Rearming the RAF for the Second World War: Poor Strategy and Miscalculation

Abstract

has little patience for those who would hearken back to some ideal time “before buying and selling took over as a dominant part of most people’s lives. Life really was slower and simpler than it is today. But was also, for the great majority, much poorer in every sense” (8). Changes to the standard of living brought more choices, new conveniences and a range foods and fashions to the public. While she might describe the odd snobbish clerk or unpleasant interaction with a customer, for the most part Bowlby rejects a view of retailers as hard-hearted capitalists who exploit and manipulate the public. Instead, the shop is a community resource worth remembering and preserving. The flurry of brief chapters means that this work is perhaps more suitable for scholars and general readers interested in retail history, rather than the undergraduate classroom. Not surprisingly, given her disciplinary background, Bowlby draws mainly from literary sources, “narratives that have featured shop settings and scenes of shopping” (11). She has culled a broad range of examples, mostly focused on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Going beyond expected works like Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames, Bowlby is equally adept analyzing the pedlar Autolycus in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, the immediate connection between a patron and shop girl in a Patricia Highsmith novel, or the absence of the butcher shop in Pride and Prejudice. There are a few forays into the trade press and the occasional operational manual for a specific retailer which is deeply mined, but her use of archival materials is impressionistic rather than comprehensive. There is also relatively little engagement with secondary works on the history of retailing, consumption, or capitalism. Instead, the strength of this work is in creating surprising juxtapositions: an analysis of the complex negotiations involved as a privileged husband in Mrs. Dalloway attempts to buy a Spanish necklace for his wife shifts to a dissection of the failing fortunes of chain jeweler Ratner’s, whose owner disdainfully boasted of selling gold earrings that cost less than a prawn sandwich from Marks & Spencer (247). Bowlby’s musings are often original and thought-provoking. Her discussion of the counter, that key site of exchange in the shop, takes us from the flat surface holding cash registers, to the more ambiguous area under the counter where illicit or embarrassing goods might reside. She then shifts to consider communication between patrons and clerks across the counter, and finishes by examining how the term counter-jumper reflects the symbolic class distance imbued into a mere panel of wood in a store. In one of her clever turns of phrase, Bowlby describes the ‘corner shop’ as “nostalgic and old-fashioned, all nooks and grannies” (37). She is at her best exploring the language of shopping, and how old terminology can become new again. In an evocative passage exploring the experience of online shopping, Bowlby reflects on computer windows, website baskets and checkouts, and muses on how even the phrase ‘bricks and mortar’ makes actual physical shops seem not long for this world: “With no mention of windows, ‘bricks and mortar’ makes it sound as if they are boarded up already—as if to condemn them in advance” (264). This is a highly readable and often entertaining volume. One caveat would be the relative lack of diversity depicted in this story: Bowlby presents a largely white vision of British shops. There are a few references to empire, but mostly as a source of goods, not of shopkeepers or consumers. The index’s listing of immigrant shopkeepers directs the reader to Eastern Europeans, the Irish-born Thomas Lipton and American department store magnate Gordon Selfridge with only passing reference to Asian immigrants. While Bowlby deftly explores class variations in shopping experience, there is little mention of race. This no doubt reflects the nature of many of the published sources that Bowlby has amassed. Yet perhaps a bit more of an acknowledgement of the ways in which whiteness has informed nostalgia for the mythic high street of the past could help to create a new vision of shops for the future.