by Lynn Russell
Like the other great Quaker industrialists of his era, Joseph Rowntree is now often accused of paternalism and excessive meddling in the lives of his employees, but he undoubtedly felt an acute sense of responsibility for their welfare and, whatever his motives, the results were not in doubt: his employees were better paid, better housed, better fed and clothed, and had better medical and social care than almost any others in the country. He remained chairman of Rowntree’s until 1923 and died two years later at the age of eighty-eight. He was buried in the Quaker burial ground at The Retreat in York, and despite his fame and fortune, in accordance with Quaker traditions, his gravestone is identical to all the others in that cemetery; if not always so in life, all were equal in death.
Joseph’s son and successor, Seebohm, also combined a strong social conscience with a hard head for business, but the effects of the Great Depression in the late 1920s and early 1930s pushed Rowntree’s to the brink of bankruptcy. In 1931 large numbers of workers in the Card Box Mill were laid off and the company cut the wages of its remaining workforce, replaced many of the male workers with lower-paid women and for a while worked a three-day week.
Rowntree’s remained in serious financial trouble throughout 1932, but within twelve months, from bleak-looking prospects and shedding its workers in droves, Rowntree’s was transformed into a fast-expanding and hugely profitable business. This was the company that Madge had now joined.
2
Florence
Madge was already nineteen and beginning to feel like a seasoned veteran at Rowntree’s when, in 1937, another nervous fourteen-year-old followed in her footsteps through the main gates of the factory. Florence Clark was born in 1923 and grew up in Layerthorpe, just to the east of the city centre, in a two-up, two-down terraced house with a front door that opened straight onto Bilton Street. There were ten of them all together: Florence’s mum, Barbara, and dad, Harry, and her four brothers and three sisters, with Florence the youngest of them all by five years. The house was tiny and, like Madge’s family, the children slept three and even four to a bed, with two at the top and two at the bottom. ‘You were lucky to get a blanket,’ she says, ‘and we had to use overcoats for blankets on cold winter nights, though if it was really cold, my mum would give us the shelf out of the fireside oven, wrapped in a piece of cloth, as a hot-water bottle. She’d put it right in the middle of the bed where all four of us could get our feet on it.’
There was no bathroom and no hot water in the house, just a tap for cold water that was shared with the neighbouring houses. There was an outside toilet – a wooden seat perched on top of a bucket – but it was more than a little precarious and Florence was always a bit frightened to sit on it when she was young in case it overbalanced. She was lucky she didn’t have to use the outside toilet at night, because there was a ‘gazunder’ – a chamber pot, so-called because it goes under the bed – in the bedroom she shared. They did not have luxuries like toilet paper, just bits of newspaper, and as the youngest, one of Florence’s jobs when her dad and mum had finished reading the paper was to tear it into squares, make a hole in the corner of them, slot a string through, and then hang them up in the outside toilet.
They had a wash house in the yard as well, a lean-to built onto the back wall of the house containing a concrete and steel boiler with a fireplace underneath and a galvanized pipe poking out through the roof to serve as a chimney. Once a week, on Fridays after school, they used to light the fire under the boiler to heat up the water for their weekly bath – the tin tub they used as a bath hung on the back wall in the yard because there wasn’t room for it in the house. They would all share the same water, so by the time the last of them got in – and as the youngest and smallest, Florence was in no position to argue about the pecking order – the water was tepid at best, and so grey and with so much soap scum on the surface that it was questionable whether they were any cleaner when they got out than when they got in.
Inside the house were hard floors of bricks laid on edge directly onto the earth beneath them, with oilcloth like a thin linoleum placed on top of them, and a scrubbed pine table and a few mismatched hard chairs in the kitchen. They used sheets of newspaper instead of tablecloths – it did at least give them something to read while they ate – and there were not enough seats for all the family to sit down together; since they all ate at the same time, the younger children had to eat standing up. With so many mouths to feed, there was never any food to spare. ‘I always remember,’ Florence says with a rueful smile, ‘that my dad had two boiled eggs for his breakfast and all I ever used to get were the tops of the eggs when he’d cut them off.’
