by Lynn Russell
During Madge’s early days in the Card Box Mill, an overlooker came marching along the production line one day, brandishing a couple of hairs that had found their way into a completed chocolate box. Madge’s sister Rose had beautiful, lustrous long hair, and when not at work had it arranged in ringlets down her back – ‘She used to win prizes for it at the Rialto,’ Madge says. Rose was now singled out and told to report to the manager’s office.
She returned to the house that lunchtime in floods of tears. Their mum looked up from her cooking and said, ‘Now then, our Rose, what’s wrong with you?’
‘I’ve been told off about my hair,’ Rose said. ‘They found a hair in one of the boxes and they think it’s one of mine.’
Madge’s mum gave her a look that was somewhat lacking in sympathy and then said, ‘Come here a moment, then.’ Rose gave her a puzzled look, but did as she was told, and Madge’s mum immediately took out her kitchen scissors and cropped off all of Rose’s long ringlets, saying, ‘There you are. Problem solved!’ However, when she’d finished snipping away with the scissors, and saw all those beautiful ringlets lying on the floor, Madge’s mum joined in with Rose’s tears and sobbed even louder than her daughter.
Juniors like Madge were paid lower rates when they were young, and they didn’t go on to the full adult wage until they were twenty-one. Like many other manufacturers, at times when there was no shortage of labour Rowntree’s used to save money by getting rid of workers when they were old enough to qualify for a full adult wage and taking on another fourteen-year-old instead. Men received higher pay than women, even when performing exactly the same task, but they were just as vulnerable to being sacked as soon as they qualified for the full adult wage. Madge’s three brothers were all fired by Rowntree’s when they reached their twenty-first birthdays. One of them, Ted, the second eldest, couldn’t find other work around York and in the end emigrated to Australia. That was in the days of the ‘Ten Pound Poms’, when it cost you ten pounds to emigrate there on voyages that were heavily subsidized by the Australian government. Neither Ted nor his parents had that kind of money, but their neighbours heard about it, held a collection in the street and raised seven pounds for him. Madge’s dad then told Ted, ‘I’ll give you the other three pounds.’ So Ted and another boy from the street went out to Australia together on a steamer packed with Ten Pound Poms. It was a ten- to twelve-week journey, and once out there the emigrants had to remain there for at least two years or repay the full cost of their passage – the huge sum of £120. As a result, most emigrants did not return to Britain for many years, even for a brief visit, and some never came back at all.
Madge was nine years old when Ted left. It was to be forty-seven years before she or any other member of the family saw him again, and it was several years before they had news of him at all. Madge’s mum wrote regular letters to the last address she had for him, but they all came back unopened, because neither his family nor the Australian authorities had any idea where he was. Like thousands of others in those bitter years of the 1930s, he was unemployed for a long time, wandering the outback trying to eke out a living and find some work somewhere, even if it was just an hour or two’s labour in return for food or a roof over his head for the night. Without work, Ted was reduced to eating out of bins, or anything he could find. He did not write to his family, partly because he didn’t even have money for a stamp, but also because he didn’t want to write with a tale of failure, preferring to leave them in ignorance of the dire straits he was in.
However, Ted came to an outback farm one day and asked the farmer’s wife for work or something to eat. She pointed to a pile of logs and told him that if he split those for her, she’d give him some food. He chopped the logs for her and did a few more odd jobs around the farm over the next few days, and eventually he was taken on as a permanent worker. The farmer’s wife had a daughter, Maud, and she and Ted started courting and in time they got married.
Madge was a married woman with children of her own long before Ted returned to Britain, but finally, forty-seven years after emigrating as a Ten Pound Pom, he came home on a visit, bringing Maud to meet his mum, who by then was in her late eighties. Madge’s mum had always said, ‘Whatever else, I’ll live to see our Ted come back,’ and she was as good as her word, and in fact lived for many years after that, dying at the ripe old age of ninety-five. However, her husband had died of a stroke some years before Ted came home, and was never to see his son again. A few years after that visit, Madge and her sister Ginny went out to Australia together and stayed with Ted and Maud on the farm, which by then they’d inherited.
