Authors: Virginia Nicholson
electric lifts, buttons to summon office-boys, coloured lights to indicate ‘In’
or ‘Out’ on office doors, all contributed to the worker’s sense that she was forever under surveillance. There was no hiding place – except one: the lavatory.
Singled Out
‘Going up to wash’ is the boon and blessing of every office-worker, and the curse of every employer.
‘Where is Miss So-and-So? I want her to take some letters . . .’
But Miss So-and-So has ‘gone up to wash’.
Of course, Mannin points out, Miss So-and-So has really gone up to fix
her lipstick or spend a little time gossiping with Miss Something-or-Other,
but the ‘Chief ’ is powerless to object. ‘Going up to wash’ was the salvation of the work-dodger, the avoider, the late-comer, the plain bored. Mannin herself lived her office days in a state of fear and hate:
. . . the sick dread of having to take down shorthand and being required to read portions of it back to the Chief whilst he sat and waited, ‘Read me what I’ve just dictated,’ whereupon the pages of hieroglyphics would mean nothing to me, and I would stumble and falter, rely on memory, or stare blankly at the page of my notebook, feeling myself growing crimson, and tears of sheer panic rushing to my eyes . . .
and impotent anger:
. . . hurrying along the same road six days a week, and back again at night . . .
strap-hanging in hot crowded carriages . . . having to go into an office on a sunny day . . . jealousy of [the other girls] because they earned more money and were more efficient than I was; and then, when I earned more money than they did, hatred of their jealousy of me . . .
O palaces of commerce, how hatefully ye stand . . . prisons of youth, machines that swallow up human beings, turning them into Robots, work-slaves . . . thirty bob a week, and never enough to eat . . .
Ethel Mannin escaped captivity; she turned her skill to copywriting in the
advertising firm, married, and became a journalist and successful novelist.
But she would have sympathised with the ‘Business Girl’ who wrote a piece
for
Woman’s Life
in September itemising the ‘Things That Make Me Grouse’. The Business Girl’s day was consumed with petty annoyances: . . . the girls who work with me keep on borrowing my pencils and paper and
rubbers and pens, and anything else they can think of . . .
. . . my typewriter wants seeing to every half minute, and, because it won’t work properly, I waste letter after letter, and of course there are more letters than ever to do – !
Business Girls
Illustration from ‘Things That
Make Me Grouse’,
Woman’s Life
,
September
. . . I’m poked away in a smutty room, about six feet square, that never sees the sun and gets its air from a passage, and I see other girls, in my lunch-hour, who can spend all day in the sun if they choose. I wish then that I need not earn my living!
Rainy mornings on crowded buses, temperamental bosses, short lunch—
hours, hunger, overtime, the expense of shoe-leather and the price of fares, all combined to crush and break the spirit of the working girl. Miss Marjorie Skrine, born in , was still imprisoned as a hard-up typist for a Temple law firm in her forties. She journeyed there from Tulse Hill and back again
every day. Miss Skrine’s short account of her working day refers to the
‘dull strain’ of work as a legal secretary. Marjorie was thoughtful and
perceptive, but notes of cynicism and accidie tinge her tone of voice, which is that of a wry, unhappy woman. As a female in the office she was in the minority: ‘There are many male typists, but not many women, as they
cannot stand the long and irregular hours.’ But the men she worked with
were, according to her, unmarriageable, the lawyers vain and stagy, the
shorthand writers mad, drunk and improvident.
On December Marjorie recorded that she had written to thank
her wealthy aunt for her ‘munificence’ in sending her a five-shilling postal order for Christmas. ‘I put it more politely than that . . . I am regarded as the lost sheep of the family because I work for my living. I suggested
the obvious remedy years ago, but the general whip-round was not
Singled Out
forthcoming . . .’ Later that afternoon, about half past six, Marjorie went
out for a break with another of the typists, a man, and over tea they
commiserated over their poverty, and discussed the attitude of men to
wives and mistresses. Englishmen, Marjorie claimed, are good to their
mistresses and show the worse side of their nature to their wives, ‘. . . though it is also true that many a wife would be put through the hoop much more than she is if her husband didn’t have a secret mistress to keep him in
something like a good temper’. Marjorie was certainly not a wife, and from
her diary it would seem that she was not a mistress either. Towards seven,
they were back at their desks, working late again. The ‘Chief ’ was in a bad mood. Marjorie checked her diary and noted that it was nearly full moon.
