Zweig also talked to employers, among whom there were ‘many good-natured men’ determined to treat business and morality as separate spheres. ‘You know business isn’t charity or a club,’ an employer in an engineering firm told him. ‘It’s fatal to be sentimental in your work.’7.
Even so, for all the intensification of the work process since the late nineteenth century, the cumulative evidence is that there still prevailed in Britain circa 1950 a considerable amount of what over half a century later seems like very old-fashioned paternalism – a paternalism that, in the employer/employee relationship, transcended the cash nexus. The full-employment context of the post-war economy clearly made a difference, in the sense that labour became a far more precious commodity than it had been during much of the inter-war period, but that alone is not sufficient explanation for what were often historically very entrenched attitudes on the part of employers and management.
Take the big high-street clearing banks. The work was often tedious and repetitive, the pay nothing special (at least in middle-class terms), but the sense of security was overwhelmingly reassuring. ‘You had a job for life, you got paid a little more each year, and the bank looked after you in all sorts of ways, through its concern for your well-being, your family, your finances and your social position,’ notes the historian of that ritualised, self-enclosed world. ‘Each employee was docked 2½ per cent of his salary for the widows and orphans fund. The only way you could be fired was by putting your hand in the till.’ In many (though far from all) of the much smaller firms that made up the City of London, the spirit was somewhat similar, if more intimate. When a 16-year-old called Godfrey Chandler joined the stockbroking firm of Cazenove, Akroyds & Greenwood & Co during the war, he warmed from the start to the family atmosphere and could not help but think of the Cheeryble brothers in Nicholas Nickleby. At Cazenove’s as elsewhere, much depended on the office manager: it was a given that he was an autocrat, the question was whether or not he was a benevolent one.
In industry at large the classic paternalist firm was the soap and detergent manufacturer Lever Brothers, the nineteenth-century creation at Port Sunlight near Liverpool of William Lever, the first Lord Leverhulme. Housing, leisure, health, retirement – all were directly taken care of by the company, which unflaggingly stressed that employers and employees alike comprised one large family. In 1953 more than a third of its 8,389 workforce had served for 15 years or more, with almost a thousand having been there for 30 years or more. Three years earlier, when Port Sunlight News featured seven men who had completed more than 40 years’ service, the accompanying article hailed them as exemplars and noted proudly that they had grown up in the ‘Lever tradition’ of ‘enlightened industrial outlook’. By this time, indeed, the 10,000th gold watch had already been handed out. Yet there were limits to the family spirit: in the model village (where nonmembers of staff could not buy houses until the late 1970s) there operated strict residential segregation between workers and senior managers.
It was similarly not quite all roses at another arch-paternalist firm, the well-known machine-tool manufacturers Alfred Herbert Ltd. The founder and, right up to his death, dominant figure was Sir Alfred Herbert (1866–1957), whose approach is perhaps best described as an authoritarian and strictly hierarchical benevolence, offering moral as much as material guidance. Discipline was everything; workers knew that there would be no seasonal lay-offs; and the prevailing parsimony, for all the pioneering welfare provision (including sports and social facilities), was positively Gladstonian. That in essence was the ‘deal’ Sir Alfred offered – and during his lifetime many skilled workers in Coventry were glad enough to accept it. Or take the paternalism of the aggressively anti-nationalisation Tate & Lyle. For all those connected with its sugar refinery at Plaistow Wharf, the biggest in the world, there was a weekly treat at the social club. ‘It was known as the Tate & Lyle Saturday night out,’ recalled one worker, Ron Linford. ‘It was really great. All the family would go including the kids. First thing we used to do was to make sure we had our seats right alongside the bar, so that we didn’t have too far to carry the drinks. There was cabaret, fancy dress with prizes for the children, dancing to the band, spot waltzes and comedians doing turns.’8.
In almost any manufacturing firm run along more or less paternalist lines, there was the annual ritual of the works outing – perhaps to one of the National Parks (such as in the Peak District) created by the government in 1949 but more often to the seaside. ‘Rewarded for Their Labours’ was how in July 1948 the Merthyr Express reported 310 employees of Hoover being ‘treated to an outing to Weston-super-Mare’ by the company the previous Sunday, including lunch and high tea at the Grand Pier Restaurant. ‘The whole cost of the outing was borne by the company in recognition of the whole-hearted co-operation of all the workers within the organisation. Mr A. R. Northover, works manager, accompanied the party, which made the journey by coach and boat.’ The imaginative importance of these factory outings, comparable to that of the Christmas office party in a later, more white-collar era, was nicely reflected in a Max Miller joke. The foreman asks four pregnant women at their sewing machines when their babies are expected. ‘Mine’s due in May,’ replies the first, ‘hers is also due in May, and so is hers.’ ‘What about the other girl?’ asks the foreman. ‘Oh, I don’t know about her. She wasn’t on the charabanc trip.’