Florence and the other local children all played in the street; they had to do so because there was nowhere else to play except for a bit of rough ground called Ropery Walk a few streets away. The girls played skipping with a long rope tied at one end to a lamppost or a house wall, hopscotch or a curious game called ‘peggy stick’ that was a bit like the old Yorkshire game of ‘knurl and spell’. It was played with a big stick and a wooden peg, shaped at both ends. You had to hit one end of the peg with the stick to flick it up into the air, and then before it dropped to the ground you had to swing back the stick and hit the peg again, knocking it as far as you could. In a narrow street lined on both sides with houses opening directly onto the pavement, misdirected hits of the peg sometimes led to the ominous sound of breaking glass. The girls also had ‘whipping tops’ that spun with the flick of a bit of string or cord, and Florence and her friends would spend ages decorating them with paints or drawing pins pushed into the top and polishing them until they shone, so that they would catch the light and sparkle like gold. In summer the boys would run down to the river at the end of the next street and go splashing and swimming in it, but Florence and the other girls never went down there.
Although there weren’t any cars in the street – no one could afford to run one, let alone buy one, in that impoverished district – over the course of the day there was a steady trickle of horses and carts with people buying and selling goods. Some only came once or twice a year, like the swarthy knife grinder with a thick moustache and eyes so dark they looked black even in bright daylight, who always wore a red-spotted handkerchief like a scarf around his neck, fastened with a gold clasp. He had an enclosed cart like a small showman’s wagon and a Heath Robinson contraption on the back: a rickety-looking metal frame, like a bicycle, with a grindstone precariously balanced where the handlebars should have been. Having drawn up his cart, the knife grinder would shout his rallying cry to alert the women of the street, and then sit on the bicycle seat. The women would bring out kitchen knives, carving knives, scissors, scythes or garden shears – no one had a garden, but some had allotments – anything with an edge in need of sharpening. He’d pocket a few coppers from his first customer and then begin to pedal his ‘bike’. The grindstone spun faster and faster, and as he drew the edge of each knife or tool across it, a shower of sparks flew upwards, drawing squeaks of excitement from Florence and the crowd of other children who had gathered to watch.
The chimney sweep would also make his rounds by horse and cart, with his brushes and sacks of soot stacked on the back. His skin was permanently ingrained with soot, and wisps of his incongruously fair hair peeped out from under a flat cap that was as black as the chimneys he swept. Sweeps were thought – by the superstitious at least – to bring good luck, and brides-to-be would position themselves so that he had to cross their path. Some even invited him to their wedding for luck, and having pocketed his fee, he would kiss the bride and make a black smudge on her cheek that she would leave untouched as a token of her future good fortune.
When the coalman came down the street with his big, powerful horse dragging the high cart piled with sacks of coal and coke, the boys used to rush out and use the back of the cart as a swing as it bumped along over the cobbles. When the rag and bone man was on his rounds, like the other kids, Florence would run inside and see if she could find any old r
ags or pester her mum for the bones from the Sunday roast. In those hard times and mean streets, very little was thrown away, but apart from his two staples, the rag and bone man would also take scrap metal, such as aluminium pans with holes burned through the bottom, empty tins, broken toys, cracked china, scrap wood, worn-out shoes, and almost anything else that might have a scrap value, no matter how slight. In theory, if the children brought him enough, the rag and bone man would give them a goldfish, but in fact the goldfish in its little glass bowl appeared to be only for show, or perhaps the rags they brought were of too poor a quality, as the most that Florence or any of the other kids in the street ever seemed to receive was a balloon.
