6

EIGHT YEARS OF CO-OPERATIVE

SHIRTMAKING.

SOMEWHERE about December, 1874, the attention of the present writer was attracted by a short paragraph in the Echo, giving an account of a public meeting attended by working women, who made speeches and passed resolutions advocating the formation of a trade union for the women employed in bookbinding. This was remarkable, not to say epoch-making. The 'intelligent workingman' is an old friend-was it possible that some one had discovered the intelligent working-woman'? This and nothing less proved to be the purport of the newspaper report. Under the inspiration of Mrs. Paterson,1 not only the bookbinders, but upholsteresses, shirtmakers, dressmakers, sewing machinists, tailoresses, and others, were successively invited and encouraged to form themselves into societies having the same objects as the trade unions of workmen, which had only been fully legalised three years before. And for the first time, at the Trades Congress held at Glasgow in 1875, bonâ fide trade unions of women were represented in the industrial parliament by women delegates, who still remember with pleasure the fraternal welcome accorded them.

Then and subsequently interesting and instructive conferences were held in different places with ladies of the above-named trades, as well as with hatmakers, umbrella-makers, nailmakers, staymakers, laundresses, and others. But space forbids us to dwell on these, which have no direct bearing upon the experiment in cooperative shirtmaking which grew out of the third women's union, established in that trade, at a public meeting held on the 1st of July, 1875, by the kindness of a clerical friend, in St. Martin's Schoolroom near Covent Garden. As it happened, public opinion had just been scandalised by two police cases, from which it had appeared that shirts were made at such prices as d. and 14d. a piece; and it was almost a matter of course that no meeting of shirtmakers would pass without allusions to, or quotations from, the Song

Then, and still, honorary secretary of the Women's Protective and Provident League (36 Great Queen Street, W.C.), a society for promoting the formation of independent self-supporting trade and benefit associations of women.

of the Shirt. But these allusions, it was soon seen, were not regarded with unmixed favour. The plainly dressed, mostly middle-aged, somewhat hard-featured, ready-witted, and on the whole eminently respectable' looking women present, were clearly not of a class to feel flattered by allusions to 'poverty, hunger, and dirt,' as the normal conditions of their existence.

It is a well-known fact that the audience at a public meeting has nearly as much hand in the speeches made as the orators themselves, who can rarely resist the temptation to develope most fully the sentiments which elicit the most intelligent applause. The audience may be wrong, and in that case the orator is led astray; but when well-meaning amateurs undertake to represent the interests of the working classes, a little wholesome docility among the speakers has its advantages. The women present were not starving slop-workers, but they responded heartily to the suggestion that organisation must begin in the best paid part of the trade, in which, moreover, wages and prices were always tending to go down owing to the competition of the cheap slop-work. Somewhat to our surprise, they also gave a warm welcome to the suggestion that if shirts had to be made at a price which would not afford a subsistence both for the maker and the dealer, the makers must co-operate and do away with the dealer.

Another point upon which light was thrown by the conversational remarks of the audience was the inequality of the wages paid for substantially similar work in the West End itself. A respectable Piccadilly hosier, keeping a workroom of his own, will pay the women he employs as good wages as women of the same class can earn at any other trade. But competition is keen even among the arbiters of fashion, with whom extravagant youth delights to clothe itself on 'tick;' rents are high in the angle between Regent Street and Piccadilly where these arbiters do mostly congregate; and in the hands of a respectable tradesman who is accustomed to pay fair wages, and to spend money when necessary on his drains, a workroom does not pay. The cost of keeping up the room,' distributed over the few thousand shirts per annum made in it, represents a charge per dozen for the making alone considerably higher than the price at which a professional shirtmaker, contractor, or middle man will offer to manufacture shirts for the trade. These shirtmakers or sweaters are sometimes ex-shopmen or shirt-cutters, sometimes women of the lower middle class with a turn for managing and driving; they live mostly in Soho or similar neighbourhoods, and take in work from several shops at a time. Their expenses for rent may of course be legitimately lower than those of the hosiers; but to realise a commercial profit out of less than the bare cost of production in the comparatively scrupulous hands of the shopkeeper, the middle man is obviously compelled to bring all his expenses down to the lowest possible limit; to pack his workpeople in one or two rooms of a

crowded house, with drainage and water-supply adapted to the requirements of one family fifty years ago; to pay them low wages for long hours when work is abundant; and to turn them on the streets the moment it is 'slack.'

6

All this was set forth with much vivacity and graphic detail in the picturesque language of which London shirtmakers have a great command. Our suggestion of a co-operative workshop, where the shirtmakers should be their own employers, and divide amongst themselves the whole price paid by the hosier to the contractor, was not allowed to drop. We were pressed to say how it was to be carried out one and another said she would like to join if it could be carried out; and as each discussion left the ladies of the trade more hopefully interested in the project, it left the rash reformers, who were not (yet) of the trade more nearly pledged to realise the hopes they had helped to raise. Moreover, we had other theories as to the employment of women, which made the vision of a co-operative workshop seductive. Idleness is the mother of misery and megrims, but not all women can go to Girton or make books, and we maintained that the true solution of the problem what to do with our girls' lay in an affirmative answer to good Bishop Berkeley's query, whether it is not to be wished that the finding of employment for themselves and others were a fashionable distinction among the ladies.' Why should not the labours of women in all feminine arts be directed by humane and intelligent persons of their own sex, instead of being abandoned to the lowest class of speculators, of which the worst-paid work seems always doomed to maintain the greatest number? Why, again, if a score of such speculators can make a living for themselves out of the labour of two or three hundred women, could not one staff of civilised managers be maintained at a less cost out of the same labour, so as to leave a margin available for raising the workers' wages? We knew that attempts had been made by Miss Barlee and others to establish workrooms for the unemployed, where government contracts could be taken, and the prices for the coarsest work given unreduced to the workers. But these were mostly charitable expedients, presupposing gratuitous management and a subscription list, and intended rather to mitigate temporary distress than to grapple with its chronic causes. Our dream was of a strictly self-supporting clothes-making factory, where women should do all the work, and divide the profits among them.

