• Programme  
• Abstracts

13.00 - 14.00 Room MC418
Welcome and Lunch

14.00 - 14.30 Barbara Caddick, University of Wolverhampton
Consuming 'home' in the imagination
Abstract

14.45 - 15.15 Alison Toplis, University of Wolverhampton
From public whipping to transportation: evidence for clothing acquisition form Worcestershire Quarter Session Records
Abstract

15.15 - 15.45 Coffee

15.45 - 16.15 Judy Faraday, John Lewis Partnership and University of Wolverhapton
'The greenhorns of Sloane Square': the Peter Jones recruitment campaign, 1918-1929
Abstract

16.30 - 17.00 Deepika Ahlawat, V&A, RCA
Empires of glass
Abstract

Deepika Ahlawat, V&A, RCA
Empires of glass
E-mail: deepika.ahlawat@alumni.rca.ac.uk

My paper will be based on my ongoing research, which traces the business history of the Birmingham-based firm of F. and C. Osler in India. Though primarily makers of lighting equipment, Osler were best known for their monumental glass furniture. I attempt to trace their influence on the percolation of European luxury-goods into nineteenth-century India, and how commissions from Indian rulers were also subtle symbols of the patrons' (changing) political and ideological alliances. Explorig how, through commissioning Osler for the redecoration of their palaces, the Indian kings were allowing also an encroachment of foreign taste into their lands, and consequently, the propagation of this material culture as an ideal across the country, I will trace how this phenomenon, perhaps more than military might, was what colonised India for Britain. In this paper, however, I will attempt to talk about the firm's showrooms in Calcutta, which opened in the 1840s, and where many custom-made goods were displayed for the local aristocracy and British expatriates. These showrooms mark an interesting amalgamation of the 'native' and British style of doing business in India.

Opportunities to consume images of the household were present and accessible to the housewife of the middling sort in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This opportunity appeared in a variety of forms; for example sales catalogues, advice manuals, and shop displays. Produced with their own specific aims they also provided a chance for the reader to consume aspects of ‘home’ in the mind. The intention is to analyse a selection of these sources exploring the potential ways home could have been consumed in the mind of the housewife. The paper is based on research for "The material culture of the household: Consumption and domestic economy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries" and encapsulates the methodology and challenges of the thesis.

This paper will concentrate on the introduction of specific recruitment strategies undertaken by the John Lewis Partnership, initially at its London store, Peter Jones. These strategies were aimed at encouraging middle class recruits into department store managerial positions in the decade following World War One. They represent the first moves by the Company to undertake a more targeted strategy which involved the selection, recruitment and training of middle class women. The retail economy, the growth of the Company and the methods used to achieve this will be discussed using material from the Partnership's archive and will include entries from the house magazine and internal memoranda. The study involves a multi disciplinary approach which crosses between business, retail and gender studies, with the requirements of the business reflecting the chnaging nature of retail managerial styles and attitudes. It will be developed in further work which will look at the job opportunities which were created for the recruits and how they were perceived by their peers, the management and the women themselves. 

This paper will examine the evidence for the acquisition of clothing contained within the Worcestershire Quarter Session Records for the period 1800-1850. Although focussing on illegal methods of obtaining clothing, secondary evidence about shopkeepers, new and second-hand, also emerges as well as information about pedlars and hawkers. The paper will summarise this evidence, puttin it into context with other local contemporary sources and the legal framework for the first half of the nineteenth century. It will show that clothing theft was widely prevalent due to the value of clothing and its subsequent use almost as a currency. Clothing acquisition can be seen to be operating on several levels through the evidence of the Quarter Session Records. However, there appears to be a marked change in the level and value of clothing thefts by the mid nineteenth century.