An ice-cream van also used to come round once a week, and the driver, Mac, did a brisk trade in halfpenny cornets. On winter evenings there was the ‘hot pea man’, and when she heard his call, Florence’s mother would sometimes send her out with a halfpenny and an empty cup. The pea man would ladle the hot, mushy marrowfat peas into the cup and put a spoonful of mint sauce on top. Florence would carry it back inside, the cup so hot it almost burned her hands, and then she and her sisters would sit in front of the fire with it and take turns to eat small spoonfuls of the peas, trying to make them last as long as possible.
On Friday nights a man came round with a little roundabout on the back of a horse and cart. He would tether the horse to a lamppost, swing out the roundabout on its steel support, and then hand-crank a handle to turn it. It was very basic, there was no music and it only had four hard metal seats, but the little kids loved to ride on it. Even though he charged just a halfpenny a ride, it was often more than Florence’s parents could afford to spend, so the halfpenny cornets and the roundabout rides were very occasional treats. Money was so tight in their house that every time the gas man came to read the meter and empty the coin box – all the houses in the street had coin meters for the gas – Florence would wait until he had gone, and then rush to search the space under the stairs where the meter was in case he had dropped a penny or a halfpenny. He never had, but she never gave up looking, just in case.
When Florence was seven, the entire street was demolished under the slum clearance programme and the family was moved to a brand-new council house in Pottery Lane. Florence was delighted when they went to see it and she discovered that it had the luxury of a handbasin with taps. Even then they still had to use an outside toilet – it wasn’t until they eventually moved to a four-bedroom house in Foss Way years later that they had a bathroom as well: ‘We thought we’d died and gone to heaven when we got there!’ Florence says.
Florence had started school at St George’s, but then went to St Wilfrid’s when they moved house, and stayed there until she left school at fourteen. There was little doubt about where she would work when she grew up. Her dad was one of only two members of the family not employed by Rowntree’s – he worked at the electricity station on Foss Islands Road – but all her brothers and two of her sisters worked there; even her mum had worked there as well before she got married. She was one of the first ‘pipers’, using an icing bag full of liquid chocolate to pipe swirls onto the chocolate assortments, in the original Rowntree’s factory at Tanners Moat by the river.
Florence finished school on a Friday in July 1937 and started work at Rowntree’s the following Monday. ‘There was only Rowntree’s, Terry’s and the railways in York really,’ she says. ‘If you didn’t go to one of them, you’d have struggled to find work at all. Mind, you couldn’t walk straight into Rowntree’s like you could at Terry’s; you had to pass the tests that they gave you, but you knew if you passed the medical and the tests, that’s where you’d be going. It was seen as the best place to work; they were good to you, Rowntree’s, with medical care and everything.’
Even those girls who did not at first follow the well-trodden route straight from school through the factory gates at Rowntree’s often turned up there within a couple of years. One of Florence’s workmates, Dot Edwards, started at Terry’s instead when she was fourteen, and spent two and a half years there. ‘I Cellophaned a lovely big fancy box for the Queen while I was there,’ she says. ‘It was on display in Terry’s window for a while, but then they went on short-time working, where you did two weeks on, but then you were off for two weeks. There was no unemployment money then so I only had half the money I’d had before – and at age fourteen it was only nine shillings and eightpence a week, even when I was working full time – so I decided to leave and went to Rowntree’s instead. I had a brother and a sister already working there and that was how you got on to work at Rowntree’s in those days; if you had relatives working there, you had preference over everyone else.’
Girls without family connections often found themselves drawn to Rowntree’s by peer pressure or the gravitational pull of the city’s biggest employer. The mother of another of Florence’s contemporaries, Madge Tillett, had planned a career for her daughter in hairdressing and had even secured her an apprenticeship. ‘My mum used to go to a hairdressers in Clarence Street,’ she says, ‘and she got me a place there, and in those days you had to pay a premium to learn. But when they asked us at school, “Where do you want to go?” all my friends said “Rowntree’s”, and when they got to me I said “Rowntree’s” as well, because if all my schoolfriends were going to be there, I wanted to be there, too. I thought, “Whatever am I going to say to my mum?” and she was really furious with me, but luckily my dad stuck up for me and said, “Let her go where she wants to.” So, like almost all of my friends, I went to work at Rowntree’s.’
