by Lynn Russell
The industrial psychologists then took over, with a series of tests designed to evaluate Florence’s memory and her basic mathematical abilities – packers had to be able to count the number of chocolates going into certain products and also weigh items to ensure they were not below the minimum weight printed on the outside of the box. They also assessed her hand-eye coordination, her attention span – how long she could carry out a monotonous, repetitive task before she grew bored and began to make errors – and her ability to spot and reject misshaped or otherwise defective chocolates. Florence was given ‘quite a few other tests as well. There were practical tests to see how nimble you were with your fingers and that sort of thing. There was a box filled with all different shapes that you had to quickly put into the right compartments in another box, and there was a test for piping, too, making shapes and patterns by squeezing chocolate out of an icing bag, but my hand was shaking that much through nerves that I made a right mess of it.’
The tests, first introduced by the Institute of Industrial Psychology in 1923, were continually being refined and developed by Rowntree’s industrial psychologists, and since Madge’s interview they had added new sections to test interviewees’ reactions and agility. In the reaction test, they recorded how quickly Florence responded to a red light as it flickered on and off. She did that well enough, but the agility test was a larger version of the child’s game where you have to move a metal hoop along a wire. If you allowed the hoop to touch the wire, it completed an electrical circuit and sounded a buzzer. Just as in the piping test, Florence’s hand was shaking so much from nerves that her attempts to move the hoop along the wire were accompanied by a relentless succession of buzzing noises, each of which only served to make her nerves worse and her hand shake even more.
‘There were quite a few other things I had to do,’ she says, ‘and after they had tried you out with all these different things, they then decided what sort of job to offer you. When I finished, they must have decided that I was all thumbs and much too clumsy for the production line, because I saw them write on my paper in block capitals “NO MACHINE WORK” – no piping or setting chocolates, or any of the other jobs in the Machine Room.’
3
Madge
Madge was almost too excited to sleep the night before her first full day at the Rowntree’s factory, and although she knew that she had dropped off for a while during the fleeting hours of summer darkness, she was wide awake as the morning sunshine grew brighter on the edge of the curtains, listening to her two sisters breathing steadily on either side of her. Being the youngest and smallest girl, Madge had to sleep in the middle of the bed between her sisters and there were many times that she cursed her misfortune at having to do so, but not that morning. She felt cosy and safe and warm, lying next to her sisters as she thought ahead to what the day might hold. She smiled to herself when she heard the knocker-up rattling their bedroom window with her long pole, as she pictured the familiar figure of Mrs Ettenfield standing in the street below. Ample-bosomed and no more than four feet ten inches tall, she was almost as tall as she was wide, and Madge’s dad always joked, ‘She needs a pole to reach the parlour window, never mind the bedrooms upstairs.’
Mrs Ettenfield was the last of a dying breed, one of only a handful of knocker-ups left in the whole of the North of England by the early 1930s, and very few of them were women. Before that time, not many families in the street owned an alarm clock, because even the cheapest ones were quite expensive and unreliable, and with stiff financial penalties for being late for work, a lot of families relied instead on the traditional knocker-up to rouse them. Knocker-ups were often the older residents of a neighbourhood, doing one of the few jobs still open to them, earning a few extra coppers by banging on doors and windows to wake people up in time for work; or the lamplighters who came round the streets lighting the gas lamps in the evenings and extinguishing them again at dawn; or even the local policemen, supplementing their wages on their early-morning beats. Now clocks were becoming cheaper, and within a few years the knocker-ups, like parlourmaids and rag and bone men, would fade into history.
Madge got out of bed, provoking a sleepy mumble of complaint from Rose as she clambered over her. By the time she went downstairs, her mum was already busy, riddling out the ashes and coaxing the fire back to life to boil the smoke-blackened kettle she had filled. Madge washed her face and hands at the sink, shivering at the chill of the water. She dressed in her new overall and spent ages tying and retying her turban in front of the mirror in the hall, but each time it looked a mess. ‘I just can’t seem to get it right,’ she said, as her sister came clattering down the stairs.
‘Here, I’ll do it for you,’ Rose said, ‘but you’ll soon get the hang of it.’ She retied it, gave a nod of satisfaction and then hurried through to the kitchen. Madge submitted patiently to her mum’s inspection, then walked up to the factory with Rose, both of them eating a slice of bread as their breakfast on the way. Madge’s gums were still sore and she tore the crusts off her bread and gave them to her sister.
Haxby Road was packed with people, all moving in the same direction. Most of the men were on bicycles, with the women on foot, a tide of white-overalled and turbaned workers flooding through the gates. They slowed to a jostling queue as they passed through the double doors into the main building. Rowntree’s rules on timekeeping were strict. Everyone had to record their exact starting and finishing times by putting their time card into one of the four clocking-in machines by the timekeeper’s office inside the main entrance, or in the time clocks in the individual departments. The process of clocking-in was known to the girls as ‘blicking-in’, because the Rowntree’s time clocks were made by a company called Blick Time Recorders Ltd, and the word ‘BLICK’ was prominently displayed in block capitals on the face of the clocks. To encourage good timekeeping, Rowntree’s gave a ‘Blue Riband’ award to those with 100 per cent attendance over the course of a year.
