London Clerical Workers, 1880–1914

Development of the Labour Market

Michael Heller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317323709
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Economics

This study is based on a wide range of business sources as well as newspapers, journals, novels and oral history, allowing Heller to put forward a new interpretation of working conditions for London clerks, highlighting the ways in which clerical work changed and modernized over this period.

1 CHANGING WORLDS AND CHANGING PEOPLE: A DEFINITION OF THE LATE VICTORIAN AND EDWARDIAN LONDON CLERK

Four Clerks

‘Honour to whom honour is due’, announced the Clerk, journal of the National Union of Clerks, in August 1890, in relation to the death of Mr A. T. Philpott, for some years clerk to the St George’s School Board. In this role Philpott was responsible for elementary education in this London borough. Prior to this, he had been headmaster of the Russell Town British School in Bristol, a position in which he was said to have gained wide experience, and won the confidence and esteem of his brother elementary school teachers. He had also been a member of the Educational Council and had been recognized as an authority on elementary educational matters.¹

In 1900 in the East End of London, A. Wilkinson was working as an Abroad Clerk for Trumans Brewery. He earned in that year a salary of £850 a year and would retire in 1903 on a yearly pension of £600.² As can be inferred from his salary, an Abroad Clerk was a position of great prestige and responsibility in the British brewing industry at this time. Contrary to what one would expect, Wilkinson spent most of his time outside the office. Most public houses in this period were tied to a brewery from which they received their beverages. Abroad Clerks acted as the link between the breweries and these premises. They were the eyes and ears of the breweries, inspecting their properties, guarding against adulteration and fraud, making sure orders and payments were collected and negotiating orders and the weekly returns of unsold beer. They were, in effect, the outdoor representatives of the brewing houses and their importance was such, for example, that a proposal was made in Trumans in 1908 to provide each of them with a car and driver.³

In 1902, on his way to school, Sydney Moseley, aged fourteen, bumped into an old classmate who had already ‘gone out into the world’. Moseley was told by him that there was a vacancy as a clerk at the Counting House of Water-low & Sons in the City and was advised to give up school and take the job. On that very day he skipped school, had his mother cut down to size for him (from his brother) an impromptu pair of trousers and that very day started working for Waterlows, joining the army of the tens of thousands of City Commercial Clerks. Moseley started on a salary of eight shillings a week and initially was responsible for calling out rows of figures, requisitions for various numbered items, to a fellow clerk who checked them off. Though starting off with high hopes and some commitment, Moseley quickly came to tire of his office work and gradual yearly increments. He resigned from Waterlows in May 1909, and following a brief flirtation with selling life policies for the Equitable Insurance Company went on to a successful lifelong career in journalism.⁴

Finally, in 1915 Lieutenant G. H. Lewis died while fighting on the Western Front in France. He had been given command of a Company on 25 September of that year. Before the outbreak of war in August 1914 Lewis had worked as a clerk in the Titles Department at the Prudential Assurance Company in Holborn Bars, London, having been transferred from ‘L’ Claim in 1913. He had been working for the company since 1903 and in the year of his transfer was earning £135 a year. Lewis, while working for the Prudential, had gained his LL.B. degree in 1909, taking honours in English Law, Colonial Constitutional Law and Roman Law. In 1913 he joined Middle Temple and commenced studying for the Bar where he took honours in each of his examinations. It was said that if his career had not met with so untimely an end he would have undoubtedly attained his Doctorate.⁵

Four very different men with four very different stories. Yet they shared in common the fact that they were clerks in London between 1880 and 1914. Did, however, the term ‘clerk’ in these examples, and thousands others like them, refer to the same type of work? Was there some common denominator in this period which bound all clerks together in one occupational field, in the same way as there was for school teachers, for example? Additionally, if this was the case, how close was this signification, and conversely, how elastic should one be in its application?

This chapter aims to answer these questions. It will first argue that there were two very different uses of the term clerk, which though overlapping were mutually exclusive. One referred to a holder of office, the other to an individual who worked in an office. Having looked at this it will examine the later group in more detail. It will argue that increasingly in this period internal and dual labour market came to operate in the clerical market in London. On the one hand were well-paid clerks who carried out responsible and often skilled jobs which offered good prospects for advancement. On the other were much more routine positions, what were referred to as ‘mechanical’ jobs which carried with them lower salaries, status and chances of promotion. Following this it will look at how the economy and the employment market for clerical labour in London changed, paying particular attention to structural changes in the City of London, local and national government, and amalgamations in the service industries. In the latter half of the nineteenth century the City was transformed into a global centre of trade and finance, the State began to take on larger role in people’s lives, and across a swathe of the tertiary sector there were a number of amalgamations which produced an ever increasing number of large scale bureaucratic organizations. In all these areas the work of businesses and government institutions became more complex. As a consequence there was a growing demand for specialized workers, and at the same time, with the increase in volume of work in many of these institutions, a growing demand for routine office labour. It was, therefore, as a result of these structural changes in the economy and the labour market that internal and dual labour market emerged, an understanding of which is crucial to define clerks and clerical work in this period. The chapter will end with an examination of clerical work in the above three areas, paying particular attention to the specialization of clerical labour.

