Cultures of Selling: Perspectives on Consumption and Society Since 1700 0754650464, 2005024150, 9780754650461, 9781138262782, 9781315258652

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CULTURES OF SELLING

Cultures of Selling Perspectives on Consumption and Society since 1700

E dited by

JOHN BENSON and LAURA UGOLINI University o f W olverham pton, UK

O Routledge Taylor & Francis Group LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2006 by Ashgate Publishing 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxfordshire 0X14 4RN 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 R outledge is an imprint o f the Taylor M»l |n!4..>wv| bv Ik* iT'-po-tori. 1 V »

Figure 1.1

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Statue of Eros at Piccadilly Circus, illustrated on the back cover of Vogue, 20 March 1935. ^Vogue/The Conde Nast Publications Ltd.

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tourist guides, and newspapers.5 By the 1930s shopping content was an established component of the women’s magazine, and was instrumental in its construction of femininity.6 Vogue, particularly, forms the central pivot of this chapter. It was a very successful women’s magazine concerned with fashionable dress and fashionable living, broadly espousing the cultures of the affluent middle and uppermiddle classes.7 The British edition began publishing in London in 1915,8 and whilst Vogue certainly invites an exploration of the ‘London-ness’ of its fashions, this chapter foregrounds the geographies of shopping cultures. Constructions of fashion and shopping were of course intertwined, so that fashion features, shopping advice columns and advertisements simultaneously provided a monthly roundup of information on the latest fashion developments and the best buys. In Vogue, shopping was about pleasure and fashion, rather than about basic domestic provisioning. Vogue's shopping took place almost exclusively in the West End. This chapter has ‘place’ at its heart and considers how maps, routes and networks were important in the way the West End functioned and was conceptualised, looking particularly at the makeup of routes within the West End, an approach that has been relatively underdeveloped within existing work. Rappaport has interpreted the late Victorian shopping article as an urban tour guide.9 This study develops this idea, considering more carefully the meaning of the precise geographies of consumption

5 This subject is discussed in a broader West End context in B. Edwards, ‘A man’s world? masculinity and metropolitan modernity and Simpson, Piccadilly’, in D. Gilbert, D. Matless and B. Short, eds., Geographies o f British Modernity (Oxford, 2003), 151-67, and B. Edwards, ‘Making the West End modem: space, architecture and shopping in 1930s London’, University of the Arts London, Ph.D. thesis, 2004. 6 The women’s magazine’s construction of femininity, and the importance of consumption within these constmctions, is explored in M. Beetham, A Magazine o f Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine 1800-1914 (London, 1996); C. Breward, ‘Patterns of respectability’, in B. Burman, ed., The Culture o f Sewing: Gender, Consumption and Home Dressmaking (Oxford, 1999), 21-31; M. Ferguson, Forever Feminine: Women’s Magazines and the Cult o f Femininity (London, 1983); J. Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies ’ Home Journal, Gender and the Promises o f Consumer Culture (New York, 1995). 7 Statistics on readership demographics are notoriously elusive for women’s magazines of this period. However, target audience, always intended to be broad, can be inferred from a careful and contextual reading of the editorial, advertising and graphic messages contained in the magazine. 8 The references made to Vogue in this chapter refer to the British edition, unless otherwise stated. 9 E. Rappaport, Shopping fo r Pleasure: Women and the Making o f London’s West End (Princeton, 2000), 126-32.

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within the magazine’s shopping information, in the context of the 1930s. It argues that it was not just the design, the fashionability and the branding of goods, but also their association with very specific West End locations, that was important within Vogue's representation of feminine consumption cultures. The West End was an area that encompassed a number of smaller retail districts, including Kensington High Street and Sloane Square. However, at its heart was a tight cluster of streets around and between Oxford Street, Regent Street, Bond Street and Piccadilly, which was acknowledged as ‘London’s most fashionable shopping district’,10 and formed the focus for shopping in Vogue. Significantly, this shopping geography runs contrary to the existing historical narrative of the inter-war period, which has overlooked the shops and shopping of central London. A combination of assumptions about the inter-war decline of the big London department stores, the impact of national economic depression on retail, and the relative importance of the suburban and provincial shopping street have drawn attention away from the centre.11 Histories that have dealt with the metropolis have either been concerned with the department stores, tailors and outfitters of the late nineteenth century,12 or with the boutiques of Carnaby Street and the Kings Road in post-war ‘swinging London’.13 The West End of the 1930s is therefore ripe for reconsideration. The first part of the chapter, ‘A trip to town’, uncovers the distinctive role of the West End in Vogue's treatment of shopping: as a hub of fashionable consumption within British shopping geographies, and as the destination of pleasurable, purposeful shopping trips. The second part, ‘Mapping the West End’s streets’, uses the ‘Shop-hound’ shopping column to examine Vogue's West End more closely, showing how its identity was constructed from different streets and routes. The third part, ‘Hiding consumers’, considers the significant absences from the magazine’s West End, which highlight the class and gender-inflected nature of this version of the city. This allows conclusions to be drawn about the ‘edited’ and ‘virtual’ nature of the shopping maps, and suggests the usefulness of the concept of the ‘imagined city’ in deciphering the meaning of magazines’ shopping narratives.

10 Residential Hotels and Caterers Association, London: What to See and Where to Stay (London, 1930), 48. 11 Honeyman, ‘Following suit’; Winship, ‘Culture of restraint’. 12 See, for example, C. Breward, The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life, 1860-1914 (Manchester, 1999); Rappaport, Shopping fo r Pleasure. 13 M. Fogg, Boutique: A ’60s Cultural Phenomenon (London, 2003).

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A trip to town The ‘trip’ was an important mechanism with which 1930s Vogue discussed shopping, and constructed its shopping geographies. This ‘trip’ involved journeying to a particular shopping area: the West End, whose shopping crowds were therefore formed substantially of those who lived somewhere else. The trip was shown to involve a sense of occasion, whether the shopper travelled the short distance from Hampstead for an afternoon, from suburban Surbiton for a day, or from Yorkshire for a precious week. Indeed such explicit distinctions between categories of reader were often collapsed by the magazine, which ascribed to all the same adhesion to metropolitan cultures. This reflected a deliberate attempt to broaden the appeal of the magazine’s contents, but also provided a comment on the London-centric nature of the cultures of England’s social elite. The Vogue shopper was not presented as a tourist, disoriented by the city. Neither was she a flaneuse, with the term’s connotations of rambling and spectating in London’s streets. Her visit was altogether more purposeful, although it was still essentially pleasurable. Whilst women depicted in Vogue's society news and glossy advertisements were confident urban habitues, the shopping columns also addressed those who were partial strangers to the city, but who did not want to be recognised as such. The magazine presented itself as an important source of ‘urban knowledge’ for these women’s West End expeditions.14 This set of spatial relationships were clearly expressed in articles such as ‘8 hour day in town’: We can’t advise you too strongly to plan your day several days ahead ... with as much care and cunning as if it were a trip to the tropics. List what you want to buy. If you are shopping for your family and house, make a note of all the necessary data. (Your husband’s collar size, your children’s measurements, the area of the lawn.) Collect swatches of all your existing clothes, so that the things you buy will fit into your colour schemes.15

Enabling the customer to purchase everything in one place was an advantage much trumpeted by the owners of department stores from their early days, and would seem to fulfil the requirements of an efficiently planned trip. It is certainly true by the 1930s the department store was a well-developed format, often incorporating a myriad of departments, which meant that a trip to town could conveniently take place within one store. This suggests a potential negation of the importance of geography within shopping and retail practices, allowing the store to operate

14 The contrast between the magazine expert and the ignorant reader is a recurrent theme within women’s magazines. See for example, Rappaport, Shopping fo r Pleasure, 131. 15 ‘8 hour day in town’, Vogue, 16 March 1938, 92.

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independently from its location and diminishing the relevance of its proximity to other businesses in the shopping area. Women’s magazines occasionally used the single-store shopping trip as a genre of shopping article. One such article on shopping at Harrods and Selfridges advised: At last you’ve booked your day - for a trip to town. You simply had to. You want a spring suit. Your skin looks alarmingly post-winter. It’s Leslie’s birthday in a week. Emma is murmuring about the glass cloths. The sun parlour wants redecorating. Your husband’s pullovers are a sight. Old Crabtree says don’t blame him if you have no cut flowers from the garden this summer. ‘A day!’ you think, ‘I need a month. It’ll take me half a day just travelling from one place to another, from dress shop to beauty salon, on to a toy shop, a decorator’s, a man’s shop, a seedsman’s and so on.’ Yes, but need you? Probably you’ve no idea of the versatility of the modem ‘department store’ where you can cash cheques, have beauty treatments, chose from the latest Paris models, attend an auction, watch a television programme, read and write letters, buy anything on earth from a candle to a cockatoo.16

Whilst historians have frequently identified the department store’s nature as ‘universal provider’ as one of its defining features, they have generally failed to sufficiently interrogate the claims for department stores’ self-sufficiency. Whilst spatial convenience might have been appropriate for the kind of every-day provisioning associated with grocery shopping, it went completely contrary to the nature of the metropolitan shopping cultures examined here. This research has discovered that the single-department-store shopping trip was largely an occasional editorial conceit and department store advertising strategy, which bore little resemblance either to the magazine’s shopping geography as a whole, or to department stores’ broader business strategies. This chapter argues that a shopping trip was neither easily nor desirably contained within one department store. The narratives of West End shopping within magazines and guidebooks, and the design, display and spatial strategies of stores, suggest that it was in variety and multiplicity that the appeal of West End shopping cultures lay: in practices of browsing and choosing, both between purchases and between different stores, processes that were pleasurable, and served to negotiate fashion and construct identity.17 It is highly important that the shops found in Vogue clustered along very specific, and largely West End, streets. This coincides with the findings of a strong body of work within consumption studies, which has highlighted the specificity of place, differentiating shopping cultures and consumers as urban, suburban, or provincial. For example, late nineteenth-century emergent consumer society has

16 Ibid., 92-3. 17 Edwards, ‘A man’s world?’; Edwards, ‘Making the West End modem’.

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been identified by historians as essentially metropolitan in character,18 singling out certain cities, notably Paris, Berlin, London, New York and Chicago, as primary locations of modern shopping cultures, often linked to their operation as fashion cities within an international arena.19 Location was certainly a central tenet of the emergent professional architectural concern with retail planning. In their important 1937 manual, Smaller Retail Shops, Bryan and Norman Westwood advised, ‘General proximity to other shops of the same trade, or same degree of luxury in special trades, is an advantage because it creates a centre for the particular trade, or a place where a particular type of person shops.’20 Stores built during the 1930s clearly reflected this advice, and positioned themselves with precision within the street network. When The Architects Journal reviewed D. H. Evans’ expensive new Oxford Street store, it concluded that ‘The site, being situated amongst such stores as Selfridges, C. & A. Modes, and John Lewis, and being both in Oxford Street and close to Bond Street where the public stream must be counted in millions, is one of the finest drapery sites in the world.’21 Furthermore, shops betrayed an awareness of the value of location in their efforts to promote themselves collectively with their neighbours through organisations such as the Regent Street Association. Even multiple shops, supposedly effecting a decentralisation of British retail during this period, often retained a flagship store in the West End. They also frequently promoted the infusion of metropolitan fashion into their national network of shops. This was evidenced, for example, in Austin Reed menswear chain’s 1930s advertising campaign, in which the company styled itself ‘Austin Reed of Regent Street’, exploiting the cachet of its newly rebuilt West End shop.22 Vogue's territory of fashionable living was not, however, restricted to the West End. The fashionable world found on the pages of the magazine had a complex national and international geography, of which its shopping map was only one part. Vogue's social calendar consisted of country weekends, hunts in Scotland, days at the races. The magazine also described life on an international stage of travel and tourism: the Riviera, Egypt, India. Coverage of couture constructed an additional

18 R. Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (London, 1985); Breward, The Hidden Consumer, M. Domosh, ‘The feminised retail landscape: gender ideology and consumer culture in nineteenth-century New York City’, in N. Wrigley and M. Lowe, eds., Retailing, Consumption and Capital: Towards the New Retail Geography (Harlow, 1996), 257-70; Rappaport, Shopping fo r Pleasure. 19 A typical example is Domosh’s work on New York. Domosh, ‘The feminised retail landscape’. 20 B. and N. Westwood, Smaller Retail Shops (London, 1937), 15. 21 The Architects Journal, 15 September 1938, 429. 22 See the examples reproduced in ‘Advertising for men only’, Art and Industry, July 1939, 1-15.

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international network, connecting Paris, London and New York, closely linked to the business structure of Vogue, which published editions in these three cities during the 1930s. However, in the British edition there was a clear and consistent message that London was the heart of this international life, and that the West End was the most important place for shopping, a place where a woman was kitted out for this international lifestyle. Yardley, a regular advertiser in Vogue, stressed the potency of West End goods, with the slogan, ‘Complexion born in Bond Street, now known around the world’.23 The fact that British Vogue's London-centric shopping network was out of alignment with the maps in French and North American editions only serves to highlight the way that Britishness was written into Vogue's imagined West End. The magazine constituted not only an urban guide, but also a manual for metropolitan shopping identities. For example, fashion features regularly recommended outfits sourced from the West End for wearing on shopping trips, so that place was at once the destination of the trip and literally cloaked the consumer. For instance, a 1935 article, ‘For town’, included garments from Digby Morton in Palace Gate, Miss Ware and Asprey in Bond Street and Fortnum and Mason in Piccadilly as recommended apparel for a metropolitan visit.24 This close connection between the magazine and its advertisers - largely shops, department stores, or designers with a West End address - could indicate that Vogue's shopping map was dictated straightforwardly by commercial interests. By the 1930s, advertisers certainly had well-established leverage within the world of women’s magazines, providing substantial revenue and dominating a large proportion of the magazine’s pages. Furthermore, the boundaries between editorial and advertising collapsed significantly in this period, in terms of format, text and graphics. This lent advertisements the authority of the editorial voice, whilst shopping columns frequently read like advertorials.25 However, this interpretation of Vogue, by favouring the process of ‘writing’ over that of ‘reading’ the magazine, overly privileges the role of advertisers and editors within consumer cultures. It also gives too much weight to the supposed dichotomy between ‘expert’ magazine and ‘ignorant’, ‘passive’ reader traditionally set up by editors. This has obscured a more active role of female consumers, a group whose increased economic power was instrumental in the commercial success of manufacturers, retailers and publishers. It has also overlooked the urban and consumer knowledges and cultures women might be expected to bring to their

23 Vogue, 16 September 1936, 1. 24 ‘For town’, Vogue, 20 March 1935, 69. 25 This convergence of editorial and advertising influences within the women’s magazine is discussed in Beetham, A Magazine o f Her Own?, 8; Rappaport, Shopping fo r Pleasure, 126-7; Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings, 47.

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readings of the magazine: an awareness of a longer history of the West End’s importance as a shopping venue and hub of fashion cultures, and an intimate knowledge of its streets.

Mapping the West End’s streets Vogue's treatment of the West End constituted a navigation of its component parts. The character of the West End had long drawn significantly on its nature as a collection of smaller, differently functioning routes and areas, home to a variety of businesses, creating a complex patchwork that was at once a source of disorientation, and the West End’s chief attraction. Likewise, from the late twentieth century, representations of the feminine consumer within popular narratives had stressed how her trip to town involved a combination of different types of activities that implied a mastery of the West End in all its forms.26 In this vein, Vogue ran a regular diary column during the 1930s, ‘Vogue covers the town’, cataloguing details of events, shows, exhibitions, films, restaurants, and nightclubs. It is clear that Vogue's ‘trip to town’ involved a sense of occasion, drawing on this assemblage of West End places and events. This was the theme of a series of Yardley advertisements in Vogue, one of which depicted a metropolitan type being entertained by a rich relative, ‘When uncle comes to town ... there’s usually a pleasant little shopping expedition, then lunch at one of the smartest restaurants in town, with perhaps a matinee to follow ... A time to be at one’s brightest and best, well turned out and with the right perfume.’27 This composite nature of the West End experience was also reflected in the variety of stores and goods recommended in Vogue. From the mid 1930s the magazine ran a regular column called ‘Shop-hound’, which largely concentrated on garments but also included accessories, groceries, furniture and services such as dressmakers, laundries and beauticians. Each column was a fictional shopping trip conducted by a small and very fashionable dog, who worked from Vogue's central London offices. The varied nature of the locations within these shopping trips necessitates the abandonment of a retail history that has been segregated according to shop type. This has been described by Miller et al. as an artificial genealogy of the modem shop, constructed as ‘an arc from the arcades and department stores of Paris through to the shopping malls of the United States’.28 The picture painted by Vogue was rather that of a larger, more textured retail landscape.

26 The diversity of the West End experience in the Victorian and Edwardian periods is usefully addressed in Rappaport, Shopping fo r Pleasure. 27 Vogue, 20 March 1935, 1. 28 D. Miller, P. Jackson, N. Thrift, B. Holbrook and M. Rowlands, Shopping, Place and Identity (London, 1998), 3.

Figure 1.2

Illustration for the ‘Shop-hound’ column, ‘Shop-hound’s conducted tour’, Vogue, 14 October 1936. @Vogue/The Conde Nast Publications Ltd.

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A typical column of 1938 described a meandering shopping trip that was, crucially for this study, rooted in the principal shopping streets at the heart of the West End. Shop-hound first reported that tie-silks for jackets could be bought by the yard from Galeries Lafayette in Regent Street and Harrods Man’s Shop, whilst desirable silk petersham could be procured from Dickins and Jones in Regent Street. Then the hound confided a ‘red hot tip for sports girls, country girls, all girls. Daks, the famous men’s trousers from Simpsons, of Piccadilly, are now being made for women. Chief advantages: perfect cut, special gadget at the waist to ensure snug fit, single side zip fastening, legs with “cuffs.” (Please note that cuffless trousers are dead as doormats).’ Then on to Bond Street, to purchase the new ‘sky-pink’ lipstick from Elizabeth Arden and Hawaiian necklaces from Fenwicks. Next she headed further south to a decorator’s in Eaton Terrace, as she had woken up the other day ‘hating her house’. The trail ended with a look at Easter Eggs at Ginnett Flowers in Ellis Street and a brief visit to Florence Hills in Princes Street, Cavendish Square, ‘a dressmaker who specialises in larger figures’.29 Shopping columns were of course not a new phenomenon in the 1930s.30 Shophound drew on an established genre of women’s magazines’ fashion reportage to round up the best bargains and most fashionable buys to be had. However, this chapter argues that not only was each fleeting catalogue of items specific to the fashionable shopping cultures of 1930s Vogue, but that the particular way relationships between fashionability, commodity and place were drawn in these columns provided a distinctive reading of the city. Vogue's Shop-hound articulated the connected themes of fashion and shopping in a powerfully spatial manner: the goods were almost exclusively located within the West End of London, and were described in the context of a real shopping trip. These columns suggested that it was the configuring and reconfiguring of fashions, commodities, shops and streets into routes and shopping trips which structured the urban narrative in the text and constructed an imagined West End. By taking a spatial approach that emphasises routes and places of connection, this chapter argues that in the 1930s the cultures of the shopping street were as important in conceptions of West End shopping as the actual purchases that took place inside the shops. This argument draws on a substantial body of work that positions the street, its representations and its lived experience at the heart of city

29 ‘Shop-hound’, Vogue, 13 April 1938, 84. 30 The tradition of the shopping column in the women’s magazine, and its derivation from an older literature of urban rambling, is discussed in Rappaport, Shopping fo r Pleasure, 126-32.

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life and notions of the urban.31 For shopping historians, women’s access to city streets has been cited as an important indicator of the modernity of emergent cultures from the nineteenth century.32 By the inter-war period, women’s presence in the street during the day was no longer a contested issue, yet the cultures of the street remained highly important. In Vogue, the street was central to how the West End was thought about, providing the framework for the all-important construction of shopping trips, and constituting its iconic landmarks: Bond Street, Oxford Street and so on. Even more crucially, it was the space where shops were encountered, window-shopping took place, and being ‘in town’ was performed. Retailers certainly understood the importance of the liminal layer of the building: they threw the full force of their architectural and display strategies onto the facade, in order to engage the passing world and attract the attention of the media.33 The kinetic nature of the street infused representations of West End shopping in the 1930s: constant pedestrian and vehicular traffic that could stimulate, disorientate or assault. In 1930, for example, the Evening Standard reported an incident, where shoppers had been endangered by their proximity to the street: Women in the busiest part of Kensington High Street found themselves confronted by a runaway horse and van at mid-day today. The horse dashed across the road and appeared about to gallop on to the footpath, where hundreds of women were inspecting the shop windows, when a bus ... headed it off. The horse and bus met in collision. The shafts of the van were smashed and the horse was thrown to the ground. Several women were taken into Messrs Pontings shop for treatment.34

This report highlights the uneasy relationship between the ‘modernity’ of urban movement and rational transport systems, and the ‘backward’ chaos of city streets. This tension was inevitable, as retailers in the West End wanted on the one hand to offer an attractive, modem shopping experience, but on the other needed large volumes of traffic for business success. It would seem, however, that West End shopping required this tension: Shop-hound’s trips incorporated both skilled, wellplanned purchasing and a less ordered, pleasurable experience of the city, carried

31 See, for example, N. Fyfe, ed., Images o f the Street: Planning, Identity and Control in Public Space (London, 1998); L. Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-century London (New Haven, 2000); J. Schlor, Nights in the Big City (London, 1998). 32 Domosh, ‘The feminised retail landscape’; M. Nava, ‘Modernity’s disavowal: women, the city and the department store’, in M. Nava and A. O’Shea, eds., M odem Times: Reflections on a Century o f English Modernity (London, 1996), 38-76; Rappaport, Shopping fo r Pleasure. 33 Edwards, ‘Making the West End modem’. 34 Evening Standard, 1 January 1930, 14.

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along by the speed of modern metropolitan life. The West End’s kineticism reflected the urgent, irregular rhythms of fashion and consumption, which were so integral to its function. The columns also foregrounded the street by writing the process of travelling between shops, usually by foot, taxi or chauffeured car, into the text. In one column, Shop-hound described starting at Comach, a hat shop in Berkeley Square, where ‘the sunshine is as pale, the windows as tall, the trees as graceful, as in Paris’, then ‘Passing on up the square, looking in at Clive Gardner’s delicate water colours and violet hearts in a flower shop, Shop-hound mounted to find the flower hats and bouquets which Marjorie Castle will have, if anyone.’ She advised, ‘In the same beautiful square ... see also K. Fisher, that sensitive and intelligent person, who loves to design frocks for you specially ... Now turn the comer with Shophound into Bruton Street, and instead of letting your mouth vainly water outside Bendicks’ tempting chocolate shop, go in and make an investment in Bittermints.’35 It would certainly seem that for Vogue, the location of shopping, and the process of tracing a route of fashionable shopping through the West End, were as important as what was actually bought. The columns carefully placed each garment within the setting of the shop, and each shop within its street context: this information was crucial to the identity of the commodity. It would also seem that expert shopping in the West End, as exemplified by the Shop-hound columnist, was characterised precisely by the activities of browsing, comparing and windowshopping, all processes that involved engagement with the shopping street. By trailing Shop-hound it becomes apparent that even in the small area around Oxford Street, Regent Street, Bond Street and Piccadilly, streets had very distinct individual identities, mythologised through successive narratives of London: magazines, guidebooks, picture postcards, novels. These stories contributed to the singling out of iconic and specialised streets within broader networks, of the kind noted in Thomas Cook’s London guide: ‘Certain streets in all the great capital cities of the world develop a personality which is among their greatest assets. The Rue de la Paix, of Paris, the Kalverstraat, of Amsterdam, and, more definitely even than these, Bond Street, of London, possess this character.’36 The West End’s ‘special’ streets formed a series of discrete routes, subtly differentiated from each other in terms of the gender and class identities of the stores and their consumers. The various routes overlapped and also met each other at points of intersection; principally Oxford Circus and Piccadilly Circus, but also through the front and back doors of the larger stores.37

35 Vogue, 4 March 1936, 18. 36 Thomas Cook and Son, London: A Combined Guidebook and Atlas (London, 1937), xiii. 37 Edwards, ‘A man’s world?’; Edwards, ‘Making the West End modem’.

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The result was a highly complex web. Shopping columns constituted textual street plans, providing a navigation that revealed Vogue's favoured routes. Furthermore, the fortnightly shopping columns uncovered an ongoing process of evolution within these shopping routes. Urban theorists have highlighted the fleeting nature of the modern city, characterising it as a series of events and impressions.38 Magazines like Vogue were particularly suited to providing an account of the ever changing physical and imagined city, by virtue of their own ephemeral, but up-to-the-minute, nature. More than its competitors, Vogue was intricately connected with the world of fashion, whose preoccupation with novelty drove the editorial framework and content. The magazine drew a link between this fashionable agenda and the need for readers to constantly update their knowledge through purchasing successive issues. In this way, Vogue was explicit about its own obsolescence: If you should pick up a Vogue of spring 1929, and compare it with the present issue, you would realise very forcibly the great change that fashion has undergone in a year. The year 1929 seems definitely demode. The 1930 woman has a new silhouette, a new spirit, and an entirely new feeling for clothes. There are new intricacies and shadings - all of which make life more interesting for women in general, for shops, and for Vogue.39

The magazine’s fashion features and shopping columns mapped out the shifting fashion and consumption geographies of the city as shopping routes and practices evolved. Parallels can be drawn here with studies of the post-war twentieth-century consumption landscape, which has paid particular attention to how the shopping practices associated with the mall disrupted existing relationships between urban, suburban and out-of-town areas.40 During the 1930s, no comparably dramatic shifts of territory took place, no new thoroughfares were cut through the historic street layout of the West End, and there was no large-scale rebuilding of existing streets. However, Vogue presented a picture of the subtle but significant reconfigurations in the map of fashionable consumption by reporting the arrival of a new shop, a new season’s collections or merely a newly available garment. This impression of in-built obsolescence masked a certain continuity in the editorial message about matters such as the class and geography of fashionable consumption. Furthermore, the evidence of oral histories suggests that women’s magazines were often not treated as ‘throwaway’, but were rather collected and

38 This literature is discussed in J. Donald, Imagining the Modem City (London, 1999); P. Gilbert, ed., Imagined Londons (Albany, 2002), 10-13. 39 Vogue (New York), 15 March 1930, 66. 40 See, for example, Miller, Jackson, Thrift, Holbrook and Rowlands, Shopping, Place and Identity.

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shared.41 This was likely to be particularly true for the expensive, glossy issues of Vogue. Read cumulatively and collectively, these columns sketched out a firmer shopping map, filtering the vast number of available shops and services evident from trade directories, to provide a more select, Vogwe-approved territory. This parallels the additive reading of nineteenth-century magazines discussed by Beetham: ‘The key element in reading the periodical is its double relationship to time. Each number of a periodical is both of its moment and of a series, different from and yet the same as those which have gone before.’42 Cumulative reading was implicitly acknowledged by Vogue in 1937, when regular readers were issued with details of its featured businesses in an ‘address book’, designed to be kept in the handbag for reference.43 Vogue drew tight boundaries around its territory. The magazine clearly attached importance to the skill of seeking out the most desirable purchases in a number of stores in a relatively small geographical area. This was emphasised by Shophound’s tongue-in-cheek directions for forays outside the boundaries. She warned, ‘Hampstead may sound very far off the map’44 and the Fulham Road was described as being ‘on the very outskirts of civilisation’.45 On recommending the Mortlake Cabinet and Joinery Company in Lower Richmond Road, Shop-hound reassured: ‘you know, the way you go to Mid-Surrey Golf Club or the ’Varsity rugger match’.46 It is worth unpacking the central territory further to reveal its most prominent places. Piccadilly Circus constituted an important pivot. It was the junction of several major thoroughfares: Shaftsbury Avenue, Haymarket, Regent Street and Piccadilly. But it also functioned as the focus of a broader cultural network, as expressed by the guidebook London: The World’s Largest City, ‘Piccadilly Circus can be said to be the axle pin of the metropolis ... It is the place that all exiled English men and women abroad think of in their home-sick reveries; and so one may justly describe it as London’s throbbing heart.’47 It was also a linchpin in Vogue's map, its statue of Eros both an important landmark and an emblem for the West End as a whole.

41 This pattern of usage is reflected in the discussion of magazines in oral history evidence. Hampshire Record Office, Oral History Collection, AV550, ‘Home-dressmaking Reassessed’. 42 Beetham, A Magazine o f Her Own, 12. 43 Vogue, 14 April 1937, 64. 44 ‘Shop-hound’, Vogue, 4 August 1937, 45. 45 ‘Shop-hound’, Vogue, 24 July 1945, 54. 46 ‘Shop-hound’, Vogue, 27 April 1938, 80. 47 London: The World's Largest City (Edinburgh, 1938), 8.

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The West End’s principal shopping arteries, housing the large department stores and other prestigious shops, were also important components of Vogue's map. Piccadilly stretched to the west of Piccadilly Circus, famous as ‘the great resort of the leisured and wealthy’.48 Here were Fortnums, with its celebrated food hall, and Simpsons, a department store for men with an increasingly popular women’s department and gift shop. Heading north from Piccadilly Circus was Regent Street. This street had a long history as the location of fashionable and luxury shopping, ‘a street of fascination, in which feminine and other needs and vanities are exhibited with all the allure of which the modern window dresser is capable’ 49 This identity had survived Regent Street’s rebuilding as an imperial parade route during the first quarter of the twentieth century.50 Several more of Vogue's favourite department stores were located here: Swan and Edgar, Dickins and Jones and Liberty. Oxford Street, if less exclusive in reputation, was still another concentrated stretch of feminine consumption and famous shops, including Selfridges and Marshall and Snelgrove, two of Vogue's key venues. The guidebook London: What to See and Where to Stay described Oxford Street in 1930 as, ‘throughout its length of a mile and a quarter from Marble Arch to Tottenham Court Road ... practically an unbroken succession of retail stores, many of them amongst the largest in the country’.51 Other prominently positioned department stores at the outer reaches of the West End included Derry and Tom in Kensington High Street, Peter Jones in Sloane Square, and Harrods and Harvey Nichols in Knightsbridge. Shop-hound gave the impression of telescoping the distances between these sites, enveloping all within its shopping trips, and thus re-imagining the West End’s geography. The prominence of these thoroughfares within Shop-hound’s map was implicitly connected to the continued fashionability of the big London stores during the 1930s, unacknowledged by existing histories. The few existing studies of inter­ war shopping have stressed three connected characteristics: the growth in cheap manufactured commodities, including ready-to-wear clothing; the rise of the multiple shop; and the importance of retail sites in suburban centres and arterial roads.52 This focus perhaps reflects an unwillingness to study, and acknowledge the continued cultural and economic importance of, retail formats that were no longer

48 Ibid., 9. 49 Thomas Cook and Son, London, xix. 50 H. Hobhouse, A History o f Regent Street (London, 1975); E. Rappaport, ‘Art, commerce, or empire? The rebuilding of Regent Street, 1880-1927’, History Workshop Journal, 53,2002, 94-117. 51 London: What to See and Where to Stay, 48. 52 Honeyman, ‘Following suit’; Winship, ‘Culture of restraint’.

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new, noted by Benson and Ugolini as a common trait of retail historians.53 In contrast, Vogue reported the continued expansion of existing stores and the establishment of new ones in this period, and plainly celebrated the kinds of shopping practices they housed. The famous department stores were presented as an absolutely necessary component of the shopping map. Shop-hound, for example, claiming it ‘unthinkable to visit the Brompton Road and not Harrods’.54 However, it was the places leading off these thoroughfares, like Grosvenor Street, Berkeley Square and above all, Bond Street, that attracted Shop-hound the most. These streets were quieter, their architecture and displays more refined and on a smaller scale, their goods unmistakably exclusive. The columnist wrote, ‘However one looks at the snobbish question of district, address and reputations, it is no good blinking at the fact that we are fatally influenced by goods bought in “Bond Street”, “in Mayfair” or its purlieus.’55 Here were designer salons, chic dress shops, milliners, jewellers and florists, as well as the more upmarket dressmakers. As they were slightly off the beaten track, Vogue could claim to be the keeper of essential urban knowledge by revealing their whereabouts. The appeal of these shops was dual, and contradictory. On the one hand they were positioned within a long tradition of elite West End consumption, their marketing strategies emphasising qualities such as ‘timelessness’ and ‘pedigree’, in order to distinguish themselves from the arriviste, showy stores of Oxford Street. On the other hand, the very exclusivity of the goods, and the highly fashionable elite cultures with which they were associated, suggested limited runs and availability. Shop-hound’s very raison d'etre was to report and celebrate a model of consumption whose status was assured by an established history, but whose specific fashions were fleeting. These thoroughfares and exclusive streets collectively formed the principal network of feminine shopping in the West End. However, Shop-hound also promoted an additional community of businesses, located in the upper storeys and less-salubrious back streets, which made themselves known in the small ads at the back of the magazine. They were the less glamorous elements of the West End’s consumption map, but essential for the maintenance of fashionable urban femininity: All together, girls - Shop-hound would like to give three loud barks and have you join in the cheering for ‘the little people’ ... those chaps you and I and all good shoppers have a passion for collecting. You know them - the ‘little’ man who does

53 J. Benson and L. Ugolini, ‘Historians and the nation of shopkeepers’, inJ. Benson and L. Ugolini, eds., A Nation o f Shopkeepers: Five Centuries o f British Retailing (London, 2003), 1-2. 54 ‘Shop-hound’, Vogue, 16 September 1936, 90. 55 ‘Shop-hound’, Vogue, 19 August 1936, 58.

Figure 1.3

Illustration for the ‘Shop-hound’ column, ‘Shop-hound puts them on the map’, Vogue, 20 January 1937. ®Vogue

SHOP-UOUi PUTS THEMON THE MAP

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such wonders with slip covers ‘at a price’ - the ‘little woman’ who runs you up a frock in no time. Hound, after spending the last fortnight tracking down a few of these treasures, now spills the beans and tells you where to find them.56

Indeed, a measure of geographical obscurity, in line with the rarity of the particular goods and services, accentuated Vogue's labelling of its map as indispensable. The presence of this complex map of ‘little people’ in Vogue further problematises a view of the magazine’s shopping geography as dictated straightforwardly by the more powerful advertisers. It also suggests the existence of a shopping network that overlapped in places with networks of production: the large number of London’s small clothing manufacturers and ‘sweaters’ situated in Soho and in the area north of Oxford Street.57

Hiding consumers Reading Vogue's shopping columns in conjunction with other narratives of the West End uncovers a variety of conflicting versions of this geography and allows conclusions to be drawn about the ways they were constructed in relation to different consumer identities and practices. It soon becomes apparent that the absences are highly significant. Vogue may have represented a broad range of shops present in West End streets: department stores, multiples, outfitters and boutiques. However, this landscape of shops did not mirror the actual street scene. The magazine in fact provided a particular rendition of the West End map for its readers through the images and text of its various editorial and advertising components, a map which provided readers with access to, and ownership of, the city. Vogue could function on different levels: it worked as a straightforward navigational aid, highlighting key venues in the complex physical city, but it also constructed a mental picture of the area, an edited version of the city. Here shops were placed within virtually configured routes, which filtered out particular streets, buildings, activities and inhabitants, and reorganised spatial relationships. Approaching the West End through a women’s magazine demands of the historian an understanding of how cities have been deciphered and mapped through the processes of writing about them.58 Such an approach to place also addresses the

56 ‘Shop-hound’, Vogue, 3 August 1938, 48. 57 This manufacturing landscape is described in C. Breward, Fashioning London: Clothing and the Modem Metropolis (Oxford, 2004), 102-105. 58 Discussed in J. Walkowitz, City o f Dreadful Delight: Narratives o f Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (London, 1992); Rappaport, Shopping fo r Pleasure, chapter 4.

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construction of cities through writing, drawing on a substantial and multidisciplinary body of work that explores the relationship between text and city, making a case for their mutual constitution, and for the usefulness of locating cities in a ‘virtual’ or ‘imagined’ level.59 This is particularly relevant for a place like the West End, which was not easily defined through its inconsistent and overlapping physical or administrative boundaries. It existed most coherently as an imagined or represented place. It was an area of London associated since the eighteenth century with entertainment, shopping and fashionable living, its map constructed variously in London guide books, the text of newspapers and women’s magazines and other urban commentaries. Cartographic studies have highlighted the manipulative effect of the editing process of maps, providing an important framework for considering the various guides and maps to 1930s London. Cosgrove for example writes: ‘all maps are thematic, selecting and highlighting particular phenomena, consciously removing others, ignoring yet more, rendering some choices incapable of adoption by virtue of prior decisions about scale and frame. Such choices and the presences and absences they create are profoundly significant both in the making and meaning of maps.’60 This chapter argues that these editing and mapping processes were at the heart of the way the modem West End was represented and constructed. This has parallels with work by historians who have highlighted the multitude of strategies for controlling and re-defining the chaotic, irrational city, to create a legible modem metropolis.61 De Certeau’s discussion of the dual perspective on the city, juxtaposing the ordered, rational mapped-out view from above, with the chaotic, labyrinthine experience at ground level, provides an especially useful model for approaching the complexity of the 1930s West End.62 Vogue ostensibly presented the West End as a navigable shopping map, a modem system of routes, in response to another ‘lived’ city, which was less easily deciphered or controlled, but whose energies nonetheless infused the magazine’s urban narrative. The shops within Vogue's ‘edited’ routes were united by the sale of fashionable goods, and a knowing investment in cultures of pleasure and leisure. The corollary to this was that within Vogue's West End, there was a multitude of unseen boundaries, effectively excluding certain areas, consumers and kinds of

59 See, for example, Donald, Imagining the Modem City; Schlor, Nights in the Big City; A. Vasudevan, ‘Writing the asphalt jungle: Berlin and the performance of classical modernity’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 21, 2003, 169-94; E. Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control o f Disorder, and Women (Berkeley, 1991). 60 D. Cosgrove, ed., Mappings (London, 1999), 11. 61 An excellent example is Nead, Victorian Babylon. 62 M. De Certeau, L. Giard and P. Mayol, The Practice o f Everyday Life (Minneapolis, 1998).

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consumption. This editing process created a gender and class inscribed city, reflecting the Vogue agenda. It is immediately apparent that Vogue's map was distinctly feminine. Recent histories have usefully questioned the exclusive claim of male figures such as the flaneur to the public life of the modern city, citing the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century female shopper as an important urban type, and as an agent of modernity.63 She has often been represented and subsequently interpreted as an unsettling figure, challenging established notions of separately gendered public and private spheres, frequently arousing anxieties about supposed physical and moral dangers posed to women. However, Rappaport suggests that women’s presence in the Victorian and Edwardian London was not as uniformly problematic as the vocal contemporary comment might suggest, and that in practice shopping provided an opportunity for a more acceptable, if still restricted, engagement with urban life than respectable women had hitherto been allowed.64 This study of Vogue indicates that the metropolitan female shopper apparently no longer aroused intense anxieties, at least among its readership. Shoppers were furthermore depicted as being altogether more ‘knowing’ than their predecessors about the shopping cultures in which they participated. Vogue portrayed female shoppers striding confidently through the West End’s streets, unchaperoned and well-informed. Their ‘safe’ engagement with the West End was no longer confined to the protected interior of the department store, a semi-private space promoted by nineteenth-century department store owners as a ‘home from home’, through the provision of restrooms, tea-rooms and the like.65 In Vogue's West End, women were dominant, and indeed men were apparently absent. However, a study by this author of masculine consumption patterns in the 1930s has revealed the existence of an established alternative shopping route for elite men, which had its root in the masculine club land of St James’, to the South of Piccadilly.66 It stretched north to Savile Row, preserve of high class tailors, by way of Jermyn Street, Piccadilly Arcade and Burlington Arcade, with their small outfitters, shirtmakers, bootmakers, and tobacconists. These male shoppers were rendered invisible by Vogue's filter, despite the fact that a notable occurrence within inter-war West End consumption was the development of a new kind of masculine consumer identity, associated with the distinctly, and self-consciously, modem ‘man’s shops’ such as Simpson Piccadilly and Austin Reed. This figure caused considerable excitement, and sometimes consternation, within the

63 Nava, ‘Modernity’s disavowal’; Rappaport, Shopping fo r Pleasure; Wilson, The Sphinx in the City. 64 Rappaport, Shopping fo r Pleasure. 65 Discussed in Rappaport, Shopping fo r Pleasure, chapter 1. 66 Edwards, ‘A man’s world?’; Edwards, ‘Making the West End modem’.

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commentaries of local and national newspapers and the trade press, partly because previously segregated masculine and feminine shopping routes were confusingly bleeding into each other.67 The new man’s shops were establishing a foothold in the main thoroughfares of feminine consumption, and adopted the selling techniques of the ‘feminine’ department stores. The absence of references to this world in Vogue suggests a desire to protect the femininity of the West End, and of the magazine itself. In contrast, a reciprocal infiltration by feminine consumers into the spaces of masculine consumption was a recurrent theme in the magazine. Simpsons, for example, had opened in 1936, styling itself the first department store exclusively for men. However, a women’s department opened in 1937. Vogue's shopping map adjusted accordingly, seemingly oblivious to the problems this caused for these men’s shops, whose legitimisation of new masculine shopping cultures depended on labelling these shops as separate, masculine spaces. The geography was appropriated, but the masculine consumer was written out. In a 1939 shopping article, Simpsons was described as if it were tailored to feminine needs: Simpson’s of Piccadilly manage to be most things to all women, despite the fact that they cater largely for men. Women’s fashions are on one floor, which makes accessory-matching an easy, intimate affair. There’s an inexpensive, quick snack bar in the basement - also a theatre ticket office and travel bureau. If you have a car, the commissionaire will see that it’s parked and back again at the door when needed free of charge.68

The West End was certainly not presented as a place for possible exciting encounters with the opposite sex. For Vogue, this was not what going shopping was about. Vogue's version of the West End also filtered out danger, for example obscuring the continued association of areas such as Piccadilly Circus and Shepherds market with prostitution. Nead and Schlor have both described how cities worked differently at night, when different narratives of danger come into play.69 Vogue's creation of perceptions of safety within its urban narrative depended on the highly temporal nature of imagined maps of London. The theme of cyclical urban transformation was a popular one for London guidebooks, which provided different maps of the West End to cover its day and night-time functions. The Magic o f London, for example, noted the flux in the urban community: ‘At night London changes ... Piccadilly becomes the bright centre of life. Enormous crowds congest its pavements: slow moving crowds, looking for amusement, for

67 Simpsons Archive, Daks, London, collection of newspaper cuttings, c. 1936-7. 68 ‘Labour saving shopping for the woman up in town’, Vogue, 23 August 1939. 69 Nead, Victorian Babylon, chapter 2; Schlor, Nights in the Big City, 20, 57.

