by Lynn Russell
‘Never mind that,’ her mum said. ‘Did they take you on?’
‘Yes, in the Card Box Mill.’
Her mum nodded to herself as if she’d known it all along. ‘Good. Well, you’ll not lack for company, will you? You’ve got two sisters already working there.’
Madge felt a little crestfallen that her mother was treating her success at gaining a job so matter of factly – paid work of any kind wasn’t exactly thick on the ground in 1932 – and her disappointment must have shown in her face, because a moment later her mum’s expression softened and she gave Madge a hug. ‘I’m proud of you,’ she said. ‘Now get yourself changed and go and enjoy your afternoon off. It’s the last one you’ll be having on a weekday for quite a while.’ She winked at their neighbour. ‘About fifty years, if all goes to plan.’ Madge could hear them still laughing at the joke as she hurried upstairs to get changed.
Madge was even excused helping with the tea that night, though she and Rose were quite adept at dodging those duties anyway. The next sister, Laura, always did more than her share, and as she was making the tea she would often say plaintively to her sisters, ‘Come on, you two, I’ve been at work the same as you, give me a hand,’ but Rose and Madge would usually find ways to sneak off and not reappear until tea was actually on the table, and most of the time they would get away with nothing worse than a reproachful look from Laura.
Madge was born in the house in Rose Street on 29 May 1918 – Royal Oak Day. The First World War was still raging and her father was away fighting on the Western Front. He didn’t set eyes on his new daughter until eight months later, when he was demobbed after the end of the war. Madge was the youngest of ten children – seven girls and three boys. Her dad had ginger hair and her mum was fair, he was right-handed and she was left-handed, and their ten children were split along similar lines: five of them had ginger hair and five of them – including Madge – had fair hair; five of them, again including Madge, were left-handed and five of them were right-handed.
Rose Street was about 200 yards long, running the full distance between Haxby Road and Wigginton Road. There were fifty identical terraced houses on either side of the street, with a narrow back lane behind them. There was virtually no traffic in the street at all – only one of all the occupants of the houses in the street had a car, and even that was used only at weekends – so the local kids could play in the street all day long. Madge and her friends had a skipping rope, fixed to a hook in the wall and stretching from one side of the street to the other, and she can still remember the skipping rhyme she and her friends used to sing on her birthday.
Twenty-ninth of May,
Royal Oak Day,
If you don’t give us a holiday,
We’ll all run away.
Where shall we run to?
Down the lane,
To see the teacher with the cane.
The girls would play rounders in the street as well, while the boys played cricket in summer with an old tennis ball and a wooden crate for stumps, and in winter they kicked an old, scuffed leather football around, and when that was lost they used a bundle of rags, tightly bound together with string, as a substitute.
There was a corner shop at the end of Rose Street. When Madge was small it was a sweet shop, and her parents or one of her older sisters would sometimes give her and Rose a penny to go and buy some sweets. ‘I used to think I could buy the whole shop for a penny,’ Madge says. ‘Rose and I would stand there for ages trying to decide what to buy.’
The rooms in the two-up, two-down houses were very small, so much so that a tall man could stand with his arms outstretched in any of the rooms and almost touch the opposite walls simultaneously. Downstairs there was a kitchen at the back with a floor of bricks, and a coal fire with an oven alongside it where Madge’s mum used to do her baking. As a child, one of Madge’s jobs was to polish the oven once a week with black lead. There were twelve mouths to feed, and every other day her mum would make up big bowls of bread dough, leave it to rise and then bake it in the fire oven, filling the house with the delicious aroma of fresh-baked bread. The big wooden table where she made the bread was also used to scrub the clothes on washday – Monday – the day of the week the girls used to dread. All of them were roped in to help with the task of washing and airing the sheets and clothes from the week, and with their mum too busy washing to cook, the Monday evening meal was usually an unappetizing cold spread of the leftovers from Sunday.