The more prosaic reality is probably caught in Valerie Gisborn’s account of her first factory outing, in 1950, as a 16-year-old working in a Leicester clothing factory. The coaches, each with a supervisor, left at 7.00 a.m. and just over four hours later pulled up along the seafront at the inevitable Skegness:
It was fine and windy but we made the best of it doing exactly what we pleased. We had many laughs and purchased silly ‘Kiss me quick’ hats. The fairground was a big attraction and we spent a couple of hours there trying to win something or other on the darts and shooting ranges. A couple of the young girls made themselves sick by having too many rides on a whiplash merry go round . . .
Everybody turned up for the coaches at 7 pm and, when the check-in was completed to ensure no one had been left behind, the coaches set off back to Leicester. Halfway home the coaches separated, each one taking a different route to a selected public house so that we could all have a drink. We stopped for one hour, and as I did not drink in pubs a girlfriend and I walked around the village, purchased some chips and a drink from the local fish and chip shop, and returned to wait for the others in the coach. Later as we drove towards Leicester the coaches caught up with each other and we all arrived back outside the factory about midnight.
‘The day out was the talk of the firm for days,’ she added, ‘and the manager, Mr Pell, organised a letter on behalf of everyone to say thank you to the boss.’9.
For women as a whole, the range of available jobs may have expanded during the first half of the century, but the work they actually did was still largely gender-determined. The figures are stark: 88 per cent of women working for wages in 1901 had been in occupations dominated by women; by 1951 the proportion was virtually unchanged at 86 per cent. Teachers, nurses, clerical workers, cleaners, waitresses, shop assistants, barmaids, textile-factory hands – these were typical female members of the workforce, with often not a man in sight, at least at a non-supervisory level. Most of that work, pending greater employer flexibility, was full-time: of the female workforce of just over 6 million in 1951, only 832,000 worked fewer than 30 hours per week.
Whether full-time or part-time, women seldom enjoyed other than lowly status in their jobs. In banks and building societies, for example, female clerical workers were largely confined to the ‘back office’, with many managers and customers unable to countenance lady cashiers before the 1960s. Moreover, although the ‘marriage bar’ (the policy of not employing married women) was gradually being lifted – from teaching in 1944, from the Civil Service in 1946, from the Bank of England in 1949 but still in place at Barclays Bank until 1961 – ther
e was still the crucial question of pay. Here the gender differential was undeniably narrowing, with the hourly earnings of women increasing by 163 per cent between 1938 and 1950, compared with 122 per cent for men. But it was still huge. If one takes the last pay week of October 1950 in all manufacturing industries, the average earnings of women (over 18) compared with the earnings of men (over 21) amounted to about 53 per cent. In the 1950s as a whole, full-time female workers earned only 51 per cent of the average weekly pay of male workers. It was not so much a pay gap as a pay chasm.10
At a national policy level, the official desire by 1946/7 to see women back in the workforce (following their return home at the end of the war) was readily understandable in the context of the prevailing labour shortage, but, among other things, it ran up against an equally prevailing anxiety that the war and its immediate aftermath had done significant damage to the social fabric, which would be more readily repaired if women stayed in their traditional homemaking capacity. The outcome, predictably, was only modified encouragement – and certainly no dangling of the carrot of equal pay or anything like it. A particularly influential economist, Roy Harrod, emphasised to the Royal Commission on Equal Pay how important it was ‘to secure that motherhood as a vocation is not too unattractive compared with work in the professions, industry or trade’. Even Bloomsbury’s finest (and Harrod’s hero), the liberal-minded John Maynard Keynes, was no crusader for equal opportunities. ‘A world in which young married women spend eight or nine hours a day away from home doing office work when their husbands are doing alike, seems a gloomy one’ was his view of the Bank of England’s prospective removal of its marriage bar.
Amidst progressive opinion generally, there existed a distinct tendency to esteem hard, sweaty – and almost invariably male – labour above ‘softer’ forms of work, with inevitable implications for pay as well as status. The biography of Jennie Lee, Aneurin Bevan’s equally left-wing wife, records a classic exchange (probably in the early 1950s) between her and another, rather younger, female Labour MP, Barbara Castle. ‘Barbara,’ said Lee, ‘we cannot ask for equal pay when miners’ wages are so low.’ In that case, replied the red-haired one, ‘we will wait for ever’. The weight of opinion – indeed of sentiment – remained with Lee. So, too, in the unprogressive middle-class world at large, where for a long time it remained a distinguishing mark of a man’s assured position in his class if his wife was able to be at home – which obviously could be shown only by actually being at home. On the radio, in films, in women’s magazines, femininity was almost exclusively identified with the home and the nurturing of children. For those women who sought to identify themselves through their careers, there was pity more than admiration. ‘Business Girls’, one of the most haunting poems in John Betjeman’s A Few Late Chrysanthemums (1954), is an evocation of ‘poor unbelov’d’ businesswomen living in Camden Town and having a precious if lonely bathroom soak before ‘All too soon the tiny breakfast, / Trolley-bus and windy street!’11
Within the workplace the male attitude to upward female mobility was almost universally discouraging. ‘Such women are the first to agree that they do not represent the general aspirations of their sex’ was how Midbank Chronicle, Midland Bank’s staff magazine, put it in 1949. ‘They have not the least desire to impose conditions that would be suitable to themselves upon the great majority for whom the same conditions would be entirely unsuitable.’ Barely half the pay, fewer perks (such as cheap mortgages), inferior pension rights – all were inherent, and duly played out, in the logic of that argument. Unsurprisingly, women working for the big high-street banks were seldom encouraged to take the exams of the Institute of Bankers and thereby achieve promotion. There was no doubt an element of fear involved – that if women advanced in numbers, they might start to threaten men’s automatic position as chief breadwinners – but the male assumption of superiority in the workplace was also a deeply entrenched cultural norm. Listen to the voice of Frank Pound, who in the late 1940s worked in the toolroom at the Mullard Valve Company in south London. He was asked in the 1990s whether there had been women attached to the toolroom, traditionally the preserve of the skilled male elite:
They had a little department, they called it the cow-shed, and the girls was in there doing turning, very simple engineering, which we hardly ever spoke to. You know, we occasionally saw them . . .