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adventure. The Theatres open; the brilliant restaurants are ablaze with light; the cars and taxis hum past with parties for a theatre or a dance.’70 Vogue's complex shopping timetables and itineraries for its unaccompanied female shoppers, contained in articles such as ‘8 hour day in town’ and ‘Shop-hound’, intersected with London’s daily cycle during opening hours. Night-time London was acknowledged by Vogue as an entertainment area, and was portrayed as exciting and accessible for women. However, the more worrying elements were written out, and it was assumed that women would have a suitable male escort. Vogue's version of the West End was also strongly class-inflected, depicting shopping streets peopled by the affluent middle classes. This picture was paralleled in Home Chat and Woman, magazines both aimed at lower middle- and workingclass women. In these publications, shopping was usually located in the local high street, and was considered to consist predominantly of grocery provisioning. Fashion was an important component of both titles, but readers were invited to engage with it through home-dressmaking, or through aspirational daydreaming about the glamorous dress of the fashionable London elite to be found in the society pages.71 The inferred rejection of metropolitan consumption by the domesticallyorientated Home Chat is perhaps not surprising. However, Woman, launched in 1937, sought to represent a younger, more modem version of womanhood. In addition to housewives, it addressed working women, often depicted as secretaries and sales assistants.72 This group, positioned by historians such as Alexander at the very heart of the thriving inter-war consumer society, enjoyed increased levels of disposable income, ripe for expenditure on cheap ready-to-wear dresses, which drew on Hollywood-inspired models of fashionability.73 However, whereas in Vogue femininity was largely constructed through the consumption of fashion, in Home Chat and Woman it was done primarily through women’s domestic role, whether or not this was juggled with waged work. It would appear that the consumers represented in Home Chat and Woman did not simply prefer to shop locally: they actually felt excluded from the fashionable West End shopping map. This experience of ostracism was articulated through comments about provincial isolation and insufficient income. A typical correspondent complained, ‘I live in the country and the nearest town doesn’t possess any very smart women’s shops so that when I see exciting frocks and

70 The Southern Railway of England and Great Western Railway of England, The Magic o f London: Guide to London and Round About (n.p., 1931), 11. 71 Edwards, ‘Making the West End modem’. 72 ‘Women must work’, Woman, 12 June 1937, 10-11. 73 S. Alexander, Becoming a Woman and Other Essays in 19th and 20th Century Feminist History (London, 1994).

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accessories in Woman I long to send for them.’74 Another wrote, ‘Alas a modest country bumpkin, I rarely visit London, I find it simply eats up money.’75 Whilst the doors of the famous West End stores were theoretically open to anyone, not all women felt in a position to take up the invitation. There was an implicit message in Home Chat and Woman that to cross the boundary between imagined and real fashionable consumption was to court disaster, suggesting that Vogue's genre of shopping held a distinctly ambiguous moral status for these publications. In 1937, for example, Woman published a story ‘The new dress’, which revealed a very different attitude to fashionable shopping from Vogue's ‘Shopping - then and now’. A penniless suburban housewife attempted to repair her ailing marriage through embellishing her dreary wardrobe. ‘She wheeled the pram right down the High Street looking into the dress shops, rocking the pram up and down as she picked out the bargains. There was a dress in one window that was just exactly like the one she’d dreamt of ... smart, expensivelooking, single-looking.’76 The woman eventually realised that buying the dress would be frivolous and selfish, when her husband desperately needed a new suit for work, and thus the marriage was saved. This was a cautionary tale, suggesting that even window-shopping could threaten established family values. Such stories can be placed within a tradition of anti-consumerist discourses, particularly those associated with fashionable feminine consumption, in line with the anxiety-laden nineteenth-century debates about women and department stores discussed by Rappaport.77 In her study of middlebrow fiction, Humble has suggested that during the inter-war years the established, more affluent middle class withdrew from public engagement with consumption and developed a culture of ‘thrift’, in response to the perception of consumer culture as a lower middle-class phenomenon.78 However, the evidence of women’s magazines of the period suggests that this was not a dominant trend within the affluent middle classes, and that the phenomenon might be more apparent within the lower-middle and workingclass sectors, as a response to their perceived exclusion from West End fashionability and concomitant rejection of its cultures. A closer consideration of 1930s Oxford Street provides evidence that a picture of a class-segregated British shopping geography is in any case overly simplistic. Vogue's Shop-hound was no stranger to Oxford Street, but was clearly highly selective about the elements included in her column. This street had been developed piecemeal, and was known as the place in this heartland of consumption

74 Woman, 22 July 1939, 4. 75 Woman, 23 September 1939, 4. 76 Woman, 5 June 1937, 22-5. 77 Rappaport, Shopping fo r Pleasure. 78 N. Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity and Bohemianism (Oxford, 2001), 88.

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where department store owners’ tastes and architects’ flair had been given the freest rein by regulators. The result was a spectacular and of-the-moment visual identity. Considerable investment was lavished on many Oxford Street stores during the thirties, as they were rebuilt in self-consciously modern styles.79 However, compared to Regent Street and Bond Street, Oxford Street had a reputation for a certain vulgarity. As Thomas Cook’s guide noted, ‘Its shops are perhaps of rather more popular appeal than those of Regent Street.’80 Many of them advertised in The Daily Mail, a national paper aimed predominantly at the lower middle class, rather than in Vogue. The Oxford Street stores overtly targeting the lower middle class included the chain stores C&A and Marks and Spencer. The street was also home to department stores such as Gamages, John Lewis and D.H. Evans, which built their reputations on keenly competitive pricing rather than glamour. D.H. Evans’ chairman recognised the demands of the site: ‘Oxford Street is a splendid but highly competitive shopping thoroughfare, thronged with most discriminating shoppers. It is only by selling at the smallest possible margin of profit that increased trade can be looked for.’81 Another Oxford Street business, Drages’ furniture shop, conducted an advertising campaign which parodied its target audience through their class profile. It featured a suburban pair, ‘Mr and Mrs Everyman’, who joked with their sales assistant, ‘Don’t lead us into extravagance, Jane’.82 The Vogue consumer type would hardly have made such a request. This was an alternative, cheaper West End, a place suggested by Alexander as ‘the Mecca of fashion for the working girl, site of her much-vaunted new affluence’.83 Vogue's map excluded these stores completely, an omission that at once defined the magazine’s own class positioning, and suggested an uneasiness about the existence of this lower middle- and workingclass ‘other’ within its shopping territory. It is apparent, then, that the West End was a place where different gender and class identities were constructed and ‘performed’ through the tracing of particular shopping routes. However, this chapter argues that even within a single magazine, the West End could have multiple identities; each mapped individually through the text, creating overlapping networks within the collective narrative of fashionable urban life. When Vogue's message is read as fractured, echoing the fundamentally patchwork nature of the magazine format, West End shopping can be seen to be accessible on several levels. Rather than taking Shop-hound’s round up as a blue­

79 For example Marks and Spencer’s ‘Pantheon’ at 173 Oxford Street of 1937-8. 80 Thomas Cook and Son, London, xxiii. 81 Glasgow University Archive, House of Fraser Collection, HF 11/2/2, D. H. Evans minute book, 11 March 1932. 82 The Daily Mail, 4 May 1936, 15. 83 Alexander, Becoming a Woman, 221.

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print for a shopping trip, a visit could be constituted differently by readers according to income, class and fashionability. A particularly elite version of fashionable consumption in the West End can be gleaned from Vogue's couture fashion features. One such article traced a map of fashion houses: ‘A tense atmosphere ... pervades the West End. The very air announces that something important is about to happen. For, behind the hushed doors of Bruton, Grosvenor, Regent and Bond streets, the new spring clothes are being bom.’84 The article plotted the positions of several designers, including Madame Isobel in Regent Street, Norman Hartnell and Victor Stiebel in Bruton Street, Enos in Mount Street and Digby Morton in Palace Gate. However, the haute couture city overlapped with the shopping city to a considerable degree. Designer clothes may have been more expensive, but the positioning of fashion houses cheek-by-jowl with retailers within the West End’s streets, and Shop-hound’s descriptions of trips to the West End outlets of small-scale London dress and hat designers within the shopping column, show that the distinction between salon and boutique was not a clear one. There were also other, more hidden, versions of the West End to be read within Vogue, which both resisted and extended its dominant map of expensive fashionable femininity. When read separately, Shop-hound’s network of ‘little people’, for example, could construct an alternative, cheaper geography. Other West Ends that had a less tangible relationship with the materiality of the area’s shopping streets can also be uncovered, using the concept of the ‘imagined city’ outlined earlier in this chapter, which suggests that a place can be meaningfully experienced through reading and fantasy. Indeed, magazine reading, given the textual preoccupation with shopping, commodities and the city, can be seen to constitute an experience of metropolitan fashionable consumption, infused with a powerful sense of place. For instance, Vogue's Shopping and Information Service was a form of mail-order, which allowed the registered reader to purchase West End goods entirely through Vogue, completely abdicating responsibility for constructing her own shopping itinerary, or even for leaving the house.85 This chapter argues that the magazine as a whole also offered similar possibilities of a virtual shopping trip around an imagined city carried out from the armchair, drawing on Scanlon’s concept of ‘journal-generated daydreams’.86 Home-dressmaking can be interpreted as one means of experiencing this imagined place, in which the line between real and unreal was blurred: materials, patterns and fashion references allowed traces of the West End to be sewn into real garments without an actual visit to the shops. Home-dressmaking was bound up

84 Vogue, 23 January 1935, 43. 85 This service was advertised in Vogue, 19 March 1930, 98. 86 Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings, 232.

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with the consumption-driven world of the fashionable women’s magazine in many ways. It was a significant component of Vogue, in line with the traditional association between women’s magazines and paper pattern companies. This reflects the continued importance of home-dressmaking and the use of local networks of dressmakers amongst the middle classes during this period, largely overlooked by historians who have focused on the Victorian, Edwardian and post-war eras.87 In March 1930, a substantial new section for women of ‘limited income’ was tucked after Vogue’s main features, a large proportion of it devoted to homedressmaking. On the surface, this section seemingly undercut the magazine’s message about fashionable West End consumption. However, a closer reading suggests that the contents were explicitly aimed at those who wished to share in the consumer cultures of Vogue, aiming to replicate on a smaller budget the glamorous ‘Bond Street’ look to be found in the main fashion features and advertisements. Clothes made with Vogue patterns were imbued with the fashionable West End model of femininity. For example, the magazine promoted itself in 1936 with an image of two glamorous window-shoppers in front of a chic boutique, accompanied by the text, ‘When you go shopping, like the two women above (you can tell they’re Vogue fans as they’re both wearing Vogue Pattern outfits), see that you put the next Vogue first on your list.’88 The message of the ‘limited income’ section was not to lower expectations of achievable fashionability, but to ‘make every shilling do the work of two’,89 an approach aligned within a long tradition of the maintenance of respectability and fashionability through home-dressmaking.90 It is important to stress that the practice, as well as the products, of homedressmaking, far from being seen as merely unfashionable, domestic and traditional, were closely associated with modem consumer culture. Homedressmaking was specifically bound together with the women’s magazine and the department store by a common concern with the consumption of fashionable clothing and the construction of feminine identities, all of which shared cultures of fantasy and desire. On a more practical level, these were the media through which the material culture of home dressmaking, including fabrics, paper patterns, and sewing machines, were bought and sold, clearly considered as desirable commodities. Vogue regularly published a directory of where its paper patterns could be bought, headed by a long list of West End stores. It is indeed striking that in the new, spectacularly modem West End department stores of the period, such as D.H. Evans and Peter Jones, drapery departments were still allotted extremely prominent positions. It would seem, then, that shopping cultures associated with

87 See, for example, Burman, ed., The Culture o f Sewing. 88 Vogue, 16 September 1936, inside back cover. 89 Vogue, 5 March 1930, 37. 90 This is a recurrent theme in Burman, ed., The Culture o f Sewing.

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pleasure, luxury and the place of the West End still had a powerful ‘aspirational’ pull for those ostensibly excluded by the geography, prices, and ‘exclusive’ atmosphere associated with this location. The distinctions between different West Ends were fluid, and creative ways of experiencing them were open to those apparently barred from the inner sanctum of fashionable shops.

Conclusion This study of Vogue's coverage of West End shopping has argued for the importance of concepts of place and spatial relationships within 1930s consumption cultures. It has also shown that shopping geographies were fluid, shifting with the whims of the fleeting fashionable metropolitan consumption cultures with which they were associated. It has contended that a variety of different versions of the West End’s shopping map existed, and that, indeed, it is most usefully approached as a written and imagined place. Integral to the argument has been an understanding of streets, routes and networks as crucial to the way the West End functioned and was conceptualised. The diversity of different shopping routes, and the way they were constantly reconfigured, was part of the city’s constant dialogue with gender, class, fashionability and modernity. The chapter has thus drawn on a definition of shopping cultures that moves beyond the confines of the store interior, to the shopping street and urban narratives within the magazine shopping column, an approach that is arguably more productive and meaningful for a discussion of shopping in the 1930s. The other principal finding has been that, in Vogue, the West End was represented and constructed as a special location: the nation’s most fashionable and iconic shopping centre, at once self-consciously modem and infused with the long traditions of elite feminine consumption. Shopping there was portrayed as an event, a source of pleasure, and a means of constructing a particular kind of consumer identity. Furthermore, the magazine suggested that associations with this place conferred value, status and meaning on the items bought. This demands a dramatic revision of our existing understanding of the inter-war shopping landscape, which has both obscured the continued significance of affluent middle-class consumption and the urban centre where it was primarily located. In respect of the former, the evidence of Vogue firmly refutes the dominance of Humble’s ‘culture of thrift’ amongst this group,91 aligning itself rather with studies that have highlighted a flourishing and broad-based middle-class consumer culture in the 1930s, concentrated numerically and culturally in London and the South East.92

91 Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 88. 92 See, for example, A. Jackson, The Middle Classes 1900-1950 (Naim, 1991).

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Shopping practices and fashionability were certainly not homogenised across the middle class, but alongside the undoubted expansion of lower middle-class consumption, the luxury end of the market concentrated in the West End displayed continued cultural potency and distinctiveness. Similarly, this study has not contested the growth of chain stores, nationally advertised brands or mail order in this period, developments that all contributed to the construction of a national shopping network with a multitude of suburban and provincial nodes. Rather, it suggests that this network operated alongside another thriving and more fashionable retail system which centred on London’s West End, and addressed a clientele with a different class profile. In the 1930s, the question of the future of British shopping geographies was far from settled in favour of the newer formats. Invocation of the West End as an important place can be seen as one of the most important tools in the hands of West End businesses in their attempt to stand their ground. Vogue's rhetoric suggests that their position within cultures of affluent middle-class feminine consumption was, for the time being at least, reasonably secure.

Acknowledgements The writing of this paper was generously supported by the ESRC and AHRC Cultures of Consumption Scheme, as part of the ‘Shopping Routes’ Project (No. R E S -143-25-0038).

Chapter 2

Beyond the Boundary of the Shop: Retail Advertising Spaces in EighteenthCentury Provincial England Victoria Morgan

W IL L IA M At the C h i n a 8„

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and T o t - S h o p

A L L E N , in C r o s s - C h e a p i n c ,

C O V E N T R Y -,

’’’"Begs Leave to inform the P U B L I C K ,

H A T he has juft come in, a very

large A flbrtraent of C o lo u r^ and Blue and W hite C H I N A * of the new t ft P atterns ; IJe likewife fells ail Sorts o f C ut and P lain Clafs W are, Jew ellers Goods, ‘Cutlery W are, all Sorts o f Ivory and H nrd-W ood T u rn ’d Goods, Cabinet Goods, Fifhing T ackle, and Mufical Jnftrum er.ts ; great C hoiceof Ladies E ar-R ings, Necklaces, and India Fans, &c. Thofe Gentlem en an d Ladles, w ho pleafe to favour him w ith th eir Com mands, fhall be fcrved on the m ort reafonable Terms*

Figure 2.1

1762 Shop Advertisement in Jopson’s Coventry Mercury}

Introduction The use of promotional advertising material in the eighteenth century was widespread and increasingly sophisticated. The successful provincial town sought to assert its identity through the image it projected in town guides, trade directories, and on its coinage and banknotes, all of which acted as a sign to townspeople and newcomers of its success. Distinct from metropolitan England, the provincial town 1 Jopson’s Coventry Mercury, 11 October 1762, reproduced by Coventry Local Studies Centre and Information Services.

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chose to represent itself in a way that reinforced its unique identity. Shops also sought to identify and promote themselves, thereby contributing to an expansion in the representation of urban commerce, and to the development of a newly urbane provincial culture. Both the shop and the town shared concerns over the need to create and project an image of themselves that could be carried outside the urban sphere. Unsurprisingly, however, it was the shops that were responsible for projecting a specialist image of shopping spaces in the town at this time. Recent research has highlighted the role of the retail sector in contributing to the improvement and modernisation of eighteenth-century towns. The perception of eighteenth-century ‘primitive’ shops, contrasted with the nineteenth-century department store as a modern shopping environment, has now been largely rejected.2 It is widely accepted that this was a period of extensive and significant change, which saw the establishment of many modem retail practices.3 Of key importance were the expansion and specialisation of shops in response to new sorts of goods, along with improvements to the shop’s physical fabric and the introduction of new practices, such as fixed pricing. Together, these changes established the roots of modern retailing.4 Relationships have been identified between the newly available goods, shopping and polite sociability, amounting to a culture of consumerism existing in the eighteenth-century provincial town.5 Glennie and Thrift have emphasised that such 2 Jeffrey’s 1954 conclusion that the retail trades had been tied to forms and practices that had altered little until 1850, and Davis’ emphasis on the extent of change in the nineteenth century, have until recently influenced much work on retail, with the consequent neglect of eighteenth-century developments. J.B. Jeffreys, Retail Trading in Britain 1850-1950 (Cambridge, 1954); D. Davies, A History o f Shopping (London, 1966); C. Walsh, ‘The newness of the department store: a view from the eighteenth century’, in G. Crossick and S. Jaumain, eds., Cathedrals o f Consumption: The European Department Store 1850-1939 (Aldershot, 1999), 46-71. 3 Fowler asserts that most of the significant changes of the eighteenth century had taken place by 1780, while Mui and Mui argue that the tempo of change increased throughout the century. C. Fowler, ‘Changes in provincial retail practice during the eighteenth century, with particular reference to central-southern England’, Business History, 40, 1998, 37-54; H.-C. Mui and L. Mui, Shops and Shop Keeping in Eighteenth-century England (London, 1989). 4 D. Collins, ‘Primitive or not? Fixed shop retailing before the industrial revolution’, Journal o f Regional and Local Studies, 31, 1993, 1; Fowler, ‘Changes in provincial retail practice during the eighteenth century’; N. Cox, The Complete Tradesman: A Study o f Retailing 1550-1820 (Aldershot, 2000); Walsh, ‘The newness of the department store’, 46­ 71. 5 H. Berry, ‘Polite consumption: shopping in eighteenth-century England’, Transactions o f the Royal Historical Society, 12, 2002, 375-94; E. Copeland, Women Writing about Money: Women’s Fiction in England 1790-1820 (Cambridge, 1995); P.D. Glennie and N.J. Thrift, ‘Modem consumption: theorising commodities and consumers’, Environment and

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consumerism should be understood not only as the increased production and purchasing of goods, but also in terms of the cultures that surrounded these.6 Although it was the buying of an increasing range and number of goods that gave a new importance to material culture, it was the associated activities, such as shopping, browsing, and the social functions performed by commodities, such as displaying status, which made consumerism a powerful force in the provincial town. Shops were at the heart of these socio-cultural changes, encouraging sociability in fashionable environments, and above all, providing access to the world of goods. It is well established that shops advertised themselves through their physical appearance - their ability to convey reputation and status to attract passing customers was an important sales technique.7 But promoting the shop could also be achieved by means other than the physical space of the shop. It has been suggested with regard to London that advertisements played a limited role in attracting customers.8 However, the extent to which this was the case for the provinces has thus far received little attention, nor has there been serious consideration of advertisements’ role in constructing the shops’ identity.9 An emphasis on the physical space of the shop has left alternative spaces of advertising overlooked. Just as shops and the act of shopping generated knowledge of goods and practices, advertisements appear to have contributed to this as well. Indeed, these ‘other’ spaces outside the boundary of the shop were complementary to its physical space. Thus, advertising spaces such as newspaper advertisements, tradecards and billheads occupied a special position among the various techniques Planning A: Society and Space, 11, 1993, 603-606; P.D. Glennie and N.J. Thrift, ‘Consumers, identities and consumption space in early-modern England’, Environment and Planning A: Society and Space, 28, 1996, 25-45; E. Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1997). 6 P.D. Glennie and N.J. Thrift, ‘Modernity, urbanism and modem consumption’, Environment and Planning A: Society and Space, 10, 1992, 423-43. 7 C. Walsh, ‘The advertising and marketing of consumer goods’, in C. Wischermann and E. Shore, eds., Advertising and the European City: Historical Perspectives (Aldershot, 2000), 79-95; J. Stobart and A. Hann, ‘Sites of consumption: The display of goods in provincial shops in eighteenth-century England’, Cultural and Social History, 2, 2, 2005, 165-87. 8 Walsh, ‘The advertising and marketing of consumer goods’, 79-95. 9 The history of advertising in Britain remains largely unresearched, writes R. Church, ‘Advertising consumer goods’, Economic History Review, LIII, 4, 2000, 621. Mckendrick has considered the principles of advertising of eighteenth century manufacturers and Mui and Mui and Cox have considered evidence of new sales techniques. N. Mckendrick, ‘George Packwood and the commercialisation of shaving: the art of eighteenth century advertising’, in N. Mckendrick, J. Brewer and J.H. Plumb, The Birth o f a Consumer Society (London, 1982), 146-96; Mui and Mui, Shops and Shop Keeping in Eighteenth-century England; Cox, The Complete Tradesman, 102-110.

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a shopkeeper employed to promote the shop. Whilst they made overt references to physical spaces, as a medium of communication, advertisements depended on an audience to interpret the message, thereby creating what Lefebvre calls a ‘mental space’.10 Such advertising space, whilst occupying a separate sphere from the physical space of the shop, was an important extension of the ‘everyday’ shopping world. This chapter examines the ways in which shops promoted themselves and the consumer spaces of the town outside their immediate physical sphere, with special regard to newspaper advertisements placed by provincial shopkeepers. It is the condensed social and spatial relations that advertisements present, which makes them a useful window onto the provincial town as seen by the consumer. As highly formalised constructions (and representations of space), they are suited to a textual reading, which not only identifies the details they contain about spatial processes, but also how they were grounded in, made reference to and reproduced consumer spaces and cultures. The various forms of advertising used to promote the shop are considered, along with the role of newspaper advertisements in promoting discourses of consumerism. The relationship between shop and town that was forged through the use of advertising in newspapers is also highlighted. In depicting these relationships, the chapter explores how advertisements conveyed images of modem consumer spaces in the town through the development of ‘advertising spaces’, which projected ideas of consumerism into the public sphere in new ways. Thus this chapter sheds new light on the cultural setting of shopping practices, shopkeepers’ selling strategies, and the spatiality of consumer processes. Material is drawn from the county town of Warwick and the city of Coventry, both of which were important provincial shopping centres in the eighteenth century.11 Warwickshire was highly urbanised by this time in comparison to other parts of the country, and had a regional centre from the medieval period. Critical threshold populations existed to support retailing structures, including a significant number of large shops. Coventry has been depicted as the ‘chief industrial and commercial city’ of the county, sharing primacy with ‘backward’ Warwick, the two being sufficiently close to form an ‘eccentric binary county town’.12 As old county centres, they were sufficiently differentiated in terms of town function not to be completely overshadowed by growing Birmingham, and both shared in the urban

10 It is this unity between mental and material space in the production of space that Lefebvre highlights. H. Lefebvre, The Production o f Space (Oxford, 1991), 6, 12, 413. 11 For a more general discussion of Coventry and Warwick’s consumer environments see V.C. Morgan, ‘Producing consumer space in eighteenth-century England: shops, shopping and the provincial town’, Coventry University Ph.D. thesis, 2003, 113-53. 12 A. Dyer, ‘Midlands’, in P. Clark, ed., Cambridge Urban History (Cambridge, 2000), vol. 2, 101.

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renaissance of the eighteenth century.13 Shop tax records indicate that in 1785 Coventry and Warwick were the two most important county retailing centres after Birmingham, with Coventry collecting £105 and Warwick £37.14 However, whereas Warwick had only one shop with over £25 rent, Coventry had eighteen with rents of over this amount.15 Taken together, these urban places had the requisite newspapers, tradecards, billheads and supporting evidence to make the analysis possible. No constraints were placed on the type of shop being considered in this research and it is hard to generalise about which shops made use of advertising materials. A significant number of shops with advertisements were larger businesses, sometimes engaged in specialist retailing. Nonetheless, low-order retailers and non-permanent ‘visiting’ shopkeepers also placed advertisements, as did shopkeepers who combined their job with other occupations. Thus while the focus of this chapter may be on a more elite group of shops, this is not exclusively so.

Shop promotion: types of advertising Sign and symbol, from shop signs to trade tokens, were longstanding tools for the shopkeeper to promote business.16 Deeply embedded in the urban landscape and the everyday mechanisms of exchange, they were a familiar part of town life and provided a means of communication with incomers. The roots of urban advertising were well established before the turn of the eighteenth century. Trade tokens, widespread in the seventeenth century due to shortages of coinage, became a convenient means of combining a practical necessity with advertising for leading traders.17 However, as their use was increasingly restricted and eventually outlawed, alternative means were found to carry the name and trade of shopkeepers into the hands and homes of their potential customers. The printing trade provided these means. More than sixty towns in Britain introduced printing presses in the 13 P. Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town 1660-1770 (Oxford, 1989); Morgan, ‘Producing consumer space in eighteenthcentury England’, 110-49. 14 Public Record Office (PRO), Exchequer Tax Accounts, Land and Assessed Taxes subsidiary documents, E l82, Coventry Shop Tax, 1785. 15 See appendix 2 in Mui and Mui, Shops and Shop Keeping in Eighteenth-century England, 298. 16 P.J. Corfield, ‘Walking the city streets: the urban odyssey in eighteenth-century England’, Journal o f Urban History, 16, 2, 1995, 132-74. 17 Cox, The Complete Tradesman, 46-7. The Coventry traders John Brooke (stationer), William Snell (mercer) and Samuel Tissell (clothier and later an innkeeper) all produced trade tokens into the eighteenth century. Coventry Record Office (CRO), Persons Index, Persons/1/2/1794, Persons/19/1144 and Persons/20/406.

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first half of the eighteenth century.18 By the end of the century, printing was established as a cost-efficient technology of communication, and was to become central to the development of advertising.19 Improved printing techniques generated the means for the production of new kinds of publicity material by the shopkeeper. Specially designed printed material for the promotion and professionalisation of the shop emerged during the eighteenth century, namely trade cards, billheads and newspaper advertisements. These were common already in London and were an accepted practice in Warwickshire certainly by the middle of the century. Robert Hughes, a draper in the High Street, Coventry, with prestigious customers, introduced his printed ‘vouchers’ around 1743, replacing the previously hand­ written bills.20 Fashioned as plain billheads or large tradecards, they were used for billing customers, perhaps preventing the need for separate tradecards and billheads. Certainly in the second half of the century such printed materials were not unusual in Coventry. The ornamented billheads of the upholsterer Alex Leighton, located on the High Street (1769) and of the draper, mercer and haberdasher Charles Weston (1771), testify to the fact that they were possibly more widespread than previously thought.21 Billheads were used by retailers even outside this leading Warwickshire city, in smaller places such as Atherstone.22 These were an effective means of identifying from whom, and from where, the goods had been purchased, carrying further the reputation of the shopkeeper, even after the goods had been taken home. This suggests that the consumption process extended beyond a single moment of purchase and that motifs of the consumption process provided lasting records of the act of buying. As documents that might be referred to and stored in the account ledgers of customers, smart billheads were capable of giving a snapshot impression of the shop to whoever’s hands the bill passed through.

18 C. Clair, A History o f European Printing (London, 1976), 312. 19 Lefebvre directly relates progress in ‘productive forces’, such as technology or knowledge, to a new mode of production of space. Lefebvre, The Production o f Space, 102­ 103. 20 A printed billhead dated 7 September 1743 appears in the Leigh Estate Accounts. Stratford-upon-Avon Record Office (SRO), Leigh Estate Collection, DR/18/ 5/ 2667, billhead, 1743. Another also exists in CRO, People Index, PA125/1. This is where the term ‘voucher’ is used. 21 Warwickshire County Record Office (WCRO), CR 1291/ 489/ 109 and CR 1291/ 489/114, billheads, 1769, 1771. 22 WCRO, CR890/1/17, Billhead of Mr J. Smith, Grocer and Teaman in Atherstone, 27 February 1786. CR/890/1/13, Billhead of William Chapman, Atherstone, 3 April 1785. In 1750, Atherstone’s population was only 2120. See Morgan, ‘Producing consumer space in eighteenth-century England’, 90.

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London billheads tended to emphasise their address, asserting their location in the capital city.23 Presumably this served a dual function of assisting long-distance clients whilst taking advantage of the social cachet attached to a London location. Provincial billheads also displayed their address prominently.24 This reinforced the relationship between shop and town; the town as host to commerce was implicated in the words and images of the advertisement. The visual details of billheads also conveyed the status of the shop and carried a sense of prestige, most likely because they were innovative, expensive to produce and therefore exclusive. Particularly ornate and detailed were the billheads of luxury tradesman Merridew, a bookseller, stationer and printer in Warwick, who chose to use the castle on the boundary of the town as an image to be associated with his shop.25 His billheads demonstrate how advertising material used a carefully chosen message, aimed at a genteel or middling rank audience. In this case, perhaps it was believed that the visual symbol of the castle conveyed a greater status than that of the town of Warwick, whilst the identities of the two were mutually reinforcing. Tradecards also often centred around similar visual motifs, including pictures, symbols, emblems and crests. Indeed, some shopkeepers went as far as to portray their most wealthy and fashionable customers on their trade cards.26 Some images drew associations with the exotic, high status and foreign lands. For example, the Grass Hopper’s tea warehouse in Coventry had pictures of Chinese people drinking tea on its tradecard.27 Other images conjured more traditional and familiar signs of status, such as royal arms or the lion and unicorn, as in the case of E.R. Srickland, a Coventry Chemist, who advertised himself as ‘Druggist to H.R.H. the Duke of Sussex’.28 It seems clear that billheads and tradecards were highly customised. They were status indicators and provided a yardstick by which judgements about the shop could be made. The resources to commission such printed material implied a wealthy and large establishment likely to be of high quality which, indirectly, carried implications about the people who shopped there. The printed material was 23 The Leigh Estate Vouchers and Receipts include a variety of London billheads, particularly dating to the end of the eighteenth century. SRO, Leigh Estate Vouchers and Receipts, DR 18, Index to Collection for the eighteenth century. 24 Both Alex Leighton and Charles Weston include Coventry in the printed ornamentation of the billhead. WCRO, CR 1291/ 489/ 109 and CR 1291/ 489/ 114. 25 British Museum, Banks Collection 17.68, 17.69, tradecards. Reference courtesy of Nancy Cox. 26 As suggested by the Keepers of the John Johnson collection, Exhibition in the Bodliean Library, December 2001. 27 British Museum, Banks Collection, 68.143, tradecard. Reference courtesy of Nancy Cox. 28 British Museum, Banks Collection, 35.72, tradecard. Reference courtesy of Nancy Cox.

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in the main an urban phenomenon, as only the largest shops with the most business could have afforded it. This further asserts the relationship between the shop and the town. The adoption of billheads and tradecards suggests an increased awareness of at least a significant minority of leading urban shopkeepers of the need to promote their businesses, not just by providing information on the shop, but also by creating positioned images of the shop. Closely associated with the rise of printing was the development of the newspaper, which provided the shopkeeper with another channel of communication. In 1695 the Printing Act lapsed, ending restrictions and thereby achieving the future freedom of the press. This assured its role as a powerful tool of communication between writers and advertisers with the public, albeit of a limited sort. By the mid-eighteenth century there were over forty-five provincial newspapers circulating, the numbers settling at about thirty-five between 1746 and 1754.29 The increasing circulation of ‘country’ newspapers, designed to be read in the provinces, revealed both the significance of newspapers in communicating news, notices and advertisements, and their popularity with the literate classes. The ‘polite and commercial people’ who patronised institutions such as coffee houses, literary circles and libraries, also supported the spreading of knowledge through the reading of newspapers.30 Weekly payments for the ‘Coventry paper’ appear in the accounts of local gentry such as Sir Rodger Newdigate over the years 1779 to 1784, illustrating their incursion into the county community.31 By the mid­ eighteenth century country newspapers had established themselves successfully as providing an outlook on provincial society, whilst retaining a template adapted from the London newspapers. There is no doubt that the leading, largest and most prestigious shopkeepers placed advertisements in the local papers, reflecting the mutually reinforcing relationship between consumption and urban life. Thus, advertising in eighteenth-century newspapers would have linked a group of literate people (typically the middling sort, gentry and upper ranks) to the town and its commercial machinery: the shopkeepers, the shops and the goods themselves. Warwickshire was well catered for in terms of newspapers. A very early Warwick town paper was publishing around 1701, suggested to be the earliest provincial newspaper in England.32 By the middle of the eighteenth century, the leading Warwickshire papers were based in Coventry and Birmingham. Jopson’s Coventry Mercury started in 1741 and continued into the next century, succeeding

29 M. Beaven, ‘Warwickshire provincial newspapers in the early 1750s’, Journal o f the Warwickshire Local History Society, IX, 1, 1993, 12-34. 30 T.R. Nevett, Advertising in Britain: A History (London, 1982), 19. 31 WCRO, CR1841/8, volume containing accounts of postage paid on letters for Sir Rodger Newdigate, 1779-1784. 32 Nevett, Advertising in Britain, 17. No surviving issues of this newspaper have been found.

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when other local papers failed. By comparison, Keatings’ Stratford and Warwick Mercury started in 1750, and was only in print for three and a half years before collapsing. Aris’s Birmingham Gazette also started in 1741. In 1757 Luckman and Sketchly set up their Coventry Gazette and Birmingham Chronicle, an indication of the pre-eminence of the two cities within the county.33 In addition, Coventry’s Piercy’s Gazette was in print certainly by the later part of the eighteenth century, and in September 1778 it became Swinney’s Birmingham and Stafford Chronicle and Piercy’s Coventry Gazette. Despite the existence of an early newspaper, Warwick was underrepresented throughout the eighteenth century, with no newspaper centring on the town and with a minor presence in the Coventry newspapers. It was not until 1806 that the Warwickshire Advertisers commenced.34 Overall, there was sufficient demand for advertising to support the printing of three substantial newspapers in the county in the second half of the eighteenth century.35 Jopson’s Mercury claimed circulation in Warwickshire, Staffordshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire. The shop advertisements, however, reflected a more localised circulation and county community, centred on Coventry, although advertisements for auctions of shop stock covered a wider geographical area, including Birmingham, Leicester, Walsall and Atherstone, perhaps reflecting the greater distance people were prepared to travel for such events.36 These papers presented a microcosm of city life largely though the advertisements and notices, and to a lesser extent local news. Advertisements for consumer goods tended to be clustered on the last pages, alongside advertisements for lost and stolen items, public concerts, theatrical performances, the races and other public business. Throughout the eighteenth century, the consumer goods featured in advertisements generally fell into three categories. Firstly, patent medicines that were manufactured in London and distributed through appointed regional agents, who were very often also the printers of local newspapers. Secondly, publications, such as books and magazines, with catalogues of new publications available from printers across the country. The third group consisted of the varied but significant number of advertisements placed by local tradesmen and shopkeepers, who were retailers rather than manufacturers. It is these that are

33 Beaven, ‘Warwickshire provincial newspapers’, 12-34. 34 Shops in Warwick were underrepresented in the Coventry-orientated newspapers. The Warwickshire Weekly Journal, which ran between c. 1769-1773, may have provided better coverage, but was not used for this research. 35 By 1743 Aris’s Birmingham paper required the income from advertising to help cover the costs of producing the paper. Beaven, ‘Warwickshire provincial newspapers’, 26. 36 For a Walsall advertiser, see Swinney’s Birmingham and Stafford Chronicle and Piercy’s Coventry Gazette, 24 December 1778, xii, 519. For an Atherstone advertiser see Jopson’s Coventry Mercury, 9 February 1767, 1332.

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particularly interesting with regard to changing provincial attitudes to consumerism, and which are the focus of the next section.

Constructing the advertisement In the second half of the eighteenth century, shopkeepers of the city of Coventry and to a much lesser extent Warwick, Atherstone, Birmingham and further afield, such as Leicester and Stony Stratford, placed a huge variety of advertisements in the Warwickshire newspapers. In addition, visiting tradesmen announced their arrival and executors advertised auctions and sales on the death of a shopkeeper. Advertisements placed by shopkeepers varied from the announcement of a newly formed partnership or a change in ownership of a shop, to a move of premises or the opening of a new shop, or the arrival of new stock. For example, in 1778 Edward Hiom, a druggist from Birmingham notified ‘the public’ that he had taken a shop in Coventry, as did the milliners Parker and Bull, also from Birmingham.37 Generally, such announcements were styled as ‘notices’. This is particularly apparent in the advertisement placed by John Upton in 1748, which drew attention to the change in ownership of a West Orchard (Coventry) shop: This is to give notice That the shop of the late Mr. Knowles, facing the Women’s Market, in West Orchard, Coventry, is now in the Possession of John Upton, who follows the same Branch of Business, in buying and selling all Sorts of Household Goods, new or old; where may be had all Sorts of Feather Beds and others; Bed ticks and Bolsters; all Sorts of ready drell Feathers, Mill-puffs and fine Flocks; Quilts, Coverlids, Rugs and Blankets; ready-made Curtains, Bed-Lace and Buckram, &c. N.B. He gives the most money for old bedding and Household Goods.38

Most advertisements were thus styled as ‘legitimate’ notices that communicated to the public some specific information about the shop. Many shopkeepers followed this initial ‘notice’ with information about the goods for sale, sometimes appearing as an ‘afterthought’ or in some cases as a post-script. The prominence of shopkeepers’ advertisements over manufacturers’ between 1780 and 1810 reflected the importance at that particular time of informing potential customers of the availability of goods at specific locations.39 This form of ‘notice’ was commonplace, and perhaps was an accepted strategy to avoid anti-advertising attitudes, enabling the acceptable promotion of the shop within the boundaries of

37 Piercy’s Coventry Gazette, 29 August 1778, 75; 27 June 1778, 66. 38 Jopson’s Coventry Mercury, 7 November 1748. 39 Church, ‘Advertising consumer goods’, 628.

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good taste.40 By using the appropriate context of a ‘notice’, information about stock could be covertly conveyed. This formal etiquette of presentation suggests that the advertisements were carefully conceptualised by shopkeepers, as very deliberate representations of shop spaces.41 Beyond informing the customer about shop location, change in ownership or goods available, further messages were conveyed about the status and reputation of the shop, and about the people who shopped there. Despite the wide variety of advertisements placed by shopkeepers, most shared common characteristics in terms of style, organisation and content. Strongly influencing the content, and consequently the style, was provincial shopkeepers’ apparent concern to inform their customers about the availability of goods. At a time when new consumer goods were continually emerging, and there was pressure to keep up with other places and competitors, it was vital that potential customers knew what stock shopkeepers carried. By detailing the goods in the shop, advertisements most likely contributed to a growing body of consumer knowledge. Warwickshire newspaper advertisements listed the goods available with some descriptive detail, including information such as the goods’ place of origin. This could be carried out in fastidious detail, as illustrated below by the advertisement placed by William Cart, a Leicester hatter and haberdasher, in 1767. To be sold By William Cart, Hatter and Haberdasher, from Leicester At Mr. Fulfor’d Shop, next door to Mr. Remington’s near the Cross in Coventry during the fair An entire new Assortment of the following Articles:____ Six-fourths, Ell-wide, and Yard-wide. Muslins of al sorts, flower’d, strip’d and plain gauze, flower’d, strip’d and plain lawns, silks and satins, all colours, Barcelona and Sarcenet Handkerchiefs, Catgut and Paris nett, Linen Handkerchiefs, Sufeer ditto, Silk and cotton hats of the newest fashion, great variety of drest caps, in the newest taste; new R h [Ranelagh? Illegible in original document] Cloaks, figur’d and plain ribbons of the choicest patterns, Minionet and trolley laces, Edgeing and footings, all sorts of Women’s Leather Gloves and Mitts ... Boys silk and sattin Hats and Caps, with feather for ditto, Garnet and Pearl necklaces and earings, French and English ditto, Garnet and Paskes Hair pins and crosses, Italian flowers and Egret with every other Article in the Haberdashery and millinery way. Articles in the hatting branch. Men’s Carline Hats ...

40 For example, see Wedgwood’s attitudes on advertising, discussed in Walsh, ‘The advertising and marketing of consumer goods’, 83-4. 41 For a discussion of representations of space see Lefebvre, The Production o f Space,

39.