Madge’s mum and dad didn’t go out often – aside from anything else they couldn’t afford it – but once in a while they would get dressed up in their Sunday best clothes and go to the Grand picture house to see a film. Madge and Rose would sit on the edge of their mum’s bed, watching her putting on her make-up, and they’d say to each other, ‘We’ll do that when we’re older.’ Once their parents had gone out, despite all their promises of good behaviour, the children would go wild around the house, with Madge’s brother Jimmy and sister Laura getting up on the wooden table in the kitchen and dancing like mad.
The front room was kept for best and only used on Sundays. One Sunday, Madge’s sister Ginny was coming through from the kitchen with a shovelful of coals to light the little fire when Madge came running out of the room, straight onto the edge of the red-hot shovel. It could have blinded her, but it missed her eyeball by millimetres and she escaped with a bad burn on her eyelid. There was a piano in the front room and Madge was sent to a music teacher for piano lessons, but she was so desperate to get out and play with her friends in the street that she barely ever practised at home. She used to sit in the front room and bang away on the piano, while her mum, who had a tin ear for music, would call out from the kitchen, ‘That’s good, our Madge.’ The truth was, the family had wasted their money, because Madge could only just about play ‘Chopsticks’ and nothing else.
Upstairs there were two and a half bedrooms: two bedrooms and a tiny boxroom where her brother Dick slept. He made a hole in the door and used to spy on his sisters and tease them, usually leading to a noisy chase down the stairs. Madge’s mum and dad had one room, though they shared it with their youngest children when they were small, and the rest of the kids slept three and four to a bed, topped and tailed, with two at the top of the bed and two at the bottom. Madge slept that way every night for five years. Only when the eldest boy, John, and their eldest sister, Edna, had both left home and got married did the congestion ease a little. Somehow there was also room in the tiny house for a large collie dog as well.
There was no bathroom in the house, just a tin bath hanging on a hook on the outside wall next to the back door; the toilet was also outside, next to the coal shed at the end of the long, narrow yard. It was what was called a ‘duckett’ toilet, like a bucket with a wooden seat over it. When they were younger, Madge and her sister Rose used to go out there with a candle after dark and drop candle wax on the backs of their hands, then go in and say, ‘Look at all the spots we’ve got!’ in the hope of persuading their mother that they had gone down with measles or some other infectious disease that would have got them a few days off school. Madge’s mum was not born yesterday, however, and was not so easily fooled. ‘I’ll give you spots,’ she’d say, and chase them out of the room.
Madge was a little scared of the dark out in the yard, with the wind blowing, rustling the dead leaves and making the door creak, and if she wanted to go to the toilet at night, she always waited for Rose and went with her. When Rose had finished with the toilet and it was Madge’s turn, Rose used to say, ‘Right, I’m going now,’ and pretend she was going to go back into the house, while Madge was crying and saying, ‘I’m going to tell my mam if you don’t stop it.’
There was a little raised flowerbed in one corner of the yard where her mum grew flowers such as geraniums and pansies, and a home-made pigeon loft where one of Madge’s brothers used to keep a few fan-tailed doves. Madge’s mum would block up the grate in the middle of the yard and fill it with water so that the pigeons could
have a drink and a bathe. They also kept an old drake that lived in a pen at the end of the yard. It had a vicious streak, and if it got out it used to chase Madge and the other small children out of the yard and down the back lane. They wouldn’t come back until one of the grown-ups had rounded it up and shooed it back into its pen.
A cobbled lane ran along the rear of the house, flanked by Parson’s Wall, a high stone wall surrounding the garden of the vicarage, which contained an orchard full of apple trees. In late summer, Madge and her sisters and brothers would climb over the wall and help themselves to the apples, even though the parson seemed an intimidating, almost sinister figure when they were young. He was very tall and dressed all in black, with a long black frock coat and broad-brimmed black hat; he looked more like an undertaker than a priest to them. However, their fear did not stop Madge and her friends from playing tricks on him sometimes. They would sneak through his garden, tiptoe up to his front door and knock loudly on it. Then they would wait, peering through the letterbox, until they saw him appear from his study at the far end of the hall, and then they would turn and run like mad, sprinting away through the orchard and over the wall, arriving back home more out of breath from laughter than from running.
