This exhibition has been created by Nick Bailey who is undertaking a PhD at the University of Leeds. His research focuses on the role that gender played in the workplace during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it is funded by the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities.
This exhibition tells the story of Flora Solomon who developed M&S’s first staff Welfare Programme in the 1930s, and it traces her work up to the early 1960s.
Flora was born into a wealthy Russian Jewish family in 1895, and she moved to Britain at the outbreak of the First World War.
She was introduced to M&S’s chairman Simon Marks in 1916, through mutual friends in the British Zionist movement. Their paths crossed again at a dinner party in 1931, and this led to Simon asking Flora to investigate the working conditions of the company’s female shop staff.