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Victoria Morgan ... n.b Ladies and Gentlemen who please to favour me with their custom in either of the above branches. May depend on being served with as neat Goods, and as cheap as they can be bought in any warehouse in London.42

The emphasis was on the goods available for purchasing. Cart’s advertisement was not one of a kind. Similar details, although not so extensive, are found in the advertisements of John Upton, household good seller and J. Brown, shoemaker, amongst others. The words in Cart’s advertisement were used not just to describe, but also to convey an impression of quality, for example ‘pearl necklaces’, ‘Italian flowers’ and ‘Paris nett’. Importantly, a sense of plenty and choice was evoked, through the repeated emphasis on variety, stating that ‘all sorts’ and ‘all colours’ were available. Clearly, variety and quality of goods was seen as an important factor in attracting business. Many advertisements stressed the shopkeeper’s name, which appeared at the top of the newspaper advertisement (or the billhead and in the centre of the trade card). This suggests that it was, at least in part, the name of the shopkeeper upon which the shop’s reputation hung, providing readers with an instant means of ‘placing’ the advertisement.43 Some visiting retailers traded on well-known names, like William Cart who declared his availability at Mr Fulford’s shop, and used the name of Mr Remington, a shopkeeper next door, to clarify his location. He thereby relied on the status of both Mr Fulford and Mr Remington to enhance his own position. The shopkeeper’s name heading the advertisement may have given readers a sense of a ‘personal’ service and relationship between the shopkeeper and his or her clients. The use of personal names suggests the extent to which shopkeepers were operating in local communities in which they expected to be known personally or through association, and the role that social networks played in the selling and buying of goods. This hints at the importance of personal links; ones that could lead favoured customers to being admitted into the back parlour of the shopkeeper, in the private space of the house. No doubt even the large urban shopkeepers knew many of their clientele personally. Carried through advertisements was a sense of engagement by the shopkeeper with his clients, maintaining a delicate balance between business and sociability. Advertisements were often addressed to ‘friends’ and to the ‘public’. Some advertisements were even styled as a personal note to ‘friends’. For example, John King, a Coventry grocer and haberdasher, wrote that he ‘embraces the opportunity to return his thanks to his friends for his past favours, and at the same time assures them they may depend upon being supplied with the best goods’, thereby creating

42 Jopson’s Coventry Mercury, 15 June 1767. 43 Walsh notes that advertisements for consumer goods sought to promote a retailer and his or her shop by enhancing the chosen image of the shop. Walsh, ‘The advertising and marketing of consumer goods’, 87.

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an atmosphere of polite sociability that was increasingly associated with the shop.44 In many cases the phrase ‘friends and the public’ was used.45 Such language struck a quasi-intimate tone, hinting at the different grades of personal connections that existed between shopkeepers and clients, and serving as a reminder that clients were not all of equal status.46 Such stylistic devices show how shopkeepers solicited their clients, and how courtesy extended beyond the boundary of the shop, with displays of civility embedded in the text of advertisements.47 For instance, in 1778 J. Lee, a brushmaker, advertised his new shop on the High Street in Coventry, writing that ‘he most ardently solicits their encouragement, as every endeavour shall be entered to give satisfaction to all that please to confer the least favour upon him, which will, with the greatest Gratitude, be acknowledged’.48 The courteous language and flattery employed towards clients appears to have furthered the illusion of the genteel customer. By depicting a picture of the obliging shopkeeper and ‘gentleman’ client, a relationship was constructed which imbued the customers with a certain social status, hinting at the way in which shopping could be instrumental in constructing identity. Words were carefully chosen and purposefully emotive, and the tone was in keeping with the supposedly refined culture of shopping in polite county towns, of which so much has been written.49 Phrases such as ‘humble servant’, and ‘begs leave to acquaint’ and ‘most sincere thanks’ were used as a matter of course. Indeed, so well known was the particular language employed by shopkeepers that at times it became an object of ridicule. As a character in one of George Eliot’s novels quipped: ‘Oh, there are so many superior teas and sugars now. Superior is getting to be shopkeepers’ slang’.50 John Grimes’ advertisement in Jopsons Coventry Mercury, for example, announced that: JOHN GRIMES, Cabinet and Chair-maker, Upholsters, and Sworn Appraiser, being advised by several of his Friends, has thought proper to acquaint the Public, that he buys and sells all Sorts of Household Furniture, &c: Whosoever pleases to favour

44 Swinney’s Birmingham and Stafford Chronicle and Piercy’s Coventry Gazette, 3 December 1778. 45 See, for example, the advertisements of Thomas Ewbank, chemist and druggist and J. Ratheram, clock and watchmaker, in Jopson’s Coventry Mercury, 31 December 1787. 46 Cox, The Complete Tradesman, 127-39. 47 Berry argues that politeness was central to the deportment of the shopkeeper. Berry, ‘Polite consumption’, 387-8. 48 Piercy’s Coventry Gazette, 18 July 1778. 49 This polite tone is found also in London advertisements. Walsh, ‘The advertising and marketing of consumer goods’, 83. 50 G. Eliot, Middlemarch (London, 1994, first published 1872), 98.

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Victoria Morgan him with their Commands, may depend upon being served with the utmost Expedition, by Their humble Servant, John Grimes. Variety of Chairs and Cabinet-Work at his Warehouse at the bottom of Cross Cheaping; Barometers made and carefully repaired; Looking-Glasses silver’d.51

The carefully crafted language of John Grimes’ advertisement, coupled with the specialist nature of his trade (as a chair and cabinet maker), served to indicate a respectable outlet in the central shopping area of the city. However, Grimes did not fail to include details of the goods and services available, even if in a more abbreviated form than other advertisers. Portraying ‘respectability’ appears to have been a consistent preoccupation of those advertising in newspapers, especially fixed-place shopkeepers.52 It seems to have been important to convey the gentility of the shop and to appear part of the polite consumer spaces of the town. The privileging of civility became a form of urbane etiquette, which in turn came to form part of shopkeepers’ practice. In a sense, therefore, shopping was subject to the wider process of ‘leisurization’ that was closely associated with the urban renaissance of eighteenth-century provincial towns.53 The advertisements were not just passive instruments that confirmed the identity of the shop and its customers. For embodied within this polite language there was also a rhetoric of persuasion. Second to informing customers about the goods available were attempts to tempt the customer to the shop, with promises of ‘fashion’, ‘London connections’, or ‘variety’ and ‘taste’. For example, in 1787 the advertisement of J. Brown, a Coventry shoemaker, in Jopson ’s Coventry Mercury, used the words ‘large assortment’, ‘newest fashion’, ‘modem taste’ and referred to London twice and Bath once: J. Brown Ladies Silk and Stuff, and Gentlemen’s Boot And Shoe-Maker, 51 Jopson's Coventry Mercury, 19 October 1767. 52 Echoing concerns of respectability, many advertisements emphasised the ‘genuineness’ of their products. In particular, the ‘true, original Daffy Elixir’ made frequent appearances in several Warwickshire newspapers, and throughout the century there was an increasing use of seals and patents on medicines. Advertisements were placed condemning the sale of fake copies of medicines. This concern with the genuine article and with commercial fraud mirrors contemporary social concern with impostors in the social hierarchy. Morgan, ‘Producing consumer space in eighteenth-century England’, 193. 53 This term is adopted by J. Stobart, ‘In search of a leisure hierarchy: English spa towns and their place in the eighteenth-Century urban system’, in P. Borsay, G. Hirschfleder and R-E. Mohrmann, eds., New Directions in Urban History (New York, 2000), 20.

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Near the Draper’s Hall, in Bailey-Lane, Coventry; Begs leave to inform his Friends and the Public, That he has taken and opened a Shop in Bailey-Lane, where he intends to follow the SHOE-MAKING BUSINESS in all its Branches, viz. Ladies Silk and Stuff shoes, and the real Italian glazed Heels, the Princess Royal’s Sandals, as neat as in London; the real Bath toes, Spring Patent, and Pattoon Clogs: Likewise all Sorts of Gentleman’s Boots, and DressShoes, in the most modem Taste, and on the most reasonable Terms. He likewise farther informs his Friends, that he is furnished with a large assortment of Lasts, of the newest Fashion, from London. He hopes for the Support and Countenance of his Friends, which he will endeavour to deserve by the strictest Attention to their interest, in, executing their Commands with fidelity and dispatch, and by taking particular Care that the work he had the Honour to make for them, shall fit, them in the neatest Manner. COVENTRY, March 29, 178754

The use of these potentially emotive and powerful words encapsulated the essence of contemporary discourses that gave rise to increasing consumption. In other words, they conveyed direct references to the rise of fashion, the emergence of new goods, emulation, the cultural cachet of London, and importantly, pleasure-seeking. Many advertisements boasted a selection of goods ‘just brought from London’ or ‘just receiv’d ’. The Coventry milliners Parker and Bull for example in 1778 advertised ‘just received from London and Bath, a genteel and fashionable assortment of hats, cloaks, caps’.55 Mr Jones at his general shop opposite the Golden Horse in Bailey Lane, Coventry, advertised ‘just arriv’d from London ... a fresh parcel of Dr Waldron’s worm destroying cake or sugar-plum’.56 Even a seedsman, Thomas Collins of Warwick High Street, advertised ‘Gardens seeds of all sorts, from London, and the best markets’.57 The mention of London would, no doubt, have been of interest to readers. London connections were frequently used to promote the goods for sale, as seen in the hatter and haberdasher William Cart’s advertisement, which described goods as ‘as cheap as they can be bought in any warehouse in London’ and the shoemaker J. Brown’s, who noted that even his lasts were from London.58 James Taylor, a wine cooper in Coventry in the mid­ eighteenth century, described himself as from London.59 Even more impressively, Mrs Stokes, milliner in Coventry, when placing an advertisement to announce her move from Well Street into the High Street, noted that ‘having great connections in 54 Jopson’s Coventry Mercury, 31 December 1787. The same text was used without change from the date given on the advertisement until December. 55 Piercy’s Coventry Gazette, 27 June 1778. 56 Jopson’s Coventry Mercury, 19 February 1759. 57 Piercy’s Coventry Gazette, 25 April 1778. 58 Jopson’s Coventry Mercury, 31 December 1787. 59 Ibid., 7 November 1748.

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London and Bath, she has an opportunity of having the fashions immediately as they come out’.60 The subsequent week she placed a similar advertisement, describing herself as ‘from London’, perhaps deciding this would make a greater impact.61 There was a specific kudos attached to anything that originated in London, and this could apply both to the shopkeeper and to his goods. The metropolis set the standard for taste; goods that bore its imprint were invested with a ‘double status value’.62 With the emergence of new types of goods came greater choice, along with possibilities for hierarchies of goods, and the opportunity to make an individualistic statement. J. Brown’s 1787 advertisement, for example, associated his stock with the London and Bath fashions, and made allusions to the foreign (and consequently exotic) and royal (and therefore high status).63 These small details indicate how advertisements gave commodities a specific cultural context. The advertising system of the provincial shopkeepers of the eighteenth century was more sophisticated than at first it appears. Shopkeepers were careful to conform to expectations of what was socially acceptable, whilst promoting new discourses of shopping and buying. Newspaper advertisements, tradecards and billheads were carefully constructed around a set of ideas about how to promote the shop: they were polite, innovative and instructive, giving information about stock and shop location. But the messages they conveyed were perhaps more powerful than this, encouraging people to buy and embracing signs of status and respectability. The language in which advertisements were constructed used a code of respectability, perhaps essential in the provincial town. In this way the advertisement was designed and styled on the same principles as the shop itself. Moreover, newspaper advertisements also served to emphasise the public face of the shop.64 Whilst shops were literally ‘front’ spaces, lining the street with their fa£ades, they were also front spaces symbolically, with a stage-set quality, and with back spaces such as store rooms and cellars hidden away. The advertisements’ emphasis on fashionability, politeness and the shopkeepers’ reputation drew attention to the shop as a public front space, and like the shop, presented a selective and partial image of retailers themselves.

60 Piercy’s Coventry Gazette, 17 January 1778. 61 Ibid., 24 January 1778. 62 P. Borsay, ‘The London Connection’, London Journal, 19, 1, 1994, 24. 63 Jopson*s Coventry Mercury, 31 December 1787. 64 For a discussion of the ‘frontal relations’ of the shop see Morgan, ‘Producing consumer space in eighteenth-century England’, 154-84.

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Representation: the emergence of modern consumer space in the city Advertisements sat at a powerful intersection between the town and its visitors and the shop and its customers. Whereas the ‘advertisement’ embedded in the retail shop was fixed in space, newspaper advertisements, along with billheads and tradecards, were in circulation, changing hands and occupying different spaces. As such, they could reach consumers outside the town. Arguably, the advertising spaces that were created through the use of newspaper advertisements, tradecards and billheads collectively contributed towards a reading of the provincial town as a modem space of consumption. How was this achieved? A number of inter-related factors can be identified. By using the new print technology some shops associated themselves with forwardthinking and innovation. In the same way that improvements were made inside the shop, so they were applied to the portrayal of the shop. The use of advertising indicated forethought and planning, possibly even amounting to a marketing strategy. This suggests the production of consumer spaces that were planned and controlled, key tenets of ‘modem’ urban space. There is evidence to suggest that such methods worked. A connection appeared between the largest and most prestigious shopkeepers in Coventry and the ones who advertised. Many of the shopkeepers who appeared in Jopson’s Coventry Mercury and Piercy’s Gazette were represented in the accounts of the local aristocracy, the Leigh family, including John Grimes, cabinet maker, Robert Hughes, draper, Hugh Jones, tea man and Lilley Smith, oilman turned grocer, to name but some.65 Using the new print technology, shopkeepers could increasingly embed a symbol or image of their shop into the street, the reading spaces of coffee houses, or the account ledgers of customers. This meant that images of shops were increasingly becoming transient and mobile. In other words, as the shop image could be transported and conveyed through the media of print, it gave a new fluidity to the representation of the shop. Advertisements often drew attention to the new practices that some shopkeepers were embracing, sometimes even making them a feature of the advertisement. The eighteenth century saw the appearance of new commodities and luxury goods on the market, greater numbers of branded goods, increasing variety of stock in shops, and the use of ‘ready money’ and fixed pricing, all of which were referred to in newspaper advertisements. For example, the Coventry mercer John Remington advertised a large assortment of silks, ending the advertisement with a reminder that ‘notwithstanding their being purchased with all the Advantages of ready Money, he is determined to sell them at prime cost’. Unusually, in 1778 a Coventry shroud-maker began his advertisement ‘FOR READY MONEY ONLY’.66 ‘Ready

65 SRO, Leigh Estate Vouchers and Receipts, DR/18. 66 Jopson’s Coventry Mercury, 15 June 1767 and Piercy’s Coventry Gazette, 4 July 1778.

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money’ may have had connotations of good value for the consumer, and was presented as an alternative to the use of credit. Such practices signified new ways of doing business, contributing to the impression of ‘modern’ spaces of consumption. Importantly, these practices were located in specific places - advertisements helped inform and emphasise the way things happened in particular places. Given London’s reputation as the innovative centre of the country, it was vital to claim knowledge of metropolitan behaviour and developments. Links with the capital were marketed as a selling point, but references to London were incorporated into provincial style, to become part of the provinces’ own identity.67 Newspaper advertisements were subject to a very particular type of contextualisation, sitting alongside other advertisements, such as for the stagecoach to London, for goods available from London manufacturers, for public lectures, drawing lessons, and for commodious new-built brick houses complete with sash windows. Thus they were part of a montage of ideas, which together represented urbane culture, but with a provincial slant that was the result of closely maintained relationships with the country community. Scattered amongst these advertisements were notices concerned with issues such as poaching, damage to woodland and lost animals, which made clear and reinforced links with the countryside. A strong sense of community also crept into the advertisements through the use of shopkeepers’ names, and sometimes those of their friends and neighbours, suggesting familiarity and personal connection with their audience. For example, in 1748 John Upton, a household goods retailer, referred to his predecessor ‘Mr Knowles’, and Hugh Jones advertised that his Tea Warehouse had moved to ‘the late Mr Hughes’s Banking Shop in this city’, suggesting that it was of more use to mention Mr Hughes’ name rather than the street name.68 The provincial city may have adopted modem living to some degree, but did so alongside a way of life that was the antithesis to that of modernity.69 Advertisements, as previously highlighted, not only gave information but also attempted to promote a desire to buy. As a consequence of their rhetoric, they generated ideas about the provincial town as a place for shopping. They drew parallels between their goods and London goods, and indirectly established links

67 A dominance model of cultural exchange between London and the provinces has limitations. Borsay, ‘The London Connection’, 31. Whilst sharing commonalties with the London advertisements, provincial advertisements also demonstrate significant differences. 68 Jopson’s Coventry Mercury, 7 November 1748; 11 October 1762. 69 Ogbom, for example, refers to the rational mind as promoted by Enlightenment as the ‘hallmark of modernity’. M. Ogbom, Spaces o f Modernity: London’s Geographies 1680­ 1780 (London, 1998), 3. Towns could be closely linked with the Enlightenment, being (in part) civilised, public, rational and secular places, and in this sense, modem. Of course, this is a partial view, as considered in P. Borsay, ‘Bath an Enlightenment city?’, in Borsay, Hirschfleder and Mohrmann, eds., New Directions in Urban History, 1.

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between the metropolitan and the provincial town. They emphasised fashion through their presentation of the latest goods, variety and taste, and they marketed their shops in relation to other well-known shopkeepers, fashionable shopping streets and significant buildings. In essence, through the portrayal of shopping spaces, they communicated and transmitted the spatialisation of modernity in the urban arena in which they operated.70 Thus the advertisements not only represented the shop, they also re-presented the shop in a new light: in the context of the fashionable urban arena, with new and plentiful goods, organised and sold in the latest mode. The use of advertising space to promote the shop, its wares and the reputation of the shopkeeper, all added to the impact of the shop’s physical space. But the significance of this medium was greater still. Newspaper advertisements also created a new abstract space of retailing.71 This new media space contributed to the production of ‘consumer landscapes’ at different spatial scales, outside the realm of the shop and of the physical urban space. The ways in which these forms of advertising were instrumental in promoting and producing consumer space can be further explained. Firstly, newspapers painted a picture of the county community, and the advertisements by shopkeepers ensured that urban commerce was represented there. Indeed, they indicated the shopping facilities available in any one place. However, the newspapers did not only advertise commodities, thrusting them into the domestic sphere - they carried the shop itself into the everyday space of the home. In doing so, the characteristics and qualities of the space of the shop were no longer embedded solely in a physical space. The advertisement, as an abstract space that closely related to the physical space of the shop, brought together this space and the everyday private life of individuals. No longer did the consumer have to go to the shop for a taste of the new fashions or to gain knowledge of new goods. The purchasing and reading of the provincial newspaper was a form of consumption in itself, which provided access to the abstract spaces of consumerism that the newspaper embodied. In turn, these spaces were certainly intended to be instrumental in promoting consumer knowledges and desires. Secondly, the advertisements were themselves highly suggestive of consumer spaces. They listed and detailed the goods available in the shop, and in doing so told the potential consumer what the shop was like. Not only did they promote consumer spaces, but actually recreated them in the media of the text. In other words, they linguistically constructed the world of goods. For example, the

70 Soja, for example, notes that urbanisation is a summative metaphor for the spatalisation of modernity. E. Soja, Postmodern Geographies (London, 1989). 71 This terminology is taken from Lefebvre, Production o f Space. Gregory defines abstract space as being one-step removed from the world it represents, commodified, and the product of capitalist exchange. D. Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Oxford, 1994), 401.

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Coventry shoemaker J. Brown’s advertisement seemed to move around the shop, from ladies’ shoes, to Italian glazed heels, to sandals, to different types of clogs. Then the advertisement moved on to Gentlemen’s boots and dress shoes, and from there to the assortment of lasts.72 The advertisements’ subtle rhetoric of persuasion also conveyed messages about fashion, novelty, and value. In this way they attempted to construct accessible landscapes of consumerism that were about the potential and possibility for buying. Advertisements and tradecards perhaps contributed to the detaching of consumer desires from the shop. Indeed, they may have changed understandings of shops and shopping, as advertisements could offer insight into the new world of goods, even in the consumer’s absence from the shop.73 It is impossible to assess the quantitative impact of advertisements. However, it can be suggested that this media space created a picture of the new consumer landscapes and became central to their production, by creating and transmitting particular ideas about the town and its shops. No longer was the communication of these ideas centred only on the space of the shop. Spatial boundaries were increasingly dismantled and discourses of consumerism were not limited to a particular space. Rather, they were both physical and abstract.

Conclusion Together, advertisements, billheads and tradecards represented the eighteenthcentury provincial town as a modem space of consumption, and helped produce the shopping spaces that were at the heart of urban life. They reveal an eclectic mix of the traditional and the modem, in both their content and style - a deliberately strategic compromise on the part of the shopkeepers and a consequence of their design imperatives. The new forms of printed advertising conveyed ideas about novelty and fashion, as well as about the availability of commodities. Beyond this, they provide insights into the concerns of the shopkeepers who were keen to tap into discourses of civility and respectability. The deployment of advertising material was part of the professionalisation of shopkeeping, and this leads us to acknowledge the important role played by shopkeepers and their advertising strategies in promoting the provincial city as a modem place. However, the placing of advertisements in this print medium had greater implications. For advertisements located the consumer landscape beyond the spatial

72 Jopson’s Coventry Mercury, 31 December 1787. 73 This draws on ideas of ‘time-space distanciation’, which may be understood as processes that revolutionise the objective qualities of space and time, and the possibilities for interaction with things that are absent in time and space. See D. Gregory, Time-space distanciation’, in R.J. Johnston, ed., Dictionary o f Human Geography (Oxford, 1991), 628.

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boundary of the shop and the street, thereby producing an abstract consumer space that we can only suppose acted on consumers’ minds. The advertisements not only re-created the shop but also re-presented the shop. Consumer space had a geographical location, occupying the centre of towns, increasingly organised and beautified. Advertisements extended consumer space further, providing the means to embed consumer discourses in the public sphere and the collective psyche. In the words of Lefebvre, each social system ‘maps out its own territory, takes it out and signposts it’.74 The advertisements were indeed map and signpost to the world of goods found in the town. Thus, advertisements may have been responsible not only for stimulating a desire to buy, but also for elevating a consciousness of consumerism beyond its immediate spatial location.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to John Benson, Laura Ugolini and Jon Stobart for their helpful comments and suggestions in the writing of this chapter.

74 Quoted in Gregory, Geographical Imaginations, 401.

Chapter 3

Creating New Spaces of Food Consumption: The Rise of Mass Catering and the Activities of the Aerated Bread Company Gareth Shaw , Louise Hill Curth and Andrew Alexander

Introduction: retail change and consumption spaces The relationships between changes in the retail distribution system and consumer culture have increasingly been explored through a range of perspectives.1 Such diversity has led to the claim that the history of consumption ‘is a prism through which many aspects of social and political life can be viewed’.2 Entwined within the historical perspective is a sociology of consumption which recognises both the important role consumer goods and services play in constructing social lives, and their cultural significance.3 It is also the case that the relationships between retailing and consumption are multi-faceted, although we would argue that three key areas of interest have emerged. These are: the links between retailing and consumption patterns, the relationship between distribution, consumption and the state, and the creation of new consumption spaces. Of course, as we shall show in this chapter, there are significant overlaps between these different strands of research. The first of these key areas is the most broad ranging, encompassing as it does a series of sub-themes and disciplinary perspectives. The recognition by historians that new products and new ways of selling changed people’s expectations, desires

1 P. Falk and C. Campbell, eds., The Shopping Experience (London, 1997); S. Miles, Consumerism as a Way o f Life (London, 1998); N. Wrigley and M. Lowe, eds., Reading Retail: A Geographical Perspective on Retailing and Consumption Spaces (London, 2002). 2 S. Strasser, C. McGovern and M. Judt, ‘Introduction’, in S. Strasser, C. McGovern and M. Judt, eds., Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 1998), 1-7. 3 Y. Gabriel and T. Lang, The Unmanageable Consumer (London, 1995); G. McCracken, Culture and Consumption (Bloomington, 1990).

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and patterns of consumption has been of increasing importance in this debate. This, in turn, has highlighted the nature, scale and timing of such changes, which many have viewed in ‘revolutionary’ terms.4 For most commentators, the consumer revolution is associated with the arrival of mass production and distribution from the later nineteenth century onwards.5 The debates on revolutionary change in consumer culture have also identified the emergence of a mass market in terms of Fordist principles, especially from the late 1930s.6 To this may be added the shifts to a post-Fordist society as discussed by Bocock and Lury, which Lee has viewed as a re-birth of consumer society during the 1980s.7 However, as Strasser, McGovern and Judt explain, the periodisation of such consumption changes is tentative and complicated by uneven patterns of development across societies.8 Benson argues that in Britain such shifts in consumption patterns were accompanied by changes in supply, but this is only a partial explanation.9 We would argue that a key driving force behind major changes in consumer society is the retail distribution system, along with the creation of new products and services. In turn, such a perspective sees the retail system being transformed by a series of revolutions relating to new forms of selling and new types of competition. Changes in distribution systems, especially new forms of competition and their impact on consumer societies have also been linked to the development of a range of state policies in different economies. Such concerns mark out a second main area of interest in the history of consumption, which focuses on the wide-ranging attempts to regulate corporate enterprises, as well as the growing concern about consumerism as social policy. Cohen, for example, has shown that in inter-war America the concept of the ‘New Deal’ highlighted the notion of consumption as a political concern.10 More generally, Strasser, McGovern and Judt argue that ‘consumption has become synonymous with citizenship ... during the twentieth century, both expressing individual autonomy and status within society and focusing political ideas about the obligation of the state to individuals’.11 Debates on retailer regulation also form a significant part of the state’s activities, as outlined

4 Strasser, McGovern and Judt, ‘Introduction’, 1-7. 5 P. Mathias, Retail Revolution (London, 1967). 6 Miles, Consumerism as a Way o f Life. 7 R. Bocock, Consumption (London, 1993); M. Lee, Consumer Culture Reborn: The Cultural Politics o f Consumption (London, 1993); C. Lury, Consumer Culture (Cambridge, 1996). 8 Strasser, McGovern and Judt, ‘Introduction’, 1-7. 9 J. Benson, The Rise o f Consumer Society in Britain, 1880-1980 (London, 1994). 10 L. Cohen, ‘The New Deal and the making of citizen consumers’, in Strasser, McGovern and Judt, eds., Getting and Spending, 111-26. 11 Strasser, McGovern and Judt, ‘Introduction’, 12.

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by Christopherson for America, by Wrigley in comparative studies, and by Shaw, Alexander, Benson and Hodson within inter-war Britain.12 Our main concern in this chapter is with the third strand of interest associated with the creation and form of consumption spaces. There exists a widespread debate on consumption that has both historical and contemporary dimensions, which are linked by the relationships between retailing and consumerism.13 More specifically, Wrigley and Lowe have drawn attention to the ‘geographies of consumption spaces and places, focusing explicitly on the street, the store, the mall and the home’.14 As they explain, there are two key sub-texts: one relates to the gendered nature of these spaces; the other centres around the different ways in which the geographies of these spaces facilitate consumption. Both of these are important in our study, and as we shall show, both have attracted increasing attention from a range of academic disciplines. The geographies of consumption spaces, as outlined by Wrigley and Lowe, are associated with the ways in which the retail industry creates, manipulates and re­ creates such spaces through the processes of competition.15 In turn, such processes are often rooted in retail innovations that lead to new forms of selling. Our specific concern in this chapter is to explore how changes in the catering industry brought about new spaces of consumption in terms both of new patterns of consumption, and of the creation of such spaces. Strongly conditioning such changes was the development of new eating places, in part associated with innovations in food manufacturing and retailing. The research draws on the still neglected theme of the rise of mass catering and, more especially, the retail activities of the Aerated Bread Company (ABC). This was a large-scale British food multiple that came to prominence in the later nineteenth century. Some of the company’s business records survive as part of the Somerfield pic collection, although the material is somewhat fragmented, consisting of some directors’ minute books, which mainly detail company strategy.16 Unfortunately, most other documentation has disappeared since the company’s closure in 1980. Two other manuscript volumes 12 S. Christopherson, ‘Market rules and territorial outcomes: the case of the United States’, International Journal o f Urban and Regional Research, 17, 1993, 274-88; N. Wrigley, ‘Antitrust regulation and the restructuring of grocery retailing in Britain and the USA’, Environment and Planning A, 24, 1992, 727-49; N. Wrigley, ‘Abuses of market power? Further reflections on UK food retailing and the regulatory state’, Environment and Planning A, 25, 1993, 154—7; G. Shaw, A. Alexander, J. Benson and D. Hodson, ‘The evolving culture of retailer regulation and the failure of the “Balfour Bill” in interwar Britain’, Environment and Planning A, 32, 2002, 1977-89. 13 Miles, Consumerism as a Way o f Life. 14 Wrigley and Lowe, eds., Reading Retail, 189. 15 Ibid. 16 L. Curth, G. Shaw and A. Alexander, ‘A new archive for retailing: the Somerfield collection’, Business History Archives, 84, 2002, 29-37.

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salvaged from the company’s Camden headquarters are held at the London Metropolitan Archives, the ABC Minute Book for 1869-1874 and the ABC Register for 1872-1885. We start our discussion with a brief review of the creation of consumption spaces in the Edwardian city, especially in the context of gendered space. This provides a background for our more detailed perspectives on the growth of ABC as a mass catering company and, more especially, its impact on creating a consumer culture centred around dining out. We argue that consumption practices and spaces associated with restaurants have been neglected relative to other forms of retailing, especially within an historical context. Of course, there are a few important exceptions, with Habermas for example arguing that places for eating out were significant in the development of the Victorian public sphere.17

Creating consumption spaces: the department store and beyond In much of the recent debates on the rise of modem consumer culture, the department store has assumed an important, almost pivotal, role. For example, Chaney and Perrot have argued that the department store was of critical importance to the development of modern consumer society, bringing about a psychological take-off in the desire for consumption.18 Perrot stated that ‘like fashion plates and catalogs, store windows became the best place to school and train the public about its appearance’.19 Similarly, Porter Benson believed that the department store was ‘symbolic of the shift from a product orientated society to one centred on consumption’, whilst in a more specific context Laermanns attempted to demonstrate that department stores acted as ‘female leisure centres and that they transformed the act of shopping’.20 The importance attached to the department store as an icon of modernity is also evident in discussions concerning urban culture. In this context, the impact of the department store has been associated with its ‘organisation and representation of

17 J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation o f the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category o f Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, 1992). 18 D. Chaney, ‘The department store as a cultural form’, Theory, Culture & Society, 1, 3, 1983, 22-31; P. Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History o f Clothing in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1994). 19 Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie, 68. 20 S. Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940 (Chicago, 1986), 18; R. Laermanns, ‘Learning to consume: early department stores and the shaping of a modem consumer culture (1860­ 1914)’, Theory, Culture & Society, 10, 1993, 20.

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urban space’.21 Department stores represented a ‘new order’, in which somewhat impersonal transactions replaced the traditional relationships between customer and shopkeeper. Moreover, from the late nineteenth century onwards, the world of consumer goods, as represented by the department store, began to merge with the urban world outside, to form a spectacle of consumer culture. City centres were restructured, becoming both dominated and represented by objects of consumption. However, if the department store was one of these key objects, marking out new spaces of consumption, it was not alone, and neither was it exclusively a female space.22 Rappaport and others have argued that, in addition to department stores, theatres and exhibitions also marked out new opportunities within the world of consumption. To these we would add the rise of restaurant culture and associated spaces in British cities. Of particular significance was the growth of chains of restaurants and tea rooms, especially through the activities of the ABC and the Lyons Company. According to Rappaport, ‘Department stores, hotels, restaurants and theatres collectively defined the commercial pleasures on offer’ in Edwardian London.23 In reality, the consumption spaces created by the ABC and Lyons were different, for whilst some of the cafes were rather functional, others, certainly the larger Lyons restaurants, were much more expensive. The more functional ones were, on the whole, much closer to the late twentieth-century American chain restaurant architecture discussed by Langdon, in that they were ‘superbly prepared to embody popular expectations’.24 In a similar way, Pillsbury argues that the restaurant is ‘a symbol of contemporary life ... a mirror of ourselves, our culture and our new geography’.25 In this chapter, we argue that the rise of mass catering, and the associated consumer outlets developed in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, exhibited similar characteristics. Both the ABC and Lyons represented new forms of retailing and catering that applied mass production and distribution techniques to facilitate their development. McCracken claims that the ‘growth of Lyons might also be a metaphor for the

21 G. Crossick and S. Jaumain, ‘The world of the department store: distribution, culture and social change’, in G. Crossick and S. Jaumain, eds., Cathedrals o f Consumption: The European Department Store 1850-1939 (Aldershot, 1999), 21. 22 Crossick and Jaumain, ‘The world of the department store’. 23 E.D. Rappaport, ‘A new era of shopping: the promotion of women’s pleasure in London’s West End, 1909-1914’, in L. Chaney and V.R. Schuwartz, eds., Cinema and the Invention o f M odem Life (Berkeley, 1995), 85-97; E.D. Rapparport, ‘Acts of consumption: musical comedy and the desire of exchange’, Crossick and Jaumain, eds., Cathedrals o f Consumption, 189-207. 24 P. Langdon, Orange Roofs, Golden Arches: The Architecture o f American Chain Restaurants (London, 1986), 165. 25 R. Pillsbury, From Boarding House to Bistro: The American Restaurant Then and Now (London, 1990), 10-11.

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emergence of consumer capitalism in Britain’.26 Whilst this may be a somewhat extravagant claim, it is certainly the case that both companies revolutionised eating out in British cities. Both were major business concerns, representing what Negt and Kluge and McCracken have termed an ‘industrialised public sphere’, with organised levels of production.27 As we shall see, they transformed the notion of dining out and offered the ‘opportunities for a somewhat sanitised version of the urban experience, a dip into the maelstrom of modernity, without being exposed to too much danger’.28 Set in this context, McCracken viewed these restaurants as representing specific material spaces for the production of new gendered identities. He further argued that these chain restaurants ‘act as a space between private and public’ spheres.29 Before examining such ideas in more detail, it is necessary to place the development of these chain restaurants in historical context. The following section will examine their business cultures and activities and, more particularly, the role played by the ABC in helping to transform the process of eating out.

The Aerated Bread Company (ABC) and the rise of the chain restaurant The ABC was founded in 1862 to mass produce bread through a new manufacturing process designed to appeal to a health conscious public. The production system was based on forcing carbonic acid into an air-tight machine containing water, flour and salt.30 Of equal significance was the industrial nature of production, for whilst a typical bakery might produce around 200,000 pounds of bread per year, ABC methods could produce ten times this from just one machine.31 The first factory failed to cope with the large demand and by 1863 a second factory was opened in Hackney (London), close enough to share supplies with the main Islington plant. By the following year there were 28 depots ‘for the [retail] sale of bread’ and nearly 100 ‘agencies’ or wholesalers.32 The ABC was also busily expanding outside of London, with activities in Manchester and Liverpool.

26 S. McCracken, ‘From performance to public sphere: the production of modem masculinities’, Textual Practice, 15, 1, 2001, 47-65. 27 O. Negt and A. Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Towards an Analysis o f the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere (Minneapolis, 1993), 14; McCracken, ‘From performance to public sphere’, 55. 28 L. Martens and A. Warde, ‘The meaning of eating out in a northern city’, in P. Caplan, ed., Foodf Health and Identity (London, 1997), 147. 29 McCracken, ‘From performance to public sphere’, 58. 30 H.W. Lobb, The New System o f Bread Manufacture (London, 1864). 31 ABC Minute Book, 26 January 1871. 32 The Times, 30 December 1864, 5.

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The company’s initial success was based on a technical innovation that transformed the nature and rate of bread production. This enabled them to produce bread and bread products on such a large scale that they were able to tender for, and provide bread to large institutions, such as schools, hospitals, orphanages and asylums.33 As these changes led to a mass production system of bread manufacture, the company saw the need to expand its manufacturing base and then gain organisational economies of scale by integrating manufacturing, wholesaling and retail functions. Despite its growing momentum in the 1870s, the company faced marketing problems within London. It needed to diversify or find new uses for the retail outlets that had expanded so rapidly, if it was to continue to grow and compete with new rivals. As a result, the ABC outlets began to carry a larger range of goods to accompany their baked products, including biscuits and also tea.34 The exact date when the ABC began to operate tearooms is not known, but it seems to have been around the mid-1870s.35 Using evidence from trade directories based on the work of Leon, it is possible to chart the rise of the new tea rooms, which were termed ‘refreshment rooms’ by the compilers of Kelly’s London directories.36 These show that by 1871 there were some 132 refreshment rooms listed in the directory, compared with 292 by 1881 and 377 in 1891. The same directories show an increase in ‘dining rooms’ from 401 in 1871 to 678 by 1891. Part of the difficulty in tracing the rise of the ABC tea shops and dining rooms lies in the terminology used. From the outset, the ABC had used the term ‘depot’ for their outlets. This encompassed activities as diverse as bread delivery, retail bakers and tea shops. It was a term they continued to use until the inter-war period. The locations of these depots are also suggestive of their changing roles and activities. Initially based in residential areas, the company began to expand into the central, commercial parts of London. A number were opened to target commuters and other travellers using the railway stations at Broad Street, Cannon Street, Westminster, South Kensington, Charing Cross and Victoria. In addition, depots were opened to cater for office workers in Holbom and Clerkenwell, whilst others were aimed at women with more leisure time in Pall Mall and Regent Street. By 1881, the ABC had a total of 38 depots in central locations and a further 69 in suburban London, although by this time the company had decided to concentrate further expansion in commercial areas. At a meeting in 1895, the shareholders were informed that there were 80 ABC outlets in central London, but that ‘there was plenty of scope for still further development’.37

33 ABC Minute Book, 23 October 1873. 34 Ibid., 3 November 1870. 35 The Times, 6 November 1912, 19. 36 R. Leon, ‘The rise and fall of the Aerated Bread Company’, Camden History Review, 25, 2001, 47-51. 37 The Times, 2 November 1895, 12.

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However, competition was increasing, especially from J. Lyons and Company, which had opened its first branch in 1894 in Piccadilly.38 Lyons was a major bakery business, and was on the way to becoming a mass catering multiple. By 1911 it had 123 outlets in central London, compared with the 106 operated by the ABC. As Bird argues, in ‘just ten years Lyons established themselves as the major restaurateurs’ in London.39 The origins of Lyons were very different to the ABC’s, and lay in catering and arranging displays for large-scale exhibitions during the late nineteenth century. As Bird goes on to explain, the company was involved in three areas of business: they supplied refreshments to exhibitions, organised entertainment, and developed restaurants and hotels.40 Of course, there were other smaller chains, but it was the ABC and Lyons that created a standardised mass catering system based around large-scale production techniques, and grew to pre­ eminence. Customers in both types of establishments were presented with standardised conditions, products, service and prices. There were clear common elements and practices shared by the two companies but, equally, there were important differences. It should also be stressed that standardisation embraced a degree of flexibility in order to cater for different markets. In the case of the ABC, for example, their outlets in prestigious areas such as Pall Mall offered better and more luxurious surroundings than their older suburban sites. However, high profile developments were much more a feature of Lyons. For example, they purchased property near Piccadilly Circus, which was to become the site of the large-scale, prestigious Trocadero Restaurant, the first phase of which was completed in 1896. This was lavishly decorated in the style of Louis XIV, ‘with a gilt balcony, where the band played’.41 By 1897 Lyons were also opening equally fashionable restaurants in provincial cities. Thus, the Lyons’ cafe on Wine Street, Bristol was described as being ‘finished in white and brilliant Oriental colours’, with ‘a light and artistic staircase’.42 Competition between the two main companies became intense, especially within central London, and was keenest along the Strand. Here the ABC had 8 outlets, compared to the 4 operated by Lyons. By contrast, Lyons were more prominent in Oxford Street, with 5 outlets to the 3 owned by the ABC. Leon suggests that this implies that Lyons were aiming at shoppers, rather than at the travellers coming through Charing Cross.43 Certainly, after the First World War, the ABC began to

38 Leon, ‘The rise and fall’. 39 P. Bird, The First Food Empire: A History o f J. Lyons and Co. (London, 2000), 15. 40 Ibid., 20. 41 Ibid., 49. 42 The British Baker, 2 October 1897, 331. 43 Leon, ‘The rise and fall’, 47-51.

Figure 3.1

A view of one of the ABC’s more prestigious establishments aimed at the leisure m arket. ABC, Blue Pocket Guide (London, 1924).

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move away from the City of London proper, and started to develop sites in other parts of the capital. Such increased competition also resulted in the changing presentation of the ABC’s outlets, including redecorating various depots and replacing marble topped tables with wooden tables covered with tablecloths. Efforts were also made to motivate staff to improve their levels of appearance and service.44 Waitresses were provided with new dresses and separate rooms in which to change into their working clothes.45 Managers and manageresses were offered cash incentives for increasing sales at their branches, and some outlets experimented, albeit unsuccessfully, with Sunday opening.46 It was also decided to increase the size of the ABC by expanding through acquisition, beginning in 1918 with the takeover of W. and J. Buszards Ltd (London). This firm was best known for its cakes, chocolates, sweets and light refreshments sold through its 140 retail outlets, many of which were ‘not doing anything like the amount of trade they were capable o f .47 The acquisition led to an increase in the profits of the ABC, as customer numbers rose dramatically during the early inter-war period.48 This success led to further acquisitions, the most notable of which was the takeover of James Cottle Ltd in 1921, representing an ambitious step towards expansion outside London. Based in the North-west of England, James Cottle Ltd operated a number of refreshment rooms in Liverpool and Manchester. In the former these consisted of four ‘Kings Cafes’ and two ‘City Cafes’, the ‘Edinburgh Cafe’, the ‘Royal Cafe’, Central Cafe’ and the ‘Coffee Pot’. They also owned the ‘Palatine Cafe’ in Manchester, as well as catering for weddings and other special events.49 The ABC also added the Lockhar and Ideal chain of restaurants to their activities in 1922.50 In addition, they continued their expansion in suburban London by opening 9 new depots across the suburbs in 1924, adding these to the 122 tearooms already operating in London. Their main flagship outlet was the St. James restaurant on west Piccadilly, which they claimed offered customers a high class dining out experience in luxurious surroundings. Such expansion brought new pressures on the company, especially concerning its supply and distribution systems. In London, the ABC’s main supply outlet was based on Camden Road, where large freezers held stocks of meat and fish. The company’s fleet of vans was not refrigerated, which necessitated a complex delivery system. As Leon explains, the arrangements for delivering different ‘types

44 ABC Minute Book, 16 November 1916. 45 Ibid., 10 October 1918. 46 Ibid., 9 August 1917. 47 The Times, 24 September 1918, 11. 48 ABC Minute Book, 21 October 1920. 49 Ibid., 21 April 1921. 50 Ibid., 26 October 1922.

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of food product, cried out for some form of rationalisation’.51 These difficulties were eventually solved by investing in refrigerated storage at the individual depot level. The pioneering activities of the ABC and their rival Lyons revolutionised the catering sector from the late nineteenth century onwards, providing a new form of dining out experience for a range of customers, and it is this experience that we now turn our attention to.