There was a ‘ping’ sound as each employee’s card was time-stamped by the machines, and the whole entrance lobby echoed with the tinny noise. Madge gave her name to the timekeeper, who riffled through a handful of new blicking-in cards and handed her one with her name and department typed neatly at the top. Rose could have showed Madge the way to the Card Box Mill, but the company rules about introducing new employees to their workplace were as precise and unbreakable as every other aspect of Rowntree’s operations, so Rose went on ahead while Madge was greeted by her designated guide and led through the factory towards the Card Box Mill.
It was a long walk, because the Card Box Mill was at the northeastern corner of the factory site. The corridor that led to Madge’s workplace was windowless, flanked by offices all the way down the right-hand side, and by a vast, concrete-floored storage area on the other side. At the far end they took a staircase up to the first floor, the main card box production area, where the beautiful fancy boxes for the chocolate assortments were made. As Madge reached the top of the stairs and looked around the vast room, she was met by a wall of sound. The noise of the clattering machines on every side was deafening, and the women working there were shouting above the din just to make themselves heard.
Built ten years before, the Card Box Mill housed about 500 workers, the vast majority of them women. They worked in a huge, wood-floored open space, interrupted only by the steel pillars supporting the roof, with electric lights hanging from the steel girders that spanned the full width of the enormous room. The overhead lighting was harsh and it was always bright in there, and often extremely hot. Along with the eye-watering smell of the glue they used to stick the boxes together, there was also a rather fusty odour, suggesting a lack of care in cleaning and dusting that would never have been tolerated in the food production areas. The same applied to the pigeons that often found their way into the Card Box Mill and became trapped there. As fast as one lot were caught or killed and removed, others found their way in through broken windows or gaps around the roof edges,
or by flying in through the main doors that were always left open in hot weather to provide much-needed ventilation, for it was one of the least comfortable places in the entire factory to work.
The roof – a series of steep-pitched ridges and troughs – was entirely glazed, and as a result the mill was freezing in winter, while in summer the heat was almost unbearable. Every door and window was left open to try to create a draught, and the women workers wore nothing but underwear or even swimsuits beneath their overalls, but it had little effect and sweat dripped steadily from their foreheads as they worked. Even when the glass roof was eventually whitewashed to reflect the sun’s rays a little, the Card Box Mill remained ferociously hot.
Madge’s guide stood over her while she pushed her card into the time clock and then showed her where to place it in the wooden racks. She then handed Madge over to the teacher – there was one in every department – whose duties included showing new girls how to do the jobs to which they had been allocated, and inspecting the work that all the women were producing, checking it for quality, making sure that materials were not being wasted and that the girls were working fast and neatly enough; ‘And they soon let you know if you weren’t!’ one such worker, Muriel, recalls with a rueful smile. As well as the teacher, there were examiners, overlookers – Grade A and Grade B – and charge-hands, and all of them were women. The various grades were distinguished by the different coloured bands on the caps they wore: teachers had a red band, Grade A overlookers a blue one, and Grade B overlookers a green one.
In the employment of women, as in much else, Rowntree’s had always been more progressive than almost any other manufacturer. The Quaker belief that God was in everyone, men and women alike, gave women as much right as men to testify or take part in the ministry at gatherings of the Society of Friends, as the Quakers were properly known, and also to seek employment if they chose. As a result, women had always worked alongside men in the Rowntree’s factory – albeit on lower wages and with fewer privileges than their male counterparts. Rowntree’s was also one of the first factories in Britain where women were allowed to progress beyond menial tasks to supervisory and managerial roles; the first, a ‘Lady Welfare Supervisor’, had been appointed by Joseph Rowntree as far back as 1891. He also allowed production line workers a say in the appointment of their immediate supervisors – charge-hands and overlookers – an example of industrial democracy that few modern industrialists have been willing to contemplate even to this day.
The teacher took Madge to an empty space on a workbench, talked her through the work she was to do and showed her how to do it once, then left her to learn it properly by watching the woman next to her and following her instructions. The cardboard pieces were cut for them, and Madge and the other box-makers’ job was to fix them together, cover them with glue – there was a pot of glue and a brush on each bench – and stick the lining paper to them, pulling it taut and shaping it to fit the curves and angles of the box they were making. She had to fashion the lid in the same way, glue the printed illustration to it, and add any ribbons or decorations that were needed.
As she watched the quick, sure movements of the woman alongside her as she created a beautiful box, lining it, shaping the lid and fixing ribbons and tassels to it, Madge had a sinking feeling. If she did the job for a hundred years, she could not imagine how she was ever going to be able to make something as perfect as that. She was so disheartened that the thought of leaving and finding other work somewhere else crossed her mind for a moment, but the thought of the volcanic reaction that would provoke from her mother was enough to dispel that idea, and she buckled down to the task of learning the job.