‘The effect of the moon on unbalanced nature is very true of men quite as
much as of women . . .’
Who can say, from these glimpses, whether the single woman worker
suffered more than her stay-at-home married counterpart? The journalist
Leonora Eyles was certain that she did. Unmarried career women, according
to her, were certain to suffer from nasty disorders of the (unused) reproductive organs in middle age. You surrendered motherhood in favour of a job at your peril. ‘Neuritis’ – a catch-all word used then to describe mental instability – was also, according to her, a risk for such women. In
Lysistrata
, his lament for the unmarried, Anthony Ludovici railed against those who defended the business girls; how, he asked, could ‘a girl withered and
broken by long years of typing’ be anything but a tragic figure? Just because the spectacle of innumerable unmarried female workers crowded on to the trams and omnibuses each morning had become a familiar one in the
interwar period did not mean that these wretched commuters were fulfilled
and happy. John Betjeman wrote ‘Business Girls’ in , but his ‘thousand
business women/Having baths in Camden Town’ could just as well have
been the typists and clerks remembered by the poet from his twenties. In
any case the poem is worth quoting for its compassionate sense of the
fragility and waste of those enslaved lives:
Rest you there, poor unbelov’d ones,
Lap your loneliness in heat.
All too soon the tiny breakfast,
Trolley-bus and windy street!
Evelyn Symonds and Doreen Potts would have been amazed to have been
so pitied. The unavoidable reality was, however, that unbelov’d women
now had to earn a living. And there were some authors, less angry than
Business Girls
Ludovici, less wistful than Betjeman, who believed that the best way
forward was a little practical advice.
*
Agnes Miall, no-nonsense author of
The Bachelor Girl’s Guide to Everything
– or The Girl on Her Own
(), was one of these. Her book was written in wartime, but was as applicable to the ‘bach’* – as she was often called – of the s and s. Then there was May Henry and her co-author Jeanette Halford, two cookery writers who set out to fill a much-needed gap in the
market with
The Bachelor Girls’ Cookery Book
(nd edition ). Little guides such as these were addressed directly to the ‘girls who . . . are forced to re-arrange their lives at a distance from home and friends’, and girls who ‘live independent lives’. Many of these found themselves unexpectedly cast into the world of employment, and the
Bachelor Girl
books offered hints and solutions to all their everyday problems. Chapter headings in Agnes Miall’s book included Furnishing, Household Duties, Etiquette and Income
for the Woman Worker. She explains how to keep accounts, draw cheques,
and gives an example of the budget of a typical ‘girl office worker, who
earns /- a week and lives in a London hostel, within walking distance of
her work’:
Salary: £ s
Partial board and bedroom
s
Working expenses (lunches)
s
Laundry
s
Dress (£ yearly)
s d
Amusements and literature
s d
Savings
s
Presents, charity, extras
s
Total
£ s d
This is twelve shillings more than Ethel Mannin earned, and most bachelor
girls, as we have seen, had to catch a tube or omnibus twice a day; at a
penny-halfpenny a fare that would have reduced lunch money to ninepence. Indeed Agnes Miall’s estimate was in many cases wildly over— generous. In the s some typists were on twenty-five shillings a week.
At a conference of women clerks in a delegate blamed office
* Pronounced ‘batch’ to rhyme with ‘catch’, rather than ‘Bach’, the German composer.