Changing experiences of dining out: creating new spaces of food consumption In nineteenth-century Britain the experience of eating out was variable and conditioned by social class, along with place of residence. Eating places could in the main be divided into the sometimes overlapping categories of ‘social’ and ‘utilitarian’ dining. The type of outlet a customer would patronise also depended on a range of social and cultural determinants. For working-class men and women eating out might mean buying pastry, confectionery, soup, whelks, pies or hot potatoes from one of the numerous stalls and street-sellers.52 Urban outlets for the middle classes included a range of ‘chop’-houses and coffee-houses, as well as dining rooms at private clubs that catered for an exclusively male clientele.53 In addition, many urban taverns also provided a range of refreshments and a luncheon bar, or offered ‘ordinary’ (i.e. a fixed price, set menu), as well as basic meals. Refreshment rooms offering breakfast and dinner were also common in London, and according to a local guide of the 1840s, could be found in almost every street.54 As with most other forms of catering, the majority of these outlets targeted almost exclusively male customers. By contrast, there were relatively few options for ‘respectable’ women to dine out alone or with female friends, whether they were in the city for work or leisure. However, the second half of the nineteenth century saw the opening of a range of new eating places. These included restaurants at many of the main London railway stations, which catered for both men and women.55 In addition, increasing numbers of refreshment rooms were opened, many of which were connected to the growing temperance movement of the late nineteenth century. These were gendered spaces,

51 Leon, ‘The rise and fall’, 49. 52 H. Mayhew, M ayhew’s London (London, 1987, first published 1861), 136-42. 53 J.C. Drummond and A. Wilbraham, The Englishman’s Food (London, 1985). 54 A. Mogg, M ogg’s New Picture o f London and Visitor’s Guide to its Sights (London, 1844). 55 E. Ehrman, London Eats Out: 500 Years o f Capital Dining (London, 1999).

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with coffee houses for men and clubs for women, and teashops catering for both.56 Furthermore, temperance cafes were established to provide safe, respectable dining places for working women. However, according to some contemporary sources, many females continued to face abysmal conditions when eating out.57 It was against this background that the ABC and slightly later Lyons began to transform the experience of dining out. The tea room, which the ABC pioneered and Lyons embellished, became a distinctively British social and cultural institution in the century after 1870. The images and terminology associated with such developments, such as waitresses with distinctive uniforms, along with afternoon tea and cakes, tend to be associated primarily with the ABC’s main rival, Lyons. However, as we shall argue, both organisations were especially significant in democratising the experience of dining out, as well as providing new facilities for women. The founders of the ABC drew heavily on a rather austere, if worthy, social reforming tradition. The company exploited this worthiness, and one of its earliest advertising campaigns encouraged customers to purchase books of tickets, which they could then exchange for bread to be distributed amongst the poor. The temperance movement, which partly influenced the atmosphere of the early tea shops, helped carry the social reform image into the ABC, which supplied food and non-alcoholic drinks. Thus, in 1870 the directors could boast that the Aerated Bread Company ‘had affected a very beneficial revolution in the habits of the people; it had rendered invaluable service to the cause of temperance and had opened a large field for the employment of a respectable class of women’.58 Given such a background, it is not surprising that the original experience of dining in an ABC depot was hardly an aesthetic one. Evidence suggests that the company spent comparatively little initially on the internal decoration and appearance of their early tea rooms.59 Properties were usually leased rather than purchased. This gave the company great flexibility in changing the location of its depots, but worked against significant expenditure on fitting out such premises. Contemporary descriptions from the late nineteenth century suggest that the ABC tearooms were rather crowded and that customers had relatively little privacy.60 Despite such conditions, it seems that in its early years the ABC tea rooms attracted a large and socially mixed clientele. According to The Times, their depots

56 R. Thome, ‘Places of refreshment in the nineteenth-century city’, in A. King, ed., Buildings and Society: Essays on the Social Development o f the Built Environment (London, 1980), 111-27. 57 Thome, ‘Places of refreshment’; The Times, 17 August 1887, 14. 58 The Times, 13 December 1870, 14. 59 ABC Minute Book, 21 October 1873. 60 Leon, ‘The rise and fall’.

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were ‘largely visited by the wealthy classes, as well as those who were not rich’.61 This may tell as much about the hours kept by The Times correspondent as about the social composition of patrons of ABC depots, since the lunchtime trade was made up overwhelmingly of lower middle-class white-collar workers of the City and central London.62 However, at other times of day the customers were different, and included the wealthy classes, as well as the tourists who had time and money to take morning coffee or afternoon tea. The ‘not rich’ customers most probably refers to those who considered an occasional outing to be an affordable luxury, perhaps for afternoon tea. It seems that the ABC’s clientele crossed both class and gender lines, with the teashops creating ‘a space between private and public’ life, which allowed young working-class women to dine in the same room as ‘City men’.63 According to McCracken, these tearooms were ‘new spaces of the city that created the stages on which modernist masculinities, male and female, could be performed’. In this context, they were far removed from the spectacles of display associated with many London department stores, and had a wider social appeal. 64 In the tea rooms of the ABC, working women could hold some degree of equality with men, at least in this dining out experience. Both the ABC and Lyons outlets were part of the processes of creating new urban consumption spaces, in which commodities and the conditions surrounding their sale became the co-ordinating frame within which economic and cultural life were grouped.65 As we previously argued, new shopping spaces in Victorian London were joined by theatres, hotels and restaurants, all of which created new jobs for women and spaces in which they could participate in commercial culture. Jackson and Thrift, on the basis of rather limited evidence, take the argument further, and suggest that the experience of dining in tea shops or in the refreshment rooms of department stores provided women with a ‘dream world’ removed from their normal lives.66 Before 1918, the functionality of some of the ABC’s depots were scarcely such dream worlds, but by contrast, the larger new restaurants opened by Lyons most probably were. They exhibited some of the spectacle of the department stores and were very well appointed. Aside from their flagship Trocadero restaurant, Lyons also had their famous comerhouses. These offered a range of services, including on the ground floor of their Coventry Street Comer House an extensive food hall for

61 The Times, 3 November 1886, 12. 62 Ibid. 63 McCracken, ‘From performance to public sphere’, 54. 64 Crossick and Jaumain, ‘The world of the department store’, 3. 65 T. Richards, The Commodity Culture o f Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle 1851-1914 (Stanford, 1990). 66 P. Jackson and N. Thrift, ‘Geographies of consumption’, in D. Miller, ed., Acknowledging Consumption (London, 1995), 85-99.

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Figure 3.2

Gareth Shaw, Louise Hill Curth and Andrew Alexander

A typical ABC teashop illustrating the emphasis on white-collar workers. Somerfield Archive. Note the availability of a separate room for female customers, though these were to quickly disappear.

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shoppers.67 These ‘super-cafes’, as Bird terms them, became important meeting places for many middle-class women and their families, or for those wanting a special treat.68 Such restaurants delimited very different spaces and experiences than those offered by the more common-place tea shops. In response to such developments, during the inter-war period the ABC started to refurbish their depots to broaden their appeal. Whereas a large number of the early outlets had served City clerks, providing smoking rooms for men, their more prominent tearooms in the West End were fitted with women’s dining rooms, which included the hitherto unimagined luxury of carpeting.69 Indeed, the Oxford Street depot was the first to be refurbished with a ladies’ room, containing lounges, writing tables and carpets, creating an altogether different experience of eating out. From the outset, the Gluckstein and Salmon families that owned Lyons had set their sights at providing a more luxurious experience than the ABC.70 They differentiated their outlets, with the tea rooms being complemented by the development of more luxurious restaurants. However, even the more mundane tearooms were, on the whole, better appointed than those of the ABC. Due to its marketing campaigns and greater attention to presentation, Lyons became the leading mass catering chain. As Lady Forbes observed in the columns of the Daily Mail: The Lyons teashop is everywhere. For the business girl not only in the City but every part of London, the nearest teashop is not far away. The girls who crowd into the teashops at midday no longer need the protection of a room for their sex alone ... From every point of view, and most emphatically from a woman’s, London has changed for the better during the past 25 years; in that metamorphosis the teashops have played a meritorious part.71

Both the ABC and Lyons became symbols of change, highlighted in contemporary novels. These have been well documented by McCracken, who has provided a genealogy of cafes in the work of Dorothy Richardson’s Revolving Lights, published in 1923.72 Within this novel, the chain tea rooms provide one of the novel’s key characters, Miriam Henderson, with ‘a space between private and

67 Bird, The First Food Empire, 100. 68 Ibid., 101. 69 ABC Minute Book, 23 November 1916. 70 Bird, The First Food Empire. 71 Daily Mail, 5 October 1921, quoted in Bird, The First Food Empire, 42. 72 S. McCracken, ‘Embodying the new women: Dorothy Richardson, work and the London Cafe’, in A. Home and A. Keane, eds., Body Matters, Feminism, Textuality, Corporeality (Manchester, 2000), 121-34; D. Richardson, Revolving Lights, Pilgrimage III (London, 1979, first published 1923).

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public’ in which ‘she can develop an urban intellectual identity’.73 In contrast, Kathlyn Rhodes, who was one of the most popular English writers of the inter-war period, was less complimentary about the ABC depots.74 One of her best known works, Sweet Life, published in 1922, contained such derogatory remarks about the ABC that it was deemed necessary for the company’s solicitors to contact her publishers.75 The ABC depots began to be more strongly marketed to tourists and visitors to London from the 1920s onwards. At a board meeting in 1922, plans were accepted for the production of the ABC Guide to London. The strategy was to obtain sufficient advertising so that after selling the guides for two pence in their outlets, the firm would either break even or make a small profit.76 The style of the publication was based on the format of ‘modem’ guide books, and provided a clear illustration of the ubiquitous nature of their London teashops. The guide for 1924 claimed to be a ‘compact and handy little guide ... To assist visitors to London, by providing them with a brightly written resume’.77 In essence, the guide described a particular site and indicated to the visitor the nearest ABC teashop. These were described as offering ‘moderate prices, quick service and excellent catering for light meals and refreshing summer drinks’.78 Interestingly, comments in an earlier guide for Americans visiting London described the ABC teashops as possibly suiting ‘a certain class of English taste’ - although the author felt that her fellow Americans would find them overcrowded places with a restricted menu.79 That popular novels played on the importance of the ABC and Lyons in the daily lives of the middle and lower middle classes, was significant. They were clearly delimiting a new and popular urban experience, especially in the inter-war period. Nonetheless, such experiences were not uniform, in that the ABC and Lyons offered different types of eating places, utilised by different classes and by both genders. Thus, McCracken’s observation that these spaces acted as stages of ‘modernist masculinities’, where the female office workers could meet, is an important feature.80 However, they also appealed to middle class women enjoying a shopping experience, as well as to the family market and to tourists. In other words, the range of consumer experiences was certainly far more complex than McCracken and others would have us believe.

73 McCracken, ‘From performance to public sphere’, 58. 74 K. Rhodes, Sweet Life (London, 1922). 75 ABC Minute Book, 16 and 23 March 1924. 76 Ibid., 16 February 1922. 77 ABC, Blue Pocket Guide (London, 1924), Foreword. 78 ABC, Blue Pocket Guide, 3. 79 B. McManus, The American Woman Abroad (New York, 1911), 89. 80 McCracken, ‘From performance to public sphere’, 51.

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Figure 3.3

The ABC Pocket Guide, which promoted the teashops to tourists and visitors to London. ABC, Blue Pocket Guide (London, 1924).

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The spectacle of Lyons’ Trocadero, with its experience of dining in style to popular music, was worlds apart from eating out in the ABC or Lyons’ tea shops. Nevertheless, the more mundane, everyday experiences and consumption spaces are just as significant as the more exotic. Indeed, this is the argument advanced by Valentine along with Jackson and Thrift, who have drawn attention to the relative lack of interest in the commonplace.81 As Valentine argues, the routine acts of consumption ‘are no less important cultural activities’ than the spectacular.82 Certainly, the developments of the ABC and Lyons had a significant impact on the urban landscape. Within inter-war London, for example, the web of teashops presented the consumer with a range of eating out opportunities in both the city centre and many parts of the suburbs. Such experiences were also available in a good many provincial cities, especially following the expansion of Lyons and the later acquisitions policy of the ABC.

Conclusion: a range of dining out experiences From the late nineteenth century onwards, the ABC and Lyons pioneered a form of mass catering based around the development of vertically integrated food organisations. In the case of the ABC, the earliest retail outlets were simply developed for selling baked goods produced by the company’s bakeries, but these quickly became teashops to provide light refreshment to the growing new class of white-collar workers, both men and women. In turn, these chain restaurants began to cater for the large numbers of lower management who commuted into London by railway from the growing suburbs. During the early years of the twentieth century, the competition provided by Lyons radically changed the nature of mass catering, with their introduction of different grades of restaurants, from the tea rooms through to the Lyon’s Corner Houses and the flagship development of the Trocadero restaurant. These helped to transform the experience of dining out from a functional event to one that involved much more spectacle. In response to this, the ABC upgraded certain of its outlets to provide a more rounded experience and, in doing so, aimed to provide respectable and desirable destinations for housewives, tourists and others visiting London. Their success was reflected in the company’s rapid expansion, both across London and in other provincial cities. However, the ABC never provided the range of experiences that Lyons offered. In large part this was because the ABC’s vision was rather too narrow

81 G. Valentine, ‘City’, in D. Bell and G. Valentine, eds., Consuming Geographies: We Are What We Eat (London, 1997), 95-120; Jackson and Thrift, ‘Geographies of consumption’, 85-99. 82 Valentine, ‘City’, 98.

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and based initially on the ethos of earnest temperance and worthy social reform. Furthermore, the ABC based its business strategy from the late 1880s on the mass, centralised production of many of the foodstuffs sold in its depots. Lyons, in contrast, had considerably more retailing and marketing experience, including a flair for staging major events. In addition, it had less need to pay attention to the preferences of shareholders, since its equity was predominantly held within the two founding families. These different backgrounds and pathways of growth led to a divergence of developments around a common core, which was the tea shop and refreshment room. In this sense, both these mass caterers provided new consumer experiences and spaces of consumption. We started our discussion by examining the role attributed to the department store in the creation of consumption spaces, becoming ‘central to the iconography of consumer culture’.83 However, alongside such developments, and in a complex way related to them, other aspects of consumption made up the web of urban modernity. These included theatres, hotels and, of course, the tea rooms and restaurants we have identified in this chapter. Together, these commercial and retail developments provided what Ewen has termed the surface expressions of urban life, characterised in part by an ‘escalating instability of class and geographical boundaries’.84 Certainly, the tea rooms were used by many different social classes, often at different times of the day, and in different places. There was also a more direct link between department stores, tea shops and restaurants. As city centres, or parts of them, became increasingly occupied by pleasurable activities such as shopping, so more shoppers were drawn in from the suburbs. It was these people, many of whom were women, that the ABC and Lyons started to target. Finally, the teashop and the restaurant added significantly to the new spaces of consumption available to the growing number of urbanites. Such spaces catered for female workers, as noted by McCracken, and also offered a dining out experience for many other consumers in the various Lyons’ Corner Houses and restaurants.85 If visiting the department stores and other fashionable shops became an important experience during the early twentieth century, then the developments pioneered by the ABC and Lyons significantly added to the consumer landscape.

83 M. Nava, ‘Modernity’s disavowal: women, the city and the department store’, in P. Falk and C. Campbell, eds., The Shopping Experience (London, 1996), 56-91. 84 Nava, ‘Modernity’s disavowal’, 64. 85 McCracken, ‘From performance to public sphere’, 47-65.

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Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank the British Academy for the generous funding of this project and other work related to the Somerfield archive.

Section 2: Wheeling and Dealing

Chapter 4

‘Speciousness is the Bucketeer’s Watchword and Outrageous Effrontery his Capital’: Financial Bucket Shops in the City of London, c. 1880-1939 Dilwyn Porter

By the late twentieth century, as far as most British consumers were concerned, the term ‘bucket shop’ denoted a retail outlet offering heavily discounted airfares. Making use of a bucket shop held few terrors beyond the possibility of buying a ticket costing more than the headline price and flying with an unfashionable airline at an inconvenient time. Lurking behind this usage, however, was a past shrouded in mystery where few things were certain apart from the fact that bucket shops rarely, if ever, sold buckets. What they did sell, from the 1880s through to 1939, when their business was curtailed by the Prevention of Fraud (Investments) Act, were stocks and shares that were often not what they seemed and financial services that left many customers out of pocket. Sometimes they were simply betting shops providing an opportunity to gamble on fluctuations in the prices of securities. Some of their business with customers was on a face-to-face basis, but much of it relied on the postal service. Contact was made with customers outside London via circulars and other printed materials, with subsequent dealings conducted by letter or telegram. Bucket shops became synonymous with the seedier side of City life and were an intermittent nuisance for over fifty years. For one commentator on London’s financial sector, the years before 1939 were ‘the bucket-shop days when security dealing was frequently a pastime for the con-man’.1 Yet, though the Stock Exchange of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not without its share of rogue traders, the con-man was most likely to be encountered among non­ members, so-called ‘outside brokers’, effectively unlicensed share-dealers, operating bucket shops from addresses in and around the City of London. In these circumstances it became commonplace, in the City and in the financial press, to use 1 P. Ferris, The City (London, 1960), 46.

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the label pejoratively. According to Francis Hirst, editor of the Economist, writing in 1911, ‘bucket shop’ was ‘[a] term of reproach sometimes applied generally to all outside brokers not connected with the Stock Exchange’. Some, he elaborated, operated as ‘unloading shops which advertise to catch investors’; others were simply ‘gambling shops which offer facilities to speculators’.2 The origins of the all-embracing label can be traced to the United States, where it had been the practice in the 1880s to use a bucket to collect the ticker tape supplying unlicensed brokers (‘bucketeers’) with the latest prices from the commodity and stock markets, though this derivation is by no means certain. ‘In any case’, as another financial journalist, A J.S. Osborne of the City News, noted in 1929, ‘the origin of the term matters little, as whether the “tape” goes into the bucketeer’s bucket or not, it is very certain his client’s money does’.3 Donald Cobbett, who began his working life as a clerk on the Stock Exchange in 1933, thought that the name had arisen simply because the shop ‘bucketed’ the money extracted from its hapless clients.4 Bucket shops and their proprietors operated on the very edge of legality and often overstepped the mark. Almost exclusively a City of London phenomenon, they were essentially parasitic enterprises, not least because they appropriated the reputation of bona fide financial institutions - the Stock Exchange especially - in order to lend themselves an appearance of respectability. The police identified a total of 177 shops as having operated within the City’s square mile between 1910 and 1936.5 Premises ‘near the Bank of England’ were de rigueur: ‘[it] looks well, you know, to country folk - even though it may be the third-floor back-room in a court half-a-mile away’.6 The bucket-shop business was also characterised by opportunism: bucketeers proliferated when stock markets boomed, and vanished, sometimes literally overnight, when they slumped. ‘Many bucket shops are of short life’, Hargreaves Parkinson, also of the Economist, observed in 1925, ‘being improvised for the occasion whenever Stock Exchange business is more than usually active’.7 The optimism generated by bull markets attracted potential clients in great numbers, many of whom were relatively inexperienced in matters of finance. In such conditions, as has been noted in relation to the United States,

2 F.W. Hirst, The Stock Exchange: A Short Study o f Investment and Speculation (London, 1911), 253. 3 A.S.J. Osbome, The Stock Exchange: Its Methods and Practice (London, 1929), 70. 4 D. Cobbett, Tales o f the Old Stock Exchange Before the Big Bang (Portsmouth, 1986), 97-103. 5 K. Newman, Financial Marketing and Communications (Eastbourne, 1984), 63. 6 ‘The “Outside Broker” by one of themselves’, Advertising, October 1891, 16-17. 7 H. Parkinson, The ABC o f Stocks and Shares: A Handbook fo r the Investor (London, 1925), 33-4.

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opportunities for artful insiders to prey on unwary outsiders were maximised.8 Bucket shops present a significant challenge for the historian, not least on account of the paucity of sources. The ephemeral nature of bucket-shop businesses, often terminated in a hurry as proprietors sought refuge from angry customers, was not conducive to the orderly preservation of records. Moreover, where a bucketeer was seeking to bamboozle a client, there was little incentive to store evidence that might subsequently assist a prosecution. Fortunately, the press, inspired in part by the campaigning zeal of the so-called ‘New Financial Journalism’ from the mid1880s onwards, helps to compensate for this deficiency. Though some of the papers that comprised London’s burgeoning financial press were themselves corrupt, most were anxious to protect their readers from bucketeers and other sharp practitioners. The Financial News, London’s first daily financial newspaper, started in 1884, campaigned vigorously against bucket shops, as did the Financial Times after 1888.9 Civil and criminal court cases, along with bankruptcy proceedings, were widely reported, although as a source, these have their limitations simply because customers, even when they had been badly served, were reluctant to seek legal redress. Prosecutions, according to Detective Chief Inspector Nicholls of the City of London Police, often ran into difficulties, the prevailing attitude among victims being ‘get-another-person-to-be-gibbeted-before-the-public-as-a-mug-but-not-me’.10 Thus it is possible that those cases that did come to court, while instructive, may not be representative of bucket-shop customer relations in general. Another frustration, noted by Charles Kindleberger in the 1970s, is that the bucket shop has been largely neglected in serious economic literature. He suggested that the historian should turn instead to novels, ‘from which in truth one can learn a great deal of historical detail about manias, panics, swindles, and financial aberrations generally’.11 Lost in a Bucket Shop, C.J. Scotter’s morality tale set in the City of London, published in 1890, serves a useful purpose in this respect. The intention here is to examine bucket shops in the British context. This may be a little easier than Kindleberger envisaged as he seems to have overlooked the work of Henry Warren, a prolific commentator on London’s financial sector around the turn of the century. The extended title of Warren’s book - The Modem Bucket Shop: a description o f the wiles o f the ‘outside ’ stockbroker or dealer, o f the manner in which he runs his gambling den, o f the London gutter press which assists him, and o f the shearing o f the lambs (1906) - has supplied the agenda for

8 See C.P. Kindleberger, Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History o f Financial Crises (London, 1978), 33-4. 9 D. Kynaston, The City o f London, vol. 1, A World o f its Own, 1815-1890 (London, 1994), 362-3. 10 E. Nicholls, Crime Within the Square Mile: The History o f Crime in the City o f London (London, 1935), 143. 11 Kindleberger, Manias, Panics, 33-4.

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much of what follows. The first concern will be to describe how the bucketeer, often masquerading as an honest ‘outside broker’, could be either the proprietor of a City gambling den, or a retailer of worthless shares. This is followed by an account of bucket-shop journalism as conducted by what one source from the 1890s called ‘the higher species of outside broker ... who does not appear personally in the business but works under the cover of what he calls a financial newspaper’.12 After a brief description of bucket-shop operations in the changed investment conditions of the inter-war period, and their demise after the 1939 Act, an explanation for the phenomenon and for its longevity is offered.

Outside brokers, gambling dens and unloading shops ‘Of bucket shops and bucketeers I could write a volume’, claimed Detective Chief Inspector Nicholls. ‘All had their “special dishes”; all put a new twist or angle on the threadbare trade of peddling worthless shares’. Nicholls was well placed to comment, having spent ‘upwards of twenty years’ in pursuit of those who sought to make a living by persuading the greedy, the stupid and the unworldly to part with their money. The degree of success they enjoyed, he observed, depended very much on ‘how artistically the shop window was dressed’.13 The telegraphic addresses favoured by some of the most notorious bucketeers in the 1890s were indicative of the attention devoted to this aspect of their business, though they were open to ridicule by knowing contemporaries. The telegraphic cypher of Mr. S. Lupton, alias J.V. Turner, is ‘Equanimity’. What an unconscious satire! I suppose there is not one among his alleged numerous clientele whose present unenviable frame of mind that word gives any adequate idea of. Then there is Mr Thomas Thompson, who bobs up serenely with ‘Remembrance’. Ye Gods! What memories! ... Surely, in Mr Thompson’s case, ’twere better to forget!14

As Cobbett later reflected, the goods and services on offer ‘had to appear solid and respectable’, even - or especially - if the reality behind the fa$ade was a business run from a City attic or basement.15 When Leverson, the principal character in C.J. Scotter’s novel, found himself in ‘a rather dingy office hard by the Bank of England’, he was baffled when told that he had been taken to a bucket shop. ‘What on earth is that?’, he asked, only to be 12 ‘The “Outside Broker” by one of themselves’, 16-17. 13 Nicholls, Crime Within the Square Mile, 140, 142-3. 14 The Hawk, 21 October 1890. 15 D. Cobbett, Nothing So Crude as a Tip: Financial Fables and Cautionary Tales fo r Stock Market Investors (Portsmouth, 1982), 11.

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advised that it was ‘another name for an outside broker’s office, that’s all’.16 ‘Outside broking’, trading in securities from premises located outside the London Stock Exchange, had expanded rapidly in the late nineteenth century, its growth paralleling that of the stock market itself. In part, this reflected the physical limitations of the 1853 Stock Exchange building, where space became increasingly hard to find as the total membership (brokers and jobbers) increased from 864 in 1850 to a peak of 5,567 in 1905. It has been calculated that, at the start of the 1880s, when the number of outside brokers began to attract serious attention, the amount of space available per member in the Stock Exchange had shrunk to just 2.08 square feet.17 At the same time, the development of rapid communications the stock indicator with its characteristic ticker tape from 1872 and then the telephone from 1882 - effectively extended the trading floor to any premises where a bargain could be struck at current market prices. Once this facility was in place, outside brokers proliferated in the City itself and also, to some extent, in London’s West End. Though it became commonplace to refer to all outside brokers as if they were bucket shops, outside firms - some calling themselves ‘stock and share dealers’ to avoid confusion - often conducted business in a respectable fashion. ‘Many of them’, as Osborne reflected, ‘are old established, have a very diversified and wealthy clientele, show great acumen as far as the stock markets are concerned and give their clients the soundest possible advice’. Some, noted Cobbett later, ‘cherished high reputations for impeccable dealings’.18 Outside brokers were at a disadvantage, in that they could not deal directly with jobbers, effectively wholesalers of listed securities, on the floor of the Stock Exchange. Thus, though they could accept orders from members of the public, they had to rely on inside brokers for the execution of this kind of business. This restriction, of course, did not apply when shares were unlisted, as was often the case with the more speculative issues. Outside brokers, however, had the advantage over insiders in that they were free to advertise, an opportunity denied to members of the Stock Exchange under its rules and regulations. Even the most respectable London dailies carried outside brokers’ advertisements in their classified columns, a practice that attracted criticism from time to time, as the link with bucketeering became more apparent. The eminently respectable Standard, no doubt to the chagrin of its City editor who was a pillar of financial rectitude, was said in 1890 to have become ‘the favourite medium for the wily fly-catchers who hail from the top

16 C.J. Scotter, Lost in a Bucket Shop: A Story o f Stock Exchange Speculation (London, 1890), 10. 17 R. Michie, The London and New York Stock Exchanges 1850-1914 (London, 1987), 251-2; Kynaston, The City o f London, vol. 1, 362-3. 18 Osborne, The Stock Exchange, 64; see also Cobbett, Nothing So Crude as a Tip, 11; Cobbett, Tales o f the Old Stock Exchange, 100-101.

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floors in cheap City offices’.19 Moreover, though orders derived from brokers outside ‘the House’ could generate a profitable line of business, insiders tended to regard outsiders primarily as competitors. As one financial newspaper commented in 1890: Many people will no doubt marvel how it is that ‘outside brokers’ thrive, whilst ‘members’ are impoverished. The reason is obvious. The latter are subject to so many arbitrary restrictions, whilst the former are absolute free lances and at liberty to advertise for and transact business in whatsoever manner they list, provided they do not transgress the law, which is, unfortunately, far from stringent.20

Insider resentment was especially evident in the early 1890s when clients were thin on the ground in the aftermath of the first Barings crisis. This prompted the Stock Exchange authorities, in response to pressure from members, to persuade the Exchange Telegraph Company to remove its tape machines from the offices of outside brokers. The Stock Exchange, as Henry Warren explained, could not ‘look idly on while speculative business [was] being diverted from its own floor to an outside channel’.21 This was undoubtedly a blow to the 87 outside firms who had previously been able to conduct business at tape prices, though it was one from which the more resilient soon recovered. Even before the advent of the tape, outside brokers had used contacts on the trading floor to supply them with the latest news via messengers posted at the door or in the street. After 1894, they simply relied on the telephone to keep in touch with the markets, there being no shortage of impecunious brokers, jobbers and clerks ready to supplement their income by supplying the latest financial intelligence to outsiders. George Gregory & Co., one of the largest outside firms, boasted of gathering information in this fashion and then relaying it via its own tape services to its various offices in the City, the West End and elsewhere.22 Members of the Stock Exchange continued to complain about ‘the serious manner in which respectable outside brokers are taking away their business’.23 By the early years of the twentieth century the attitudes of insiders had hardened further. In 1898, Lord Chief Justice Russell of Killowen triggered a minor moral panic by suggesting that an unscrupulous minority was systematically undermining the commercial probity of the financial sector.24 Around the turn of the century a 19 Financial Standard and Mining Guardian, 29 March 1890. 20 Ibid., 25 January 1890. 21 H. Warren, The Modem Bucket Shop: A Description o f the Wiles o f the ‘Outside ’ Stockbroker or Dealer etc. (London, 1906), 8-10. 22 D. Kynaston, The City o f London, vol. 2, Golden Years 1890-1914 (London, 1995), 101-103. 23 Financial Times, 15 March 1895. 24 G.R. Searle, Corruption in British Politics 1895-1935 (Oxford, 1987), 33-40.

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series of scandals that exposed the modus operandi of various high-profile company promoters seemed to reinforce this impression, supplying respectable City firms with every incentive to distance themselves from the miscreants. Neither did it help when, as happened from time to time, bucket shops sought to pass themselves off as bona fide Stock Exchange firms.25 Admission requirements for membership of the Stock Exchange were relatively modest, and the General Purposes Committee was sometimes criticised for its lack of rigour in enforcing its rules and regulations. Even so, as Ingall and Withers, albeit two insiders, pointed out in their treatise on the Stock Exchange in 1904, the extent of fraud committed by members of the House was ‘infinitesimal’. Outside brokers, however, were beyond the reach of the General Purposes Committee. There was nothing to prohibit a former member, banished from the Stock Exchange for failing to honour his commitments, or even a convicted criminal, from setting up in business. With the City apparently enveloped in a miasma of corruption, it was natural that insiders should seek to distance themselves from the outside broker, described by Ingall and Withers as ‘a financial fungus ... amenable to the rules of no committee, and who is in most things a law unto him self.26 Thereafter, the idea that dealing with an outside broker was a step on the road to financial ruin became almost a cliche of financial journalism, as well as a recurring theme in every handbook written with the investing public in mind. The first requirement for any investor, Hirst advised in 1911, was to find a good broker so as to ensure that he would ‘be protected by the rules and regulations of the London Stock Exchange’. Parkinson, writing in 1925, was equally circumspect. The investor, he argued, had no means of distinguishing between the respectable outside broker and the bucket-shop keeper. In these circumstances, he would be well advised ‘never to place any business with an outsider except on the recommendation of some person of undoubted experience and probity’. For Osborne, in 1929, membership of the Stock Exchange was in itself a guarantee that transactions would be conducted honestly. If a member transgressed, dire consequences were almost certain to follow. He would be expelled from the Stock Exchange and lose his good name. The outside broker, however, was subject to no such deterrent and ‘this condition being absent, trouble may at any time occur’.27 For Warren, in 1906, the bucket-shop keeper was essentially ‘an outside broker who gambles with his customers at tape prices’.28 Appropriately, Leo, the

25 See, for example, the case of Borthwick & Co., which claimed a bogus connection with a Stock Exchange firm in an attempt to defraud a client of £200. Financial Times, 16 January and 12 February 1897. 26 G. Ingall and G. Withers, The Stock Exchange (London, 1904), 23, 36. 27 Hirst, The Stock Exchange, 75; Parkinson, The ABC, 45; Osbome, The Stock Exchange, 66-8. 28 Warren, The M odem Bucket Shop, 1.

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proprietor of the fictional shop in Scotter’s novel, was ‘a sporting gent’, equally at home at a cock fight or at the races. His premises comprised an outer office staffed by one or two clerks, and behind it ‘a kind of office and drawing room combined’, where ‘a very noisy crowd of gentlemen of more than one nationality’ devoted themselves to the serious business of speculation.29 This is consonant with other descriptions from the 1890s of the fairly basic facilities that were required. They have a number of tape machines in their offices, around which the clients s i t ... just like they do in the betting clubs the police raid every now and then’.30 The reference to ‘betting clubs’ is significant, for a bucket shop could offer its clientele the same kind of excitement as that generated by more instantly recognisable forms of gambling. At the bucket shop there was a ticker and a blackboard, upon which the quotations, as they appeared on the tape, were chalked ... ‘Milwaukees just coming on, gentlemen!’ the man at the indicator would exclaim, as the machine began to print the letters on the tape. Then those men in the room who had made a bet on Milwaukees would hurry up to the blackboard, eagerly awaiting the figures which would soon be chalked upon it. The momentary suspense, with all eyes straining upon the board, kept the crowd silent; but immediately the figures appeared, the tension was broken, and the language frequently became painful, while a sceptical member of the crowd would perhaps walk across to the tape to see that the figures had been correctly called and recorded.31

A City location was, of course, advantageous for this kind of business, the links between the financial sector and gambling being well established at all levels. The Financial Times, in 1890, had bemoaned the existence of ‘a bevy of betting houses ... within a half-mile radius of the Bank and the Stock Exchange’, where City clerks and office boys frittered away their wages on small bets with bookmakers at ‘starting price tape-shops’. ‘The petty cash box’, it was noted wearily, ‘must suffer’.32 One reason, it was said, for the Stock Exchange’s campaign to deny ticker-tape facilities to outside brokers was to curb those clerks who ‘would ascertain what figures were about to be sent across the wires, and then, jumping into cabs, drive to the nearest bucket shops, and make their bets’.33 In their defense, it might be suggested that they were simply following the example set by their employers. In 1898 John Ashton, an authority on gambling, argued persuasively that ‘as a place for gambling’, the City was more important than the Turf. ‘The time bargains and options, without which the business of the Exchange 29 Scotter, Lost in a Bucket Shop, 3, 10-11. 30 ‘The “Outside Broker” by one of themselves’, 16-17. 31 Warren, The Modem Bucket Shop, 8. 32 Financial Times, 13 November 1890. 33 Warren, The Modem Bucket Shop, 9.

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would be very little’, he observed, ‘are gambling pure and simple, whilst the numerous bucket shops, with their advertisements and circulars, disseminate the unwholesome vice of gambling throughout the length and breadth of the land, enabling people to speculate without anyone being the wiser.’34 As courts wrestling with the complexities of the Gaming Act discovered, it was often very difficult to distinguish between the financier and the gambler, the speculator and the punter. There was, in short, ‘a hazy borderline between play and seriousness, between speculation as a form of betting and proper investment’.35 Although straightforward wagers, often with wealthy clients for large sums, were not unknown, a majority of gambling transactions conducted through bucket shops involved the so-called ‘cover system’. The customer was persuaded to deposit a proportion, perhaps 10 per cent of the quoted price, ostensibly to ‘cover’ the purchase of a particular stock or ‘pool’ of stocks, usually one in which the shop had an undisclosed interest. For a while the price might rise, supported by a whispering campaign orchestrated by bucketeers and their allies on the Stock Exchange floor, thus encouraging more customers to risk their cash. Part of the amount originally deposited might even be returned in the guise of ‘profit’, in order to keep clients sweet and to induce them, if possible, to take further risks. This was known in the trade as ‘feeding a dog on its own tail’. More often than not, it seems, no stock was actually purchased and when the price fell, as in due course it inevitably did, the cover was simply retained by the shop. Alternatively, the bucketeeer might actually buy into a line of stock that he was encouraging customers to ‘cover’, thus pushing up the price. This put him in a position where he could reap a double reward. First, he could maximise his profit by selling his shares at what he judged to be the top of the market. Second, when the disposal of his holding had caused the price to tumble, he could claim that the customer’s cover had ‘run-off and keep it for himself. There were good reasons why bucket shop owners were sometimes known as ‘cover snatchers’. The trick, of course, was for the knowing customer to ignore exhortations to ‘hold tight for a bigger profit’ and to seek settlement of the account while he was ahead, well before the shop withdrew its covert support and allowed the price to fall. Even if this happened, however, the bucketeer might still retain the advantage by ‘pleading the Gaming Act’. At this point naive customers would discover that, as far as the law was concerned, their investment was deemed to have been a wager and that it would be impossible to enforce their claim. According to Warren, bucket-shop clients fell into two categories: ‘rogues’ and ‘innocents’. The rogue

34 J. Ashton, A History o f Gambling in England (New York, 1968, first published 1898), 2 7 4 .1 am indebted to Mark Clapson for this reference. 35 M. Clapson, A Bit o f a Flutter: Popular Gambling and English Society, c. 1823-1961 (Manchester, 1992), 22. See also G.R. Searle, Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 1998), 81-3.

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understood the nature of the game he was playing and was sometimes successful. He was representative of what one critique of City affairs in the late 1890s called ‘the speculating public, which likes, one might almost say prefers, to gamble in rubbish’.36 The innocent, however, very often a customer in the shires who had been attracted by newspaper advertisements and plausible mailshots emanating from the City of London’s golden square mile, was ‘quite ignorant of the game and [was] welshed of his cover in this mean fashion’.37 While thinking that they were making an investment, they found that they had been induced to risk their capital in a speculative game that almost inevitably produced more losers than winners. It seems likely that the ‘cover racket’ supplied the bread and butter for most City bucket shops. They were also adept at unloading shares of little or no intrinsic value. Often these were new issues in the highly speculative mining sector. Socalled ‘company promoters’ developed considerable expertise in creating new companies simply to capitalise on the speculative fashion of the moment.38 From time to time, as markets boomed, they were assisted by what Ingall and Withers called ‘whirlwinds of public insanity’, when the determination of small investors not to miss out on something good rendered them astoundingly gullible.39 In these circumstances, as Mr Justice Cave observed when summing up in the case of Strachan versus the Universal Stock Exchange in 1895, customers were virtually inviting bucketeers to take advantage of them. ‘Some folks’, he reminded the court, citing the Tichbome claimant as his source, ‘has money and no brains; others has brains and no money; surely those that has money and no brains were made for those who has brains and no money’.40 Bucketeers and their customers, in the judge’s view, deserved each other, a view that appears to have been endorsed by the laughter in court that his remarks provoked.41 In these circumstances, the role of the bucket shop was to create a market for the less credible among new issues, or to breathe new life into stock in which the

36 H.E.M. Stutfield, ‘The company scandal: a City view’, National Review, December 1898, 580. 37 H. Warren, Dr Taylor o f London Wall: Prince o f Bucket Shop Swindlers (London, 1908), 19-22. See also Parkinson, The ABC, 46; Osborne, The Stock Exchange, 74-5. 38 For an example see J. Armstrong, ‘Hooley and the Bovril Company’, Business History, 28, 1, 1986, 18-34. 39 Ingall and Withers, The Stock Exchange, 101. 40 Financial Times, 25 April 1895. The ‘Tichbome claimant’ was Arthur Orton, a butcher’s son from Wapping, the plaintiff in a celebrated legal case of the 1870s, who claimed that he was the rightful heir to the Tichbome family’s considerable fortune. 41 As Kindleberger points out, ‘The position is occasionally expressed ... that sheep to be shorn abound, and need only the emergence of effective swindlers to offer themselves as sacrifices’. Kindleberger, Manias, Panics and Crashes, 81.

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Stock Exchange had lost interest, usually with good cause.42 To some extent this could be achieved simply by encouraging speculators to play the market. In Scotter’s novel, Leo’s customers - especially the ‘gold crowd’ - were happy to gamble in the shop, thus creating an illusion of genuine market activity. ‘ “Heads I win, tails you lose”, suggested itself to me as the guiding principle of these gentlemen’s transactions’, Leverson reflected. ‘They were open to make a few thousands, or lose them’. A broker’s circular detailing investment opportunities might also be used to drum up interest in a particular stock. As an additional incentive, the shares might be offered for sale direct to the customer with the bucketeer-vendor generously agreeing to forego the normal rate of commission that would be charged by a reputable broker. Here the bucket shop would rely on firms that supplied lists of shareholders in public companies, laboriously copied by lowpaid female clerks from the registers held at Somerset House. Experience suggested that someone who had been persuaded to speculate unwisely on a previous occasion might well be either desperate or foolish enough to do it again. In this way the price of shares that the intelligent investor would not have accepted even as a gift ‘were hoisted up with the rapidity of rockets’.43 Although speculators looking for a quick profit might take a calculated risk, investors looking for capital growth were advised ‘to avoid like the plague ... the outsider who offers to sell him rubbish shares charging no commission’.44 Therefore, it was sometimes necessary for the bucket shop to adopt more subtle strategies, such as ‘list splitting’. This involved acquiring a list of shareholders and then contacting half the names with an offer to sell and the other half with an offer to buy at a lower price. In this way, without necessarily purchasing a single share, the shop could create a market and generate a profit simply by transferring shares from sellers to buyers, making its ‘turn’ on the difference between the ‘bid’ and ‘offer’ prices. A further refinement of the bucketeer’s craft was to establish a postal stock exchange - again charging no commission - with the object of inducing customers to exchange any shares of real value for shares that the shop was seeking to unload. What this amounted to, as Warren suggested, was an invitation to ‘Sell your dividend-paying stocks and shares, and buy my rubbish’. When backed by a barrage of ‘advice’, delivered via unsolicited circulars and bogus financial newspapers, this approach often proved effective, especially among inexperienced investors ‘awed by the formalities connected with Stock Exchange business’.45

42 Thousands of joint-stock enterprises remained on the Stock Exchange register at any one time, even though they had ceased active trading. See G. Robb, White-Collar Crime in Modem England: Financial Fraud and Business Morality, 1845-1929 (Cambridge, 1992), 88 .

43 Scotter, Lost in a Bucket Shop, 63-75; Warren, The Modem Bucket Shop, 11-13. 44 Hirst, The Stock Exchange, 75. 45 Parkinson, The ABC, 46.

