The girl
who stayed under the parental roof would contribute to the family budget,
but would have to be within walking distance of her job or find fares. Flats might be more convenient, but were expensive and often lonely; tenancies for single women were hard to come by – they weren’t supposed to live
alone, it wasn’t thought respectable, and some landladies clearly suspected
that if they did, it must be on immoral earnings. In , prompted by
the rise in the number of single women, the Women’s National Liberal
Federation called upon government to recognise that spinsters had special
needs in this area. Their secretary, Miss Aline Mackinnon, spoke up for
many like herself: ‘I am an incorrigible spinster, and I think it would bring an enormous amount of happiness to a great many spinsters if they could have their own little homes. I know of dressmakers, cooks, elementary
schoolteachers, and all kinds of people who live in lodgings and who, if
they had a little house of their own and a little bit of garden where they
could get dirty in the evenings, would have an entirely different outlook.’
The government was dilatory, but various utopian bodies, like the Women’s
Pioneer Housing Company, did look out for their needs and started a programme of converting old houses into groups of apartments for independent singles; however, the rents were expensive.
Many working women preferred to live in hostels, because they were
Singled Out
much cheaper, centrally located, provided breakfast, dinner, laundry facilities and ready company, yet gave one the feeling of independence. Nineteen-year-old Mary Margaret Grieve felt herself to be reasonably well-off when she started her first London-based job as a trainee journalist on
Nursing
Mirror
in . She had £ s a week, and her family supplemented this with another ten shillings, yet even so it was essential to economise. The Grieve parents lived in Glasgow, so staying at home was not an option.
Mary lodged in a hostel in Earls Court. It was a great gloomy mansion
block, but from her minute first-floor cubicle she could just see stars
between the chimney-pots. Hostel life was full of shifts and expedients.
The mean manageress charged threepence for a bath; for this sum the geyser
produced a barely tepid puddle at the bottom of the tub, so the girls clubbed together and bought a length of red hosepipe. This they attached to the hot water tap on the landing, diverting the water supply from a little basin which was normally used for washing stockings and underwear, to just reach the bath at the other end of the corridor.
Stingy rules also prevailed over breakfast. Mary would join the queue
and receive her permitted portion of half a slice of toast, one pat of butter, one minute portion of marmalade and a cup of tea. Seconds were allowed, but nobody had time to queue twice before dashing off to catch the
underground from Knightsbridge. ‘I was slightly hungry all the time I was
on
Nursing Mirror
. . .’ she remembered.
Affording enough to eat is the constant refrain of the business girls. ‘By
far my biggest financial strain was lunch,’ remembered Mary. Normally,
fivepence for a sustaining cheese roll, a glass of milk and a slice of fruit cake at a dairy in Maiden Lane kept hunger at bay, but every so often when finances were very low she would go a little further afield to an unusual
free canteen hidden away on the upper floor of an office block in Kingsway.
Mary suspected that the business girls who frequented this ‘unique feeding
place’ came from ‘an older profession than mine’. Nobody else she knew
seemed aware of its existence, so she was probably right. The procedure
was as follows: as you went in the lady at the entrance handed you a paper
on which was written a biblical text. You seated yourself at a long trestle
with all the other young women, then bowls of a good substantial stew
were passed down the row:
One ate one’s lunch in silence. On finishing each luncher stood up, recited from memory the text on her slip of paper, handed in her paper at the desk and left. No payment was asked.
Business Girls
I have no idea who ran this admirable enterprise, nor do I know if I was strictly entitled to the hospitality offered . . .
The free stews for fallen women might have been a godsend to Beatrice
Brown and her sister Enid, who worked as typists in central London and
grew to know every nasty tea-shop in the Strand, from the ‘Busy Bee’ to
the ‘Chintz Teacloth’, in their search for cheaper and better lunches. In
vain – ‘they all smelt of sugar and fat and dusty curtains’, and the tables
were so uncomfortably low that you hit your knees when you pulled your
chair in.
Like Mary Grieve and the Brown sisters, Ethel Mannin, who started as
a typist for a big advertising company in London on twenty-three shillings
a week, was always ravenous, always watchful of her purse, making up for
inadequate cheap lunches with sweets and chocolates at her desk. With an
upper limit of ninepence for lunch, she too became a reluctant habitueé of
tea-shops. ‘Through constant usage you grow to hate them all.’ There were
the big noisy popular ones, the quiet arty ones, the cinema tea-lounges and
the risque´ basements appointed with screens and couches for courting
couples. Ethel had been to them all. And always the question was, what
could you ‘run to’? Usually, tea and sardines on toast, a sausage or a Scotch egg; when what you longed for was fruit compote and tinned peach melba at prohibitive prices. Dare you treat yourself ? Would the pert waitresses
despise you if you went cheap? Arty ‘Copper Kettle’-style tea-shops were
exorbitant, their decayed gentlewomen owners charging as much as one-and-sixpence for their ‘home-made’ jams, cakes and cress sandwiches, but cinema lounges were reasonably priced, the tea good and the ambience
cosy.
Ethel Mannin observes everyday life in the s from the inside, and
her detailed accounts of aspects of British society, from clothes to contraceptives, air travel, education, Bright Young Things and the Chelsea Arts Ball, have the ring of truth. One of her essays, ‘Palaces of Commerce’, complains tellingly of the tedium, vexations and frustrations endured by thousands of
female wage-slaves like her, compelled daily to be swallowed up behind
the pitiless glass and concrete fac¸ades of the modern office.
Mannin lamented the ‘Americanisation’ of office life. Open-plan systems,