The Sweethearts

by Lynn Russell

  When Florence and the other new girls started work, Rowntree’s invited their mothers to come in during their first week, to look round the factory and see what their daughters were doing. In fact, although Florence had been interviewed on her own, throughout most of the 1930s the girls’ mothers or sometimes a friend of the family would sit alongside them during their interviews. The system was changed in 1938, so that girls were interviewed without their mothers being present, though they were still invited into the factory on the afternoon of their daughters’ first day at work, to have tea with them in the café annexe and talk through their first experience of paid work. History does not relate whether this was to reassure the mothers that their daughters were being well trained and looked after, or to stiffen the backbones of daughters who had found their first taste of the workplace unpleasant and were looking for a way out.

  The parents of boys starting apprenticeships were also invited to the factory. A huge range of skilled tradesmen were employed by Rowntree’s, and every craftsman, joiner, engineer, bricklayer, plasterer, electrician, plumber, painter and decorator had an apprentice. Their mothers and fathers would look round the factory and then go over to the dining hall and have tea with their boy’s overlooker, just to get to know the man who was to be in charge of their son for the five- to seven-year term of his apprenticeship.

  Florence’s mum came in one afternoon soon after she had started work, but Florence was so scared of the overlookers and so fearful of doing something wrong that she did not even look up when her mum walked past her workbench, but kept her eyes down, fixed on her work. When she started, she was too frightened to do anything but get on with her work, but ‘it was a learning experience there,’ Florence says, ‘and I soon got a bit braver and a bit bolder, and I came out of there knowing a lot more than when I went in – and not just about work!’

  It was all piecework – the quicker you worked, the more you could earn – and there was very little training. New girls like Florence were not set to work with an experienced woman who could have shown them the ropes and helped them get up to speed; they were shown once what they were supposed to be doing and that was it, they were thrown in at the deep end and left to sink or swim. Rather than making her less error prone, Florence’s nervousness and her desperation not to make mistakes made her even more fallible, and there was precious little sympathy for her from some of her more experienced workmates. She recalls:

  It took a while to learn everything, but if they thought you were going too slow and costing them money, some of the women you were working with could be pretty impatient with you … and some a bit more than impatient. My job was to keep a woman supplied with cardboard to make the boxes and at first I couldn’t keep her going fast enough with them. She thought I was being too slow, so she threw a box at me and one of the corners hit me in the eye. I had a real shiner of a black eye and a scratch on the eyeball itself and she panicked a bit then, and said, ‘I’ll never do that again.’ I think she was worried stiff that I’d report it, but I was far too frightened of her to do that. Anyway, my eye was all right, and I soon got up to speed with the work; it was amazing how quickly you learned. It was funny, when we started, the experienced women didn’t want us juniors anywhere near them, because they thought we’d be costing them money, but by the time we got moved to other departments, we’d got that good at it that they didn’t want us to go.

  Nearly all the production line workers in the factory were paid at piecework rates, and there were sometimes astonishing differences in the speed at which some of the more dexterous women could perform their tasks. One woman was legendary for the speed with which she could chop cherries for the Cherry Cup chocolates (known as Liquid Cherry in the 1930s) for the Black Magic assortments. Normal workers picked up a cherry from the pile on their left, placed it on the chopping board in front of them, cut it in half with their knife and then picked up the two halves and dropped them into the container on their right. However, this particular woman had evolved a system where she flicked cherries across from her left, trapping them against the blade of her knife, cut them in half with a blow of the knife and then flicked the halves into the container on her right with the knife blade. She worked so fast that she reached her targets and achieved the maximum piece-rate income well before the end of the working week, and after that she would surreptitiously shift some of her surplus cherries to the containers of her workmates so that they too could earn more.