The shirtmakers had no money in hand, but they were willing to back their opinions to the extent of throwing up their present situations to join the Co-operative Society, if any of their friends would provide rooms, sewing-machines, and work for them; and in the face of this call it seemed that to refuse our own co-operation would be to earn a place with him

So the eponym of the firm and its present biographer were united in the bonds of lawful partnership, and as the word 'co-operative' stinks in the nostrils of every shopkeeper, the name of Hamilton & Co.' was allowed to shine upon a brass plate on the door of 68 Dean Street, Soho. Commerce, indeed, is considered infra dig. in certain circles, but for a young lady to take an interest in the poor shirtmakers' was quite right and unexceptionable, and susceptible friends were easily satisfied that the brass plate was to be regarded as an emblem of social reform. Should we be equally successful in persuading hosiers and drapers to regard it as the sign of a real and competent shirtmaker?

For the encouragement of those who may wish to follow in our wake, it should be explained that our ignorance of the nature of 'business' in general and the manufacture of shirts in particular was absolute and complete. We endeavoured to improve our minds by taking in the Warehouseman and Draper's Journal; we studied the Sewing Machine Gazette; we were filled with envy of the educational advantages enjoyed by tailors, who have classes where the scientific mysteries of their craft are unveiled to students; we gazed at every shop window decorated with the garment on which our minds were set; we purchased for private contemplation and analysis a selection of, so to speak, 'representative shirts' of all grades of distinction. We welcomed the adhesion of a young lady who shared our opinions, and had had some experience in keeping her father's 'books;' and we were truly grateful when Mr. Samuel Morley introduced us to the chief of the shirt department in Wood Street, a personage of far too much importance for us to have aspired to the honour of his acquaintance without such potent intercession. Much midnight oil' was burnt as the shirtmakers, after their day's work, met to confer with us as to the time and place of beginning operations, the manufacture of a specimen shirt, and the composition of our original staff; and as our first sewing-machine drove cumbrously to our meeting-place on the top of a four-wheeler,' the historically-minded amongst us wondered whether, in days to come, that cabload would rank in the annals of co-operation with the wheelbarrow in which the Rochdale pioneers trundled their whole stock-in-trade down Toad Lane in 1844.

Our real experience of life as a shirtmaker began with the search for rooms. Landlords and house-agents looked at us dubiously as we explained, in the most matter-of-fact tone we could command, that we required premises for business purposes,' and alluded, with a would-be practical air, to the importance of light and ventilation for a 'workshop.' We began our quest in what appeared superficially the most desirable streets, and, as we descended gradually in the social scale, we found that we might have been accepted had we wanted a studio, or a school, or even a milliner's shop, but as shirtmakers we must betake ourselves to humbler and more expensive quarters. As

idle amateurs, we could get a good house in a quiet street for 80%., together with all the deferential civility due to highly desirable tenants.' As working shirtmakers, after refreshing our radicalism with a glimpse of 'th' oppressor's scorn, the proud man's contumely,' we were fortunate in securing half a house for 90l., under a landlord whose exceptional amenity explained itself afterwards when we learned that he was an admirer of George Eliot's works.

It should not be forgotten, when we are referred to private enterprise and the natural action of supply and demand to provide decent homes for the working classes, that the congestion of population and the rise of rents in certain districts are fostered and aggravated by the refusal of large landowners to let this natural action of supply and demand take its course upon their own estates. The rents of tenement houses and places of business are abnormally high, say in St. Giles's, because the ground landlord of the adjoining estate prefers to let his houses at a lower rental for residential purposes, so that the tide of population cannot find its level over the whole area, but is dammed up into the slums. The great proprietor may be able to boast that there are no rookeries on his property, but his neighbours pay for this immunity, which is secured by driving off the rooks as country parishes used to guard themselves against giving house-room to potential paupers.

After the question of workrooms came that of workers. We learned that there go to the scientific construction of shirts two sewingmachines by different makers, a shirt-cutter, a preparer of collars and wristbands, known as a 'tacker and turner,' a buttonhole-maker, a shirtmaker proper, otherwise called a 'topper,' a front-maker, a plainworker, also a little girl to sew on buttons and 'go to shop' (sc. to fetch work); and unless one of the former functionaries combines the 'giving out the work' with her own department, this will employ a separate forewoman. It is by no means an easy task so to deal round the different jobs of work that the different stages shall keep pace and no time be lost while one part is waiting for another; but without this division of labour it would be impossible to make a shirt in a couple of hours, or two dozen in a day, as may have to be done on an emergency.

Of course we ought to have known beforehand exactly how few hands would suffice to do all the work in the best way, and how much work would be necessary to keep them fully employed; and we ought also to have had orders enough in hand to begin with to last for two or three weeks, instead of less than as many days. The initial losses of the co-operators were due to the fact that none of these conditions were complied with; the staff of workers at weekly wages employed at starting was much larger than the work would warrant. On the other hand, but for this overstaffing the infant firm would not have been able to turn out the best work from the first; so that the evil VOL. XV.-No. 88. 3 Y