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Abstract
This article uses five images selected from the Stationery Office and the Treasury to anchor a discussion of copying technologies in office processes in the British Civil Service between circa 1919 and 1947. The first section situates the photographs within a specific history of the use of copying technologies within administrative offices based on reading the images in concert with the surviving textual records of these departments. The second section views the photographs as visual symbols of the feminization of clerical work during this time period, a view informed by reading the images in conjunction with the literature exploring the ‘white blouse’ revolution and the proletarianization of typing work.
Notes
[1] TNA: PRO T1, 7143B, ‘Civil Service Commission Temporary Writers’. 1871. T1, 17041, ‘Civil Service Commission Establishment’. 1879. T1, 17942, ‘Copying Staff’. 1890.
[2] T1, 8613B, ‘Abstractors, copyists, and Typists’. 1891 especially 17576 26 December 1891 and 14823 27 October 1891. T1, 12310, ‘Office Machinery Inspectorate’. 1919. Also see TNA: PRO Stat 12, 19/2 ‘Proposed employment of traveling inspectors, to reduce careless use of typewriters, waste of paper, etc. in the various government departments. 1916–1918.’ The introduction of machines into offices of the British Civil Service is discussed in B. Craig, ‘The Introduction of Copying Devices into the British Civil Service, 1877–1889’, 105–133. W. B. Proudfoot provides a history of the copying technologies using the stencil method in The Origin of Stencil Copying. A full review of technologies in use for copying documents in use in civil service offices appears as a detailed schema prepared by the Committee on Duplicating Processes set up in 1929, see the First Interim Report, 1930, in TNA: PRO Stat 14 1342.
[3] The use of photography as a technology for making records for official purposes is a topic requiring further investigation. We know that the camera often arrived in a workplace as a personal tool. It also appears to have been hired for a specific purpose as appears to be the case with the Underwood Street photographs kept by the Stationery Office, four of which we include in this article. Photographs also helped office analysts as was the case with the image we include from the Treasury's O and M officers. See notes 5 and 6 below.
[4] TNA: PRO Stat 20. Over four hundred photographs located in this class appear to have been selected from a number of sources in the Stationery Office: there are photographs of antique equipment and stationery, and publicity images of HMSO shops and exhibits at fairs. Among these varied sources was an album of photographs that include numerous images of the Underwood Street central duplicating facility operated by HMSO in London since 1912. There are photographs of various processes such as hektography and stencil copying, of typing operations to prepare masters to be used in copying processes, and some images of the addressograph operations where master plates were prepared to be used in addressing envelopes. The images show workers engaged in these operations, ad hoc storage of copies and plates on the perimeter of the rooms, and offices for the supervisors. Most of the workers in these photographs are women while most of the supervisors are men. We have selected four images: Stat 20 391, 422, 408, and 423. These photographs date from late 1919 or early 1920.
[5] TNA: PRO T 222, 920(1), 920(2) and 920(3). From these three photographs we have chosen 920(1).
[6] For example, see Jones, The Nineteenth-Century Foreign Office: An Administrative History, pp. 22–40; Lowe, “Of Mice and Men: Constructing an Administrative History of Twentieth-century,” 103–114; Pellew, The Home Office 1848–1914: From Clerks to Bureaucrats, 23–32; and MacLeod, Government and Expertise. Specialists, Administrators and Professionals, 1–26. Contemporary investigations by Parliament provide discussions of continuing issues in civil service office work especially the evidence and reports of the Playfair Commission, 1875; Ridley Commission, 1888; MacDonnell Commission, 1914 and Bradbury Committee, 1919.
[7] Parliamentary Papers, 1854–55, Vol 20, pp., 423–429.
[8] T1, 8613B and T1, 8752C, ‘Conditions of Employment of Women as Typists…’ 17 March 1894.
[9] The entry of women into the civil service and their greater use in office work was closely associated with the increasing use of office machines especially the typewriter. However, devices of other types, especially the hektographic copier, the various forms of stencil copiers, as well as adding, calculating, and punch card machines were operated by women as well as men. See TNA: PRO T162 153 e25753 1927 for a breakdown of the number of full and part time women employees in the service and the types of machine these women operated. The importance of office machines to the work of administrative offices is revealed starkly by the difficulties caused by their reduced availability during the First World War. On the spread of machines into office work see for example, Stat 12 35/15 on the central repair of typewriters and the growth of machines between 1899 and 1910; Stat 12 36/2 on the list of office materials supplied by the Stationery Office before the war; and Stat 12 38/1 concerning the growing use of calculating machines during the war and a frank discussion of the best ways to control demands. A similar situation developed during the Second World War. The importance of stationery supplies and of machines used in office work is discussed in Stat 14 1463 and in T 162 745/41586/01 ‘Paper Shortage Committee, 1940–1944.’ Office machines used in the Civil Service are discussed and pictured in Desborough, Manual of Duplicating Methods, 1–86. More illustrations of machines and a discussion of their best uses is in Machines and Appliances in Government Departments (1947) in T 222 32 and T 222 1200. Also see Agar, The Government Machine: A Revolutionary History of the Computer, 1–432 for an extended history of civil service work in the first half of the twentieth century from the perspective of machine use and machine metaphors.
