Shelley Gibson 1960s to 80s (part 2)

Employment Rights

Chamknitt 1977

The 1975 Employment Protection Act introduced important rights for working women who were expecting a baby. Women with two years service with their employers were entitled to six weeks paid maternity leave and could return to their job up to 29 weeks after the birth. Women could not be sacked if they were pregnant. That meant Shelley could happily take time off to have Angie in 1983.

In the 1970s and 1980s, men started to become more helpful in the home, particularly those who’d lost their jobs while their partners were still in work. This was the case of Bobby, who lost his job at the docks in East London the year after Angie was born. During the 1980s, unemployment rose to three million people. During some years, 16 out of every 100 workers didn’t have a job. The situation differed from the mass unemployment of the 1930s, though. When Fred Davis’s dad lost his job in a Lancashire coal mine in the 1930s that left a whole family without income. At least now, there was often two earners in a home; the man and the woman.

Fashion department Welwyn Department Store (1970s)

Whatever’s next in fashion?

Peter Jones Theme for Autumn ’66

In the 1960s, teenagers had become firmly established as the most important buyers of fashion, and designers and manufacturers looked to the worlds of pop music, street fashion and sport for ideas.

At first, many adults were horrified at the new extremes. “Whatever’s next in fashion?” asked the John Lewis magazine, The Gazette, in 1968 as mini skirts got shorter and shorter. The answer was less formal clothes for everybody. Trousers, T-shirts and trainers are now part of everyone’s wardrobe. Often, it’s not the design, but only the designer label that makes a difference.

Dunlop Green Flash

Shelley had briefly been a punk rocker at school in the mid-1970s, but though she was a bit of rebel, she actually preferred soul and funky music. By the time she started work at John Lewis at 19, she was part of a group of East London ‘soul girls’ who used to spend every Saturday night at trendy clubs in the West End. Platform shoes like Shelley’s were at their most fashionable and extreme in the 1970s – for both sexes.

Typical punk style included dyed and spiked hairstyles, slashed jeans, holey fishnet tights, heavy boots, and leather jackets. Punk rebels were not quite as original as they might have imagined, though – slashed clothes were first seen in the sixteenth century in northern Europe.

Sunday Trading Laws

Green and navy print (2000)

Staff dress at John Lewis was changing with the times, too, though it’s fair to say, the punk look was never big among Partners! In 1969 the days of grey workwear had finally come to an end when a sand-coloured business dress was introduced for women. In 1972 French navy replaced grey as the business colour. Blouses to accompany the French navy business dress went through various changes – Cavendish print (1972), Suzanna (1979), Natalie (1982) – and finally in 1994 the green and navy print was introduced to be replaced by the current, more flexible, range of suits and separates worn by Partners today.

Not until 1980s did John Lewis Central London stores open on Saturday afternoons – until then they had always closed at 1pm. Then in the late 1980s, despite the initial opposition of the John Lewis group, came Sunday trading in the UK.

Sir Stuart Hampson, the Partnership’s Chairman at that time, described the Partners efforts to put the arguments against Sunday trading forward to members of Parliament as bringing one democracy “face to face with another”.

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