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Many shops targeted their campaigns carefully, asking firms making copies of company registers to supply them with contact details of widows and spinsters who, according to City mythology, were always the most easily deceived, and of shareholders with relatively modest stakes. They had learned that ‘the man or woman with a little capital [was] often either inexperienced or badly advised, and, consequently, easier to ensnare by silly promises of huge gain’.46

Bucket-shop journalism At the height of the boom in ‘Kaffirs’ (South African gold mining shares) in the mid 1890s readers of the Financial Times were warned to steer clear of The Tape, a fortnightly publication which claimed, like many papers published in the City at the time, to be ‘devoted solely to the interests of investors and speculators’. The Tape's readers, having been offered shares in a slate quarry, were exhorted to take its advice very seriously: ‘Before speculating consult the Editor; before investing consult the Editor; before risking your money in any new enterprise consult the Editor’. It was possible, observed the Financial Times, that the editor had been hiding his light under a bushel in modest premises at 70 Fore Street, but ‘when the Editor is acting as a broker, it would be desirable to consult someone else as to the value of his wares’.47 In short, The Tape seems to have been a fairly typical example of an outside broker’s journal of the period. The last quarter of the nineteenth century saw an expansion in the number of investors and a corresponding growth in the financial press.48 Before the 1880s, financial journals such as the Financier and the Bullionist, along with the ‘money article’ to be found in most London dailies, had targeted a specialist City readership, making few concessions to a wider public. The arrival of the ‘New Financial Journalism’ brought with it both a lighter touch and an ambition to connect with what Ellis Powell of the Financial News later identified as ‘the modem investing public, its personnel numbered by hundreds of thousands, and representing every class of society except the absolutely destitute’.49 Whether driven by West Australian gold, as in the late 1880s, South African gold in the mid 1890s, home industrials in the late 1890s, or rubber shares just before the First World War, each bullish surge of the stock market tended to raise the number of

46 Warren, The M odem Bucket Shop, 11-22. See also Robb, White-Collar Crime, 29­ 30. 47 Financial Times, 5 March 1895. 48 D. Porter, ‘Where there’s a tip there’s a tap: the popular press and the investing public, 1900-60’, in P. Catterall, C. Seymour-Ure and A. Smith, eds., Northcliffe’s Legacy: Aspects o f the British Popular Press, 1896-1996 (Basingstoke, 2000), 71—4. 49 E.T. Powell, The Evolution o f the Money Market 1385-1915 (London, 1916), 466.

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private investors. One estimate, just after the turn of the century, suggested that around 250,000 individuals were owners of marketable securities at that time.50 Revenue derived from company advertising, especially the prospectuses issued by companies that were coming onto the market, drove the New Financial Journalism forward. It was quickly apparent that one of its most important functions was to bring investment opportunities to the attention of readers, even if they had only modest amounts of money at their disposal. Ostensibly, the bucket-shop press performed a similar function, appropriating aspects of the New Financial Journalism in order to facilitate cover snatching and unloading. Like many of the bucket shops to which they were attached, bogus financial newspapers and journals were anxious to make a favourable impression. The tendency to name shops with a view to inspiring confidence - the General Stock Exchange Company and the Investors’ Protection and Information Agency are good examples - was reflected in the titles of their papers. In 1888, the Statist, set up a few years earlier as a rival to the august Economist, deplored the trend. ‘To give point and piquancy to this ghastly caricature of journalism’, it complained, ‘these costermonger rags all set up for financial oracles. Heaven save the mark! They are financial advisers, financial guides, financial standards, financial observers, and financial humbugs of every kind.’51 There was, naturally, some purpose to these titles. A weekly publication originating from an address in the City and calling itself The Tape or the Financial Whoys Who? was seeking to brand itself as an insider, a knowing participant in the affairs of the financial sector. Alternatively, titles such as the Financial Critic or the Stock Exchange Guardian were redolent of the independence and candour that a reader might reasonably hope to find in a paper advising on investment. Some bucket shop papers were published from the shop itself but many sought to conceal the connection by operating from a separate address, usually, according to Warren, ‘rooms at the top of some dismal building in the City’.52 Occasionally, more elaborate tactics were deemed necessary. Edward Beall, a notoriously corrupt company promoter known around the City as ‘the Black Prince’, used the first issue of his monthly, the Financial Critic, to publish an attack on himself, and the second to insert a letter threatening to sue the paper for libel.53 This somewhat eccentric ploy was designed to conceal his connection with the paper and to deceive the readers whom he intended in due course to part from their cash. Journalism in this debased form, circulated free and unsolicited, was highly indicative of the

50 ‘How the British public invests’, Financial Review o f Reviews, February 1906, 79. 51 Statist, 11 February 1888. 52 Warren, The M odem Bucket Shop, 144-6. 53 D. Porter, ‘City editors and the modem investing public: establishing the integrity of the New Financial Journalism in late nineteenth-century London’, Media History, 4, 1, 1998,51-2.

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‘speciousness’ and ‘effrontery’ that Osborne saw as characteristic of bucket shop proprietors in general.54 Bucket-shop papers, often compiled by impecunious journalists moonlighting from more respectable employment elsewhere, were a repository of all the techniques that had been developed by City editors of the new school to serve up financial news in a way that their readers would find palatable. This was hardly surprising, since much of the editorial content appearing in bucket-shop papers was simply lifted from other sources and reprinted. According to Warren’s estimate, about 90 per cent of the content was ‘stolen in this fashion by the office experts ... who are not above stealing from a man’s manuscript, and then returning it to him with thanks’. Interspersed with this material were features with titles such as ‘House Chat’ or ‘Stock Exchange Gossip’. These aimed to create the impression that the writer was a City insider whose judgement could be trusted. Copy of this kind was very often supplied by an ex-stockbroker who had suffered the indignity of being ‘hammered’ for failing to settle his accounts, ‘one of whom is to be found on the staff of almost every financial and bucket shop paper’.55 As a variation, a few bucket shops published substantial weeklies containing items of interest for the general reader alongside financial news and advice, presumably with a view to drawing new customers into the net. The Oracle, a 32-page weekly published by Barker & Co., bankers of Mark Lane, in the late 1880s and early 1890s, supplemented features on the Stock Exchange (‘Capel Court’) and the money markets (‘Lombard Street’) with ‘Art Gossip’, ‘Sport Gossip’ and, for the would-be sophisticate, ‘The Oracle in Evening Dress’. Its real purpose, however, was to encourage country readers to deposit their savings with Barkers Bank or to restructure their shares portfolio by making use of its ‘Free Sale and Exchange Department’, an artfully disguised bucket shop.56 Some operators, identified by Warren as ‘journalistic bucket shops’, seem to have conducted business almost exclusively through their papers, a tendency that was to become more pronounced in the inter-war period.57 For most bucketeers before 1914, however, the newspaper simply supplied a shop window for any shares that they were anxious to push. At the same time, it was a convenient way of making contact with an expanding body of small investors, many of whom were anxious to avoid the tiresome formalities of dealing with a member of the Stock Exchange. Unlike bank managers or bona fide stockbrokers, the bucketeer required no references as to a client’s character or financial good standing. This helped to create a situation in which a corrupted form of the New Financial Journalism, the

54 Osborne, The Stock Exchange, 77. 55 Warren, The Modem Bucket Shop, 150-61. 56 See, for example, The Oracle, 30 March 1889; also the same firm’s Trade, Finance and Recreation, 30 March 1892. 57 Warren, The Modern Bucket Shop, 167-83.

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main aim of which had been to protect investors from exploitation, became the principal route along which the bucketeer could lead ‘a flock of innocent people into his gambling hell’.58

Bucket shops and bucket-shop journalism in the inter-war period The onset of hostilities in August 1914 ushered in a four-year interlude when the bucketeer was forced to look for alternative employment. With war approaching rapidly, the Stock Exchange closed on 31 July. It re-opened on 4 January 1915 but for the next four years operated under severe constraints. For a while, marketable securities were subject to a minimum price threshold, a significant disincentive for the speculator, and the Treasury imposed strict limits on new issues, the stock-intrade of many bucket shops. At the end of the war, however, the prospect of a bonfire of controls revived market activity and there was a short-lived boom.59 This provided the kind of conditions in which parasitic financial activities flourished, and the money page of the Daily Mail issued the obligatory warning. Judging by numerous letters we receive, the fraternity that issues circulars inviting subscriptions for ‘operating trusts’ and other such blind pools and get-rich-quick schemes is pursuing its nefarious trade with renewed vigour. The character of these enterprises ought to be self-evident, but the gullibility of a large section of the public is so inexhaustible that they seem to flourish. The best course is to consign all such literature to the waste-paper basket or send it to the police.60

In this respect, the restoration of ‘business as usual’ was something of a mixed blessing. ‘Side by side with the brisk increase in Stock Exchange business concerned with investment’, it was reported, ‘there has arisen an equally large volume of the speculative order’. Having abated during the war, gambling on stocks and shares had now reappeared along with ‘share-pushers’, ‘share dealers’ and ‘touts’.61 Post-war conditions were generally conducive to a bucket-shop revival. The money page of the Sunday Express, with a sure instinct for the mood of its readers, explained that thousands of people who had responded in patriotic fashion to the appeal to buy War Loan stock, were now for the first time taking an interest in investment. ‘The attractive terms offered by the Government have whetted their appetite’, it continued, ‘with the result that they have become interested in general 58 Warren, Dr Taylor, 6. 59 D. Kynaston, The Financial Times: A Centenary History (London, 1988), 77-8; 82-3. 60 Daily Mail, 3 February 1919. 61 Economist, 17 May 1919.

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securities’.62 Having been held back during the war years, new issues drove the stock market to new peaks in 1920-1 and 1928-9. A short-lived mania for rubber shares in 1924-5 also helped to draw in new shareholders. ‘Romantic sounding names - Buckit-this and Bantam-that’, recalled Cobbett, ‘were bandied about to beguile the unwary with visions of tropical abundance. And, of course, seductively in a rising market, everyone began to fancy they had discovered Aladdin’s Cave in Throgmorton Street’.63 Many new issues of the 1920s, as Harold Wincott, editor of the Investors' Chronicle, later observed, were ‘shockingly bad’, the companies often having no real assets beyond an optimistic prospectus. Insiders came to refer to them as ‘dirt track’ flotations.64 Speculative enthusiasm was the order of the day. By the end of the decade, the Sunday Express money page, edited by Cranfield Hicks, had taken on some of the characteristics of a tip sheet: ‘Ship Canal Debentures, recommended for investment in the Sunday Express at 95 have jumped to 101’.65 ‘Now everybody is a potential investor or speculator’, proclaimed the Financial Times in January 1929, ‘with the balance in favour of a speculative tinge’.66 It is clear that bucketeers welcomed the prospect of new lambs to be fleeced. Even a cursory reading of the financial press in the inter-war period indicates that they were up to their old tricks. With investors keen to ‘buy for the rise’ in the 1920s, and anxious not to miss out as markets in the 1930s recovered from the effects of the Wall Street Crash, there were ample opportunities to operate the cover racket in one of its many variations. A ‘cautionary note’ in the Investors' Chronicle warned readers to steer clear of James Beard and Co., a firm of outside brokers. ‘With the usual anxiety to give money away to clients’, ran a critical note, ‘the firm strongly urged them to open up an operation in Mond Nickels on the basis of Is. [one shilling] per share margin, to be closed with 4s. per share profit. This Is. per share margin appears totally inadequate, and likely to disappear as soon as it was lodged with the brokers’.67 As in the period before 1914, the intention was to blind customers with the science of investment while persuading them, in effect, to bet on a rise in the price of the shares at odds that were always in the shop’s favour.

62 Sunday Express, 29 December 1918; Kynaston, The Financial Times, 83. 63 Cobbett, Tales o f the Old Stock Exchange, 15. 64 H. Wincott, The Stock Exchange (London, 1946), 127-8. It seems likely that the ‘dirt track’ appellation found favour after a spate of new issues in the late 1920s that sought to tap into the popular enthusiasm for greyhound racing and motor-cycle speedway. For the speculative aspect of speedway see J. Williams, ‘ “A wild orgy of speed”: responses to speedway in Britain before the Second World War’, The Sports Historian, 19, 1, 1999,4. 65 Sunday Express, 1 January 1928. 66 Financial Times, 2 January 1929, quoted in Newman, Financial Marketing, 59. See also Porter, ‘Where there’s a tip’, 79-82. 67 Investors’ Chronicle, 6 October 1928.

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Bucket-shop journalism also flourished. Cobbett recalled that there were ample opportunities in the 1930s for a stockbroker’s clerk with literary aspirations, many of them provided by ‘dubious types of the yellow-shoes variety’. Once, responding to an advertisement from a journal with an address reassuringly close to the Stock Exchange, he found himself being interviewed by ‘a Canadian-sounding gent behind nothing more reassuring than a bare trestle-table ... beneath a dangling, bare electric light-bulb, in a solitary dusty room’.68 Tried and tested titles were dusted off and given another run. Who could doubt the reliability or good intentions of the Financial Independent or the Financial Forum &. Investor’s Guidel Like their pre1914 counterparts these publications, which usually took the form of a weekly market review, proclaimed their independence at every opportunity, while seeking to foist securities that were anything but secure onto the public at large. Collin Brooks of the Financial News, in a guide for investors published in 1930, claimed these were typical ‘bucket-shop tactics’ of the period. He outlined the part that a paper called something like the Investor’s Monitor - ‘an imposing four-page sheet printed on good tinted paper’ - might play in unloading a line of worthless securities acquired from a company promoter: Three or four numbers of the paper in succession reach a few thousand citizens whose names happen to be on the registers of certain companies, or whose presence in the telephone directory suggests that they have some means ... There is not even a mention of any particular share which might cause the more astute recipient to suspect that the producers of the journal [‘Financial Purity Press’] had any friendly or unfriendly interest in any given enterprise or its securities. Not until the fifth or sixth number does [the editor] announce that he feels compelled to respond to the many requests he has had from innumerable subscribers to make his advice occasionally positive instead of negative. Accordingly, on page four of this issue his readers will find a recommendation.69

Newman has identified 43 spurious financial newspapers and reviews operating in this fashion between 1926 and 1937, but it seems likely that the total was far higher. They were simply the most visible part of the barrage of unsolicited communications - including telephone calls, telegrams, circulars, letters, postcards and door-to-door visits - to which bucket shops subjected potential customers between the wars.70 Although the Companies Act of 1929 sought to curb some of the most obvious abuses, especially the hawking of shares by door-to-door salesmen, a sharp fall in the level of stock market prices after the crash of October 1929 was probably a more significant, if temporary, constraint. ‘Share-pushing’ - the term was now 68 Cobbett, Tales o f the Old Stock Exchange, 99-100. 69 C. Brooks, How the Stock Market Really Works (London, 1930), 68-9. 70 Newman, Financial Marketing, 62-5.

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widely used to cover a multitude of sins - abated only to reappear with the stock market revival of the mid 1930s, shares in construction companies and car manufacturers becoming especially fashionable. When Lord Nuffield decided to sell a large block of his shares in Morris Motors in October 1936, the unseemly scramble on the Stock Exchange floor seemed to supply a graphic illustration of ‘casino capitalism’ - a phrase in vogue among socialist critics of free enterprise at its worst. It would be difficult, observed the Financial Times, ‘to convince the public that the Stock Exchange functions predominantly as an investment market proper when such an example of frenzied gambling as this is broadcast throughout the country’.71 Such concerns were enhanced by the realisation that the re­ emergence of bull market conditions had persuaded bucketeeers and share-pushers of all descriptions to renew their efforts to get rich at someone else’s expense. ‘Whether through human cupidity’, observed the Economist, or from a relaxation of ordinary standards of care, it seems inevitable that “share-pushers” should flourish like the rose when the security markets are active’. It was clear, moreover, that bucket shops had ‘recently been reaping a rich harvest’.72

Regulation and the emerging left-wing critique of the 1930s However, this was to be the bucketeer’s last hurrah. Bucket-shop scams and aggressive share-pushing were probably no more of a public nuisance in the 1930s than they had been in the 1890s, but the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the worldwide slump that followed had changed the political climate. With economic liberalism under pressure, especially from the political left, it was prudent for those who believed in capitalist free enterprise to put their houses in order. In the United States, this movement was epitomised by the advent of the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1933. The London Stock Exchange, though resistant to external controls of this kind, was clearly anxious about its reputation after the scandals of the late 1920s and was more vigilant thereafter in its efforts to discourage ‘dirt track’ shares, floated for the purpose of generating quick profits for company promoters at the expense of small investors. According to Harold Wincott, who was anxious to defend the Stock Exchange from its critics, there was ‘a vast improvement in the quality of the new issues made in the 1936/7 boom relative to those made in earlier booms’. He added for good measure that ‘the proportion of the 1936/7 flotations which went wrong and cost investors the money they put up was only a tiny fraction of the whole’.73 These initiatives were complemented by a

71 Financial Times, 16 October 1936, quoted in D. Kynaston, The City o f London, vol. 3, Illusions o f Gold 1914-1945 (London, 1999), 422-3. 72 Economist, 7 November 1936. 73 Wincott, The Stock Exchange, 128-9.

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more determined effort by the City of London Police to combat the abuses occurring outside the Stock Exchange. Twelve officers trained in Company Law were appointed to a special ‘bucket-shop squad’ in 1936 and 40 arrests were made in its first year of operation.74 When the stock market boomed in 1936-7, the demand for legislation to bring share-pushing under control became more insistent. The ease with which most financial miscreants continued to evade the law, despite the efforts of the City of London Police, was the subject of much comment. When under pressure from the authorities, they often simply disappeared, assumed a new identity and started up again from a new address. ‘In recent months’, observed the Economist in March 1937, ‘the whole matter of share-pushing has received the limelight of publicity in Parliament, in the Courts, and in all sections of the Press’.75 It was a wonder, therefore, that abuses persisted virtually unchecked and that the public seemed ‘little better educated than before’, allowing bucketeers and their associates to enjoy rich pickings. By the mid 1930s, however, the situation was different from that prevailing before 1914, in that demands for an end to bucketeering and sharepushing more generally were now being articulated in the context of an emerging left-wing critique of capitalist finance.76 Tom Johnston, a Labour MP who had developed a particular interest in savings and investment issues, was important here. In his book The Financiers and the Nation, published in 1934, he was especially concerned with the savings of working people (‘small accumulators’), and how they might best be protected. According to Johnston, the capitalist system under which they laboured, with its inevitable procession of booms and slumps, created conditions in which, from time to time, City slickers were given the opportunity to expropriate a proportion of the collective nest-egg that more honest citizens had put aside over the years. And so boom and slump, slump and boom has gone on, decade after decade, the severence of fools from their money. As every fresh crop of small accumulators saved sufficient to invest, and looked round hopefully for some ‘certain security’ with an adequate interest yield, lo! Always there opportunely appeared some plausible leader of finance with a get-rich-quick scheme, casting it before his victims 77 as an angler casts his flies for trout.

74 Newman, Financial Marketing, 63. 75 Economist, 27 March 1937. 76 For an account of the development of consumer politics in the 1930s, see M. Hilton, Consumerism in Twentieth-Century Britain: The Search fo r a Historical Movement (Cambridge, 2003), 108-36. 77 T. Johnston, The Financiers and the Nation (London, 1934), 36. Johnston’s determination to expose share-pushing rackets was ‘universally acknowledged’; Economisty 26 November 1938.

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For Johnston and others of his persuasion the obvious long-term solution to this problem was for the state to provide a safe place for the nation’s savings. These could then be invested in a way that would generate much-needed employment, rather than speculative activity on the stock market and elsewhere. In the short term, however, Johnston concentrated on exposing current abuses and calling for urgent action. Thus, in November 1936 he used a parliamentary question to draw the attention of the Board of Trade to canvassers hawking the shares of Building Construction Investment Ltd, and followed this up by asking if there were any plans ‘to curb the activities of fraudulent share-pushers’. The President of the Board having responded rather feebly, it was left to one of Johnston’s Labour colleagues, Tom Williams, to follow through: ‘In view of these well-recognised robberies that are taking place, will the right hon. Gentleman consider the advisability of establishing a National Investment Board to prevent them?’78 Such a prospect, however distant, was sufficient to persuade City opinion that it might now be politic to co-operate with the government and clean up the financial sector, if only to safeguard the sacred principle of Stock Exchange self-regulation. Caveat emptor (‘let the buyer beware’) might still suffice in the City itself, where insiders struck deals with other insiders. There was a growing recognition, however, that outsiders, especially small investors, were unprotected in their dealings with the ‘hangers-on ... many of whom, lacking any official connection with the Stock Exchange, [were] quite beyond its control’.79 In August 1936, urged on by a campaign in the press, with the Daily Mail, the Investors' Chronicle, the Financial News and the Financial Times leading the charge, the Board of Trade established a departmental committee under Sir Archibald Bodkin to examine the share-pushing problem. This, the Economist noted later, had signalled a determination ‘to stop the flow of money from the pockets of the gullible to those of the glib’. A further indication of the urgency with which the Board now viewed the situation was its decision in April 1937 to distribute leaflets via savings banks, alerting potential victims to their likely fate should they stray into the clutches of a bucketeer or allow themselves to be seduced by a share-pusher.80 The Bodkin Report, eventually published in August 1937, made a number of recommendations that later formed the basis of the Prevention of Fraud (Investments) Act of 1939. The most important of these was that outside stockbrokers - now to be known as ‘dealers’ - should be licensed by the Board of Trade and required to conduct business in accordance with a set of rules designed to eliminate the abuses for which bucket shops had become notorious. No business, for example, was to be transacted as a result of unsolicited calls. Brokers who were already members of a ‘recognised’ stock exchange would not require a license, nor

78 House o f Commons Debates, 5th series, vol. 317, cols 672-4, 10 November 1936. 79 Kynaston, The City, vol. 3, 423-4; Wincott, The Stock Exchange, 125-7. 80 Economist, 24 April 1937.

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would outside brokers who belonged to the Association of Stock and Share Dealers, ‘recognised’ by the Board of Trade in August 1939. Thus an important element of self-regulation was preserved. Though some details attracted adverse comment as the bill made its way through parliament, the licensing provisions were widely supported. ‘Prohibitions and exemptions by order’, the Economist predicted, ‘will provide the essential flexibility of attack which has hitherto been lacking’.81 Any dealer inviting a customer to do business on the basis of a false, misleading or intentionally deceptive statement risked a prison sentence of up to seven years. Though the onset on war meant that the Act was not fully implemented until 1944, it appeared to have an almost immediate deterrent effect.82

Some conclusions Stripped to its essentials, the bucket shop was a highly specialised retail outlet offering a variety of financial products and services to the public. Supply-side conditions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were generally favourable, as the number of joint-stock companies issuing shares grew more or less steadily throughout the period. These shares constituted, in effect, the bucketeer’s stock-in-trade, which was then marketed in a number of ways, sometimes by offering the customer an opportunity to invest or to speculate, sometimes by offering the chance to gamble on rising prices. Problems arose when customers discovered that the financial product that they had bought was of little or no value, the awful truth dawning as the market price of the share suddenly collapsed. In this situation, much would depend on whether the customer had conducted business with the bucket shop as a foolish investor or as a speculator with some appreciation of the high level of risk involved. Similarly, there were difficulties when customers discovered that the services provided by the bucket shop were illusory, the dreaded moment often arriving when they learned that the cover deposited to cover the purchase of shares had ‘run o ff. Again, the attitude of the customer would be important here. If they had believed when depositing their cover that they were making some kind of investment and that the shop would actually buy shares on their behalf, then they would have every reason to feel cheated. However, if they had been ‘buying for the rise’ and had grasped the risky nature of the transaction, akin to gambling, into which they had entered, then they could have few complaints. When Leverson, in Scotter’s novel, realises that he has lost heavily and begins to curse the proprietor, the outside broker’s clerk takes him aside: ‘Come now, Mr Leverson, be reasonable. You exercised your own

81 Ibid., 30 July 1938. 82 Newman, Financial Marketing, 64. See also L.H. Leigh, The Control o f Commercial Fraud (London, 1982), 44-5.

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judgement in the matter, and it would be unfair to saddle Mr Leo with the responsibility of your unfortunate position. I think too highly of you to believe that you are in earnest’.83 Bucket-shop customers, it should be recognised, were exercising a free choice. Savings banks and reliable brokers were available. Nobody forced them to invest in speculative securities or to put their cover at risk via a bet at undisclosed odds. Supply-side conditions favoured the bucket shop in another important respect. Though it gradually became tighter over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the regulatory environment relating to the financial sector was so loose that even the most obvious, yellow-shoed trickster might defraud the public and hope to get away with it. The Stock Exchange, despite the recommendation of the Royal Commission that investigated its affairs in 1878, resisted the idea that it should be regulated by means of a Royal Charter, and in many respects considered itself above the law, actively discouraging members from settling disputes with each other in the courts. Its rules and the manner in which they were applied were thus largely left to its General Purposes Committee, much criticised by Ingall and Withers at the turn of the century for failing to punish insiders who colluded with outsiders ‘in various acts of market-rigging and other flagrant crimes’. Even when stock frauds were tried in the courts, company promoters and their allies in the bucket shops often emerged unscathed on account of ‘the hopeless and not unnatural floundering of His Majesty’s Judges amid the mazes of Stock Exchange detail’.84 Until the 1930s, as Robb has argued, a laissezfaire mentality prevailed in the financial sector, along with ‘an emphasis on individual responsibility [that] discouraged state intervention to protect shareholders’.85 This left an effectively unregulated space in which the bucketeer could operate with relative impunity until the Act of 1939 came into force. A recent obituary of Meyer Blinder, head of Blinder Robinson (‘Blind ‘em and Rob ‘em’) and America’s self-styled ‘King of the Penny Stocks’, is instructive here. It reminds us that it is possible, even in a highly regulated market environment, to make a fortune by selling artfully disguised ‘piss-holes in the snow’ to customers who think they are acquiring a rather more substantial asset.86 Having considered the supply-side factors that underpinned the bucket-shop phenomenon, it is also important to consider demand as embodied in the thousands of customers who were prepared to do business with the fraternity described by one City insider as ‘the bold, bad bucketeers’.87 In Kindleberger’s view, financial swindles of all kinds are essentially ‘demand-determined’, being closely related to

83 Scotter, Lost in a Bucket Shop, 150. 84 Ingall and Withers, The Stock Exchange, 1-2, 21-2. 85 Robb, White-Collar Crime, 181. 86 Daily Telegraph, 13 March 2004.1 am grateful to Gerry Douds for this reference. 87 Cobbett, Tales o f the Old Stock Exchange, 98.

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the irrational behaviour of investors in boom conditions, when ‘fortunes are made, individuals wax greedy, and swindlers come forward to exploit that greed’.88 As Searle has indicated in the context of the mid-Victorian era, ‘it was impossible to view all investors who had been dishonestly deprived of their capital at a time of speculative excitement merely as passive victims'. It was not uncommon to suggest that defrauded investors were complicit in their own ruin, thus conveniently deflecting the argument that state intervention to regulate the market was necessary. The emphasis on individualism, as Robb has observed, meant that the problem of white-collar crime tended to be viewed ‘in personal rather than structural terms’, an attitude that persisted well into the twentieth century.89 According to Hargreaves Parkinson, in 1925 bucket shops existed because ‘in a community of some 47 million people not all are wise, prudent and unselfish’. Some were foolish enough to believe that they could make a fortune ‘by the investment of their resources in dubious antipodean gold mines’. Others were ‘sufficiently credulous to believe that entire strangers will put themselves to considerable trouble and expense in order to provide them with the opportunity ... of acquiring shares “guaranteed” to show enormous capital appreciation and to pay fabulously high dividends at the same time’.90 If some people insisted on ignoring the advice appearing almost daily in the press, and continued to hand money to bucket-shop keepers and share-pushers of all descriptions, there was, it seemed, little that could be done to protect them from the consequences of their own folly. This view underpinned attitudes to investor protection until the 1930s, when there emerged a more coherent critique of the stock market, linking the incidence of fraud to the kind of speculative booms that often occurred when money was cheap. Bucket-shop abuses, preying on the gullibility of investors seeking the illusory pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, or on the ever-readiness of punters to make a bet, could now be regarded, to use Sidney Webb’s phrase, as ‘inseparable accidents’ of the capitalist system.91 With that system being subjected to increasing critical scrutiny, active intervention designed to curb the activities of the City’s criminal and quasi-criminal fringe operators, could now be justified.

88 Kindleberger, Manias, Panics and Crashes, 81-2. 89 Searle, Morality and the Market, 80-1; Robb, White-Collar Crime, 189-90. 90 Parkinson, The ABC, 44. 91 See Webb’s introduction in Johnston, Financiers and the Nation, v-viii.

Chapter 5

Buy Now - Pay Later. Credit: The Mainstay of the Retail Furniture Business? Clive Edwards

Introduction This chapter focuses on the role of credit in relation both to the furniture retailer and the consumer, with particular emphasis on the period 1850-1980. It was during this time that the retail furniture business expanded to meet the growing demands and purchasing power of the British population. The majority of the study relates to domestic furniture, but in many cases, the commentary considers attitudes applicable also to other durable commodities. One of the intentions of this chapter is to explore the important role played by credit (and in particular instalment credit) in the changes that have occurred in the culture and practice of retailing and consumption. Savitt for example points to the need for historians to map changes in distribution systems, as not only the chronicling of famous names or locations, but also as a series of interactions between social, economic, and geographic factors.1 This work is an attempt to examine one aspect of these interactions, namely credit. The importance of its role for consumers has been emphasised by Finn, who forcefully claims that ‘the expansion of consumption in modem England was powered in significant part by personal credit relations.’2 This chapter will also consider the nature of credit in relation to consumer needs and demands. A truly consumerist society ‘involves large numbers of people staking a real portion of their personal identities and their quest for meaning - even

1 R. Savitt, ‘Looking back to see ahead: writing the history of American retailing’, Journal o f Retailing, 65, 3, 1989, 326-55. 2 M. Finn, The Character o f Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740-1914 (Cambridge, 2003), 17.

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their emotional satisfaction - on the search for and acquisition of goods’.3 The availability of credit was one tool in creating this sort of society. Indeed, ‘modern’ consumer societies have been defined as societies ‘in which choice and credit are readily available, in which social value is defined in terms of purchasing power and material possessions, and in which there is a desire, above all, for that which is new, modem, exciting and fashionable’.4 This connection between the business and the culture of consumption is important in understanding the key role of credit in the consumption of home furnishings. Credit has been a tool of business for many centuries in a wide range of trades, and has had a variety of roles to play. In some cases, it has been associated with a high-class trade, where accounts were made up after the often bespoke goods had been supplied. In other cases, credit has been stigmatised, and denigrated in favour of saving-up and making cash purchases.5 As Lancaster suggests, the ‘tension between hedonism and self-restraint is usually expressed in condemnatory remarks by elite observers on the consuming patterns of lower or newer social groups’.6 It is essential to recognise that credit was, in the main, beneficial to both retailers and consumers, and that both had a rationale for using it. However, retailers who offer credit terms have often been accused of selling credit - with less emphasis on the goods - and have been represented as ‘sharks’ and money-lenders, operating dubious trading practices.7 Although financial malpractice clearly affected many consumers, the use of credit facilities became normal business practice in the early modem period, and by the middle of the nineteenth century the spread of credit gradually enabled a growing proportion of consumers to begin to purchase durable goods out of income, and thus join the ‘consumer society’.8 Against this backdrop, the relationship between credit facilities and consumption practices, and their impact on customers and retailers will be examined. The picture revealed is much more complex than it may at first appear. From book debts to weekly collections at the door, from credit sales and hire-

3 P.N. Steams, ‘Stages of consumerism: recent work on the issues of periodization’, Journal o f M odem History, 69, 1997, 105. 4 J. Benson, The Rise o f Consumer Society in Britain 1880-1980 (London, 1994), 4. 5 See R. Gelpi and F. Julien-Labruyere, The History o f Consumer Credit, Doctrines and Practice (London, 2000); L. Calder, Financing the American Dream: A History o f Consumer Credit (Princeton, 1999); N.C. Cox, The Complete Tradesman: A Study o f Retailing, 1550-1820 (Aldershot, 2000), especially chapter 5. See also the Co-operative movement’s attitude, discussed below. 6 B. Lancaster, The Department Store: A Social History (Leicester, 1995), 162. 7 See, for example, the cases quoted in P. Scott, ‘The twilight world of interwar British hire purchase’, Past & Present, 177, 2002, 196-225. 8 For more on the central role of consumer credit in the period 1740-1914, see Finn, The Character o f Credit.

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purchase to post-dated cheques and credit cards, the chapter will explore the range of credit made available to customers. It will also consider the extent to which credit was one of the key factors for a successful retail furniture business. Indeed, in the case of furniture, like other expensive items such as sewing machines, pianos, and more recently, motorcars, credit has often been the only way that retailers could sell their stocks and many consumers (not just the working class) could furnish and equip their homes. Retailers were likely to expand their business if they offered credit, in many cases mining a seam of customers who would not have purchased in any other way. The problem was, and still is, that credit, like all aspects of retailing, raises differing issues for the two parties involved. From a retailer’s point of view, there were policy matters of funding the purchase of stocks before full payment had been made, the expenses involved in offering and controlling credit systems, concern for the image of the store, and the probability of bad debts. From the consumer’s point of view, credit purchase was also a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the opportunity of ‘buying now and paying later’, which gave the ability to acquire high-price goods by way of staggered payments, was often the only way many consumers could enter the market for new goods. On the other hand, excessive interest rates, the potential in some cases for the ‘snatch back’ of the goods, and the wider morality issue of ‘going into debt’, were restraining factors. Indeed, although social reformers had been raising these issues for many years prior to the major legislation relating to hire-purchase in 1938, consumer protection from the excesses of some retailers was slow in coming. However, by the mid-twentieth century the British government had not only legislated against many of the abuses of hire-purchase, but had also begun to use controls on credit as an economic tool. Despite continued reservations, for example about the level of personal indebtedness, it is nevertheless clear that the ubiquity of credit in the later twentieth century and twenty-first century demonstrates its ultimately widespread acceptance.

Precursors of the mainstream Although credit had been part of the retail infrastructure since at least the sixteenth century,9 in terms of furniture selling it was generally limited to high-class businesses and the sale of bespoke work, which had become firmly established by the eighteenth century. The furnishing trades of the eighteenth century were sophisticated in their business dealings, despite (or perhaps because of) supplying a

9 Cox, The Complete Tradesman, 146.

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relatively small market.10 There were at least two forms of credit available.11 For the richer customers it was common for invoices to be submitted for major commissions on completion of the work. These invoices might take months or years to be paid, and it was not unusual for furnishers to be forced to vigorously chase their clients for payment of the debt, by extensive correspondence and sometimes litigation. Secondly, an early form of instalment credit was available. For example, in 1707 Christopher Thornton of Southwark noted that ‘you may also be furnished with chests of drawers, or looking glasses at any price, paying for them weekly as we shall agree’.12 In either case, one of the recurrent features of credit trading was the need to strike a balance between good and bad debts. In 1726, Daniel Defoe warned in his Complete English Tradesman that ‘He that takes credit may give credit, but he must be exceedingly watchful, for it is the most dangerous state of life that a man can live in’.13 This matter is clearly exemplified by the case of a London upholsterer, a Mr Devenish, who had debts outstanding for over ten years, perhaps demonstrating a rather reckless attitude to the granting of credit. His executors recorded his list of debtors in 1802, and noted them as either (a) good, easy to collect, (b) repayable by instalments, (c) bad or irretrievable, or (d) they exceeded the Statute of Limitations.14 This range of debtors, from good to bad, or worse, represented the common gamut of credit risk for many businesses, large and small, which trod the thin line between meeting customers’ demands, yet also remaining solvent and making a profit (or not in some cases).

The expansion of retailing and credit The case of Mr Devenish showed that doing business with a small number of highly influential and exclusive customers who only settled their accounts annually (or

10 For a brief introduction to furniture retailing in this period see D. Alexander, Retailing in England During the Industrial Revolution (London, 1970), 154-8. For a more detailed discussion on the retailing and consumption of eighteenth-century furniture and furnishings, see C. Edwards, Turning Houses into Homes: A History o f the Retailing and Consumption o f Domestic Furnishings (Aldershot, 2004). 11 Among smaller dealers, goods could also be exchanged to settle debts, payments could be made on account, and discounts could be granted for prompter payment. See Finn, The Character o f Credit, especially 94-6. 12 C. Thornton's Handbill, quoted in A. Heal, The London Dictionary o f Furniture Makers (London, 1953), 116. 13 D. Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, quoted in Cox, The Complete Tradesman, 146. 14 City of Westminster Archives, Letter Book of Thomas Devenish, 33 Villiers Street, London, March 1796-June 1804, 36/36, letter, March 1802.

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even less frequently), as well as extending short-term credit to a wide range of customers, could have the effect of putting traders in a vulnerable position. Although the granting of credit was essential to acquiring the most prestigious commissions, some shopkeepers used the issue of the hidden costs of credit as a selling point for promoting cash sales. One example of a furniture retailer who faced this challenge directly was George Oakley of 8, Old Bond Street, London. His trade card (c. 1809-14) stated that ‘The number of artists and mechanics as well as the large capital necessarily employed in this concern, together with the extensive stock kept for ye accommodation of the public are obvious reasons which render it impossible to conduct it by giving credit. The lowest price is therefore annex’d to every article for ready money or good bills’.15 Thus, one of the major distinctions that appeared to develop in the nineteenth century was between those outlets providing credit and those - apparently - trading for cash only. Although an exclusive and elite business continued to exist, a growing middle-class market was being exhorted to look upon careful money management as a necessary skill; buying for cash and not becoming indebted was one aspect of this. Nevertheless, as Finn has pointed out, cash and credit ‘featured not as polar opposites ... but rather as unstable positions on the kaleidoscope spectrum of exchange mechanisms available to the modem English consumer’.16 Therefore, although it would have been easier to operate exclusively either a cash or a credit business, in reality many retailers offered both systems. For retailers supplying privileged customers, the problems of debt collection that had plagued eighteenth-century furniture dealers were still evident in the nineteenth. For example, the letter books of the London furnishers Miles and Edwards (c. late 1830s) demonstrate some of the pitfalls arising from abuses of goodwill. One example showed that the Duke of Sussex, who owed £1200, was only prepared to pay in instalments, whilst the Duke of Newcastle, who had a three year old debt of £59 16s 4d, only paid up when the partners began to charge interest. In another case the partners settled for a payment of 2s 6d in the pound.17 Benson and Shaw have noted the changing attitude to credit, especially in the drapery business, which were cited in evidence to a Government committee in 1833: ‘the limitation of credit given by the retail trade [was] one part of the improved system of business’.18 More in general, many retailers emphasised that this limitation of credit was a means of keeping prices lower. In October 1831, for

15 British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings, Banks Collection of Trade Cards, D.E. 627, trade card, n.d. 16 Finn, The Character o f Credit, 284. 17 F. Mallett, ‘Miles and Edwards of London’, Furniture History, 6, 1970, 75. 18 British Parliamentary Papers, 1833, Q. 1389, quoted in J. Benson and G. Shaw, The Evolution o f Retail Systems 1800-1914 (Leicester, 1992), 32.

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example, the drapers Jolly and Sons of Bath advertised their new shop in the Bath Chronicle, and emphasised that: [Economy] can only be obtained by an exclusive Ready Money System, no article being delivered unless upon prompt payment. The advantages of this system are great. By it the tradesman is enabled to purchase on the very best terms and from the quickness of his return, and his not incurring any risk of loss from bad debts a very small profit will remunerate him: the benefit thus arising to the consumer can only be judged by comparison.19

Fifty years later, the London furnishing firm of Oetzmann and Co. considered, like Jolly and Sons, that cash payment before or on delivery was the most favourable system for the customer. This, they suggested, was cheaper because ‘any other method of payment, however short may be the credit given, entails an expensive system of book-keeping, a staff of clerks, collectors, inquiry agents and unfortunately too often the expense of solicitors and a loss by bad debts’. The cash system avoided these costs.20 Department stores, in particular, offered lower prices for cash payment ‘to extricate themselves from older trading practices that essentially protected wealthy shoppers at the storekeepers’ expense’.21 Department store customers were perceived to be people who ‘pay as they go’.22 From the mid-nineteenth century, the increasing population, the growth in the number of households, and the growing desire for emulating the comforts of the ‘middle-class’ home, put mounting pressure on the systems of manufacturing, and, in turn, on the retailing of furniture. The change to regular wages that were paid weekly or fortnightly meant that many sections of the working classes were able to budget their finances and often for the first time, to buy durable goods for the home. As the supply side infrastructure changed to meet these new demands, credit became both a popular and a necessary part of many retailers’ business strategy in an expanding market.23

19 Quoted in M. Moss and A. Turton, A Legend in Retailing: House o f Fraser (London, 1989), 19. 20 J. Oetzmann, Hints on House Furnishing and Decoration (London, n.d., c.1880), 294. 21 E. Rapport, Shopping fo r Pleasure: Women and the Making o f London’s West End (Princeton, 2000), 50. 22 However, the practice was often different, as department stores soon introduced their own monthly accounts. The role of the department store in shaping consumer culture is discussed for example in R. Laermans, ‘Learning to consume: early department stores and the shaping of modem consumer culture (1860-1914)’, Theory Culture & Society, 10, 1993, 79-102. 23 For the developments in the production and supply of furniture, see C. Edwards, Victorian Furniture (Manchester, 1993).

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Apart from ‘simple’ credit, whereby payment was delayed until the submission of an account, or until a certain quarter day, by the mid-nineteenth century there was a move towards new contractual systems, including hire-purchase instalment plans.24 Although credit accounts remained part of the infrastructure of higher-class retailing, it seems that it was the middle class that initially took advantage of instalment systems. For example, piano purchase on the ‘three year system’ was widespread by the 1860s, and ownership was an undoubted symbol of respectability. Scott suggests that hire-purchase was ‘originally confined to the more affluent sections of society, [but] it began to filter down to the working classes from the 1860s, when Singer used the system to market its sewing machines’.25 The distinction between consumers who were granted credit on the basis of delayed payment of the full amount and those who were to pay small sums weekly seems to have been as much social as it was economic. The ability of the working class to engage with the acquisitive economy was aided by itinerant credit drapers. These travelling suppliers allowed working-class purchasers to buy textiles and furnishings for the home, in addition to clothing, on credit.26 For the rural working class, the use of scotch drapers and itinerant traders, most of whom accepted payment in weekly instalments, remained particularly important. The well-known writer Flora Thompson in Lark Rise to Candleford, recalled: A man who kept a small furniture shop came round selling his wares on the instalment plan. On his first v is it... he got no order at all; but on his second, one of the women, more daring than the rest, ordered a small wooden washstand and a zinc bath for washing day. Immediately washstands and zinc baths became the rage. None of the women could think how they had managed to exist without a washstand in their bedroom.27

Shops introduced versions of the weekly system as well. One of a series of newspaper reports published in 1849, entitled Labour and the Poor in England and Wales, mentioned that ‘When a young couple get married, they generally go to a 24 This change from ‘status based’ to ‘contractually based’ credit is discussed in Finn, The Character o f Credit. 25 Scott, ‘The twilight world of interwar British hire purchase’, 196. It should be bome in mind that in the second half of the nineteenth century many working-class families furnished their homes from brokers and dealers in second-hand furniture. 26 See M. Finn, ‘Scotch Drapers and the politics of modernity: gender, class and national identity in the Victorian tally trade’, in M. Daunton and M. Hilton, eds., The Politics o f Consumption: Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America (Oxford, 2001), 89-108. 27 F. Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford (Harmondsworth, 1967, first published 1939), 125.