The Clerk Defined

In 1909 Edward A. Cope, a clerk himself, published his book, Clerks, Their Rights and Obligations.⁶ Noting that ‘The clerical career has a great past behind it: it is quite safe to say that it has a great future before it.’⁷, Cope, in his first chapter, proceeded to give a comprehensive historical survey of clerks in which he traced the various contemporary uses of the term. Cope discovered clerks as far back as ancient Assyria and Egypt. The term clerk itself originated in the middle ages, all writing and accounting work being carried out by the clergy or clerics of the Church.⁸

Gradually there came to be a differentiation between different classes of clerks. Some were officers of the church who were not required to be priests. Thus there developed a distinction between ‘clerks in holy orders’ and other kinds of clerks. Over time the position became more secular, progressively separating itself from the church,

… It came to be applied as the designation of the ‘officer who has charge of the records, correspondence, and accounts of any department, court, corporation, or society, and who superintends the general conduct of its business,’ which is one of the definitions given in the ‘New English Dictionary.’ We use the word extensively in this sense, as for example in the titles ‘Clerk of the Household,’ ‘Clerk of the Kitchen,’ ‘Clerk of the Crown’; and ‘Town Clerk …’⁹

Finally came the everyday use of the term, summed up in Dr Murray’s definition in the Chambers Dictionary as, ‘One employed in a subordinate position in a public or private office, shop or warehouse, to make written entries, keep accounts, make fair copies of documents, do the mechanical work of correspondence and similar clerky work.’¹⁰ Cope noted that although the final definition in the evolution of the term was by far the most commonly used, the other older definitions had not been ousted. There were still Clerks of Assize, Clerks of the Peace, and also Clerks in Holy Orders.

Clearly in the four clerks who introduced this chapter, Mr A. T. Philpott and A. Wilkinson were clerks in the office holder sense. Both had responsible positions, and would have been in charge of a large number of staff. A good example of this definition was The Clerk of the Peace, an office abolished in 1888 with the creation of County Councils. The Clerk, who can be seen as the link between the Crown and the Quarter Sessions in the counties throughout England and Wales, was the key legal county official before reform. He advised the sessions on issues of law and administration and kept its minutes. Throughout the year his responsibilities included drawing up indictments, lists of deeds and enclosure awards, and keeping records such as lists of poor law commissioners, candidates for posts of county officers and the decisions of arbitrations of corn rents. In addition to this, he was responsible for supplying copies to the public and correspondence in matters relating to the County and the Sessions. For performing these duties to the public he was entitled to a fee according to a fixed scale. With the abolition of the Quarter Sessions and the office his functions in the new County Councils went to the Clerk of the Council. The Clerk maintained his legal, administrative and advisory role and in addition became responsible for the ever growing personnel of the administration. He was by far the most senior officer.¹¹ In the capital, for example, following the abolition of the London County Council in 1965, he became the Director General of the new G.L.C.

It is with the other definition of clerk, an individual who held a subordinate position in an office, that this study is concerned. The term, however, was, and has remained, problematic. It was felt that it was not elastic enough to cover the panoply of uses to which it was applied. As the magazine, the Office, commented in October 1889, ‘… ‘clerk’ is a general term admitting of no precise definition’.¹² Having noted that the term had become completely revolutionized in meaning, the article commented that to some the word meant anyone employed in an office in any capacity apart from the manager, while to others the cashier, bookkeeper, stenographer and anyone not doing work of a purely routine nature would also be excluded. It was, in the opinion of the article, this failure to come to a precise definition that made the creation of a general clerical union impossible. To make matters worse, as the term was felt to have a pejorative undertone, many people who were working in a clerical capacity refused to apply the term to themselves.

