Jill Nicholls at Spare Rib. copyright: Mark Rusher
Jill Nicholls
I joined Spare Rib part time in 1974, having finished university and worked for a while as a driver, delivering architectural plans round SW London. In fact it was while working there that I’d waged my most successful feminist campaign ever. The women drove smaller vans and were paid £17.94 a week (handed to you in a tiny brown envelope). The men got £21.50. I argued that the women’s work was of equal value and when I left, there was equal pay. It had been less risky for me to make a fuss than for the other women who worked there, as I was just passing through.
At Spare Rib we had equal pay but it was a lot less than that (I recall £14 a week for the full timers though that was a couple of years later). This was always a bone of contention, as we were against low pay for women. But the magazine had to survive on sales, advertising and donations – no-one was making a profit.
I started off compiling Shortlist. This was a double page spread of ‘what’s on’ in the women’s movement all over the UK and Ireland plus short reviews of pamphlets. I progressed to helping news editor Ann Scott. Once a month we would go to a left wing photo agency called Report to choose pictures.
Its little office was on the top floor of a building opposite Selfridges on Oxford St. It was run by an irascible, intimidating, ancient, Austro-Hungarian Jewish man called Simon Guttmann. He would sit with us as we worked our way through cellophane envelopes of contact sheets, looking at the tiny images through an eye glass. There was not just no internet then but no computers nor email – just typewriters, notebooks, telephones and of course personal contact. With Simon, that wasn’t always so easy – he had very strong views of what stories we should be covering, which images we should choose and how we should caption them.
I remember one visit when Ann and I wanted pictures to go with an article about women in Japan – Simon was determined we should take a photo of a strike in the Midlands instead. There were a couple of women on the picket-line but it wasn’t a women’s issue like Grunwick or Trico – we stood our ground. ‘You’re just little old ladies knitting in the corner’ he said scathingly. We laughed about it but it stuck in my mind – could it be a bit true?
All the photographers at Report were men, though they covered many women’s issues very sympathetically. We also sought out women photographers -.Angela Phillips, for instance, who took the wonderful upbeat image on the very first cover. Also Maggie Murray, Val Wilmer, Micheal Ann Mullen and many more. Some of them went on to found Format – a women’s agency to rival Report and its successor, Network.