Singled Out
inefficiency on low wages; junior typists who had only had a sandwich and
an apple for lunch lacked the stamina to deal with the work load. Provincial city offices paid clerical workers even less, sometimes as little as ten shillings a week; on that you could afford a penny bun or, on good days, a three— penny bowl of soup for your lunch. Cheese rolls and fruit cake would have
been unthought-of extravagances. A budget like this left no space for
impulse buys, hairdressers, restaurants, alcohol, holidays or any of the things the credit-card-carrying office worker of today takes for granted. (It also, as one office worker remembered, left no spare income for soap or extra sets of underwear. The typing pool on a hot day could be suffocatingly smelly.)
The Bachelor Girl’s Guide
goes on to provide a wealth of invaluable information and advice which, in its ingenuity and judgements, tells us
much about the humble standards of the day. Take Agnes Miall’s words of
wisdom on the furnishing of bedsitting rooms: ‘Soft art green and a dull
brown are a good basis in almost any room. A dark bedcover is always
preferable to a white in a bedsitting room. Artistic washstand china often
tempts girls to spend a good deal of money, but considering its fragility this is hardly worth while.’ And on store-cupboards: ‘The store cupboard should always contain a tin of condensed milk . . . a quarter of a pound of plain
biscuits, packets of jelly, blancmange and custard powders, cubes of soup,
a pot of jam, a tin of shortbread (in case a friend drops in to tea on Sunday), tinned salmon and sardines and a tin of apricots, peaches or pineapple chunks; also . . .’ (presumably to assist in the preparation of that forgotten dish, junket) ‘. . . a bottle of rennet’.
May Henry and Jeanette Halford come to the rescue here with a wide
range of catering solutions. Their cookery book gives recipes calculated in
small quantities, many of which could be performed easily on a spirit or oil stove, with minimal
batterie de cuisine
. The aim was to encourage: ‘We hope this book will continue to be considered one from which any fool can cook.’ Thus heartened, the trusting ‘bach’ might turn to sustaining recipes
for Fried Sprats, Boiled Sole, or Baked Pigeons. But if that seemed too
daunting, May and Jeanette had helpful instructions on how to make
Sandwiches (‘The slices should be thin and the crusts neatly trimmed
off . . .’) or, failing that, Toast.
Agnes Miall saw herself
in loco parentis
to the unwary woman worker, proffering warnings of the ‘mother-knows-best’ variety: every bachelor girl ‘should make it a rule to wear pure wool combinations, with fairly high
neck and sleeves to the elbow, next to the skin in winter . . . cotton should never be worn next to the skin. It is liable to cause severe chills.’ Not content with such mundane practicalities, she took the plight of the single
Business Girls
girl to heart in her tips on etiquette. At work, it was important not to
permit fellow employees to single her out ‘on account of her sex’, the
assumption being that women were often treated with undue deference.
‘
Try to forget that you are a woman
’ was her advice. Social life could be tricky too: ‘Bachelor girls are too apt to fall into free and easy ways . . .’ Don’t imagine that the formalities can be ditched, she cautions: ‘This is a very serious mistake that may lead to terrible trouble . . . People who are willing to waive introductions are rarely desirable companions and should be sternly discouraged.’ She worried too about their solitariness: Girls who go about much alone in big towns (especially in certain parts of
London) sometimes complain of being spoken to by strange men. This will
rarely, if ever, happen, if you walk along briskly and purposefully, not staring at anyone. It is loitering and aimless strolling that are to be avoided. If spoken to in spite of precautions, a decided answer or a cold stare will usually end the annoyance.
The reality that emerges from the
Bachelor Girl
books is one of economic stringency and drab loneliness, of lunches on trays – a Marmite sandwich and a cigarette – of washing your hair under the tap and using the leftover
shampoo to clean out the basin, of sitting in the park on Sundays. In this
context, dreaming of rose-coloured carpets was the nearest one could get
to having them. Agnes Miall even has a chapter with tips to the Bachelor
Girl on how to fit and lay her own carpets (assuming she could afford
them), probably art green or dull brown ones at that. Perhaps being a
business girl wasn’t such an ‘easy and pleasant livelihood’ as it at first