The Office adopted the latter definition given above, and not wishing to upset the sensibilities of its readers preferred to use the phrase ‘office workers’. In many respects, however, this definition was too exclusive. The nomenclature ‘clerk’ continued to be used throughout this period, and indeed up to the Second World War and beyond to refer to office workers encompassing virtually all grades of work both skilled and unskilled. The New Survey of London Life and Labour in 1934, for example, stated, ‘The term “clerk” is applied to persons engaged in a large number of heterogeneous occupations of very different character and grade, the only common feature being that they work at a desk in an office.’¹³ One important caveat that the above work in its chapter on clerical work contributed to a definition was that, ‘ … clerical work … is not an industry in itself, but an occupation or service common to a large number of industries, and generally speaking it may be distinguished from other commercial occupations by the fact that its technique is essentially concerned with methods of recording and accounting rather than with the nature of the transactions to which the records and accounts relate’.¹⁴

Although it was frequently pointed out that what precluded any precise definition of the term clerk was the numerous industries and services they were spread across, it should be remembered that the work being carried out in all these areas was for many essentially the same; recording, accounting, registering, retrieving and corresponding. The London clerk Arthur Whitlock, for example, during his fifty-one years of clerking applied many of these clerical skills in the Army and Navy stores, marine insurance, the War Office, the Hearts of Oak Benefit Society and the National Insurance Board.¹⁵

The Dual Labour Market

The Office did, however, have a point. There had been a revolution in clerical work. It was a change which explains the differences between G. H. Lewis and Sydney Moseley. Lewis worked in the Titles Department of the Prudential, a position which required legal training and specialized knowledge. If he had survived the war he would, undoubtedly, have progressed well in the company. Sydney Moseley’s work on the other hand was less specialized. Although by the time he left Waterlow’s in 1909, after nearly seven years service, he was doing some accountancy work and paying out wages, his work was still of a fairly routine nature. ‘Oh! How hard it is to get on!’ lamented Moseley in May, 1905, ‘Sometimes I feel as if I can stand it no longer and go along recklessly. Piles and piles of Requisitions – dreary, rotten REQUISITIONS; just calling out numbers endlessly – ‘4–5: 12–250’ – and so on.’¹⁶

By the 1870s, internal labour markets appeared in mid- to large scale employers of clerks in London.¹⁷ These internal markets offered lifelong employment, career structures and welfare benefits in return for loyalty, hard work and commitment. Internal labour markets will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter in the context of company welfare programmes and the evolution of the office career. For the purposes of this chapter it is important to note that in many of these markets a two-tier system emerged in clerical work. On the one hand were clerks whose work tended to be of a more specialized order, who were usually better educated and came from higher social backgrounds. These earned relatively high salaries and had good promotional prospects throughout their careers. On the other hand, there were clerks whose work was much more routine and demanded less specialization and skill. They were accordingly less well paid, had fewer prospects and were recruited usually from a lower social class.¹⁸ Many of these individuals, as in the case of the Great Western Railway (GWR), were youths or ‘Junior Clerks’.¹⁹ While this two-tier or dual labour clerical labour market was primarily structured by skill and to a lesser extent age throughout the period of this study and beyond, it increasingly became gendered. This is perhaps one of the key developments in the history of the office. As Samuel Cohn and Ellen Jordan have argued, from the 1870s onwards, women were increasingly used in offices for secondary clerical work. Their higher education, the relatively higher social status of applicants, their cheapness and most importantly, their readiness to work for relatively short periods of time, made them ideal for employers for this type of labour.²⁰ This will be discussed in greater depth in Chapter 5.

One of the best examples of a dual labour market can be seen in the Civil Service. As far back as 1855 the Northcote-Trevelyan Report had recommended a division of labour in the civil service based on those who carried out intellectual tasks and those concerned with more mechanical work. The Playfair Commission in 1875 also spoke of the need of, ‘… making a distinction between those classes of clerks who do the higher and more responsible work, and those who do the inferior work.’²¹ As a result of its recommendations an Order in Council of 12 February, 1876, established the Lower Division (subsequently the Second Division in 1890) and, perhaps emulating the GWR, a class of boy clerks. Thus four classes were established; Administrative Officers and Higher Division Officers who were responsible ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Tables
• Introduction
• 1 Changing Worlds and Changing People: A Definition of the Late Victorian and Edwardian London Clerk
• 2 The Clerk, the Office and Work: Changing Horizons
• 3 Attitudes of the Clerk towards Work
• 4 Work, Income, Promotion and Stability: The Late Victorian and Edwardian London Clerk Revisited
• 5 The Mechanization and Feminization of the Office, 1870–1914: Threats or Opportunities?
• 6 Education, Merit and Patronage: The London Clerical Market
• 7 Commercial Education and the Clerk
• 8 Clerical Trade Unions, Associations and Collective Organizations
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index