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furniture broker in Newcastle or Sunderland with perhaps £10 of ready money, obtaining a considerable part of their “plenishing” upon credit, and paying for it by instalments.’28 For this class of trade, it was not long before the credit terms seemed to become more important in the advertising matter than the goods themselves. In 1892, for example, the Crown Furnishing Company of Holloway, London, published a flyer emphasising its deposit and weekly terms. They advertised that they could furnish one room for £5.00 by payment of a 10 shillings deposit and 2 shillings a week thereafter.29 Other companies featured services that included free delivery, free life insurance and credit granted with no security required. There were two other developments, club and check trading, that offered credit to late nineteenth-century consumers. The two were quite different. The clubs were for saving towards a purchase, often at a specific store, whereas check trading was a true credit system. Both stores and independent financial institutions ran these check trading facilities. The Provident Clothing and Supply Company, for instance, was established in 1881, and soon developed links with furniture retailers as well as other types of suppliers. The customer used ‘checks’ supplied by the company to pay the retailer the normal price of the goods, and then paid back weekly amounts, including interest, to the check company. This arrangement was to the retailer’s advantage, as the responsibility for the debt was removed and he / she obtained nearly full price for the goods (the check company taking a commission) without any involvement in the cost of granting credit or collecting payments. The middle class could also take advantage of ‘club’ benefits. Indeed, one of the first specialist finance houses to fund credit sales was the Civil Service Mutual Furnishings Association, established in 1877.30 In 1890 John Robinson and James Syme set up the ‘Robinson-Syme Ballot and Sale Furnishing Society’, a credit supply operation. This club system of credit was described as follows: ‘[The] society has been formed to provide members of building societies and others, with the ordinary requisites for furnishing houses or apartments, and on such easy terms as cannot fail to make this undertaking ... a great success.’31 Using manufacturers, wholesalers, or other firms on a published trading list, the customer could order goods and the supplier would be paid by the society, the member then paying back a fixed amount as agreed. As these ‘club’ schemes were limited in their membership, they indicate that credit for the middle classes, like mortgages, could be made acceptable if presented appropriately.

28 J. Ginswick, ed., Labour and the Poor in England and Wales 1849-5l y vol. ii (London, 1983), 40. 29 University of Oxford, Bodleian Library, John Johnson Collection, Trade Catalogue Collection, Crown Furnishing Company estimate, 1892. 30 Benson and Shaw, The Evolution o f Retail Systems, 32. 31 Robinson-Syme Furnishing Company, Rules o f the* first* Robinson-Syme Ballot and Sale Furnishing Society Limited, (London, 1890), single sheet.

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However, the credit system that proved most popular in the late nineteenth century was based on retailers who operated their own ‘in-house’ instalment payment systems, especially hire-purchase. Hire-purchase was apparently first promoted by the Countess of Blessington. In 1830 she had apparently been impressed by the Parisian furniture sellers’ practice of hiring furniture by the quarter, half or whole year. The arrangement was that if after that period the furniture was purchased, the original sum agreed for the year’s hire was to be allowed towards the purchase money.32 Apocryphal or not, the idea certainly took root as a tool for selling furniture and other high-priced items from the third quarter of the nineteenth century. A later example of the application of this form of credit to the retail furniture trade was the ‘improved system of credit’ adopted by the Surrey furniture merchant John Rawlings. In 1899 he explained that he offered a rental arrangement that could be converted to a later purchase, with an allowance for any rent paid.33 He commented that this ‘hire-system’ had first operated in the pianoforte trade and the benefits had been enormous, as ‘there is scarcely a home [today] without its piano’.34 Rawlings explained why customers would benefit from his scheme: ‘This system of credit renders the furniture on approval during the hiring and is the best guarantee that can be offered for soundness and efficiency of goods.’35 Although credit systems had potential pitfalls for both parties, hire-purchase transactions were particularly risky for customers who defaulted. In 1889, the bald dictionary definition of instalment sales or hire-purchase already hinted at some of the issues that reformers would soon be taking the trade to task for: ‘A system adopted by some traders in substantial articles, such as furnitures, sewing machines, pianos etc., by which the seller retains the right of ownership until payment, and stipulates for the right to retake the article, without return of some or any part of what has already been paid, if the buyer makes default in any instalment.’36 As the provision of credit for furniture purchases grew, there were to be many stories of unscrupulous dealers who benefited from the lack of legal protection for their customers. The law completely ignored the principle of equity between the parties in hire-purchase contracts. Instead, it was judged that as time was the essence of the contract, any default in payment was a fundamental breach of the contract: this stipulated that payment had to be made at the prescribed time, or the owner of the goods could claim them back with little redress for the purchaser. Although the law offered some protection to those suffering under the burden of

32 R. Harris and A. Sheldon, Hire-Purchase in a Free Society (London, 1961), 20-1. 33 J. Rawlings, Improved System o f Credit (London, 1899). 34 Ibid., 14. 35 Ibid., 6. 36 Century Dictionary, 1889, quoted in Calder, Financing the American Dream, 89.

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‘normal’ credit agreements made with oppressive creditors, it was to be some time before the anomalies with regard to hire-purchase were corrected.37

The expansion of credit It was not long before some credit and hire-purchase systems acquired the bad name that they subsequently retained for much of the twentieth century. In particular, social and artistic reformers despised the commercial furnishers who apparently sold credit rather than style and design. In her 1897 book The Art o f the House, for example, Rosamund Marriott Watson wrote that ‘Some of the most illustrious writers of today inhabit homes and houses that, decoratively speaking are a slur upon civilisation.’ The reason for this was to be found ‘in the hire-purchase system and in Tottenham Court Road’.38 The apparent connection between bad design, credit, and that particular London thoroughfare would not have been lost on her middle-class readers, since the area was a well-known ‘furniture’ centre. The provision of unconstrained credit was also criticised by social reformers, although this was as much a veiled critique of working-class consumption practices as it was of the financial system. As noted above, these criticisms often came from ‘elite observers’ who commented ‘on the consuming patterns of lower or newer social groups’.39 Shaw Sparrow, for example, considered in his 1909 publication, Hints on House Furnishing, that ‘thrift was looked upon as a foe to business: and we are now beginning to see that an over-stimulated demand in trade weakens the national character and begets an unrest of mind without will-power’.40 He devoted a whole chapter to the ‘Systems or Methods of Furnishing’. His review began with a denunciation of the hire-purchase system. Readers were urged to buy only what

37 There were some examples of hire-purchase companies being involved in civil actions at this time. See the cases of Hire Purchase Furnishing Company v. Richens, 20 December 1887; French v. Tower Furnishing and Finance Company, 1 November 1888; Tower Furnishing and Finance Company v. Brown, 6 December 1889. The Times, 20 December 1887; 1 November 1888; 6 December 1889. 38 Quoted in A. Adburgham, ‘Give the customers what they want’, Architectural Review, May 1977, 295. 39 Lancaster, The Department Store, 162. 40 H. Shaw Sparrow, Hints on House Furnishing (London, 1909), 30. The American observer, Louise Boland More wrote in a similar vein in her book Wage Earners' Budgets of 1907, noting that the ‘instalment system’ was ‘almost universal among the [American] working class for the purchase of pianos, sewing machines and parlour furniture, which is far out of keeping with the family income’. Quoted in C. Grier, Culture and Comfort (New York, 1988), 206.

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they could afford outright, as well as to furnish according to their needs, not their wants. For Shaw Sparrow, the reasons were as much ethical as commercial: not only was it foolish to pay extra for the privilege of spreading payments, but he also suggested that ‘purchase without payment dulls self-respect’.41 Shaw Sparrow was clearly writing for a middle-class audience that was probably more likely to be worried about the potential narrowing of class distinctions that easily-available credit offered, than they were about the ethics of credit. As goods were in part indicators of social standing and markers of distinction, it is not surprising that the potential growth in working-class consumption should raise some fears in middleclass groups. Despite these critical voices, demand for furniture grew rapidly as credit became socially useful, if not socially acceptable. J.B. Jefferys made the point explicitly: ‘the spread of the hire-purchase method of trading helped to make the potential demand effective’.42 This is a crucial point, as it recognises that credit acts as an enabling connector between supply and demand. Consumers themselves acknowledged the benefits of credit. B.L. Coombes, for example, noted how credit not only helped furnish workers’ homes, but also helped to give a sense of pride to the new owners. When he and his wife moved into two rented rooms in a South Wales mining village during World War One, he recalled: ‘how proud I felt when I saw them furnished for the first time, and realised that all that shining new furniture was ours - even if most of it still had to be paid for’.43 Retailers were aware that they could meet a wide range of demand by using credit as a sales tool. The Hackney Furnishing Company for example promoted its Equitable System of House Furnishing in a booklet that said: ‘if you are a poor man with only a few rooms you may have as much real comfort in your home ... as the nobleman in his ancestral halls’. They published a testimonial from one ‘satisfied customer’: ‘I could easily pay you cash for this order, but what’s the use? You give me no advantage if I pay cash, and why should I disturb my investments when your system enables me to pay out of income. If I could get lower price elsewhere by paying cash I would go elsewhere, but your prices are bottom.’44 Debates over the provision of credit reflected contemporary changes in the market place. The technological developments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were such that new furniture was now affordable, albeit often on

41 Shaw Sparrow, Hints on House Furnishing, 30. 42 J.B. Jefferys, Retail Trading in Britain, 1850-1950 (Cambridge, 1954), 421. 43 B.L. Coombs, These Poor Hands: Autobiography o f a Miner (London, 1939), quoted in Benson, The Rise o f Consumer Society, 77. 44 Hackney Furnishing Company, British Homes: Their Making and Furnishing (1911), quoted in P. Kirkham, R. Mace and J. Porter, Furnishing the World (London, 1987), 58.

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credit terms, to an increasing percentage of the population.45 In addition, there was a growing market for the renewal of furnishings in line with both changes in fashion and the effects of wear and tear. Stone and Rowe have shown that consumer expenditure on durable household goods (at constant 1938 prices) more than doubled between 1910-14 and 1935-8.46 In 1924, the Furnishing Trades Organiser reported that T h e amazing capital computed to be directly employed in [furniture] hire-purchase, amounting to not less than £4 million, upwards of two million hire-purchase agreements being signed annually.’47 In 1921, it was estimated that there were 16 million agreements for all consumer durables, with 4 million new ones contracted each year. By 1935, this figure had risen to 24 million, with 7 million new agreements being signed annually. It was also estimated that at that time about 80 per cent of cars, 90 per cent of sewing machines, 75 per cent of furniture and 95 per cent of pianos, wireless sets and gramophones were bought on hire-purchase terms.48 Despite its popularity, there were still voices raised against too much easy credit, and against hire-purchase contracts in particular.

Supporters and critics of the credit system Critical attitudes to retail credit were often based more on the prejudices of the observer than on the facts of the system. Johnson points out that: Criticisms should have been not of the credit system itself, for this made expenditure on and consumption of services provided by a durable good more nearly synchronous than with cash payment, but against high rates of interest charged, lack of information for customers on the terms of credit, and the provision of shoddy 49 goods which became totally worn out before instalment payments had finished.

In fact, there were a number of supporters of the credit system. One economist, writing in 1927, considered that in the case of the purchase of durable goods, such as furniture, the total expenditure on the goods clearly preceded total consumption (i.e. until they fell apart), and the extended payment time was therefore completely

45 For changes in technology, see C. Edwards, Twentieth Century Furniture Materials, Manufactures, Markets (Manchester, 1994), especially chapters 3 and 4. 46 R. Stone and D.A. Rowe, The Measurement o f Consumer Expenditure and Behaviour in the United Kingdom, 1920-1938, vol. ii (Cambridge, 1966), Table 56, 35. 47 Furniture Trades Organiser, December 1924, n.p. 48 P. Johnson, Saving and Spending: The Working-class Economy in Britain 1870-1939 (Oxford, 1985), 157. 49 Ibid., 159.

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justified.50 Some even went as far as to suggest that credit improved the moral fibre of the citizens of the country, in complete contrast to earlier critics who suggested that an ‘over-stimulated demand in trade weakens the national character’.51 For example, the banker, J. Gibson Jarvie, speaking at a conference of the Economic League in 1928, considered that hire-purchase had a moderating influence on labour: ‘psychologically, instalment selling has a value, for there is no gainsaying the fact that the moment a man has a stake in the country he becomes a better citizen’.52 However, certain dubious practices on the part of sections of the trade led to charges of poor-quality goods, money-lending and even usury, rather than careful attention to the home-making needs of the nation. In 1919, Sir Leo ChiozzaMoney, a left-wing economist, considered that ‘the average furniture shop in poor districts is full of stuff only fit for a bonfire, and it is palmed off on the hirepurchase system at extravagant prices to poor people who have no chance of getting anything better.’53 Issues around interest rates also caused much concern. In the wake of World War One, various cases were brought before local profiteering committees,54 where debates frequently hinged on the difference between cash prices, often with mark­ ups of around 50 per cent, compared to hire-purchase sales that had a mark-up of 100 per cent. Retailers often successfully contended that these mark-ups were common throughout the trade, and had operated prior to the war.55 Other dubious practices also provoked outcries. A court report from 1928, for example, recorded how: A working class woman bought £62 15s worth of furniture from a Tottenham firm on hire-purchase terms. Through illness, she got into arrears after £53 2s had been paid ... In her absence the hire-purchase firm (Messrs Webb’s of High Road Tottenham) caused her house to be stripped - save for an overlay and two pillows and sought to recover removal charges of £1 11s and offered their client an option to

50 Ibid., 158. 51 Shaw Sparrow, Hints on House Furnishing, 30. 52 Quoted in M. Tebbutt, Making Ends Meet: Pawnbroking and Working-class Credit (Leicester, 1983), 170. Jarvie worked for United Dominions Trust and later campaigned vigorously against the 1938 legislation on hire-purchase trading. 53 Cabinet Maker, 25 January 1919. 54 Profiteering Committees were established under the Profiteering Act, 1919 and were organised under the aegis of local government councils. There were also committees set up for particular trades and suppliers. Cmd. 983 (1920). 55 See examples of Jay’s Furnishing Stores and the West Central Furnishing Company quoted in Scott, ‘The twilight world of interwar British hire-purchase’, 198.

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pay £3 11s to collect the repossessed goods at her own expense and to pay 15s a week until the debt was discharged, as a condition of re-letting them.56

Criticism also came from within the trade. In 1928, for instance, the chairman of the London retailer Shoolbred noted in the forward to Horace Vachell’s book The Homely Art, that this publication (which condemned irresponsible credit) was ‘an effort to combat the increasing temptations to buy fine phrases and free gifts instead of good furniture’. He further noted that ‘every responsible furniture merchant will be grateful to Mr. Vachell for vigorously condemning the tendency to exploit furniture and the love of home, for money-lending purposes.’57 The furniture manufacturer Edward Pinto also commented on the usurious practices of many credit traders who ‘did not work on a fair margin and then add something for hire-purchase; they worked on an exorbitant margin and then faked a very slightly lower cash retail price, to mislead the public into thinking how little they were paying for credit’.58 These practices were highlighted in a debate broadcast by BBC Radio in 1937, focusing on the merits and demerits of hirepurchase. The manager of a cash-based department store quoted examples of mark­ ups in the furniture trade. He instanced the case of a bedstead whose cost ex-factory was 21s, and was priced in a cash department store as 29s 6d, and in a hirepurchase shop at 41s 6d, while the corresponding figures for a cane tub chair were (factory cost) 4s, (department store) 5s 9d, and (hire-purchase store) 13s 6d. But the ‘cream’ he said ‘is a bedroom suite, cost ex-factory 18 guineas, cash trade £29 Is, hire-purchase trade £45 19s’.59 Retailers themselves were aware of the problems that might be caused by the indiscriminate granting of credit under difficult trading conditions. In 1933, the Cabinet Maker commented that ‘owing to the increasing competition, the “spreadover” period has been extended in many cases to four years, initial deposits have been reduced and goods unsuitable for long term credit have been included’.60

Retail practices Despite these problems, it seems clear that the provision of instalment credit had the effect of stimulating trade, enabling many households to furnish their homes and in many cases to purchase better-quality furniture than could have been afforded otherwise. Notwithstanding the obvious benefits to customers, retailers

56 Quoted in A. Vallance, Hire Purchase (London, 1939), 62. 57 H. Vachell, The Homely Art (London, 1928), Foreword. 58 E. Pinto, The Craftsman in Wood (London, 1962), 134. 59 Quoted in Vallance, Hire Purchase, 50. 60 Cabinet Maker, 11 March 1933.

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had to overcome the stigma of credit purchase, and went to some lengths to legitimise the process. For example, the London furnishing company, Drages Ltd, used a testimonial from the Countess of Oxford to praise the use of hire-purchase. She was apparently ‘amazed to think that a man of moderate means can furnish for £100.00 on a payment of only £2.00’.61 The euphemisms ‘furnishing out of income’ or ‘use as you buy’ were no doubt intended to appeal to the sensibilities of middle-class consumers, but inevitably perhaps, much of the credit business was conducted with the working class. Indeed, Board of Trade estimates suggested that by the late 1930s, hire-purchase accounted for more than 70 per cent of sales of furniture to the working classes.62 However, there was still some moral opprobrium attached to instalment credit in the 1930s. A textbook on managing a hire-purchase business, published in 1930, stated that ‘when a person furnished his house on credit he did so at the risk of endangering his social situation, and consequently had to proceed under the cloak of secrecy’.63 The desire for secrecy was exploited by some retailers, either as a positive marketing tool, by ‘delivering in plain vans’ to avoid connections with credit sellers, or negatively by threatening to publicise the names of payment defaulters. The music-hall song below indicates a popular take on some of the themes associated with the provision of credit. The ridiculing observations on the lack of references, the incentives offered, and the ‘delivery in a plain van’ all reflected contemporary practices that encouraged business, but maintained secrecy. ‘I’ve only just got married and I’m on the rocks and broke’, He said ‘don’t let that worry you, why, money is a joke! Why, we only run our business to oblige you sort of folk, And we always lay your lino on the floor!’ ‘But Mr. Drage’ my Missus said ‘our neighbours know we’re new, And when they see your van, they’re bound to say a thing or two.’ He said ‘they won’t: we send it round in vans as plain as you. And we always lay your lino on the floor!’ So five hundred pounds in furniture, she spent did my Old Dutch; ‘What deposit Mr Drage’ said I ‘would you require for such?’ He simply smiled and said ‘would two and sixpence be too much? And we always lay your lino on the floor!’

61 Good Housekeeping, 1932, quoted in B. Braithwaite, N. Walsh and G. Davies, Ragtime to Wartime (London, 1986), 136. 62 Scott, ‘The twilight world of interwar British hire-purchase’, 198. 63 C.W. Aston, Hire-purchase Accounts and Finance (London, 1930), 3, quoted in Scott, ‘The twilight world of interwar British hire-purchase’, 198.

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I said ‘That’s very generous, but no reference I’ve got’ He said ‘we do not want them; they’re a lot of Tommy-rot. Why you needn’t even give your name, if you would rather not And we always lay your lino on the floor!’ ‘Well thank you Mr Drage’ I said ‘you’ve really been most kind, But what about the payments?’ He said ‘that as you’re inclined Pay half a crown a week, and if you can’t well never mind For we always lay your lino on the floor!’64

The lyrics also referred to the fact that it was the woman who selected the goods, but the credit agreement was in the husband’s name. Although women were often seen as responsible for the home’s decoration and functions, retailers were frequently reluctant to grant them credit, as the responsibility for married women’s debts was unclear in law, and remained so until 1935.65 The intense competition between retailers in this sector, and the way some businesses sought trade ‘by advertising that they do not seek references, [or] that no deposit is required, and even that no payment need be made until thirty days have elapsed’,66 caused consternation among critics and social reformers alike. The fear was expressed that ‘it may lead to furnishing by improvident people, [thus] increase the bad debts on the part of the firms concerned, and consequent prejudice to the genuine buyer of furniture’.67 The biggest growth in furniture credit selling and particularly in hire-purchase was through the developing chains of multiple stores. Much of the success of the twentieth-century house furnishing multiples was based on their promotion and use of credit selling, which they used to expand their business. J.B. Jefferys made the point that: ‘As the method of trading developed, the financial strength and financial ingenuity of the retailing firms became a more important factor in their success, than the quality of the goods sold or the particular techniques of buying and selling

64 N. Long, Drage’s Way (c.1930), quoted in Lancaster, The Department Store, 100. 65 The case of Jolly v. Rees (1864) had decided that husbands were not liable for their wives’ debts if the goods purchased were not ‘necessary’ and the wife had been forbidden to pledge her husband’s credit. The Married Women’s Property Act of 1882 did little to improve the situation, and it was not until the Law Reform (Married Women and Tortfeasers Act) of 1935 that married women obtained full contractual rights and liabilities. See also Finn, The Character o f Credit, especially 264-72; E. Rappaport, ‘ “A Husband and his wife’s dresses”: consumer credit and the debtor family in England 1864-1910’, in V. De Grazia with E. Furlough, eds., The Sex o f Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (Berkeley and London, 1996), 163-87. 66 Long, D rage’s Way. 67 H.L. Smith, The New Survey o f London Life and Labour (London, 1931), 216.

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[they] employed.’68 This financial strength enabled them to fund their own credit finance and make substantial profits not only on the merchandise, but also on the interest charged. The financial power of some firms also resulted in take-overs and amalgamations and the domination of the hire-purchase aspect of the multiple furniture trade by the Great Universal Stores group, which by the 1950s controlled hundreds of shops.69 Some firms did seem to become more interested in money lending than in selling furniture. The deposit and the weekly payment seemed to be more important than the goods.70 For example, in the 1930s the multiple branch business, Times Furnishing, had a slogan: ‘£1 a month buys £40 worth of furniture’, with no mention of deposit, interest rates or total payments.71 Furthermore, several dubious practices associated with credit selling increased people’s low opinion of parts of the trade. Indeed, at various times during the century, legislation was introduced to curb practices such as the ‘snatch back’ of goods if payments were not kept up. However, legislation did not cover such activities as the substitution of goods seen by the customer in the showroom for inferior ones from stock, and did not regulate interest rates.72 The financial problems faced by consumers who took on hire-purchase commitments to acquire furniture were often evident. These were the result of the mismatch between the demand for furnishings, especially in a new home, and the reality of finding the weekly payments, particularly in times of unstable employment. One example was cited by a social worker in 1936, after seeing that a furniture salesman on an unidentified ‘large housing estate’, had sold a customer ‘a rexine three-piece suite, a Jacobean sideboard and a gate-legged table’. The consequences of the transaction soon became apparent when financial problems occurred. The social worker commented that: [The customer soon] found they had surrounded themselves with debt, and first one thing and then another had to go. They found the attractive advertisements were just a myth, and instead of the shop-walker who showed them around and said ‘won’t

68 Jeffreys, Retail Trading in Britain 1850-1950, 427. 69 In 1950, the Great Universal Stores group controlled over half the total number of multiple furniture stores, including Jays and Campbell’s, British and Colonial Furniture Co., Jackson’s and Smart Bros. Ibid., 425. 70 See the practices of the Crown Furnishing Company. University of Oxford, Bodleian Library, John Johnson Collection, Trade Catalogue Collection, Crown Furnishing Company estimate, 1892. 71 C. Veasey, Good Furnishing (London, c. 1935), n.p.; University of Oxford, Bodleian Library, John Johnson Collection, Trade Catalogue Collection, TLC. 1.554, Times Furnishing Co. 72 For the 1938 Hire-Purchase Act, see Vallance, Hire-Purchase.

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you stay for lunch and let us send you home in a car?’ they found on their doorstep one morning a very different type of man, and when he went their furniture went with him.73

There were some attempts to offer alternatives to these common commercial practices. The Co-operative societies initially had taken a moral position in regard to credit provision. Rule 21 of the original Rochdale Pioneers charter stated that all goods bought and sold by the society should be paid for in cash.74 However, by 1911, 79 per cent of societies were giving credit of some sort to their members.75 In 1923, the attitude of the Co-operative movement was still that ‘to trade with the tally man is the essence of improvidence, and the sooner the workers realize this the better it will be for them and the country at large’.76 A training manual for furnishing staff noted that ‘we know some societies that refuse to adopt the system (hire-purchase) owing to the disinclination of the committee or members to admit legalised credit’.77 Instead, they offered a club system that members paid into and then drew on when sufficient funds became available. By the end of 1929 outstanding consumer debts in Co-operative credit trading totalled over five million pounds, either in club trading or in hire-purchase. This was in part a response to the competition of multiple retailers,78 and in part a response to the economic realities of selling furniture. Another alternative to commercial hire-purchase was a provision in the 1936 Housing Act, which authorised local authorities to supply new furniture to tenants on hire-purchase terms. This arrangement probably helped some buyers to avoid the more serious pitfalls of credit buying. For example, St. Helens allowed up to £11.00, Chesterfield £12.00 and Blackburn up to £18.00, although in this latter case the furniture remained the property of the Council.79 Prior to the Second World War, about 10 per cent of Scottish local authorities provided a quantity of moveable furniture, mostly under hire-purchase arrangements, although some supplied it free of charge ‘chiefly in cases where the tenant’s own furniture or bedding had to be destroyed because it was verminous’.80

73 B.E. Astbury, ‘The hire-purchase system: a social worker’s views’, Hire Traders’ Record, April 1936, quoted in Scott, ‘The twilight world of interwar British hire-purchase’, 198. 74 Johnson, Saving and Spending, 131. 75 Ibid., 136. 76 Co-operative News, 3 March 1923, quoted in Tebbutt, Making Ends Meet, 169. 77 A. Haigh, Furnishing and Hardware (Manchester, 1925), 189. 78 Johnson, Saving and Spending, 137. 79 D. Jeremiah, Architecture and Design fo r the Family (Manchester, 2000), 120. 80 M.J. Elson, Housing and the Family (London, 1947), 105.

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Thus, the first thirty years of the twentieth century saw great changes in the provision of credit and the subsequent expansion of consumption. However, injustices continued. As only the law of contract and common law were applied to hire-purchase agreements, the scope for redress through the courts was limited, and judgements were often harsh. In 1938, whilst hearing a hire-purchase case, Lord Justice McKinnon commented upon the nature of an unfair contract: ‘If anyone is so foolish as to enter into such an agreement as this I do not know [that] his case can be considered harsh.’81 Despite such remarks, changes in the law were made in the same year. The 1938 Hire-Purchase Act changed the nature of the law to specifically address issues and iniquities related to this system of credit selling. Notwithstanding the criticisms, some of which were undoubtedly well-founded, the development and rapid expansion of credit facilities in the period 1870-1940 was an essential component in the growth of the market for home furnishings. The ‘never-never’ had come of age.

Post-war developments In 1948 Hermann Levy pointed out that ‘instalment selling has become respectable’.82 This may have been true in some quarters, particularly as the legislation of 1938 began to be implemented, but the evils of the trade were difficult to disperse, in the minds of critics at least. In 1946 the Board of Trade established working parties for a number of industries to report on post-war needs. The Report on Furniture adopted an ambivalent attitude towards hire-purchase, reaffirming that although abuses clearly existed, attitudes to credit were often based on prejudice of one sort or another. As regards hire-purchase, we have been impressed by the unanimity with which manufacturers [my italics] have attributed to this section of the retail trade the main responsibility for many of the evils, which prevailed before the war. In particular, we have been told that it was the price pressure on manufacturers practised by some hire-purchase specialists which led to the competitive depreciation of quality.83

The Working Party Report also highlighted the less attractive aspects of credit retailing:

81 South Bedfordshire Electrical Finance Ltd. v. Bryant (1938). All England Law Reports, 3, 1938, 580-4. 82 H. Levy, Shops o f Britain: A Study o f Retail Distribution (London, 1949), 149. 83 Board of Trade, Working Party Report on the Furniture Trade (London, 1946), 145.

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The cost of hire-purchase facilities bears little relation to the value of the article: in fact it is probably true to say that the cheaper the goods, the heavier is the expense involved in the service because of the more frequent collection of the payments and the longer term of credit given in the case of people with small incomes. Although this aspect of the matter has sometimes led to unjustified complaints about the charges made by the hire-purchase firms, it has been an evil of the hire-purchase trade that some firms have tended to use the sale of furniture as a means of conducting a money-lending business and have been more interested in selling terms than furniture. There was also a good deal of public complaint before the war about the bullying methods adopted by some firms and the operation of the ‘snatch back’ (i.e. the recovery of furniture in cases where the consumer had difficulty in completing the payments).84

Complaints that hire-purchase retailers had unduly influenced the design of furniture were also aired in the trade’s own press. In 1953, for example, the Furnishers’ Encyclopaedia criticised ‘hire-purchase interests, which had relentlessly forced down manufacturers’ prices, [and then] advertised with sordid pomposity that the homes of the people were a true measure of national greatness’.85 However, the author conceded that hire-purchase had been a useful tool generally to help people on small incomes to reach a higher standard of living. The success of credit facilities varied within the furniture trade. Many multiple businesses were running credit schemes that were highly profitable whilst also meeting market demand. They numbered their accounts in thousands, and often operated their own separate finance companies. However, for the smaller-scale retailer ‘the offer of hire-purchase terms presupposes that he will carry the finance himself - a procedure which may embarrass him unless his capital is considerable or he can get the finance arranged through a specialist finance house’.86 Whatever the internal arrangements for credit were, it is clear that they were very significant in the sale of durable goods. The Census of Distribution of 1950 showed that expressed as a percentage of all sales, 38 per cent of women’s and men’s wear; 80 per cent of radio and electrical goods, 80 per cent of furniture, and 100 per cent of sales in gas and electricity showrooms were on instalment terms.87 The Financial Times recognised this fact when in 1954 it suggested that ‘It can now almost be said that in furniture retailing a good hire-purchase organization is as, or more important than, a wide range of designs.’88 84 Ibid. 85 M. Sheridan, Furnishers' Encyclopaedia (London, 1953), 212. 86 Manchester Guardian Commercial, 1 July 1938, quoted in Levy, Shops o f Britain, 149. 87 J.D. Hughes and S. Pollard, ‘Gross margins in retail distribution’, Oxford Economic Papers, 9, 1957, 77. 88 Financial Times, 31 December 1954.

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Nevertheless, the effects of hire-purchase were still of concern to critics on social, aesthetic and economic grounds. In 1957, for example, the National Council for Social Service reported on the inability of households to balance budgets and the iniquities of high-pressure salesmanship, which continued to cause distress.89 In the same year, a commentator in Design magazine discussed the apparently iniquitous effects of hire-purchase, citing the example of a customer being sold a cocktail cabinet with an automatic light (although the house had no electricity), in which the customer then proceeded to keep bread. The writer thought this demonstrated just how far this method of selling could lead people astray. Finally, she said, ‘the less informed, less intelligent section of the public turns to the shops which sell their wares the loudest and appear to offer the biggest bargains’.90 The Design article continued with another reproach to the retailer, that of being a purveyor of bad design: ‘For so long as most hire-purchase customers are docile enough to be misled whenever they enter a retail store, the general standard of furnishing is likely to suffer through the acceptance of poor and unsuitable designs.’91 In the same year, the Christian Economic and Social Research Foundation suggested that the government provide credit facilities through Post Offices for young couples setting up home ‘instead of occasioning those who supply the service to charge more for it’.92 Not all commentators saw hire-purchase as an evil. In a report published in 1957, the Church of Scotland’s Committee on Church and Nation for instance noted that ‘Hire-purchase is often condemned as veiled money-lending, but it should be recognized that in many cases it is generally beneficial to society. Homes, holidays, motorcars and washing machines and [furniture] have been brought within the reach of almost all’.93 All these comments say as much about attitudes towards the working class and their consumption patterns as they do about credit issues, and in many cases, the retailer was portrayed as the villain of the piece, encouraging overspending or supplying inappropriate goods. The reality of retail practice was somewhat different. In 1956, J. G. Morrell wrote about his own experiences as a shopkeeper (with two shops) selling furniture to both middle and working-class customers. He discussed the fact that ‘the bulk of [his] London business was with working-class customers and approximately 90 per cent of this was on credit terms. At his other shop, in a University town, the pattern of trade was more balanced, and only 50 per cent of the trade was on credit. He went on to say with regard to the London branch, that ‘in common with most firms of this class of business, a hire-purchase charge was made of 20 per cent for 2 years’ credit’.

89 Kirkham, Mace and Porter, Furnishing the World, 58. 90 D. Meade, ‘Furnishing by hire-purchase’, Design, 104, 1957, 41. 91 Ibid. 92 Kirkham, Mace and Porter, Furnishing the World, 58-60. 93 Harris and Sheldon, Hire-purchase in a Free Society, 28.

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Interestingly, he questioned why consumers seemed to stand for this. The reasons were not hard to find. ‘I soon discovered that many working-class customers would not risk the possible embarrassment of making an appearance in the salubrious surroundings of a West End or middle-class store. This being so, they had to take their chance in their own kind of shops.’ This was the case even though prices were apparently lower in the West End of London. ‘I discovered that in the West End of London it was possible to buy comparable furniture on hirepurchase at a total cost slightly below the cash price charged by the [working-class] store to its customers.’94 This retailer considered that working-class customers’ anxiety was also tinted with apathy: It is the deposit to be paid which becomes all-important and the knowledge that ‘At such and such a shop I can have what I want on credit’. The existing hire-purchase customer is particularly prone to this influence. Opening the initial hire-purchase account is generally an irritating sort of procedure. To continue at the same shop involves no further effort.95

There was some truth in this, as customers tended to remain loyal to a particular shop or even salesperson.96 A revealing survey of furnishing problems on new housing estates in Manchester, undertaken in 1960, attempted to examine the effects of hire-purchase on family life. One respondent had a ‘sparsely furnished home with nothing in the living room except two armchairs’ but they said they would not take on hirepurchase because they were afraid of getting into debt. Conversely, another ‘family admitted they had “to go into a lot of debt” over furniture and a neighbour said that their home was “like a palace” although she often “comes begging for a cup of tea”.’97 In other situations, the benefits of hire-purchase were sometimes checked by circumstances beyond the influence of the trade or of its critics. In the 1950s and 1960s the government’s use of credit controls as a crude lever for the management of consumer spending particularly affected furniture purchases (Table 5.1). In 1964, an Economist report considered that consumer spending on furniture was prompted (or hindered) by the credit arrangements available:

94 J.G. Morrell, ‘Furniture for the masses’, Journal o f Industrial Economics, 1956, 27. My thanks to Judith Attfield for this reference. 95 Ibid. 96 The author’s own experience in the trade. 97 Manchester and Salford Council of Social Service, Setting up House (Manchester, 1960), 16.

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The importance of credit trading, together with the fact that furniture purchases tend to be of a capital nature, have made this a trade vulnerable to government credit policy and to the general economic outlook. Perhaps the most important factor that triggers off the consumer purchasing decision is the amount of cash deposit, and the monthly repayments required on furniture.98

Table 5.1 1968"

Effect of economic measures on demand for furniture 1958­

September 1958 Hire-purchase restrictions on furniture entirely removed. April 1960

Hire-purchase restrictions re-imposed. Furniture 10 per cent deposit, 2 years to pay. Cars and domestic appliances 20 per cent, 2 years.

January 1961

Hire-purchase restrictions eased. 3 years to pay on all these products.

March 1963

Add-to facility on hire-purchase restored for furniture.

February 1966

Hire-purchase restrictions tightened again - furniture up to 15 per cent deposit, 30 months repayments, as well as domestic appliances and cars.

July 1966

Freeze and squeeze budget including further tightening of hire-purchase restrictions on all products. Furniture up to 20 per cent, with 24 months repayments. Purchase tax regulator increases furniture purchase tax to 11 per cent. Cars and domestic appliances from 25 per cent to 27.5 per cent.

November 1968 Autumn budget to stem resurgent consumer spending. Hire-purchase restrictions tighten on all products on furniture 20 per cent deposit, 24 months to pay.

Table 5.2 partly reveals the impact of these government regulations on credit. The introduction of particular controls or their relaxation had a direct correlation with the trade of retail furnishers. The 1963 figure reflected the restoration of the ‘add­ on’ facility, which allowed customers to add new purchases to an existing agreement, with usually only a small increase in weekly payments. In 1966 the double impact of two rises in the deposit requirements, as well as a rise in purchase-tax rates, resulted in a decline in the year’s sales.

98 Economist Intelligence Unit, Retail Business, 81, November 1964, 18. 99 M.R.V. Goodman, Review o f the Domestic Furniture Industry (Stevenage, 1969).

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Table 5.2 Hire-purchase and other instalment credit sales by furniture shops (£ million)100

1962 1963 1964 1965 1966

Independents HP Total sales £ million 64 315 63 315 340 65 70 358 60 356

% of sales 20.3 20.0 19.1 19.5 16.8

M ultiples Total sales £ million 90 96 104 111 105

HP

% of sales

65 67 72 68 58

72.3 69.8 69.2 61.3 55.2

All furniture shoips Total HP % of sales £ sales million 407 129 31.7 411 131 31.9 443 137 30.9 467 140 29.92 463 119 25.7

Table 5.2 shows that even during a time of major government interference through credit controls, overall retail sales increased, although not surprisingly, hirepurchase business decreased as a percentage of the total. This is especially noticeable in the multiple sector, where hire-purchase was initially a significant part of their overall trade but fell from 72.3 per cent to 55.2 per cent of total sales over a four-year period. Since the 1970s, the proportion of hire-purchase trade financed by stores has declined. The growing cost of financing the hire-purchase trade in-house has led many retailers to contract out their credit business. Other sources of finance have also increasingly become available to consumers, often in the form of a personal loan or credit card via a finance house.101 This factor often meant that consumers could become ‘cash customers’ in the shop and ask for and obtain discounts.102 In 1971 the Crowther Report on Consumer Credit was published. Many of its recommendations on changes to consumer credit law were later enshrined in the Consumer Credit Act of 1974. This afforded protection to people who entered into credit agreements in the following ways. Provided that the credit did not exceed £25,000, a customer could cancel a credit agreement within a certain period of time, as long as purchase was not made over the telephone, and they did not sign the agreement at the seller’s shop or place of business. Secondly, creditors could not demand early payment, try to snatch the goods back, or end the agreement without having served a written notice to the customer, giving seven days’ notice of their intention to take such action. Thirdly, if the customer had paid at least a third of the total price of the goods under a hire-purchase agreement, the creditor could

100 Economist Intelligence Unit, Retail Business, 110, April 1967, 6. 101 In a hire-purchase transaction, the title to the goods remains the property of the seller until they are paid for. In a credit sale, the ownership passes immediately to the buyer. 102 See Which? Magazine, October 1974, 307, for a report on furniture shops, where they recommended strategies for getting discounts.

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not take the goods back without first obtaining a county court order. Fourthly, if the customer considered a credit agreement to be unfair, he / she could apply to the court and ask it to consider the agreement, amend it, or put in place a new one, if it was proven to be excessive. However, the court would only do this if it could be shown that the agreement was ‘extortionate’. Fifthly, as the creditor could either be the retailer or a third party source of finance, consumers could choose whom to sue if necessary. Finally, the Office of Fair Trading was required to licence any firm that undertook the business of credit supply.103 These changes made it more difficult for the retailer to enforce agreements, so it was often the case that retailers resorted to offering a wider range of credit facilities, which in many cases were supplied by third parties. By the 1980s, financial market de-regulation, inflation and increasing prosperity amongst much of the population contributed to a heavier promotion of consumption and credit. One example from a specialist multiple furniture retailer in the 1980s illustrates the choice available. In addition to cash or credit card payments, there was (a) a system of accepting three-monthly post dated cheques; (b) an ‘Instant credit’ agreement if a customer had a credit card available; (c) a standard hire-purchase or credit sale agreement; (d) a personal loan (via an outside provider); or (e) an arrangement with a lender such as the Provident, for a loan to be paid back weekly. It was also possible to pay into a lay-off account or savings account (with no interest paid) to accumulate a fund before spending it in-store. The choice of credit would ultimately be based on the rating of the customer.104 Other suppliers of furniture such as department stores offered rotating credit agreements, while mail order or club purchases were paid for by weekly payments through an agent.105 As recently as 1983, a Design Council report found that many people were still troubled by the morality of using credit to buy furniture: Most people nurture some conception of the ideal home interior, but are prepared to let furniture give way to more immediate needs such as white goods or highperformance products like hi-fi or motor cars, and make do with what furniture they already have. For many households, paying for furniture can be difficult, as borrowing money for durables other than furniture is seen to be less selfindulgent.106

103 Consumer Credit Act (London, 1974). 104 Author’s private information. 105 R. Coopey and D. Porter, ‘Agency mail order in Britain 1900-2000: spare time agents and their customers’, in J. Benson and L. Ugolini, eds., A Nation o f Shopkeepers (London, 2003), 226-48. 106 Design Council, Report to the Council on the Design o f British Goods (London, 1983), 31.

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For three centuries and more, furniture retailers have sold their goods in ways appropriate to their markets. Even though there is an ever-growing interest in our homes and their furnishings, it is still often the case that many consumers and retailers seem to think that credit and the terms on which it is offered are the best way to buy and sell furniture.107

107 At the time of writing (2004), many furniture retailers have been heavily promoting terms such as ‘no deposit’ and ‘free’ credit over three or four years.