They also had a rusting black bicycle – one of the old-fashioned, heavy iron ‘sit up and beg’ types – that they named ‘Black Bess’ after Dick Turpin’s steed, and they used to take turns to go round and round the block on it, pedalling down the street and round the back lane, while the others counted loudly the minutes and seconds it took. That simple pastime could occupy them for hours until the gang gradually lost interest and drifted away in search of the next game or amusement.
Being the youngest of the ten children, Madge was, she says, ‘really spoilt’, and her sisters Marian and Ginny even used some of their wages from the factory to pay by weekly instalments for a top-of-the-range Silver Cross dolls’ pram for her, together with two beautiful dolls. One of her other sisters, Mabel, used to do a lot of knitting and she chipped in by knitting all the dolls’ clothes. Madge hardly ever used to play with that pram or those dolls, but she was not being a spoilt brat, for she had a friend across the road whose family were even poorer than Madge’s and couldn’t buy her any sort of dolls’ pram to play with. Consciously or subconsciously, Madge decided that she did not want to be playing with her expensive toys in front of a friend who did not have any, and instead the two friends played with a little rag doll. They got a cardboard shoebox and made cushions and blankets out of scraps of fabric to put inside it, then poked a hole through the end of the box and tied a piece of string through it. While the Silver Cross pram and the expensive dolls remained almost untouched, Madge and her friend would play for hours pulling the shoebox along the street behind them as if it were a pram and they were taking their baby out for some fresh air. If it was a wet day and the box started to disintegrate, they just went and found another one.
Madge’s dad – his name was John, but everyone called him Jack – was a jolly-looking, apparently extrovert character with a bushy moustache and stocky build, but appearances could be deceptive, because he was quiet, shy and softly spoken and, like the rest of the family, he was never in any doubt as to who was the boss of the household. Madge’s mum was a real hard worker. She more than had her hands full with a family of twelve to look after, but she used to take in washing as well, trying to earn a bit of extra money to help make ends meet. She did not have a washing machine or anything like that; it was all hand-washing, done with a boiler, a dolly tub and a washboard, and her big, powerful hands were always reddened from the work, the constant immersion in water and the cheap, rough soap she had to use.
Madge’s mum could be formidable, but she was warm and loving to her children and she had a kind heart, as well as a soft streak for those down on their luck. There were plenty of ‘gentlemen of the road’ – tramps – on the streets in those days, many of them veterans of the Great War, too rootless, too injured or too traumatized to settle easily back into normal civilian life – and they all knew Madge’s mum. Madge remembers them coming down the street, heralding their approach by singing at the tops of their voices. They would walk round into the back lane at the side of the house and wait there, and after a couple of minutes Madge’s mum would always come out and give them a mug of tea and a big lump of home-made custard tart or apple pie; they all knew where to go for a hot drink and a bite to eat.
It had probably never occurred to Madge or her mum to wonder why York had become such a ‘chocolate city’, but throughout the twentieth century, the city’s three big confectionery firms – Rowntree’s, Terry’s and Craven’s – employed about three times as many people as York’s other great industry, the railway. The reason was partly an accident of history and partly of geography. Sited on a principal junction of the east coast mainline and straddling one of the main tributaries of the River Humber, the railways and the barges plying the waterways between York and the port of Hull gave the confectionery manufacturers cheap transport for raw materials like cocoa beans and sugar, and easy access for their finished products to the great industrial populations of Yorkshire, the Northeast and the Northwest. York also happened to be the site of a long-established Quaker community, and Quaker and non-conformist industrialists in York and elsewhere dominated the confectionery trade.