[10] Stat 12 20/4 ‘National Health Insurance Commission England 1912–1918.’ T 1, 12341, ‘Stationery Office Shepherdess Walk and Underwood Street’. T 1, 11822, ‘Underwood Street Addressograph 1913–1915’.
[11] Stat 20. The prints are endorsed with a stamp 1920 March 18; however, the images may have been taken somewhat earlier and that the stamp indicates the date the photograph was given to the Stationery Office. Several of the images in the set taken at ‘H.M. Stationery Office Underwood Street’ appear to have been provided by the Grafton Reproduction Company Commercial Photographers. 291 Lavender Hill, Clapham Junction London S.W. 11.
[12] T 222 32 on the May Commission.
[13] T 1, 12341, ‘Underwood Street Branch.’ Bradbury Committee Report, 1919 Cmd 62. May Committee Report, 1931 Cmd 3920. T 222, 32, May Committee comments favorably on use of modern office machinery.
[14] Stat 14, 1156. ‘Office Machinery Committee’, Stat 12, 19/2, Memorandum on Inspectors 1917 June 20. T 1, 12310, on Traveling Inspectors. Stat 14, 1156, on Machinery Committee. T 199, 83, ‘Treasury investigating Officers. Creation of Posts, Transfers, Pay and Grading 1919–1940.’ T 199, 32, eo118/01, ‘Treasury Investigation Officers (Machinery) Staff Complement and Organization. 1925–1936.’ T 199, 84, eo118/03, ‘Treasury O and M Section Reid Young Report 1941’. A valuable history of the Treasury from the point of view of a long-serving principal is T. Heath The Treasury 1927.
[15] T 199, 85, eo/118/120/01, ‘Organization and Methods Division. Information Required by the Select committee on National Expenditure re Activities and Staff 1941’.
[16] T 162, 881, eo/51953/026, ‘Organization of the Civil Service Working Party No 4 Interim Report October 1946 Business Efficiency in Government Departments’. T 199, 1198.
[17] T 222 920.
[18] T 222, 918, Correspondence Costing.
[19] Fine, Souls of the Skyscraper: Female Clerical Workers in Chicago, 1870–1930, 6–10.
[20] Craig, ‘The Introduction of Copying Devices into the British Civil Service, 1877–1889’, 120.
[21] Fine, Souls of the Skyscraper: Female Clerical Workers in Chicago, 1870–1930, 13–14.
[22] Davies, Woman's Place Is at the Typewriter: Office Work and Office Workers 1870–1930, 55.
[23] Fine, Souls of the Skyscraper: Female Clerical Workers in Chicago, 1870–1930, 21. See also Gardey, Mechanizing Writing and Photographing the Word, 326.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Ibid., 327.
[27] An 1892 course catalogue for an Ontario business college, for example, declared that, ‘as stenographers and typists [women] have special qualifications in neatness, taste, deftness of action and quickness of perception and there is no line of industry to which they are better adapted … possessing nimble fingers, nervous and delicate organs and being quick to hear, think and comprehend’. Quoted in Lowe, Women in the Administrative Revolution, 76. See also Davies, Woman's Place Is at the Typewriter: Office Work and Office Workers 1870–1930, 90–91, 94–95.
[28] Ibid., 55.
[29] Schwartz, The culture of the copy, 226.
[30] Anderson, ‘The White-Blouse Revolution’, 6–7. According to occupational statistics for clerical workers in the US, by 1880 women represented 40% of stenographers and typists (who were considered as a single group); by 1990, women accounted for 76% of that group; and by 1930 they represented 95% of the group. See Davies, Woman's Place Is at the Typewriter, appendix 1, Table 1.
[31] Schwartz, The culture of the copy, 226.
[32] Fine, The Souls of the Skyscraper: Female Clerical Workers in Chicago, 1870–1930, xvii. The complex relationship between the feminization of the clerical work force and the deskilling of clerical work in the US and Britain has been discussed by a number of writers. See, for example, Fine, The Souls of the Skyscraper: Female Clerical Workers in Chicago, 1870–1930, 83–103; Cohn, The Process of Occupational Sex-Typing, 65–90; Crompton, The Feminisation of the Clerical Labour Force since the Second World War, 122–143.
[33] Wilson, The machine should fit the work, 21.
[34] Ibid., 22.
[35] Lowe, Women in the Administrative Revolution, 123.
[36] Gardey, ‘Mechanizing Writing and Photographing the Word’, 330.
[37] Anderson, The White-Blouse Revolution, 20.
[38] Ibid., 20–21.
[39] Gardey, ‘Mechanizing Writing and Photographing the Word’, 331. See also Davies, Woman's Place Is at the Typewriter, 129–162.
[40] For further discussion of the nature and limits of implementing scientific management in clerical work see, for example, Hedstrom, Beyond Feminisation, 156–161; Davies, Woman's Place Is at the Typewriter, 97–128.
[41] Rose, Visual Methodologies, 5.
[42] For example, two of the earliest practitioners of scientific management, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, used photographs to illustrate and support their view of the relationship between workers and technology. See Lindstrom, Undiscovered Mary Pickfords, 725–751.