Chapter 6

‘Funny Money’, Hidden Charges and Repossession: Working-class Experiences of Consumption and Credit in the Inter-war Years Avram Taylor

Introduction Working-class experiences of consumption varied considerably during the inter­ war period. The range of choices open to individual consumers, then as now, was governed by their occupation, status, regularity of employment and, above all, their income. Although both men and women were subject to many of the same pressures, working-class experiences of consumption and credit were also gendered. While this was a period during which consumer goods became more widely available, it was also a time of extreme poverty and hardship within many working-class communities. This is the paradox at the heart of the debate about the condition of Britain in the inter-war years, and especially the 1930s. As Stevenson and Cook put it, ‘new levels of prosperity contrasted with the intractable levels of mass unemployment and the depressed areas’.1 The existence of both high unemployment and industrial growth at the same time, which gave rise to considerable regional variation in economic performance, has produced much debate about standards of living during this period. Although it is apparent that the variation in living conditions can largely be explained by the decline of the old industries and the rise of the ‘new’ in different parts of the country, a consideration of the impact of the available forms of credit on living standards is an aspect of social history that is often overlooked in such discussions. This chapter deals with 1 J. Stevenson and C. Cook, Britain in the Depression: Society and Politics, 1929-1939 (Harlow, 1994), 12. Stevenson and Cook offer an ‘optimistic’ perspective on this question. For a more ‘pessimistic’ account of this debate see K. Layboum, Britain on the Breadline: A Social and Political History o f Britain Between the Wars (Gloucester, 1990), 41-68, chapter 2.

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working-class consumers’ experience of consumption and credit during the inter­ war period, with particular reference to Tyneside and the Durham coalfield. It employs both written and oral sources, drawing on working-class autobiographies and on interviews with residents of Tyneside and Durham conducted by the author. The conurbation of Tyneside was at the centre of the nineteenth-century industrial revolution, and the economic development of the region was shaped by its position on both a coalfield and a tidal river. In his 1928 survey of Tyneside, Mess offered a comprehensive description of the industries on which the local economy was based. Although he listed a variety of economic activities, it can be clearly seen that the area was based on coalmining, shipbuilding and heavy engineering, with shipbuilding being the most significant.2 Mess also noted that ‘There is not a great deal of women’s work on Tyneside: women are just over twenty per cent of all occupied persons, as against just under thirty per cent in England and Wales.’3 Of those women who were in paid employment, the majority were in domestic service, but there were also significant numbers of women employed as barmaids, laundrywomen, clerks, typists, or in the retailing sector.4 Knox has pointed to the ‘invisibility’ of women’s work on Tyneside, as the region has always been perceived in terms of masculine labour. However, there were several industries that employed women and, particularly after the opening of the Team Valley Industrial Estate in 1937, employment opportunities for women expanded in the inter-war years.5 Developments on Tyneside in the inter-war period need to be seen in the context of wider trends in the British economy. During the 1920s, the old export ‘staples’ of the British economy, coal, iron, steel, textiles and shipbuilding collapsed. The decline in these key industries resulted in an increase in the number of unemployed in those areas that were dependent upon them and, as an area based on heavy industry, the North of England was particularly severely affected.6 By June 1932, unemployment in the North of England had reached 36.4 per cent of the insured workforce, which was the highest regional rate in the country, apart from

2 H.A. Mess, Industrial Tyneside: A Social Survey Made fo r the Bureau o f Social Research fo r Tyneside (London, 1928), 18-23, 51. 3 Ibid., 47. 4 Ibid. 5 E. Knox, ‘ “Keep your feet still, Geordie Hinnie”: women and work on Tyneside’, in R. Colls and B. Lancaster, eds., Geordies: Roots o f Regionalism (Edinburgh, 1992), 92­ 112. 6 D. Baines, ‘The onset of Depression’, in P. Johnson, ed., Twentieth Century Britain: Economic, Social and Cultural Change (Harlow, 1994), 169-87; J. Stevenson and C. Cook, The Slump: Society and Politics during the Depression (London, 1977), 54-5.

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Wales, which only exceeded it by one per cent.7 While some industries were in decline, others were thriving. Service industries expanded, as did the production of motor vehicles, aircrafts and consumer durables. This paradoxical situation was epitomised by the contrasting situations of Coventry, which experienced a boom in the 1930s, and Jarrow on Tyneside, which was reliant on shipbuilding, and suffered an unemployment rate of 67.8 per cent of the insured workforce in 1934.8 Numerous contemporary accounts described the effects of the economic depression on the population of Tyneside. Mess thoroughly documented the decline of the region’s industries, the poor social conditions, and their impact on health. When Priestley visited Tyneside in 1933, as part of his ‘English Journey’, he was shocked by the scenes of industrial decay and urban squalor he observed. In Jarrow, he noted, ‘One out of every two shops appeared to be permanently closed. Wherever we went there were men hanging about, not scores of them but hundreds and thousands of them. The whole town looked as if it had entered a perpetual penniless bleak Sabbath.’9 In 1938, Goodfellow’s research group set out to bring Mess’s work up to date, and found a region severely disadvantaged by the effects of economic recession. Compared with the industrial towns in London’s Home Counties, Tyneside had a vastly greater proportion of the population in receipt of unemployment benefit.10 Considering the key indicators of tuberculosis and infant mortality, Goodfellow found that the region compared unfavourably, not only with the country as a whole, but also with other industrial regions. He concluded that ‘it appears that the effects of continued trade depression upon Tyneside have been more serious than is generally realised.’11 This picture of economic depression forms the background to the working-class experiences of consumption and credit that will be considered in this chapter. The social history of working-class consumption and credit has received a certain amount of attention, both within general studies of working-class life, and in general studies of shopping and consumption.12 However, the literature specifically

7 N.F.R. Crafts, British Economic Growth During the Industrial Revolution (Oxford, 1985), 170. 8 Ibid., 11, 57. For a description of Jarrow during the depression, see E. Wilkinson, The Town that Was Murdered: The Life-Story o f Jarrow (London, 1939). 9 J.B. Priestley, English Journey (London, 1994, first published 1934), 314. 10 The poorest of the London Boroughs, Shoreditch, reached a figure of 137 in receipt of Unemployment Assistance Board allowance for every 10,000 of their population. By contrast, the lowest rate on Tyneside was that of Felling at 256, with several districts recording substantially higher rates. D.M. Goodfellow, Tyneside: The Social Facts (Newcastle, 1940), 16. 11 Ibid., 10. 12 For general works on the British working class that discuss patterns of consumption see, for example, J. Benson, The Working Class in Britain, 1850-1939 (Harlow, 1989);

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dealing with working-class consumption has tended to be dominated by studies of the co-operative movement.13 There have been far fewer studies specifically concerned with working-class habits of consumption and credit, although Johnson’s study of working-class patterns of saving and spending, and Tebbutf s study of pawnbroking and working-class credit are two notable examples of extended treatments of these topics.14 The author’s more recent study picks up on a number of the themes in the general literature on the working class, and discusses these in relation to those forms of credit historically associated with this group.15 The difficulty of managing inadequate household finances, the unequal division of income within the household, and the various survival strategies employed by women are also often alluded to in the literature on working-class women.16 Finally, there are a small number of studies dealing with specific aspects of consumption and credit, such as hire purchase, which contain material directly relevant to the study of working-class consumers.17

E. Hopkins, The Rise and Decline o f the English Working Classes 1918-1990 (London, 1991); D.M. MacRaild and D.E. Martin, Labour in British Society, 1830-1914 (Basingstoke, 2000). For general works on consumption that include a discussion of working-class life see, for example, J. Benson, The Rise o f Consumer Society in Britain, 1880-1980 (London, 1994); J. Benson and L. Ugolini, eds., A Nation o f Shopkeepers: Five Centuries o f British Retailing (London & New York, 2003); B. Lancaster, The Department Store: A Social History (London & New York, 1995). 13 For works on co-operation see, for example, G.D.H. Cole, A Century o f Co-operation (London, 1944); P. Gurney, Co-operative Culture and the Politics o f Consumption in England, 1870-1930 (Manchester & New York, 1996); S. Yeo, ed., New Views o f Co­ operation (London & New York, 1988). 14 M. Tebbutt, Making Ends Meet: Pawnbroking and Working-class Credit (Leicester, 1983); P. Johnson, Saving and Spending: The Working-class Economy in Britain 1870­ 1939 (Oxford, 1985). See also P. Johnson, ‘Credit and thrift and the British working class, 1870-1939’, in J. Winter, ed., The Working Class in Modem British History: Essays in Honour o f Henry Pelling (Cambridge, 1983), 147-70. 15 A. Taylor, Working-class Credit and Community since 1918 (Basingstoke, 2002). 16 For works on working-class women that include some useful discussion of patterns of consumption see, for example, P. Ayers and J. Lambertz, ‘Marriage relations, money, and domestic violence in working-class Liverpool 1919-1939’, in J. Lewis, ed., Labour and Love: Women's Experience o f Home and Family, 1850-1940 (Oxford, 1987), 195-219; E. Roberts, A Woman's Place: An Oral History o f Working-Class Women 1890-1940 (Oxford, 1984); E. Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London 1870—1918 (Oxford, 1993). 17 See, for example, J. Blackman, ‘The development of the retail grocery trade in the nineteenth century’, Business History, 9, 1967, 110-17; M. C. Finn, ‘Scotch drapers and the politics of modernity: gender, class and national identity in the Victorian tally trade’, in M. Daunton and M. Hilton, eds., The Politics o f Consumption: Material Culture and

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This chapter will discuss working-class experiences of consumption, with a focus on the various forms of credit available to them: hire purchase, ‘ticket’ agencies, credit drapers, and corner shop credit. It will be argued that experiences of credit and consumption were not unified but fragmented by the material and cultural differences within the class itself. Although this diversity of experience was structured primarily by material factors, it was also shaped by cultural considerations. The chapter will consider the individual experiences of selected consumers, primarily on Tyneside, as a means of highlighting wider issues of class, gender and community. The acquisition of consumer goods through cultivation, scavenging, self-assembly, or a combination of all of these was quite common during this period, and this is the first aspect of consumption we need to consider.

Cultivation, scavenging, self-assembly and second-hand purchasing Working-class consumers in the inter-war period had a variety of means of obtaining the items they needed or desired, which did not involve having to part with hard cash. Vegetables could be grown, usually on allotments, for home consumption, produce could be gathered from the surrounding countryside, and some consumer goods could be assembled from parts discarded by others. The cultivation of gardens or allotments could supplement a family’s income, and many working-class men were particularly fond of gardening.18 Wilkinson noted that allotments were an important source of fresh vegetables for the unemployed in Jarrow.19 With application, it was even possible to feed a whole family with home­ grown produce, as the son of the Northumberland pitman James Brown explains: ‘I’ve known me father go to the garden and fetch the whole dinner in. Howk the tetties, cabbage and kill a hen. That was our dinner. It didn’t cost a ha’penny, just out of the garden.’20 During the depression years, the surrounding countryside often provided a source of free food, as the Durham miner George Bestford recounts:

Citizenship in Europe and America (Oxford, 2001), 89-107; P. Scott, ‘The twilight world of interwar British hire purchase’, Past & Present, 177, 2002, 195-225. 18 Elizabeth Roberts discusses the significance of fresh produce from allotments for families in Barrow and Lancaster. She also points out that the produce of these allotments did not just benefit the allotment holders. ‘The majority of respondents remember either being given surplus products or buying them at very low prices.’ Roberts, A Woman’s Place, 158. 19 Wilkinson, The Town That Was Murdered, 230. 20 B. Williamson, Class, Culture and Community: A Biographical Study o f Social Change in Mining (London, Boston & Henley, 1982), 112.

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But rabbits were the thing! And a good dog was half the battle. And I did have a good whippet! I think we’d have starved if it hadn’t been for this dog. Away he’d go and back with a rabbit. Some of the farmers were very good. They would give you some potatoes or a turnip. But some would give you nothing; not a sausage. We used to pinch off them.21

Making or assembling the things you needed for yourself was another means of obtaining items without purchasing them. A Tyneside dock worker explained that during the 1930s ‘Young couples, very often with the help of friends, made their own furniture from boxes.’22 In his autobiography, which described his childhood in Jarrow during the 1920s and early 1930s, Arthur Barton wrote that, as we would expect, a bicycle was the chief object of desire for a boy growing up at this time. However, bicycles were not always acquired in an orthodox manner. Barton explained: One or two trimmers’ sons in our street had new ones, but most of us made our early bikes slowly and painfully over almost years, adding a wheel here and a pair of handle-bars there until the blissful day when they were actually going concerns on which it was possible to travel north and west and south away from the river, the works, even the sea.23

Many working-class people (boys in particular) employed this method, of gradual self-assembly, as a means of obtaining a bicycle in what can be seen as a kind of second-class participation in the consumer goods revolution of the inter-war years, when there was a general growth in the ownership of consumer durables. For those who could not build their bicycles themselves another route to ownership was to buy one second-hand. Arthur Barton, for example, bought his first bicycle from a school friend for seven and sixpence.24 Mr Hargreaves, who grew up in North Shields at around the same time, painted a similar picture. He was the son of a small shopkeeper and, as such, a bit better off than his friends from the nearby Ridges estate. Many slum dwellers cleared from North Shields were relocated to the Ridges, and the estate’s residents contained a high proportion of unskilled workers and less ‘respectable’ members of the working class. It was revealing of their different backgrounds that although his friends from the Ridges estate either had second-hand or cannibalised bicycles, Mr Hargreaves eventually got a new bicycle (bought on hire-purchase) from a North Shields shop. Another item that was often obtained though a process of self-assembly was a 21 K. Armstrong and H. Beynon, eds., Hello, Are You Working? Memories o f the Thirties in the North East o f England (Whitley Bay, 1977), 81. 22 Ibid., 27. 23 A. Barton, Two Lamps In Our Street (London, 1967), 44. 24 Ibid.

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radio, either through purchasing the individual parts, cannibalising old radio sets, or a combination of the two. However, there were obviously limits to the extent of this second-class participation in consumerism, as it was not really possible to do the same with items such as vacuum cleaners.25 Self-assembly of certain consumer goods was driven by necessity and made possible by working-class ingenuity. This suggests a hierarchy of consumption within the working class itself, with those who could afford to purchase new items above those who had to ‘make do and mend’. A further alternative, of course, was to purchase items second-hand, and second-hand shops were concentrated in the poorest areas. Tom Callaghan, describing his upbringing in West Newcastle, stated that ‘During my childhood in the late 1920s and the 30s, quite a fair section of the working classes had no alternative when seeking a change of clothing, footwear or household goods, but to resort to a visit to one of the many secondhand shops, that could be found in most parts of Newcastle.’26 Scotswood Road, in his own district of Newcastle, was particularly notable for the amount of second-hand shops it housed.

The ‘recurrent struggle on the frontier of survival’: mutuality and the informal economy27 A number of commentators have remarked on the degree of neighbourhood sharing and self-help that characterised working-class communities during the inter-war period.28 This mutuality meant that, on occasion, some items of food or clothing, for example, were provided by the generosity of neighbours. However, items could also be purchased, or goods or services exchanged within the informal economy. The experience of one respondent, Mr Lewis, a miner’s son, bom in South Shields in 1928, provides a good example of this type of informal neighbourhood economy. When he was five years old, his father left home, leaving his family considerably worse off than many others in the neighbourhood. His mother, a tailoress, survived by taking in sewing from the neighbours, as well as through their charity. He said:

25 Tape: Mr Hargreaves - 14.7.94 - 045-065. 26 T. Callaghan, A Lang Way To The Pawnshop (London, 1987), 80. 27 I am indebted to Ralph Glasser for this phrase, which aptly sums up the experiences described here. R. Glasser, Growing up in the Gorbals (London, 1987), 144. 28 For accounts of working-class communities in this period see, for example, C. Chinn, They Worked All Their Lives: Women o f the Urban Poor in England, 1880-1939 (Manchester, 1988); R. Roberts, A Ragged Schooling (Manchester, 1987); R. Roberts, The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter o f the Century (Harmondsworth, 1973); Williamson, Class, Culture and Community.

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The people upstairs were working. He was a labourer in the shipyard, that was real luxury that. So they had a large family and she would make, say a pan of broth, and she would bring it down. She would say, ‘Oh, I’ve made too much.’ That’s the way the generosity worked. Everybody kept an eye on everybody else and made sure everybody was alright.29

Mr Lewis also explained the way in which goods and services could be provided through the community itself, rather than through ‘commercial’ channels: The community looked after itself. So if somebody was a miner, for example, if you helped them to put the coal in they would give you a couple of buckets of coal. Or, like me mother, they would let her have some coal very cheaply. You know, coppers a bucket. So we didn’t buy coal from a coalman. There were enough miners around to buy coal from.30

Miners were able to sell coal due to the generous coal allowance they received, which exceeded the amount needed for domestic consumption.31 A recurrent theme of Mr Lewis’s account was the exchange of goods and/or services. When I asked Mr Lewis if people usually received something in exchange, this became very clear: It would be, yes, but not immediately but you knew it was there. I mean in some cases it would be. I mean if you wanted some coal from a pitman you paid him tuppence a bucket for the coal. But a lot of other things. I don’t know where they drew lines. Some things you paid for other things you didn’t. So if you wanted ginger beer from the ginger beer lady across the road, you paid her. If somebody was baby-sitting, I mean they never got paid.32

This respondent’s account illustrates the manner in which the borders between neighbourhood self-help, exchange and consumption became blurred in such transactions. Mrs Perkin was bom in 1917, and grew up in Byker, a poor working-class district in Newcastle’s East end. Her father was a painter and decorator who experienced quite long periods of unemployment, during which the family was

29 Tape: Mr Lewis - 15.9.94 - 045-057. 30 Ibid., 080-5. 31 B. Supple, The History o f the British Coal Industry, Volume 4, 1913-1946: The Political Economy o f Decline (Oxford, 1987), 541, 543. 32 Tape: Mr Lewis - 15.9.94 - 418-30. Thomas Callaghan also discusses the informal economy of his neighbourhood: ‘It was amazing how many unofficial house-traders there were in most working-class districts when I was a lad: enterprising individuals using their initiative to make ends meet, as very few could manage on the meagre dole allowance.’ T. Callaghan, Those Were The Days (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1992), 12.

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pushed to the margins of existence. Mrs Perkin’s account of the family’s survival strategy is revealing, not only for the resourcefulness her mother displayed in the face of extreme hardship, but also because of the manner in which such circumstances could transform the family into a unit of production, albeit in a very small way. After assessment by the means test, her father was awarded a food voucher for five shillings, which had to be spent at the co-operative stores. Her mother’s method of making the five shillings go further was to use it to buy only the basic ingredients for a pan of broth, two stone bags of flour and some yeast. As her mother was a skilled baker, she was able to bake bread of a sufficient quality to be sold to those men who were in work. This enabled her to raise extra money, which served, for example, to feed the gas meter. Mrs Perkin’s mother also made and sold ‘proggy’ mats (mats made from pieces of rags) and took in washing from the adjoining, more affluent, area of Heaton. The whole family was involved in her various enterprises, with the children helping to carry the heavy bags of flour, scavenging for wood on a nearby tip to fuel the oven, and so forth.33 The survival strategies described above were similar to those employed by the poorer members of the working class in other parts of the country during this period. As Chinn stated, Through a multitude of shifts, a wife of the urban poor exhibited her skills in household management and displayed her success in defying the hostile conditions of slum life.’34 This could involve making nappies or blankets for an infant, or using old clothes or scraps of fabric to make rugs, as described above. Ayers and Lambertz, for example, described how one Liverpool woman ‘took in sewing for a “better” dress shop, made rag-rugs to sell, and made her own children’s clothes from odd bits of clothing she bought from jumble sales.’35 Roberts pointed out that it was quite common for women in working-class neighbourhoods to sell food and drinks such as pies, cooked hams, lemonade, ginger beer and other consumable items from their front parlour or back kitchen. These part-time shops could also develop into proper ‘house shops’, selling a variety of goods.36 There were thus various means of acquiring essential items, or even small luxuries, which either did not involve a cash transaction at all, or at least not one within the formal economy. Obviously there were only a limited range of items which the neighbourhood could provide for itself, so the type of informal

33 Tape: Mrs Perkin - 4.2.94 - 170-225. 34 Chinn, They Worked All Their Lives, 66-7. 35 Ayers and Lambertz, ‘Marriage relations’, 203. 36 Roberts, A Woman's Place, 141. Such accounts of small scale trading are consistent with Benson’s account of ‘penny capitalism’ in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, showing the continued significance of these practices to the local economy. J. Benson, The Penny Capitalists: A Study o f Nineteenth-Century Working-class Entrepreneurs (Dublin, 1983).

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transactions described here could only supplement, not replace, conventional purchases. Although purchasing an item outright was obviously the most desirable option for those with the means to acquire new goods, this was not usually possible for working-class consumers, in which case some form of credit had to be considered. Various factors were significant in determining whether or not an individual would make use of a particular form of credit, not least its social acceptability, and this is an issue we need to consider in relation to attitudes to consumer credit during this period.

Hire-purchase Hire-purchase has been ably defined by Vallance: As distinct from the ordinary form of sale of goods on credit, a hire-purchase contract is a transaction in which the purchaser obtains immediate possession of goods which he wants to buy in consideration of an undertaking to make a series of payments of stated amounts on specified dates in the future. He does not, however, become the unconditional owner of the goods when they enter into his possession.37

This means that the possibility of repossession was the distinctive feature of this form of credit. As Vallance pointed out, once the system was extended beyond the very wealthy, the lender’s security resided in their right to resume possession of the goods conditionally sold, and this meant that the goods in question had to retain sufficient value for reselling purposes. Thus the goods suitable for hire-purchase had to be sufficiently durable to be sold second-hand in the event of any default.38 Many of the mass-produced consumer goods that first became widely available during the inter-war period were bought on hire-purchase.39 A speaker in the House of Commons in 1928, for example, pointed out that ‘In the monthly review of the Midland Bank, it is stated that from 50 per cent to 80 per cent of the motor cars, 70 per cent of the sewing machines and 80 per cent of the pianos and gramophones sold in this country are disposed of on the hire-purchase system.’40 Bicycles, furniture, radios and vacuum cleaners can be added to the list of items commonly obtained on hire-purchase during this period.41 Scott has found that furniture and

37 A. Vallance, Hire-Purchase (London, 1939), 16. 38 Ibid., 23. 39 S. Bowden, ‘The new consumerism’, in Johnson, ed., Twentieth Century Britain, 251. Tebbutt, Making Ends Meet, 193-4. 40 House o f Commons Debates, vol. 216, col. 2065, 4 May 1928. 41 J. Hilton, Rich Man, Poor Man (London, 1944), 133. Three quarters of all vacuum cleaner sales and three quarters of all radio sales in 1938 were on hire-purchase terms.

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carpets were the most significant items obtained on hire-purchase during the inter­ war period, accounting for just under 30 per cent of recorded transactions.42 Working-class consumers were among those who made use of hire-purchase, although the conditions under which it was offered to them were often unfavourable, in part at least because of the abuses perpetrated by unscrupulous vendors, who took advantage of the fact that this type of credit remained unregulated until 1938.43 Increasing public concern about hire-purchase led to demands for legislation. The Hire Purchase Act of 1938, proposed by Ellen Wilkinson, the Labour MP for Jarrow, was the first piece of hire-purchase legislation, and became law in July of that year.44 During the Bill’s second reading, Ellen Wilkinson gave examples of the type of practices that she was attempting to combat. The most notorious was that of ‘snatch-back’, whereby a hire-purchase firm took the goods from the buyer, after a considerable proportion of the cost had already been paid, in order to resell them. Ellen Wilkinson pointed out that this abuse was the result of a loophole in the existing law, which was ‘the cancer in the whole system’.45 She gave the example of a woman who had obtained furniture worth £27 Is 9d, of which she had paid £25 16s 9d when she fell behind with her payments. She was then prosecuted and the court ordered her to pay £6 8s 9d costs. While she was out cleaning, a van called and took all the furniture away as well as £5 worth of goods to pay for the court costs.46 Repossessions were sometimes resisted by the community itself. The following account shows how this community solidarity operated on Tyneside. Mrs Wrigley was bom in Howdon in North Tyneside in 1925. As a child she witnessed a repossession: And I remember the bailiffs coming, we called them ‘the bums’. ‘Here’s ‘the bums’ coming’. And they came up, and she was trying to shut the door and keep them out, and they were pushing, the two great big fellas, they were pushing, and she was only little and she was pushing at the other side and she wasn’t going to let them in. And finally they got in, and then she fainted, and the fella just picked her up and put her on the bed. And somebody who seen them getting in ran across to the Legion (the Wooden Legion) for her brother, and by the time he came across the stuff was nearly all out. And he says, ‘Hey, hey, hey! What’s going on?’ They said, ‘Hey look mate

S. Bowden, ‘Credit facilities and the growth of consumer demand for electric appliances in the 1930s’, Business History, 32, 1, 1990, 54. 42 Scott, ‘The twilight world’, 199. 43 Vallance, Hire Purchase, 63-9. 44 B.D. Vemon, Ellen Wilkinson (London, 1982), 147-51. 45 House o f Commons Debates, vol. 330, col. 730, 10 December 1937. 46 Ibid., col. 731.

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we are just doing a job. We’ve got to come and collect it. We’re sorry that your sister’s fainted and that like, but we cannat do nowt about it’. And away the furniture went. And I can remember that plain as can be, the two big burly men taking all the furniture away.47

Although it was a family member who intervened, the woman’s brother was alerted to the repossession by a neighbour, demonstrating both the deference to family ties, and the way in which they intertwined with those of community. It is worth noting that although we do not know the extent of this particular woman’s default, her husband was in regular employment, and Mrs Wrigley was sure that they would not have been far behind with their payments. Awareness of the repossessions taking place in the neighbourhood influenced Mrs Wrigley’s mother’s attitude towards hire-purchase, and she became very reluctant to acquire anything in this way. When she eventually did, in 1939, she was still extremely anxious about the repayments. Thus repossessions could activate the solidarity of the community, which sought to resist them, but they could also be a source of shame and social embarrassment. A further example of the use of hire-purchase before 1945 highlights the complexity of working-class attitudes towards credit, and the way in which they were invariably linked with notions of ‘respectability’. Although widely used, hirepurchase did not automatically gain acceptance from all sections of the workingclass. Mrs Tansley was the daughter of a colliery winding engineer from County Durham. Her father was also a teetotal Methodist and a treasurer of the union.48 In other words, he was an exemplary member of the ‘respectable’ working class. Mrs Tansley was bom in 1918, and the family did not use any form of credit until the hardship created by the General Strike of 1926 made it unavoidable. When they did finally enter the world of the ‘ticket man’ it was for a very limited period.49 However, in 1940, when Mrs Tansley was 22, her parents decided to buy a vacuum cleaner on hire-purchase. There was a man, a traveller, came round the doors and he was selling these vacuum cleaners. The canister type, and it was a good one, and it was £24. And I came home from work and me father and mother had got this vacuum cleaner to pay so much a week. Eeh, and I went crazy! I didn’t speak to them for about a week because they’d bought this vacuum cleaner. It was just the thought that they had bought this on hire-purchase, and I thought it was dreadful.50

47 Tape: Mrs Wrigley - 7.10.94 - Side 2: 404-426. 48 Tape: Mrs Tansley - 12.7.94 - 000-130. 49 Ibid., 275-292. 50 Ibid., Side 2: 0384)58.

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Significantly, Mrs Tansley objected to her parents’ use of hire-purchase not because she was aware of any of the abuses of the hire-purchase system considered above, but because of the relatively large amount of money involved, and because hire-purchase was a ‘new thing’.51 Some commentators have suggested that the move to a new housing estate created the desire to purchase new consumer durables during this period, and that salesmen would take advantage of this situation. Scott points to the significance of pressure from salesmen on new arrivals on a housing estate, who would then find themselves in debt. As he explains, ‘Making HP purchases on moving to an estate accentuated the reduction in disposable income caused by the large rise in rental costs that such a move typically entailed.’52 In their account of a housing estate built during the 1930s in the suburbs of Manchester, Wythenshawe, Hughes and Hunt describe how the women who moved to the estate felt the need to ‘live up’ to their new surroundings.53 Hughes and Hunt stress the pressure on women to consume encouraged by advertising and the availability of new consumer goods. They also point out that many of the families that were moved from the slums to new council estates could not easily afford the rents. This resulted in many of the poorer residents leaving such estates while, for those who remained, financial management was a strain.54 Mrs Johnson was brought up on an estate very similar to Wythenshawe. Her family had moved to the newly-built Pendower estate in the west end of Newcastle in 1928 because her parents felt that the move would benefit Mrs Johnson’s health. Her father was a very poorly-paid railway worker, and they struggled to pay the rent on their new house. Mrs Johnson explained that although many families on the estate were quite affluent, there were also several families, like her own, that could barely afford to live there.55 The experience that Mrs Johnson’s family had of moving to a new estate must have been typical of many families that were rehoused during this period. The family originally lived in one room in the Shieldfield district of Newcastle and, as a consequence, had very little furniture. So when they moved to their semi-detached

51 Ibid., Side 2: 126. 52 Scott, ‘The twilight world’, 210. 53 A. Hughes and K. Hunt, ‘A culture transformed? Women’s lives in Wythenshawe in the 1930s’, in A. Davies and S. Fielding, eds., Workers’ Worlds: Cultures and Communities in Manchester and Salford, 1880-1939 (Manchester, 1992), 88. 54 Ibid., 79, 86. Vincent points to the difficulties that poorer tenants faced on such estates, which lacked some of the support structures that existed in the older districts: ‘In a famous survey, M ’Gonigle and Kirby found that the death rate was actually higher in some council estates than in the slums which had been left behind, owing to the impact of high rents on poor diets’. D. Vincent, Poor Citizens: The State and the Poor in TwentiethCentury Britain (Harlow, 1991), 89. 55 Tape: Mrs Johnson - 20.5.94 - 000-070.

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council house, even though they took the little furniture they had with them, they also had to buy more. Mrs Johnson described how ‘When we went to Pendower, me mother got furniture at Woodhouse’s furniture store on Northumberland Street, and of course those days if you got behind with the payments they came and took part of the furniture away, and they came and took her sideboard. Well she loved her sideboard, and I don’t think my mother ever got over it.’56 This family’s experiences suggest that women may have suffered more emotional distress as a result of repossessions, as their greater involvement in the domestic sphere could lead to an increased attachment to the lost items. Mrs Johnson went on to say that the repossession also had the effect of putting her father off hire-purchase for ever: ‘But that was the last time she ever got hire-purchase because me father wouldn’t have it after that. That was the finish. You just did without after that.’57 This example highlights the gendered nature of decisions about consumption within the family: although Mrs Johnson’s mother felt the loss of the sideboard more deeply, it was her father who decided that the family would not make any further use of hire-purchase. It is worth noting further that although the family had purchased several items of furniture, only the sideboard was repossessed. Secondly, Mrs Johnson felt that there was a great deal of shame in having items repossessed in this way. She said that, ‘You didn’t talk about it, you were ashamed!’58 As a consequence, although there were other families on the estate who were poor enough to have undergone the same experience, Mrs Johnson said that that they would not have been willing to discuss it. It seems that on Tyneside the ruthlessness with which repossession was carried out could vary considerably, and that some traders were more scrupulous than others. An advertisement that appeared in the local newspaper in 1927 for the shop that repossessed the furniture from Mrs Johnson’s family, for example, claimed that ‘Cash and credit prices of every article are always quoted; goods paid for within three months are charged at cash prices, within twelve months half the difference is allowed. If unable to continue payment through permanent unemployment or illness, the customer may retain goods to the amount paid for, less a small charge for use and transport.’59 Mrs Johnson’s account supports the firm’s claim that in the event of a repossession, they allowed customers to retain goods to the value of the amount they had already paid. Some of the other advertisements in the same issue of this newspaper were not so open. Another advertisement, headed ‘Graham’s Famous No-Deposit System Makes Home Furnishing a pleasure’ had no cash price for some of the items of furniture, simply stating, ‘3 /- Weekly buys this luxurious

56 Ibid., 109-120. 57 Ibid., 125. 58 Ibid., 135. 59 Evening Chronicle, 21 October 1927.

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Super Sprung Suite’, or ‘2/6 Weekly buys this massive Solid Oak Extending Diner’.60 It would seem that, in some ways, women were at the sharp end of the expansion of the hire-purchase system. Ayers and Lambertz say that: Inter-war revelations about hire purchase (HP) agreements also gave evidence as to how anxieties could mount and multiply for working-class women. A huge variety of new, mainly mass-produced and cheaper consumer durables became available between the wars, marketed with more sophisticated modes of advertising. Highpressured sales techniques (canvassers working on commission), for instance, encouraged people to enter into (HP) agreements to buy shoddy goods, which they could not necessarily afford to pay for over long periods. They also feared husbands ‘finding out’, for many women apparently managed to contract large HP purchases without husbands’ specific consent or involvement in the deal.61

Legally, married women had to get their husband’s signature as guarantor when entering into HP contracts.62 However, not all women were aware of this fact, and it is quite clear from the evidence that Ellen Wilkinson presented in parliament that some women did enter into HP agreements that they felt to be legally binding. She quoted a trader who stated: ‘I have trained hundreds of men to overcome wives’ objections and sales resistance against signing documents when their husbands are not present.’63 In one case a husband did subsequently object to an agreement that had been signed when he was not present, and the salesman not only insisted that it was legally binding, but threatened court action if the instalments were not paid.64 Ellen Wilkinson also cited the case of a woman who could not say ‘No’ to door-todoor canvassers, and pawned the goods as soon as they were delivered. ‘The result was that one day her husband returned from work and found her dead in a gas-filled room. It is stated that he held up a bundle of tickets and said, ‘These are what killed my wife”.’65 Although Ellen Wilkinson was obviously drawing on some of the worst incidents to strengthen her case for legislation, the examples she cited 60 Ibid. 61 Ayers and Lambertz, ‘Marriage relations’, 205. 62 Scott, ‘The twilight world’, 199. Scott also points out that ‘Many husbands did not see the point of investing in machines that would do their wives’ work for them’. Ibid., 200­ 201. 63 House o f Commons Debates, vol. 330, col. 733, 10 December 1937. Concern over the hire-purchase system had been expressed for some time before the introduction of the 1938 Act, and it had also been previously noted that women were pressured into signing agreements which were not properly explained to them. See, for example, House o f Commons Debates, vol. 312, col. 2223, 28 May 1936; vol. 321, col. 555, 4 March 1937. 64 Ibid., vol. 330, col. 733, 10 December 1937. 65 Ibid.

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illustrated the problems women experienced in the period before hire-purchase legislation was introduced.

Ticket agents Club or ‘check trading’ has succinctly been defined by Johnson as a system ‘which involved independent companies selling checks on credit, which could be redeemed at certain associated stores which were reimbursed by the issuing company’.66 Various commentators have indicated that this form of trading was widely used by the working class.67 Jefferys has suggested that in the years following the First World War club or check trading provided an impetus to the growth of certain small-scale retailers: ‘This movement, which was more widespread in the North than in the South of England, flourished in the periods of heavy unemployment and for many families provided the only method of affording new clothes.’68 The importance of clothing clubs to the unemployed during the depression years was borne out by a Pilgrim Trust report of 1938: ‘The majority of unemployed families buy clothing through a “club” into which they pay a shilling or two a week for the family - as also that impossibly recurrent item, children’s shoes (if they get bought at all).’69 The authors of the report also noted that in order to obtain ready money, some Liverpool families pawned clothes soon after buying them through a clothing club, thus multiplying the cost to the consumer.70 During the inter-war period on Tyneside there were a number of credit businesses that employed agents. As well as representatives of mail order catalogues and credit drapers, there were also ‘ticket’ agents, who acted for credit firms that had an arrangement with a particular shop (or a number of shops) that would accept their vouchers. Indeed, all over Tyneside there were shops that would accept tickets of one sort or another. The biggest and most important of these were Shephard’s and Parrish’s. Parrish’s of Byker and Shephard’s of Gateshead were

66 Johnson, Saving and Spending, 152. 67 In her study of working-class life in Middlesbrough at the turn of the century, Lady Florence Bell described the popularity with housewives of that town of this form of trading, which she referred to as the ticket system. F. Bell, At the Works (London, 1985, first published 1907), 70-1. In her 1913 study of Lambeth, Maud Pember Reeves pointed out that the appeal of the clubs was that the regular weekly payments enabled the poor to calculate their expenditure more easily. M. Pember Reeves, Round About a Pound a Week (London, 1979, first published 1913), 63. 68 J.B. Jefferys, Retail Trading in Britain 1850-1950 (Cambridge, 1954), 334. 69 The Pilgrim Trust, Men Without Work: A Report Made to the Pilgrim Trust (London, 1938), 125. 70 Ibid., 124.

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large department stores, both located in working-class areas, which offered consumers on limited budgets the option of buying a variety of goods on credit.71 Both had their own currency, which was obtained by taking out a ticket with an agent of that particular shop. This was then exchanged at the store for tokens that could only be used within that particular retail outlet. The tickets were sold in multiples of a pound, and the interest charged on them was a shilling to the pound. Although it is not possible to identify the precise time at which Shephard’s and Parrish’s began credit trading, at the outset both shops used local, self-employed ticket agents, who may initially only have had dealings with one of these stores. More often, though, agents had agreements with several shops. The disadvantage for the customer of dealing with a small ticket agent was that the ticket would be made out to only one of the shops that the agent dealt with, making this a more restrictive form of credit than that provided, for example, by Provident checks. Shephard’s and Parrish’s mainly served the local communities of Gateshead and Byker respectively, but they also attracted customers from other parts of Tyneside, as the respondents who used them testified. People from the West End of Newcastle, though, tended to use shops in the centre of the city, particularly those in the Westgate Road area, which in many ways were similar to Shephard’s and Parrish’s. Trams from the West End of Newcastle stopped at the bottom of Westgate Road, where the shops that would accept ‘tickets’ tended to be located.72 All these shops sold clothing, but some also sold other goods as well, and they seem to have run mainly on credit. The shops in the Westgate Road area depended on ticket agents to bring in customers, and there were also several small companies,

71 Shephard’s was founded by Emerson Shephard, a cobbler by trade. He came into some capital and opened his first shop in Swinburne Street, Gateshead, in 1906, selling shoes. In 1924, he moved to West Street, Gateshead, and began selling drapery as well. The store closed in 1980. J.T. Parrish’s was established in 1879 at 10 Oswald Terrace, Byker. It moved to 116 Shields Road in 1881, and closed in 1984. Gateshead Central Library, Local Studies Collection, Class No. L658.871, Shephard Ltd (Private Publication n.d.); Evening Chronicle, 1 June 1980; Ward’s Directory Newcastle, Gateshead, North & South Shields, Jarrow, Sunderland and the Adjacent Villages (Ward’s Directory) (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1879/80), 483; Ward’s Directory (1881/82), 446; The North East Times, November 1984. 72 Tape: Mr Parkin -19.2.94 - 280-290. These shops included: Wenger’s, 101 Westgate Road (est. 1934), J. McAdam & Sons, 212A Westgate Road (est. 1925) and W oolfs nearby at 57 Westmorland Road (est. 1911). There were also shops like Blaylock’s (est. 1923) on New Bridge Street that served the same clientele. Ward’s Directory (1934), 891 (Wenger’s); Ward’s Directory (1925), 653 (McAdam’s); Ward’s Directory (1911/12), 1140 (W oolfs); Ward’s Directory (1923), 545 (Blaylock’s).

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located in Newcastle city centre, which dealt with these shops.73 An example of this type of agency was T. Archer Lee, based in Worswick Chambers (est. 1937).74 However, the largest credit agency on Tyneside was a national company, The Provident Clothing & Supply Company Limited, formed in 1881.75 The Provident system was, and is, extensively used on Tyneside, and the company still monopolises the business of check trading nationally. The Provident first began trading in Newcastle as The Provident Clothing Club in 1893, but it does not seem to have had a great deal of impact until much later.76 One informant explained that the Provident did not appear in Byker, in Newcastle’s East end, until 1937, long after Parrish’s money had already become an established part of life.77 The Provident system had two major advantages over private agents or smaller companies. A Provident order could be used in a greater number of shops and in a more flexible manner than ‘tickets’ from other companies. All the shops described above accepted Provident orders, and a single Provident order could be spent in several different shops. All the respondents that had used the Provident at this time agreed that it was the best form of credit available to them. As one woman put it, ‘You paid the same to Provident as you did to these little agents, but when Provident came onto the scene it was ideal. That’s how I brought my family up, with the help of Provident. I relied on Provident.’78 Another respondent described the advantages of Provident orders: ‘The glory of them was that you could take them to 20, 30, 40 or even more shops, and they had collectors.’79 The Provident provided a more flexible form of credit than other firms, but at the same rate of interest: a shilling in the pound. The advantage of the Provident order was that it enabled a customer to shop around, rather than be tied to one store, which meant they could find the most competitive prices. As one of the respondents put it, ‘You could use it just like as if you had money in your purse.’80 The crucial difference was, of course, that money was less expensive. As neither Shephard’s nor Parrish’s would exchange their tokens for cash, a substantial black market in their money arose, in which the tokens were exchanged informally for ready cash. The available evidence suggests that the ‘street value’ of the tokens was usually 14 shillings to the pound. It could also be more or less than

73 Tape: Mr Parkin -19.2.94 - 290-305. 74 Ward’s Directory (1937), 711. 75 Provident’s 90 Years o f Service, souvenir issue published by Colonnade on behalf of the Provident Clothing and Supply Company, (1980), 2. 76 Ward’s Directory (1893), 957. 77 Tape: Mrs Perkin - 4.2.94 - 425-35. 78 Ibid., 430. 79 Tape: Mrs Rowntree -21.2.94 - 99-103. 80 Ibid., 25.