When Madge started at Rowntree’s in 1932, Ginny was working as a tour guide, showing visitors around the factory. There were seventy women working in the Guides department, a reflection of the huge popularity of the Rowntree’s factory tours. School parties, clubs and all sorts of other organizations – 70,000 people a year in total – took the free tours, coming from all over the North of England and far beyond, by train, charabanc and later, as affluence increased, by car. People coming by train arrived at Rowntree’s Halt and the guides, dressed in cream overalls edged with brown piping and wearing navy-blue court shoes, would walk through the factory to meet them there. Other arrivals were dropped off by bus outside the guides’ office in part of the Dining Block.
Ginny was a lively character and very popular with the visitors. Their dad used to say, ‘There’s always one devilish one in a family,’ and in the Fishers it was Ginny, though Madge herself was not far behind. Ginny was, Madge says, ‘a real devil, always cracking jokes, playing tricks and bending the rules whenever she could’. Rowntree’s tour guides were strictly forbidden to accept tips, but many visitors, especially the Americans, were accustomed to tipping everywhere they went and Ginny was certainly not going to look such a gift horse in the mouth. As she was showing the visitors around the factory, she would glance behind her to make sure there were no supervisors or managers within earshot and then say, ‘We’re not supposed to accept tips, you know, but in case you’re interested, that’s my pocket right there!’
As a tour guide, Ginny often had to work very long hours. The tours didn’t start until 8.30 a.m. but the guides still had to turn up for work at 7.30, and spent the first hour of their day working on the production lines. They then assembled in a long line and were given one of the five routes: A, B, C, D or E. Each guide would take a small group, usually about eight people, and lead them on a three-mile walk around the factory that took two hours to complete. One tour started at the Card Box Mill, another in the Gum department, another at the Cream Block, another at the offices, and the last one at the Melangeur Block. The name Melangeur (the workers pronounced it ‘mullanja’) had been adopted from a term used by the French and Swiss confectioners who had perfected the art of chocolate-making. Mélangeur meant ‘mixer’ in French and the Melangeur Block was where all the chocolate for the factory was made.
As well as the general public, Rowntree’s also used factory tours to strengthen the company’s links with wholesalers and retailers. Once a year a train would set off from London and ‘stop at just about every station’ to pick up local shopkeepers and bring them to York for a factory tour. The guides would go down to Rowntree’s Halt to meet them and show them around the factory, and then serve them tea. There were evening tours too, and dinners, and Ginny would sometimes work till midnight, having been there since 7.30 a.m., though if they worked that late, Rowntree’s did at least pay for taxis to make sure that all the guides got home safely.
While Ginny led factory tours, Madge and her sister Rose were hand-making fancy boxes, but their other sister in the Card Box Mill, Laura, was at the machine end of the room, doing much less interesting work, making plain boxes and the ‘outers’ – the large cartons in which the completed boxes were shipped. She would have loved to have been working in the same section as Madge and her other sisters, making boxes of all shapes and sizes, as it was interesting work and very skilled. T
here were heart-shaped boxes for Valentine’s Day, and special ones for Christmas and Easter, as well as for one-off presentations. When Madge was eighteen she was chosen to make four beautiful boxes to be presented to Queen Mary and her three ladies in waiting during a visit to the factory, all in ruched satin with drawers with silk tassels, and each box a different colour: gold for the Queen, and red, green and blue for her ladies in waiting. The Queen spent some time standing at the end of the bench, right next to Madge, watching her work, and it was all Madge could do to stop her hands trembling with nerves.
