CHAPTER 4 GRACE DARE UNDERCOVER Grace Dare lived up to her courageous nom de plume. Going undercover to expose shopworkers’ scandalous conditions, she took the fight for their rights to the top. In fact, Grace Dare was none other than Miss Margaret Bondfield. In 1896, at the age of twenty-three, Margaret was already a seasoned shopgirl, having worked her way up from draper’s apprentice in Hove to positions in a series of high-class shops in London. She had become a secret member of the National Union of Shop Assistants, which was founded in 1891, an affiliation forbidden by her employers. She missed church on Sundays, her only day off, to attend union meetings. But she was far more than simply a secret union member. She was a spy. In 1896, she began penning a series of bold articles with the aim of stirring up the world of shopkeeping, aimed at exposing the exploitative conditions of shopwork. Margaret recalled how she would wait until her room-mates were asleep and then ‘stealthily, with the feeling of a conspirator, knowing I was committing an offence for which I could be heavily fined, I would light my half-penny dip, hiding its glare by means of a towel and set to work on my monthly article’.1 Bondfield’s fierce sense of social justice had begun at home.