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this, depending on the financial desperation of the person selling the tokens. The sale of tokens for cash seems to have been carried out on several levels. Firstly, between neighbours; secondly, they could be exchanged at some comer shops for cash; and thirdly, they were sometimes sold to professional people, like doctors, who could make a considerable profit by buying tokens at less than face value from their patients. One respondent suggested that ‘black market’ trading in tokens could almost become a small business. I remember a dealer in Parrish’s checks in our street. She would buy a pounds worth of checks for, say, 12s and 6d and resell them for 15s. Making a profit of 2s and 6d to the pound. She always had checks for sale. Of course the poor unfortunate person selling them got deeper and deeper into debt.81

Attitudes towards this practice were similar to those towards illegal moneylending: both took place within working-class communities, but were not always approved of by the community itself. Another respondent said: People used to get so many Parrish’s checks and sell them to somebody else a lot cheaper. They still had that debt to pay off. People were hard up and they used to sell them. I used to think it was terrible for them people to go and buy them because it was creating a bigger debt for the people who were selling them.82

Women would sometimes make use of credit from a ticket agent without telling their husbands. The Byker respondent quoted above said that not only did her mother obtain tickets for those women who were refused them because they owed too much, but she would also pay the ticket agent on behalf of women who did not want him to call when their husband was at home, for fear of him finding out about their use of credit.83 Men would permit the use of a particular form of credit if they felt that it was socially acceptable. Mrs Rowntree (bom in 1917), for example, grew up in Gateshead, the daughter of a time-served engineer who worked in the shipyards. She strongly asserted that her father was both skilled and ‘respectable’, and did not, on the whole, approve of credit. However, the family did get credit from her uncle, who was an agent for Shephard’s of Gateshead, but the fact that there was a family connection with the firm made that an acceptable form of credit to her father. She explained that ‘I don’t think that he would have allowed my mother to seek credit from an outside agency any more than he would have allowed her to go to the pawnshop.’84

81 Ibid., 16-20. 82 Tape: Mrs Wrigley - 7.10.94 - 540-5. 83 Letter no.l from Mrs Davis to author, in possession of author, 25 January 1994. 84 Tape: Mrs Rowntree - 21.2.94 - 515.

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Scotch drapers and tallymen

Tallymen, or scotch drapers, also operated as credit traders, but offered a different type of service to working-class communities, as they supplied the goods in question, usually clothes, directly to the consumer. There were several firms of credit drapers trading on Tyneside during this period, two of the most significant being the Newcastle clothing firms of Locherby’s and W.D. Macrae’s.85 Interviews were conducted with a retired credit traveller from Locherby’s, Mr Burton, and with the son of the founder of Macrae’s. Jim Macrae was bom in 1916, and joined his father’s firm in 1932. Mr Macrae described how: At the age of 16 I started work for my father. Until I was 2 0 ,1 was father’s assistant on his credit rounds, but then took over the Tyneside connection which included Jarrow, Hebbum, South Shields etc. This was a scattered area which I had to travel by bus and train. We were general drapers selling clothing for the whole family as well as household goods.86

According to Mr Macrae, when his father began trading, his stock included suits and other items of clothing, bedding and work clothing, such as pit boots and socks. This was the same trade that Locherby’s were engaged in. Mr Burton explained that his firm sold ‘Carpets, blankets, sheets, curtains, clothing, underwear, socks, you name it we sold it!’87 The reason that these firms offered such a wide range of goods was that much of their business was conducted in fairly remote villages. Particularly before the development of regular public transport, such firms were able to take advantage of a market that was largely reliant on local shops and travelling salesmen. Both firms also covered quite a wide geographical area. While Locherby’s tended to concentrate on the Blyth valley area, they also did some trading in County Durham. As well as the South Tyneside route, which Mr Macrae described, Macrae’s also traded in County Durham, and the firm eventually moved to Durham city. The bulk of the trade of both firms came from supplying made-tomeasure suits to miners.

85 The origins of Locherby’s go back to the early 1800s. During the period described here, the business was trading from premises purchased in 1902, 25 Ridley Place, Newcastle. Tape: Mr Burton - 4.7.94 - 084-100. W.D. Macrae’s was set up in 1914, and was originally run from a warehouse at 65A Blackett Street, Newcastle. Tape: Mr Macrae 15.6.94-140-50. 86 Ibid., 000-052. 87 Tape: Mr Burton - 4.7.94 - 450-5.

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Mr Macrae described his method of trading in colliery districts: We used to try to get recommendations for new customers, and we always could find out from the insurance men what sort of payers they were, because we all worked together. We all collected in the same houses. In the colliery villages you went on a Friday night to collect the money, and we were all following each other in and out. There was ourselves and the insurance man and the grocer and all this sort of thing. And the woman of the house she used to sit there with the money that the men had brought in, dishing it out.88

The credit drapery trade involved a weekly collection, just as the ‘ticket’ trade did. However, there was no identifiable interest charge in the case of credit drapery. The trader just charged inflated prices to begin with. As Mr Macrae stated, ‘We didn’t used to charge any interest. We incorporated that in the price. But people like Shephard’s and Bevan’s and that sort of thing they used to put a shilling to the pound on, you see, and so do the Provident.’89 However, despite Mr Macrae’s apparent pride in not charging interest, when I asked him how much he added onto the price, he became somewhat vague, and said that it was ‘around’ a shilling in the pound.

Small shopkeepers Although working-class people have always used some form of retail credit, our knowledge of it is limited by the lack of available sources. Kent, for example, points out that ‘Although historians of retailing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries agree on the ubiquity of customer credit, the literature, reflecting the paucity of evidence, contains few illustrations of its nature and extent.’90 Small general shops in working-class districts offered credit to their customers on a daily basis, but written records of these transactions were not generally preserved. 91 Small shopkeepers were particularly important to the life of working-class communities during times of economic hardship, whether this was the result of economic depression or industrial conflict. Roberts’ account of his parents’ comer

88 Tape: Mr Macrae - 15.6.94 - 303-10. 89 Ibid., 269-80. 90 D.A. Kent, ‘Small businessmen and their credit transactions in early nineteenthcentury Britain’, Business History, 36, 2, 1994, 51. 91 Although see D. Alexander, Retailing in England During the Industrial Revolution (London, 1970), 175; M.J. Winstanley, The Shopkeeper’s World, 1830-1914 (Manchester, 1983), 55; M.C. Finn, The Character o f Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740­ 1914 (Cambridge, 2003), 95-8.

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shop in Salford during the first quarter of the last century emphasised not only the integration of the shopkeeper with the community, but also the delicate financial balancing act it involved. As his mother put it, ‘ “In the hardest times”, she said, “it was often for me to decide who ate and who didn’t”. If bankruptcy, always close in a corner shop, was to be avoided, one had to assess with careful judgement the honesty, class standing and financial resources of all tick customers.’92 Roberts’ mother was not only a shopkeeper. She also offered various services to the people in the area, acting as a village scribe, communicating with official bodies on behalf of the illiterate, and also acting as an unpaid doctor.93 As the testimonies collected in Memoirs O f The Unemployed show, local comer shops helped many people to survive during the depression of the inter-war years.94 Most of the people interviewed obtained their groceries on credit from small stores. This could leave families with debts that would take them years to clear. While some shopkeepers may have offered ‘unpaid’ services to their communities, others were also capable of unscrupulously exploiting the poverty of those around them. A London house painter, quoted in Memoirs O f The Unemployed, stated that small grocery stores in poor working-class districts charged approximately 25 per cent more for their goods than did cash stores.95 However, if their customers fell upon hard times, then small shopkeepers often suffered too. Even more ephemeral were parlour stores. These did not have any legal status, and were organised within the framework of the informal economy. Williamson’s account of the mining village of Throckley in Northumberland during the first half of the twentieth century cites examples of small-scale attempts at retailing by the residents.96 In Throckley, parlour stores were dependent upon the local Co-op, from which they obtained most of their goods. Williamson’s mother stated: I remember also in Mount Pleasant and other colliery rows, little shops. Some were huts in a garden; some were in an outhouse in the yard. One was owned by Mrs Barry, one by Cecil March, one by Mrs Donnison, one by Mrs Liddle. These shops were useful for small items. They sold haberdashery, sweets, also food. Most of these people bought stuff from the Co-op, put on coppers, but they did get the dividend from the Co-op for their purchases.97

Some of those interviewed for this work recalled that there were parlour stores in the villages in Felling on the South Bank of the Tyne, poor areas demolished in the

92 Roberts, The Classic Slum, 81. 93 Ibid., 132; Roberts, A Ragged Schooling, 15. 94 H.L. Beales and R.S. Lambert, eds., Memoirs o f the Unemployed (London, 1934), 86. 95 Ibid., 166. 96 Williamson, Class, Culture and Community, 128. 97 Ibid.

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slum clearance programmes of the 1930s. One of these shops was in the village of Jonadab, run by a local woman who also purchased all her goods from a nearby co­ operative store. This practice had the advantage of allowing the ‘shopkeeper’ to make a profit from the dividend, while charging the customer very little above the purchase price.98 Although the shops in Mount Pleasant did not offer credit, the shop in Jonadab ran on ‘tick’. The woman who ran it also acted as a moneylender, unpaid midwife and a community arbitrator, often intervening in disputes. Her granddaughter said of her grandmother that ‘She left a lot of money when she died, but she was a hard-working woman for the community. She did everything. You see in them days, well everybody relied on somebody with a bit of know-how.’99 A discussion of the business practices of small shopkeepers reveals much about the ambiguity of the relationship between shopkeepers and customers in this period. Firstly, there is the issue of whether or not interest was charged, and how it was collected. Johnson makes the point that it can be difficult to calculate the cost of shop credit to the consumer, as ‘interest was often charged indirectly by selling inferior goods at inflated prices to customers tied by their tick book to a particular shop’.100 Some of the interviewees claimed that comer shops never charged interest, while others cited specific cases where they did. One respondent described the small general dealer, located in a poor part of Gateshead, that her mother worked for: The goods were top prices. When they bought goods it was itemised in the book and totalled up when they came to settle. Often it was more than they could afford, so it was carried forward to next week. Their books were never clear. My mother was told to add two shillings to their bill each day.101

What is not always clear from such accounts is whether interest was being charged openly. In the case of Cowans, for example, a small general dealer based in the Byker area of Newcastle, respondents offered two conflicting accounts. One interviewee said that, ‘We all shopped there because we didn’t bother going very far for shopping. Well we didn’t have money to go on the trams. Things were a wee bit dearer there, but we were glad of it, because we got tick all the week until pay­ day.’102 This woman stated that Cowans charged about a ha’penny more than other shops for the goods themselves, but that they did not charge interest. She did not feel exploited by the shop, as she felt that ‘He knew we couldn’t pay exorbitant

98 Tape: Elderly Gateshead Residents - 12.3.94 - 80-100. " Ib id ., 110. 100 Johnson, ‘Credit and thrift’, 154. 101 Letter no. 13 from Mrs Drake to author, in possession of author, 27 January 1994. 102 Tape: Interviews with elderly residents of Byker - 13.3.93 - 325.

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prices.’103 A male respondent painted an entirely different picture of the shop: ‘They sold everything, owt you wanted, put it on the tick bill, and she’d put her extras on y’ see. Say it was two shilling for a pound of bacon, y’ know just a rough idea, well it would be three shilling if you got it on tick.’104 Another interviewee, discussing Gateshead corner shops during the inter-war period, said that they did not charge interest to ‘tick’ customers, although he conceded that they were more expensive than other shops.105 It is impossible to generalise. All we can say for certain is that some corner shops did charge interest, but it is not clear whether their customers always knew this. Corner shops charged more than larger stores, but the amount that the shopkeeper added to credit customers probably varied greatly from shop to shop. Mrs Wrigley offered a further insight into the ways that shopkeepers could covertly charge for ‘extras,’ a practice that can be defined as ‘creative pricing’. Mrs Wrigley worked in a comer shop in a working-class area on the banks of the Tyne during the Second World War. Most of the customers obtained their groceries on ‘tick’. She acknowledged that all customers (cash or credit) were covertly being charged extra for ‘wastage’.106 One particular incident was especially revealing about the way that small shopkeepers used ‘creative pricing’ to maintain good relations with their customers, while still obtaining their due. This lady come in and swore blind she had paid her bill. Well when you paid your bill it was written in the book. Of course it wasn’t marked off in the book, and she was adamant she had paid it. It wasn’t a lot. Anyway [the owner] said, ‘Who did you pay?’ and she says, ‘Well I’m not sure now but I know I paid it.’ So he says, ‘Right o.k. we’re not going to argue about it.’ He said to me, ‘When that lady comes back in I’ll serve her.’ So what he did was he put a ha’penny or a penny or tuppence a week onto her bill. So he got his money back by putting the odd coppers on.107

Although this system of credit was open to a certain amount of abuse, it was generally founded upon mutual trust between the shopkeeper and the customer. One respondent, for example, described working in a comer shop in Byker during the 1920s and 1930s: We had a large book called the ‘tick’ book. The customer’s name was on the top of the page, there was no address though, as the boss always knew everybody and trusted them. They ticked all week, V41b butter, Vilb margarine, *41b tea, all of this

103 Ibid., 337. 104 Tape: Mr Jones - 15.9.93 - Side 2: 460-70. 105 Letter no. 12 from Mr Morris to author, in possession of author, 22 January 1994. 106 Tape: Mrs Wrigley - 7.10.94 - 387-90. 107 Ibid., 395-410.

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went on the tick page. On Friday night or Saturday night they came to pay, and pay one shilling off the back debt, then they got a lot more groceries back.108

The Newcastle evidence suggests that during the inter-war years, small shops in areas that housed the skilled working class did not usually offer credit. Mrs Cook, for example, lived in the Heaton area of Newcastle during the 1930s, an area which, as Byrne says, housed the ‘respectable’ working class during this period.109 Food shops in this area did not give credit, and usually displayed a sign informing their customers to this effect.110 Mrs Cook felt that it did not fit in with the ethos of the respectable working class to obtain groceries on ‘tick’. In fact, she only knew of one woman who did manage to obtain credit from a local shop, and this apparently led to a great deal of marital conflict when her husband found out.111 However, this type of credit was freely available in Byker (an area of Newcastle that housed less skilled members of the working class) during the same period. Similarly, there were no pawnshops in Heaton, while Byker had several during this period.112 Although regular visits to the pawnshop had been a feature of working-class life since the nineteenth century, and pawnbrokers acted as a safety net to those on the ‘frontier of survival’, there was still a great deal of shame attached to this form of credit.113 In Tyneside, for example, women would try and conceal their use of the pawnshop from their neighbours.114 A woman who grew up in the Byker area of Newcastle, referring to the difference between using a ticket agent and a pawnbroker, explained: ‘I think that almost everyone at some time would use Parrish’s checks. People weren’t ashamed of using credit it was a way of life, but they were ashamed of using the pawnshop.’115 Mrs Wrigley’s account of her mother’s use of the pawnshop provides a good illustration of the conflicts engendered by solidarity and respectability, requiring a complex management of appearances on the part of the individual. Mrs Wrigley’s

108 Letter no.l from Mrs Davis to author, in possession of author, 25 January 1994. 109 D. Byme, ‘Working-class owner-occupation and social differentiation on inter-war Tyneside’, in B. Lancaster, ed., Working Class Housing on Tyneside 1850-1939 (Whitley Bay, 1994), 103. 110 Notes from interview with Mrs Cook, resident of Heaton, 17.9.93. 111 Ibid. 112 Ward's Directory (1930). 113 See, for example, Glasser, Growing up in the Gorbals, 166. Johnson also discusses the social stigma attached to pawning possessions, and points out that ‘Many ruses were followed to disguise or conceal pawning from neighbours.’ Johnson, Saving and Spending, 184. Roberts maintains that pawnbroking was a less socially acceptable means of credit than comer shop ‘tick’. Roberts, A Woman's Place, 149. 114 Tape: Mrs W rig le y -7 .1 0 .9 4 - 108-16, 117-47, 150-4. 115 Letter no. 3 from Mrs Gibson to author, in possession of author, 1 March 1994.

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mother used to visit the pawnshop regularly until about 1936, when her two brothers started work. ‘Me mother used to go because her and a neighbour used to go together. They used to put the thing under the pushchair. For all everybody else was going, well the majority of them were going. She [the neighbour] used to say, “Howay, shove your bundle under the pram”.’116 Mrs Wrigley went on to say that as a child, she was sent to the pawnshop with strict instructions not to tell her grandmother about it.117 Most often, however, women pawned items without their husband’s consent, and several women would even covertly pawn their husband’s clothing. One Byker woman recalled: ‘We had to go, get parcels out of pawn shops without dad knowing, bring them home, hide parcels behind doors until mam got them opened when no-one was looking and then hang dad’s suit back in the wardrobe.’118 Another respondent made clear the reasons for concealing her use of a pawnbrokers: ‘I never told mine [my husband] nowt, I used to dae things on the sly sometimes. I used to pawn his suits. I was frightened, ‘cause he would have hit us in the eye, and laddie, my man was six foot two!’119

Co-operative stores Co-operative stores, which played an important role within the working-class economy, were primarily associated with the respectable working class, and the promotion of values of thrift, temperance and self-help.120 Not only did the founders of the movement, the Rochdale Pioneers, have an explicit policy of selling only pure and unadulterated goods in their stores, but they also made it a point of principle to trade only on a cash basis.121 The co-operative movement’s disapproval of the use of credit represented an obstacle to the use of their stores for many of the poorer members of the working class,122 who often combined membership of the Co-op with comer shop credit. Roberts described customers who, in blatant disregard for the principles of the movement, made use of both his family’s store and the Co-op:

116 Tape: Mrs Wrigley - 7.10.94 - 108-16. 117 Ibid., 117-47. 118 Letter no.l from Mrs Davis to author, in possession of author, 25 January 1994. 119 Tape: Elderly Gateshead Residents - 12.3.94 - 421. 120 Gumey, Co-operative Culture, 24, 156-7. 121 J. Thomley, Workers' Co-operatives: Jobs and Dreams (London, 1981), 19. For co­ operative leaders’ objections to credit see, for example, Johnson, Saving and Spending, 131-2. 122 MacRaild and Martin, Labour in British Society, 136; Chinn, They Worked All Their Lives, 74.

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Among the more thrifty of our credit customers were those who did a little cash shopping at the Co-operative stores (an organisation detested and railed at by shopkeepers and publicans alike). With Co-operative dividend at 35 in the £, quarter day brought them a small bonanza which they often used to clear off arrears on the tick book at the shop. This practice enraged my father, who, in his cups, swore he was being ‘used’.123

During the inter-war years, the co-operative movement found itself increasingly compelled to offer credit to its customers, and ‘mutuality clubs’ or ‘20 week clubs’ were introduced. The trend towards credit sales continued throughout the 1920s, and attracted considerable new business, although there was still resistance to the provision of credit, both within local co-operative societies, and from the leadership of the movement.124 This led to an uneven provision of credit at a local level. For example, the 1938 Pilgrim Trust report pointed to the ‘pressing need’ for the co-operative societies to provide clothing clubs in Liverpool.125 However, despite the continuing reservations of those within the movement, co-operative societies continued to expand their credit provision during the 1920s. The stoppages of 1921 and 1926, for example, left many miners deep in debt both to co­ operative societies and to other creditors.126 By the end of 1929, co-operative credit trading totalled over five million pounds.127 Tyneside was no exception, and several of the respondents remarked that it was possible to get a ‘club’ from ‘the Co-op’, although this form of credit does not seem to have been as widely used as that provided by comer shops. Interest was not charged on co-operative mutuality clubs, but a co-operator had to hold at least one share (lOs.Od.) to join this scheme.128 A woman from the Northumberland village of Wylam recalled that ‘Members could take out what was called a ‘club’ for various values. For example, a £2 club was paid back at the rate of 2 shillings a week for twenty weeks. I think that there had to be enough in the member’s account to cover it, but it could be spent at any Co-op shop at any time during the twenty week period. These clubs were a big help when extra things were required.’129 In poorer areas, co-operative stores were not used to the same extent as the local private shops, but they were still patronised by some, even if not always in a consistent manner. Callaghan explained that although his mother did her main shopping in the Co-op, they did not cater for all the needs of the poorer customers,

123 Roberts, The Classic Slum, 83. 124 Tebbut, Making Ends Meet, 192-3; Johnson, Saving and Spending, 136-9. 125 The Pilgrim Trust, Men Without Work, 125. 126 Supple, The History o f the British Coal Industry, 463. 127 Johnson, Saving and Spending, 136-7. 128 Tebbut, Making Ends Meet, 193. 129 Letter no. 16 from Mrs Lowrey to author, in possession of author, 15 February 1994.

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who sought ‘bacon pieces, cracked eggs, spare ribs, broken biscuits, or even firewood’.130 A respondent from Byker said that her mother only joined the Co-op after 1945, when her financial circumstances improved, having previously used corner shops.131 The dividend that the Co-op paid to its members was highly prized. As one respondent put it, ‘they paid quite large dividends 2 shillings and sixpence to 3 shillings and sixpence in the pound.’132 Although Mrs Wrigley’s family bought goods on credit at the local comer shop, one of her neighbours was a loyal co­ operative customer, and used to share the benefits of the dividend: The lady who lived further along the street she was a real store woman. Everything she got at the store, the Co-op you know. When her dividend came she would knock on the door, ‘Are you there?’ and she used to give me mother half-a-crown. And me mother would say, ‘Eeh no, I don’t want your half crown’. Then she [the neighbour] would say, ‘Go on, get yourself a few cakes’. In her eyes it was a little treat for my mother to have for herself.133

Conclusion In conclusion, working-class experiences of credit and consumption were not unified but fragmented by the material and cultural differences within the working class itself. Although some were pushed to the margins of existence, others could take advantage of developments in retailing and credit provision to improve their standard of living. The various retail outlets and credit systems used by the working class were often quite firmly rooted in the community, but this should not lead us to automatically conclude that this led to a unity stemming from shared experience. Working-class experiences of credit and consumption were structured by the tension between the desire to appear ‘respectable’ to one’s neighbours, and the values of solidarity and mutuality. For many, the experience of consumption was a ‘recurrent struggle on the frontier of survival’, particularly when unemployment struck, and it could take all a family’s resourcefulness and ingenuity to maintain itself during the worst periods. The misery and hardship caused by repossession need to be considered alongside the widened access to consumer goods created by the expansion of hire-purchase that occurred during the 1920s and 1930s, and there is no doubt that traders took advantage of the fact that this form of credit was unregulated. For those who could

130 Callaghan, A Lang Way To The Pawnshop, 13. 131 Letter no. 3 from Mrs Bush to author, in possession of author, 28 February 1994. 132 Ibid. 133 Tape: Mrs Wrigley - 7.10.94 - 160-5.

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not afford to buy, even on credit, there was the possibility of second-hand participation in the consumer goods revolution through scavenging or self­ assembly. Credit was the most costly for those in direst need, compelled to compound debts by selling shop tokens to neighbours, or pawning goods bought on hire purchase or through a clothing club. Finally, there was a gendered dimension to working-class experiences of consumption and credit, as women not only had to deal most directly with the problems of managing the household finances, but they were also at the sharp end of the ongoing conflict between the values of mutuality and respectability that characterised working-class life during the inter-war period.

Acknowledgements I wish to thank Bill Lancaster and Don MacRaild, my colleagues at Northumbria University, for their encouragement and advice on completing this chapter. I would also like to thank the editors of this volume for their comments on earlier drafts.

Appendix (Description of taped interviews in order of appearance in text) Tape A, date: 14.7.94 Interview with Mr Hargreaves, bom in North Shields in 1923, the son of a small shopkeeper who lived near to the Ridges estate (now known as the Meadow Well estate). Tape B, date: 15.9.94 Interview with Mr Lewis, bom in South Shields in 1928. His father was a miner and his mother was a seamstress. His father left home when he was five years old, and his mother survived by taking in sewing from neighbours. Tape C, date: 4.2.94 Interview with Mrs Perkin, bom in Byker in 1917. Her father was a painter and decorator, and she later worked in retailing. She and her family experienced great hardship during the depression years. Tape D, date: 7.10.94 Interview with Mrs Wrigley, bom in Howdon in 1925. Her father was a boatman on the Tyne. As a child she witnessed a repossession, her family made use of various forms of credit, and she also worked in a corner shop. TapeE, date: 12.7.94 Interview with Mrs Tansley, born in Sunniside in County Durham in 1918. Her father was a colliery winding engineer, a teetotal Methodist, and a union treasurer.

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He worked in Wardley Colliery until it closed in 1938, when the family moved to Stanley, also in County Durham. She married in 1942. Tape F, date: 20.5.94 Interview with Mrs Johnson, born in 1924 in the Sheildfield area of Newcastle. The family moved to the Pendower council estate in the west end of the city in 1928. Her father was a railway worker, and her mother worked in a factory. Tape G, date: 19.2.94 Interview with Mr Parkin, bom in 1922 in Newcastle. He was an agent from the late 1940s to the 1970s, and worked for ten different firms covering all aspects of the trade: collecting, selling, supervising, accounts inspection and tracing bad debt. His work took him to most parts of Tyneside, Northumberland and Durham. Tape H, date: 21.2.94 Interview with Mrs Rowntree, bom in 1917 in Gateshead, currently living in Byker in Newcastle. Her father was a time-served engineer, and her husband was also a skilled engineer. Her mother worked in Shephard’s department store, and Mrs Rowntree worked in Parrish’s department store. She moved to the Heaton area of Newcastle when she got married in 1937. Tape I, date: 4.7.94 Interview with Mr Burton, a retired credit traveller for the Newcastle clothing firm of Locherby’s. He started working for the firm in 1947. Locherby’s tended to concentrate their attentions on the Blyth valley area, but also did some trading in County Durham. Tape J, date: 15.6.94 Interview with Mr Macrae, a retired credit traveller for the Newcastle clothing firm of W.D. Macrae’s, and the son of the founder of the company. Jim Macrae was bom in 1916, and joined his father’s firm in 1932. Macrae’s traded in the South Tyneside area and in County Durham, and the firm eventually moved to Durham city. Tape K, date: 12.3.94 Interview with a married couple and a female neighbour. The couple were both bom in 1924, and the neighbour was born in 1912. All three grew up in the Gateshead area. The husband was a shipyard worker, and worked in various yards in the Tyneside area. The neighbour spent part of her childhood in a workhouse, and later married a merchant seaman. TapeL, date: 15.9.93 Interview with Mr Jones, bom in 1926 in the Byker area of Newcastle, who had a number of different jobs, and was later an illegal moneylender in the same district.

Section 3: Good Salesmanship

Chapter 7

‘The Customer is Always Right’: Change and Continuity in British and American Department Store Salesmanship, 1945-1960 Joy Cushman

The quality of shop floor salesmanship in retail stores has been a point of concern among shopkeepers, shopworkers and customers for as long as shops have had salespeople. For department stores, which built their reputations on quality service from their beginnings in the nineteenth century, this was even more the case. As Porter Benson has argued, quality of service was a constant point of conflict between American department store managers, customers and saleswomen in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in part because each party had different experiences of service and different visions of what such service should entail.1 British stores experienced similar problems. In 1932 a management consultancy ‘Report on a National Survey of Retail Selling Practices’ announced that salesmanship in British retail generally was unsatisfactory, and that department store salesmanship was in an even worse state.2 These concerns about salesmanship in British and American stores set the stage for a renewed ‘crisis’ in salesmanship in the immediate post-Second-World-War years. The post-war ‘crisis’ occurred at the same time in the US and UK, from the late 1940s to the early 1950s. This simultaneity was a direct consequence of the fact that the origins of the crisis in both countries stemmed from war-time rationing, price controls and tight labour markets. However, the response to this salesmanship crisis was chronologically staggered, stimulated by a return to open competition 1 S. Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940 (Chicago, 1986); S. Porter Benson, ‘The Cinderella of occupations: managing the work of department store saleswomen, 1900­ 1940’, Business History Review, 55, 1981, 1-25. 2 John Lewis Partnership Archive, Harold Whitehead & Staff, ‘Report on a National Survey of Retail Selling Practices’, 1932.

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with chain store multiples, and by the expansion of mass consumption, which correlated with the end of price controls in America in 1946 and the end of rationing in Britain in the early 1950s. Despite the chronological differences in development of both countries’ mass consumer societies, the crisis in salesmanship instigated similar - even if superficial - transformations in the rhetoric and practice of department store customer and employee relations in the US and UK. These transformations were symbolised by the increased emphasis on courtesy over service, and were similar to the salesmanship of the past in their ultimate goal: to improve sales and secure customer loyalties. However, the post-war campaign to reinvigorate salesmanship also revealed the challenges with which both British and American department store managers grappled after the war, as they struggled to maintain customer and employee loyalties in the face of intense competition for both. This chapter identifies the origins and consequences of the post-war ‘crisis’ in salesmanship by looking at changes in customer and employee relations in some of the major urban department stores in Britain and America, including Marshall Field’s in Chicago, Strawbridge & Clothiers in Philadelphia, Harrods in London and the House of Fraser in Glasgow. Comparative analysis of changes in these major emporia demonstrates that British and American department stores from a range of economic, social and cultural environments shared a great deal in common in the mid-twentieth century. This is significant, because it suggests that the documented similarities in department store evolution in Britain and America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries continued into the post-war years, despite the distinct divergences in consumer market development that happened in the interwar years, when American mass retail techniques and mass consumption developed more rapidly than in Britain.3 The purpose of the post-war focus taken in this chapter is to push the historical literature on department stores beyond the generally accepted 1940 cutting-off point, in order to begin exploring the ways that post-war department store managers reconciled themselves to the mass consumer societies their nineteenth-century predecessors had helped to create.4

3 S. Bowden and A. Offer, ‘Household appliances and the use of time: the United States and Britain since the 1920s’, Economic History Review, 47, 1994, 725-48. 4 A. Adburgham, Shops and Shopping, 1800-1914: Where, and in What Manner the Well-Dressed English Woman Bought her Clothes (London, 1964); B. Lancaster, The Department Store: A Social History (London, 1995); W. Leach, Land o f Desire: Merchants, Power and the Rise o f a New American Culture (New York, 1993); Porter Benson, Counter Cultures,; G. Crossick and S. Jaumain, eds., Cathedrals o f Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850-1939 (Aldershot, 1999); M. Miller, The Bon Marche: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869-1920 (Princeton, 1981); E. Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (Oxford, 1989); E. Rappaport, Shopping fo r Pleasure: Women in the Making o f London’s West End

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The salesmanship ‘crisis’ and its origins During the Second World War, retailers on both sides of the Atlantic raised the alarm about salesmanship, lamenting the erosion of service and skill on their sales floors. They attributed the deterioration of selling skill to the seller’s market climate of rationing, credit controls and scarcity, where goods practically sold themselves to customers eager to spend higher war-time wages.5 Many customers were not happy either. A Department Store Economist survey of 3000 American department store customers in 1943 concluded that, ‘In spite of free and frequent deliveries, in spite of limitless credit terms, in spite of fancy wraps and classy toilets, in spite of all the expensive services that push the operating expense up and the profits down, service, to the customer, still means the kind of treatment he or she gets at the salesperson’s level.’ To clarify what that level was, the article quoted one respondent who commented that ‘The situation is atrocious - clerks are discourteous and rude. Stores after the war with the best salespeople will get my business.’6 The problem for post-war department store retailers and customers was that rather than returning to idyllic (and perhaps never existent) pre-war norms, the ‘crisis’ of salesmanship only worsened following the war. In 1952, Fortune magazine reported that selling efficiency in the US was not only stagnant but declining, reaching ‘such an abysmal point that upward of $3 billion annually in potential sales is being lost at the counter through apathy and lack of skill’.7 In 1954, the Willmark Service System analyses and other business research surveys reported that fewer salespeople than before the war engaged in ‘suggestive selling’ or ‘trading up’ techniques, and that sales transactions per payroll dollar had (Princeton, 2000). There are also a multitude of company histories of department stores, of which the following form a small sample: L. Wendt and H. Kogan, Give the Lady What She Wants! The Story o f Marshall Field & Company (Chicago, 1952); R. Hower, History o f Macy's o f New York, 1858-1919: Chapters in the Evolution o f a Department Store (Cambridge MA, 1943); M. Moss and A. Turton, A Legend o f Retailing: House o f Fraser (London, 1989). 5 See, for example, R. Williams, ‘Intensified sales training for postwar period’, Bulletin o f the National Retail Dry Goods Association, July 1944, 21, 52, 54-5; Traders advised to be more competitive’, Drapers’ Record, 1 March 1952, 75. 6 ‘Your customers speak on post-war services!’, Department Store Economist, December 1943, 10-12. 7 ‘What’s wrong with retail salesmanship?’, Fortune, July 1952, 79. See also ‘Selling performances’, Department Store Economist, February 1951, 121. The following Fortune magazine articles focused not only on retail salespeople, but on travelling salespeople and manufacturing sales forces as well: ‘What’s wrong’, 77-80, 146-54; ‘What’s the matter with American salesmanship?’, Fortune, September 1949, 67-9, 180-84; ‘Help wanted: sales’, Fortune, May 1952, 100-103, 196-204.

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decreased from 2.99 in 1940 to 1.38 in 1951.8 In Britain the Drapers' Record recorded a 22 per cent increase in the number of customers served per assistant between 1938 and 1950. However, the journal attributed that trend to the war-time sellers’ market and expressed concern about the declining value of the average sale and declining performances in salesmanship.9 In 1953, one British store staff manager articulated the general sentiment of his trade when he argued that, ‘The will to serve the public is certainly lacking in the majority of sales staffs these days, and only assistants with pre-war experience seem to show any interest in good salesmanship.’10 It is debatable whether or not there was a real decline in standards of salesmanship during or after the war. The 22 per cent increase in customers served by each assistant in British department stores denotes a significant increase in individual employee productivity. In America, the standards for the much-touted Willmark Service System analyses were based on retailers’ ideals of selling effort not an objective measure, or a constant measure over time. Whether or not a ‘real’ crisis in salesmanship existed, the perception of crisis was common not only to British and American department store retailers, but to wider business circles as well, as demonstrated by Fortune magazine’s extended commentary on the issue. The goal, of course, was to identify the origins of the supposed decline in salesmanship and to rectify the problem as quickly as possible. There were two major interrelated factors contributing to concerns about salesmanship in the 1940s and 1950s: competition with chain store multiples for the dollars and pounds of expanding consumer markets, and high retail labour turnover that endangered the quality of shop floor service. Competition fo r customer loyalties The extent of real competition between department and chain discount or variety stores is not easily discerned, but department stores certainly thought it important. Through retail organisations such as the National Retail Dry Goods Association (NRDGA) in America and the Drapers’ Chamber of Trade in Britain, directors of department stores complained frequently of competition with the variety and discount store multiples, accusing such stores of sapping middle-class department

8 ‘What’s wrong’, 78-80; ‘Salespeople: an undeveloped potential’, Journal o f Retailing, Winter 1953-1954, 149-56, 196; ‘National standards of selling performance’, Department Store Economist, November 1950, 20-21; ‘Selling performance slump’, Department Store Economist, November 1951, 114; ‘Ira Hayes: “I BEGGED the clerk to sell me a shirt” ’, Stores, April 1962, 19-21. 9 ‘How to raise productivity in retail trade’, Drapers’ Record, 21 June 1952, 16-17. 10 ‘How do they serve?’, Drapers’ Record, 25 April 1953, 105.

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store consumer bases.11 This is one of the great ironies in the history of the ‘retail revolution’, given that only a century earlier smaller retailers had accused nascent department stores of imposing on their customer bases.12 In Britain, competition between department and variety stores increased significantly in the 1950s. In 1950, department stores accounted for 71 per cent of turnover in the ‘general stores’ market, and variety stores accounted for 29 per cent. By 1961, the department store share had dropped to 59 per cent, and the variety store share had risen to 41 per cent.13 It was the independent department stores who felt this competition most. Between 1950 and 1957, the independent store share of the department, variety and general store trade in Britain dropped from 79 to 31 per cent. At the same time, the Co-operative movement’s share in that trade tripled from 10.5 to 32.2 per cent, while the multiple shops’ share also increased from 10.5 to 36.6 per cent.14 Crucially, the large-scale, previously independent department stores that are the focus of this analysis, including Harrods and the House of Fraser, were counted as part of the multiples group for statistical purposes in the post-war years, because these stores were actively expanding by buying other department stores.15 In effect, it was not they, but their independent store counterparts who were under threat, not just from chain variety and discount stores, but also from the growth of Co-operative department stores and the major department store groups. In America, the statistics are less straightforward regarding department and chain variety store competition. A 1963 Harvard Business School study showed that between 1929 and 1960 the department store sales index (which included mail order) increased more than the variety store index, demonstrating that department stores were doing relatively well. The problem was that both the department and variety store indices increased less than the total retail sales index - a consequence of the fact that the main competition for consumer expenditure came primarily from the furniture and appliance stores and the automotive group, particularly in the late 1940s and 1950s.16 The problem for American department store executives was not 11 For example, Harvard Baker Business Library, M.P. McNair, ‘Department stores on uneasy street’, transcript of speech delivered to the NRDGA, 1953; ‘How to combat chain and multiple competition’, Drapers’ Record, 3 March 1951, 17-18. 12 E.D. Rappaport, “‘The halls of temptation”: gender, politics and the construction of the department store in late Victorian London’, Journal o f British Studies, 35, 1996, 58-83. 13 Department of Industry, Business Statistics Office, Report on the Census o f Distribution and Other Services, 1971, Part 1 (London, 1975), 1/15. 14 T.W. Cynog-Jones, ‘Report upon the census of distribution’, New Dawn, 3 October 1959, 634. On competition before 1950, see J.B. Jefferys, Retail Trading in Britain, 1850­ 1950 (Cambridge, 1954), 73. 15 Lancaster, The Department Store, 85-93. 16 M.P. McNair and E.G. May, The American Department Store, 1920-1960 (Boston, 1963), especially 11-15; E.B. Weiss, Selling To and Through the New Department Store (New York, 1948), 1-10.

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that their stores were doing badly; rather, they were not doing well enough as long as they had to share the non-durable consumer market with variety and discount stores, while consumers spent an increasing proportion of their disposable income at car dealerships and appliance shops. In the post-war years, British and American department stores attempted to compete with chain stores on two fronts: price and service. Cohen and ZweinigerBargielowska have argued that the end of price administration in America in 1946, and the end of rationing and price controls in Britain in the mid-1950s fuelled dramatic increases in post-war consumption in both countries.17 The challenge for department stores was that much of the post-war increase in consumption stemmed from the pent-up demand of the middle and working classes, for whom store loyalties were increasingly determined by price, a factor on which the chain retailers arguably had the upper hand.18 Nevertheless, British and American department stores were determined to tap into the expanding consumer market by extending seasonal sales and widening their range of lower priced goods, a strategy that British department stores had deployed to good effect at the turn of the century.19 Despite their continued efforts to engage in price competition, department store managers believed that customer loyalties would continue to depend largely on the quality of the interaction between the sales assistant and the customer, and for good reason. Many surveys of American customer attitudes in the 1950s demonstrated that middle- and upper-class women - the backbone of department store merchandising - rated the quality of service received second only to merchandise assortment as an indicator of their own store loyalties.20 This was clear to Harrods’ 17 L. Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics o f Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York, 2003), 62-165; I. Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain: Rationing, Controls, and Consumption, 1939-1955 (Oxford, 2000), especially 11. For more on changes in consumption, see J. Benson, The Rise o f Consumer Society in Britain, 1880­ 1980 (London, 1994); G. Cross, An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modem America (New York, 2000). 18 On the changing nature of customer loyalties and the influence of price, see P. Lyon, A. Colquhoun and D. Kinney, ‘UK food shopping in the 1950s: the social context of customer loyalty’, International Journal o f Consumer Studies, 28, 2004, 28-39; ‘Big stores sharpening price weapon?’, Drapers’ Record, 29 March 1952, 70-71. 19 ‘Removal of the expensive look’, Drapers’ Record, 17 February 1951, 19; B. Judelle, ‘The changing customer, 1910-1960’, Stores, November 1960, 7-24. On the use of sales at the turn of the century, see C. Hosgood, ‘Mrs Pooter’s purchase: lower-middle-class consumerism and the sales, 1870-1914’, in A. Kidd and D. Nicholls, eds., Gender, Civic Culture and Consumerism: Middle-class Identity in Britain, 1800-1940 (Manchester, 1999), 146-63. 20 For example, ‘The department store through the customer’s eyes’, Department Store Economist, July 1956, 32-3, 60-61; ‘The department store through the customer’s eyes’,

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directors well before the end of price controls, when, in the face of competition from other stores, the H arrodian G azette advised staff that ‘Smiles are not rationed.’21 This theme recurred in the British trade press in the early 1950s. A small British retailer noted with chagrin in March 1952 that ‘One big change since 1939 was that there was no such thing as a completely loyal customer. Each shopper tended to seek to find what she wanted at the right price and to get the measure of service she required.’22 Only a few months later, at a Drapers’ Chamber of Trade school for budding retailers, the key speaker argued that: At [the] beginning of [the] century this country had [a] two-tier society of aristocracy and working-class. [The] First world war destroyed that pattern and substituted [a] three-tier society of the rich, middle-class and poor - itself destroyed since. 1939, until to-day there was emerging one vast middle-class, a great levelling up and proportionate levelling down [that] equalised the range of income and opportunity.23

In this context, the speaker maintained, ‘A wom an is n o t go in g to shop with you to ­ day ju s t because h er fa m ily has alw ays done so, o r even b ecause she h e rse lf has been satisfied in the past. If there is a good article in a chain store down the road at a more convenient price she will buy it.’ The solution: ‘Influence of personality on sales was incalculable, and managements must create atmosphere in which it could thrive.’24 This evidence suggests that British department stores and chain stores were in full competition for middle-class customer loyalties even before the end of rationing in the mid-1950s, and that department store managers had already identified service as the means for securing those loyalties. American department store retailers were quick to reach conclusions similar to those articulated by their British counterparts. In 1954 the general merchandise manager at Marshall Field’s - the American bastion of customer service contended that ‘What we have to sell is becoming less and less important - since our competitors can usually get the same goods. What is becoming more and more important is how w e sell, the w ay we treat o u r cu sto m ers.'25 As American department store profits declined precipitously in the late 1940s and early 1950s after inflated war-time highs, managers recognised that there was little room to engage in price competition. Department Store Economist, September 1956, 36-7, 60-61; ‘Public relations for retailers, part 5, “your feminine public” ’, Stores, July 1951, 40-41, 52. 21 ‘Smiles are not rationed’, Harrodian Gazette, 33, March 1948, inside cover. 22 ‘Big stores’, 71. 23 ‘DCT summer school: importance of better selling emphasised’, Drapers’ Record, 19 July 1952, 12-13. 24 ‘DCT summer school’, 12-13. Italics in original. 25 ‘Somebody special’, Field Glass, 13 September 1954, 2. Italics in original.

Figure 7.1

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Net profit for American department stores as percentage of net sales, 1920-1960. Source: M.P. McNair and E.G. May, The American Department Store, 1920-1960 (Boston 1963).

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