For the first few days, as the newest junior in the department, she was kept busy on subsidiary tasks, keeping the box-makers supplied with card, paper and the other materials they needed, and topping up their glue pots with the foul-smelling liquid glue they used. The glue pots sat bubbling away on small Bunsen burners and the fumes would not only get on the girls’ chests, but also left a foul taste in their mouths. The smell and the fumes made Madge feel nauseous at first, so much so that she nearly had to run to the toilet to throw up at one point, but slowly she got used to them as she began to learn the craft of box-making.
Her first few efforts were something of an embarrassment, with the paper lining full of lumps, bumps and creases, the folds in the card not sharp enough or in the wrong place, and with dribbles of glue on the outside, but she rapidly improved and before long her work was drawing admiring glances from her fellow workers and even compliments from the overlookers. Although there were no formal apprenticeships for women in the factory, as there were for the men learning skilled trades like carpentry, bricklaying, painting, decorating and electrical engineering at Rowntree’s, work such as box-making was highly skilled and a genuine trade, and despite her earlier misgivings Madge ultimately proved to be one of the most skilful of all. The skills that she and the other Rowntree’s girls acquired at work increased their self-confidence, and that confidence often extended into their home lives as well. Many felt more able to stand up for themselves and argue their corner with a father or husband, though a woman who was thought by men to be too ‘pushy’ or ‘gobby’ was often deemed a ‘factory girl’ – shorthand for a loud, crude and foul-mouthed woman.
Rowntree’s paid workers a week in hand – the girls were paid on Thursday afternoons for the work they had done the previous week – so Madge had to wait eleven days before she received her first wages. Early on the Thursday afternoon, a woman from the pay office appeared in the Card Box Mill, pushing a trolley along the aisle between the clanking machines and pausing at each workbench to hand out a pay packet. A man walked alongside her, his eyes darting everywhere, as if he was riding shotgun on a wagon train and expecting an attack by outlaws at any moment.
The system of paying wages had been rather less formal in Rowntree’s early days. In the old factory at Tanners Moat, everyone kept their own note of the hours they had worked and at the end of each week the foreman went round with a hat full of coins, asked each of them, ‘How much time has thou got?’ and then paid them accordingly.
Madge had been trying to imagine what it would feel like to hold her first ever pay packet, and the feeling did not disappoint. She signed her name in the ledger to show that she’d received her wages, and then held the small brown paper packet unopened in her hands, savouring the moment. She turned it over and was about to rip it open when Rose called across to her, ‘Tear off the corner and check it first. Once you’ve opened it, you can’t go to the pay office and complain, even if your wages are short. They might just say you’ve pocketed it and are trying it on.’
Madge tore off a corner of the pay packet and fingered the edge of one crisp, new ten-shilling note. She shook the packet, heard the rattle of a coin and tipped the packet to let the coin slide to the top so that she could make sure it was a shilling. She turned the packet over again, ripped it open and took out her wages. The ten-bob note, the first she’d ever had in her hands, was pristine, straight from the bank and without a crease in it, and it almost felt like sacrilege to fold it up and put it in the little blue sailor bag hanging around her neck, where she kept her money for her tea because they were not allowed to have pockets in their overalls.
Madge had been taken on as a junior at the minimum Rowntree’s wage of eleven shillings a week, and she didn’t even see much of that because, like all her sisters and brothers, she had to march straight home on pay day and hand her wage packet to her mum. She would keep ten shillings (fifty pence) for Madge’s keep and then give her back the odd shilling as spending money. From then on, every week Madge spent sixpence (two and a half pence) on the price of admission to a dance at the New Earswick Folk Hall or the Assembly Rooms in the centre of York, and used the other sixpence to buy make-up: ‘I always loved my make-up,’ she says, ‘and I would far rather spend my money on that than the sweets, drinks or stockings that my sisters often bought with their mon
ey.’ However, Madge didn’t even have a shilling to spend during her first few weeks at Rowntree’s, because she had to pay for her own uniforms for work – the white overall and turban to cover her hair – and she had to have two of them, so that she had one to wear while the other was in the wash.
As in most other industries of that era, the rules about uniforms for work were more strict for women employees than for men, and the male authors of the Rowntree’s rule book also made patronizing attempts to link the requirements of food hygiene to attractiveness and style, including the comment that: ‘A Clean Cap and Overall Properly Worn Make an Attractive Uniform. A Workmanlike Appearance is the Best of Styles for the Workroom.’ Although admittedly far less men worked on the production lines, rules about covering hair with a cap were not applied to them until 1953, and it is probably no coincidence that from that date onwards, the company itself provided and paid for staff uniforms, whereas previously, women employees had been expected to provide their own, at their own expense.
The women didn’t wear hairnets – the rules requiring them to be worn at work were not introduced until the 1960s – but without exception, all the women production workers, even in areas like the Card Box Mill where no edible items were produced, had to wear turbans, and as Madge had discovered, there was an art to tying these. There was also often a conflict between the factory regulations and the dictates of fashion: the rules stated that all the woman’s hair had to be tucked under the turban, but most women left at least a fringe of hair exposed, and often much more than that.