One of the most famous names in that trade began life in very humble circumstances, when Joseph Rowntree Senior established a small grocer’s shop at 28 Pavement, York, in 1822. A devout Quaker, he was given an immediate reminder of the evils of the demon drink when he attended the auction of the shop premises at a nearby pub and found the auctioneer so drunk that Joseph had to sober him up by repeatedly plunging his head into a bucket of cold water before the sale could even begin. Despite – or perhaps because of – that treatment, the auctioneer then sold the property to him.
In time, his two eldest boys joined him in the business, but it was not large enough to support the third son, Henry, as well. Instead, he began working for Tuke and Company in Castlegate, another Quaker-owned business, importing and manufacturing tea, coffee and cocoa, until, in 1862, he bought and renamed the Tukes’ business. A lively, gregarious personality, Henry had great ambition and charm, but rather less business sense. Despite total sales of no more than £3,000, he promptly splashed out on ‘a wonderful new machine for grinding cocoa’ and a collection of ramshackle buildings on the bank of the River Ouse to house a new factory. It was always a dark, dingy and damp place, and often worse than damp; whenever the river was high, it flooded the cellars. Within seven years, Henry’s elder brother, also called Joseph – who was cautious and prudent where Henry was impulsive and spendthrift – had to take over the running of the company to save his brother from the shame of bankruptcy, and succeeded in turning the business around.
During the latter half of the nineteenth century, the falling price of cocoa as Britain and the other imperial powers forced down the price of raw materials from their colonies, coupled with the rising wages paid to industrial workers, paved the way for a boom in the consumption of cocoa and chocolate. Once barely affordable luxuries for the working classes, both were now within the reach of almost everyone.
Employing just a handful of workers in 1869, Rowntree’s labour force swelled so rapidly that by 1890 it had far outgrown the original factory at Tanners Moat, and construction began on a new factory, a steadily expanding sprawl of fortress-like red-brick buildings on a site that eventually covered a square mile between Haxby Road and Wigginton Road in the north of the city. By 1909, 4,000 people were employed there.
Even while the firm was still struggling, Joseph Junior’s brand of Quaker philanthropy had led him to seek a means of improving the social condition of his workforce and, in 1901, his son Seebohm, who shared his father’s concerns, produced a report revealing the scale of the deprivation in the slums that had developed in York and other cities during the previous century. It had a powerful impact on the young Wins
ton Churchill: ‘I have been reading a book which has fairly made my hair stand on end,’ he said, ‘written by a Mr Rowntree who deals with poverty in the town of York … I see little glory in an Empire which can rule the waves and is unable to flush its sewers.’
Spurred on by his son’s report, Joseph acquired 150 acres of land in open country between the Rowntree’s factory and what is now the York outer ring road for a new ‘garden village’ – New Earswick – echoing existing developments at Bournville, Port Sunlight and Saltaire for Cadbury’s, Lever Brothers and Salts Mill workers respectively. Joseph insisted that the houses were to be spacious, ‘sanitary and thoroughly well built’, with large gardens. Rents were low and New Earswick was a genuine mixed community, with housing for both workers and managers. There were allotments, a local community centre – the Folk Hall – sports facilities, a library, a doctor’s surgery, shops and a post office. The village was open to anyone, not just Rowntree’s employees, but the majority of residents earned their living at the factory, and it proved enormously popular.
In line with Joseph’s progressive ideas, all employees at Rowntree’s also had access to sports, social clubs and other facilities, free education, a company doctor – the first one was appointed to the staff in 1904 – and a team of nurses. There was a dentist, an optician and a chiropodist, and Rowntree’s even had its own social workers, ambulance and a fire brigade with its own fire engines; with 14,000 employees at its peak and some highly inflammable products stored at the factory, Rowntree’s was a greater fire risk than the city itself.
Joseph also introduced a Works Council in an effort to replace the ‘us and them’ industrial relations that blighted so many other industries. In 1906 he established one of the first ever occupational pension schemes in the world, holidays with pay were introduced in 1918, and the following year the working week was reduced to forty-four hours, with no Saturday working, long before the vast majority of other British factories followed suit. Soon afterwards, Rowntree’s brought in a profit-sharing scheme for employees, again one of the first in the country.