Another girl, Marjorie Cockerill, was planning to join the Co-op and work in the kitchens, but when she told her father, he said, ‘You’re not going into the kitchens – you’re that clumsy, you’ll cut your hands off. Get yourself to Rowntree’s and get a job there.’ Muriel Jones, who had lost both of her parents within ten months of each other when she was young, and had been taken in by her aunt and uncle, saw a similar lack of sympathy from her guardian. ‘When I left school,’ she says, ‘and had “had a rest”, as my uncle called it, over the weekend, he said, “Right, now get yourself over to Rowntree’s and see if you can get a job.”’
Rowntree’s also gave employment to people from other areas of the country. One of them, eighteen-year-old Gwen Barrass, left her home in Cramlington, Northumberland, to work at Rowntree’s in 1938 without knowing a single soul in York. At the railway station she had to find the girls who were to be lodging at the same address as her – one girl from Washington, County Durham, and two from Newcastle – none of whom she had ever met before. They shared a room in a boarding house and were each charged one pound a week for full board at their lodgings, but it was very poor quality and the food they were given was almost inedible. Her wage as an adult was one pound eighteen shillings a week and she tried to send a few shillings home to her mother every week, so she did not have much left to spend on herself.
For other girls, a move to York was rooted in a family tragedy. Sheila Hawksby’s great-grandparents came from Derbyshire, where they had worked as domestic servants in a country house, but both caught cholera and died, leaving Sheila’s grandmother and four other children as orphans. The three oldest, including her grandmother, were old enough to work and so moved to Yorkshire in search of jobs, but the two youngest, aged just five and seven, were taken in by Barnardo’s and then sent to Canada. Once there, the two children were separated and sent to homes thousands of miles from each other. Sheila’s grandmother never saw either of them again.
Before she moved to York and found work at Rowntree’s, Sheila’s early life had been spent among the coalfields of South Yorkshire. After years in the grimy colliery districts, with the smoke-belching chimneys, the clanking winding-wheels at every pit head, the black dust that coated every surface no matter how many times the house was swept and cleaned, and the pall of smoke that seemed to hang permanently over the pit villages, York was a revelation to her. ‘I thought it was a beautiful place,’ she says. ‘Going dow
n Coney Street with all the lovely shops, I’d never experienced anything like that before. I thought York was a wonderful city, and I still do.’
Even though Florence had lived in York all her life and nearly all of her family already worked at Rowntree’s, she still found it ‘quite a scary experience’ when she went into the factory for the first time for her interview. Blonde-haired and so petite that she looked even younger than her fourteen years, she drew a little comfort from the fact that a large number of other young girls were also being interviewed at the same time. Boys tended to be taken on sporadically at the factory, on an ad hoc basis, but Rowntree’s need for female workers had steadily increased to cope with the rising demand for their new Black Magic assortments and Aero and Kit Kat bars, and they tended to recruit them at mass interviews and hirings, usually coinciding with the end of the Easter and summer terms, when the fourteen-year-olds were leaving school.
Most of them would have been as intimidated as Florence by the sheer scale of the Rowntree’s factory and the vast numbers of people already employed there. ‘There were so many people pouring in through the gates,’ Florence recalls, ‘and the whole place was so huge – even the rooms were enormous – that I couldn’t imagine how I was ever going to find my way around the place.’
Like the other girls applying for jobs, Florence went through an interview, a ‘very stiff’ medical examination and also underwent a psychological evaluation. Her medical history and general state of health were assessed, and the nurse examining her searched her scalp for nits, checked her teeth and eyes, and examined her skin, taking a very close look at her hands and arms. ‘They wanted to make sure that you were good and healthy before they took you on!’ Florence says. She was also weighed to make sure she was not too thin for her height. Another girl, Lillian, remembers them ‘playing steam’ with her for being underweight – she was only six stone ten at the time.