And these women would not have had an apprenticeship?
Oh, no, no, no, they were, I believe they called them trainee workers, and they were trained during the war, I take it, to help people get things done in the war, you see.
The implications were clear. Women might have penetrated the toolroom during the exigencies of war, but their presence was no longer acceptable; there was no question of their receiving apprenticeships and thus becoming full toolmakers, and management and the male toolmakers between them would soon ensure that women were wholly excluded from the citadel. In short, it was back to the cow-shed.
Yet the fact is that in her oral history of Mullards, together with similar light-industry firms in south London, Sue Bruley has found ‘no signs that women resisted the pressures to reinforce strict occupational segregation’. Furthermore, ‘the only signs of unrest among the women in these years [1920–60] was over piece rates’, though ‘there is little evidence that dissatisfaction over pay rates spilled over into serious unrest’. Much turned, presumably, on the expectations of working women, as well as the extent to which they looked to their job as the central source of their identity. And certainly the Social Survey’s study Women and Industry, based on 1947 fieldwork, made it abundantly clear that in the eyes of most women (working and otherwise) it was wrong to combine work and marriage, with work having to be second best unless that was financially impossible.12
This finding would not have amazed Pearl Jephcott. Through both her sociological fieldwork and her involvement in the girls’ club movement in London, she had a thorough understanding of how young women entering the labour market saw work in the broad scheme of things. In Rising Twenty, her 1948 study of just over a hundred girls living in three parts of England (‘a pit village in County Durham; a cluster of decaying and blitzed streets within a mile of Piccadilly Circus; and a northern industrial town [Barrow?] notable for its armaments and shipbuilding’), she set out her stall in a chapter called ‘The Dominant Interest’:
Practically every girl says that she will want to give up her job when she gets married, and expects her career to continue for another five years at most . . . Those who consider that they might stay on at work give as their reason not a belief in the value of their job, nor even personal independence, but ‘only if my husband’s pay weren’t enough’ or ‘if we need to get a good home together’. No one feels her job to be so important either for other people or in her own life that she ought to continue with it.
‘Generations of tradition lie behind this outlook,’ emphasised Jephcott. And she added that ‘for the last 65 years, almost since the weddings of these girls’ great-grandmothers, there has been no appreciable change (apart from the war periods) in the proportion of women of 15 to 45 who do go out to work’.
Jephcott’s findings were particularly relevant given the youthful profile of the female workforce – an age analysis in July 1948 revealed that 57 per cent were 30 or under, compared with 37 per cent of the male workforce. But for a vivid picture of the female workforce as a whole, one turns to the tireless Zweig, whose Women’s Life and Labour (1952) was based on well over 400 interviews, mainly in the late 1940s. He visited ‘cotton and silk mills, engineering factories, potteries, woollen mills and finishing-up trades, shops, canteens, hospitals, glove and hat and shoe factories, printing offices and paper-sorting departments in Lancashire, Cheshire, Staffordshire, Yorkshire and London’, comprising 46 workplaces in all.
There he found a predominantly unskilled workforce in which ‘a strong preference for a concrete job of a specific nature’ was voiced ‘only infrequently’. A pronouncement like ‘
I was always interested in telephones, so I took a job as a telephonist’ was ‘rarely heard’. Instead, the ‘one outstanding preference’ was more often than not expressed in the assertion: ‘This is a clean job.’ And Zweig commented:
The social prestige of jobs is primarily based on the cleanliness and tidiness of the jobs performed, as it has been tacitly assumed that like attracts like, the clean and tidy girls being on clean jobs. The low prestige of mill girls is basically caused by the fluff and dust of the cotton mill . . . The cardroom tenters, who collect the highest share of fluff and dust, enjoy the lowest prestige, the spinners forming the middle and the weavers the upper class.
Many women also preferred what they called ‘a light job’ – interpreted by Zweig to mean light not only physically but also mentally. ‘Maybe they have enough bother and worry of their own,’ a supervisor explained to him about the general disinclination to stick at jobs requiring a significant degree of concentration or thought. ‘When an easy job comes along I have to split it and let it go round.’ There was, argued Zweig, an essentially different mindset involved:
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