Even though Madge and the other girls had stools at their workbenches, they usually used them to hold their work because, with boxes stacked while they waited for the glue to dry, there wasn’t enough space on their benches for everything. They preferred to stand anyway – it wasn’t possible to do the work while sitting down – but they were more than ready for a rest and a sit down by the end of the day. They had a ten-minute break in the morning – there was no afternoon break – but they did not have time to go to the dining hall during break time, so they would all buy a mug of tea or cocoa, or a glass of milk or squash from the trolley brought round to each department by one of the servers from the Dining Block. Rather than sit on their high stools in full view of the overlookers, Madge and the other girls used to lay their stools on their sides, flat on the floor next to the machines, and then perch on the legs and chat until they finished their drinks. Sometimes they would even crawl underneath the benches where they worked, out of sight of the overlookers, but they had to crawl back out as soon as the bell went to signal the end of the break, and get cracking again straight away.
As they were doing hand-work, Madge and her workmates could go for a short toilet break whenever they needed one, whereas Madge’s sister Laura at the other end of the room had to wait for break time. Like those at many other factories, she and her workmates could only leave their work stations during official rest periods, because if anyone left at other times they had to stop the machines. ‘You all had to go to the toilet together,’ one of them recalls. ‘We worked from half past seven to half past five, and you kept working until the conveyor stopped.’
Another woman, Kath, who worked in Cream Packing, putting the chocolate assortments into the boxes that Madge and her workmates made, recalls that:
We used to get a ten-minute toilet break when they’d stop the machines and we all had to go to the toilet together, because when the conveyor was running you had to be working. One charge-hand was a real stickler. She would look at the clock and say, ‘Right, ten minutes, no longer,’ and then turn the machine off. Precisely ten minutes later, whether or not everyone was back from the toilet, she’d turn the machine back on again. Down would come all the chocolates, and the last few girls would be scrambling to get back to their places in time. With the time it took to get there and back, you’d only have six minutes’ break time, but it was amazing what you could get up to in those six minutes, especially my friend Joyce. She used to draw black lines on bits of white paper, stick them on her eyelids, like giant false eyelashes, and walk down the aisle between the machines, fluttering her eyelids at the men she passed going down the room.
The girls were not allowed food on their workbenches, so if they wanted something to eat at break time, they either had to eat it sitting on the floor or go downstairs to the room where they kept their coats. Again, as soon as they had finished eating, they had to rush to the toilets and then be back at the machines ready to start work as soon as they started running. ‘If you weren’t there,’ says one of them, ‘that was your lookout and you’d be struggling to catch up.’
Some of Madge’s workmates in the hand-work section took advantage of their relative freedom compared to the machine box-makers stuck at their workplaces on the conveyor belt, and they often used a toilet break as an excuse to go for a crafty smoke outside, since smoking was forbidden anywhere within the factory buildings. Madge did not smoke, but her friend Alice would often pretend to have period pains in order to take a break; if the overlookers had been more alert, they might have noticed that she appeared to be having two or three periods a month.
There was a rest room as well, where women could go if they weren’t feeling well. They could have an hour’s sleep and then, if they still didn’t feel any better, they could go home. This was also open to a certain amount of abuse, and sometimes Madge or one of the other girls would either elude the overlookers and sneak off to the rest room or pretend an illness they didn’t really feel, and then go and have a quick forty winks.
Until the age of eighteen, like all the other juniors at Rowntree’s, Madge spent a few hours a week at what were known as ‘Day Continuation’ classes, another of Joseph Rowntree’s liberal innovations, aimed at extending the education of his workforce for a few years beyond their schooldays. Employees had to attend classes one day a week for boys and one afternoon a week for girls. For the most part, the classes were not aimed at improving their working skills, but rather as an end in themselves, giving them a taste of music and drama, for example, that they might otherwise never have experienced.
Miss Birkenshaw took the drama group, and while most of the girls and women at Rowntree’s wore plain-coloured, utilitarian clothes in more or less drab shades of green, brown, grey or black, she was an altogether more exotic specimen. Her hair was immaculately coiffed and she wore thick make-up with heavily rouged cheeks that made her look a little like a Japanese geisha, and she always dressed in heavily frilled blouses and suits in vivid shades of pink, red and orange. Her reading style was equally dramatic and her choice of mainstream, middle-brow books such as Jamaica Inn proved very popular with Madge and the other girls.
Miss Johnson, the music teacher, was a much less flamboyant character but no less well liked by her pupils. She was a Scot, with a soft Highlands accent, and taught the girls everything from traditional Scottish ballads to light opera and classical music. She wore her long, dark hair in a bun, but as she waved her hands about conducting an imaginary orchestra while the music played, her hairpins would often fall out and her hair would tumble around her shoulders while the class collapsed in fits of giggles.
The girls were also expected to improve their physical condition through PT (physical training) sessions, and Miss Birkenshaw often took those classes as well. In winter or in poor weather, the sessions were held in the factory gymnasiums – one for each sex – in the long glass veranda along one side of the Dining Block, but in summer the classes were held out of doors, often on the Rose Lawn near the main gates of the factory. Madge and the other girls, shivering and self-conscious, had to go outside and over the road, wearing their shorts that looked like navy-blue knickers, and they had to do their exercises on the lawn with everyone peering out of the windows at them, as one of them later recalled: ‘I always hated PT because of that.’ Those who were keener on exercise could also do fitness and athletics classes after working hours, some of them run by Audrey Kilner-Brown, who worked in the Personnel department but was well qualified to coach athletics, having won a silver medal in the 100 metres at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
The Day Continuation classes took place in the Dining Block, where the junior employees were also taught skills for life. In the case of girls, such skills were often, though not always, linked to their supposed future roles as wives and mothers. In autumn 1938, the company’s house journal Cocoa Works Magazine noted ‘a strong demand for courses of instruction in the domestic field, helpful to brides to be’, and ten years later the magazine was still proudly claiming that they helped ‘the natural ambition of the normal girl for marriage and motherhood’.
However, the girls’ classes were not confined to the domestic duties that wives and mothers were expected to carry out; they were also taught a variety of subjects that appeared to vary from year to year according to the skills, interests and sometimes the hobbies of those appointed to teach them. Many girls seem to have been taught English and natural sciences but, pe
rhaps surprisingly in the context of the times, many also learned woodwork, making wooden trays, stools or other small items for their homes.
Madge and her classmates were also taken to see the glazed hot house near the Dining Block, where the gardeners grew tropical fruits like bananas, as well as vanilla pods and cocoa beans, though the latter were for demonstration purposes, not for production. During the war years, when imports of fruit from the Caribbean virtually ceased, that hot house was one of the few places in Britain where you could actually find a banana. There were also grass tennis courts between the hot house and the Haxby Road, one of several leisure facilities that women employees on short-time working were encouraged to use, and behind the tennis courts there were flowerbeds where the gardeners grew the cut flowers for the vases spread throughout the factory.
4
Florence
Like Madge, Florence was sent to work in the Card Box Mill, where they made the fancy cardboard boxes for the chocolate assortments, and the plainer ones for Black Magic and Dairy Box. Her heart sank when she saw her workplace for the first time that summer day in 1937, because there were so many machines and the noise they made was deafening. As if that wasn’t daunting enough for a shy girl like Florence, the overlookers were also very strict. ‘They used to sit in the middle of the room at right high desks,’ she says, ‘so that they could see everybody and everything that was going on, and when you were just starting and very young like me, I daren’t do anything wrong, because I was really frightened of them.’
Two of the overlookers, Miss Price and Miss Sanderson, were ‘both tartars really’, according to Joan Martin, one of Florence’s workmates, who also worked under their hawk-like gaze:
Everything had to be done just right or you were in trouble. Miss Sanderson was very tall and very straight-laced. She was in charge of inspecting your work and if you got one thin mint too many in a box, or whatever it was, you were in trouble. And if Miss Sanderson came round the corner and caught you putting a chocolate in your mouth, you’d really be in for it. Miss Price was shorter and tubbier, but pretty strict too, though the foreman, Mr Walker, was even worse. He was a holy terror and a lot of the girls were frightened of him. Miss Price and Miss Sanderson could be a bit too demanding, but they were nice enough away from the factory. They shared a house in Fountain Street, just off Haxby Road near the factory. They were living together, but in those days nobody thought anything much about that; if they thought about it at all, they probably just assumed they were friends.