  As elsewhere in the factory, in addition to their lunch break, Florence and the other girls had a ten-minute break in the morning, though none at all in the afternoon. The break was taken at or near their workbenches and conveyors, since there was insufficient time to go anywhere else. A woman from the kitchens came round with the trolley of hot and cold drinks – tea, coffee, cocoa, milk, lemonade or lime juice – though they weren’t provided free; the girls had to pay for them. Although there was a choice of drinks, the trolley did not contain any food. In some of the food production areas, employees were not allowed to bring in anything to eat in case crumbs or other debris contaminated the confectionery or attracted vermin; in others they were merely forbidden to eat at their work tables, but could eat sitting on the floor or in the changing room downstairs, or there was a ‘corridor kitchen’ where they could buy sandwiches or scones that had been made in the Dining Block. Less strict rules applied in areas of the factory where no food was produced, like the Card Box Mill and the Saw Mill, which may help to explain the Card Box Mill’s near-permanent population of pigeons.

  At first Florence and her fellow juniors used to sit under the bench during their break and try to turn out some more boxes while they were there, to keep up to the rate that had been set, but even during their breaks the overlookers used to watch them, and would shout at them, ‘This is a break. You’re supposed to sit and rest and not do any work,’ and the girls had to stop. Like many others, Florence used to go home for her lunch because she lived so close to the factory, so she did not use the Dining Block regularly until much later on when she was put on night shifts, but occasionally, if her mother was away for the day visiting a relative, Florence would have her lunch at work.

  The Dining Block was on the other side of Haxby Road from the factory, and at dinnertime – lunchtime to those born outside of the North – although some made the dash across the road, most of the thousands of workers opted to reach the block by means of the tunnel that ran right under the Haxby Road. On the night shift, when the factory was largely deserted and the gates locked, there was no option but to use the tunnel. The entrance was near the Rose Lawns, and the first time she used it Florence thought that from the outside it looked like an overgrown bike shed, but inside, to her amazement, she found that there was a grand double staircase leading down into a broad tunnel. At the far end Florence followed the crowd of chattering workers up another double staircase into the three-storeyed dining hall.

  The Dining Block was on the same giant scale as the rest of the factory. The offices and the Health department that had occupied part of the building when Madge was interviewed had now been moved to the newly built Cream Block on the other side of the road, and almost all of the Dining Block was now given over to feeding the army of Rowntree’s workers. There was a café and servery, and a 500-capacity men’s dining hall on the ground floor, a women’s dining hall seating 2,000 on the first floor, and an executive dining room with waitress service on the top floor, where the firm’s managers and directors could eat. Florence and her workmates would join the queue, and as they approached the servery, wooden railings at hip height funnelled them into single file. Having ordered their food, they then sat at long, thin wooden benches to eat their lunch, usually soup, meat and two veg and a steamed pudding, though on Fridays the main course was always fish. Whether served at midday or in the middle of the night, it cost less than a shilling, with meat and two veg for sevenpence halfpenny and fish and chips fourpence or sixpence.

  The Dining Block was pa
cked from noon to 2 p.m. every day, with the peak at 12.30 p.m. when the women’s dining hall was usually full to bursting. Men and women were always segregated, eating in separate canteens, a practice that continued until the 1950s. Contact between the male and female workers at any time during the working day was very limited. Apart from an occasional sighting of a manager hurrying past, as a rule the only men that the women on the conveyor belts would see were those who brought in the tubs of chocolate or heavier materials and took out the empty ones, or wheeled away the trolleys of completed boxes or outers.

  Although some of the older workers recall Seebohm Rowntree, ‘a little man with white hair and a gold chain across his waistcoat’, walking round the factory and greeting all the women employees he passed with a courteous ‘Good morning ladies,’ many of the later generations of managers, who were all ‘quite posh’ according to Florence, used to walk around the factory without speaking. The manager of the Card Box Mill, Ned Sparkes, rarely showed his face at all, much to the regret of Florence and some of the other girls, because he was very good-looking. ‘He had the looks of a 1940s matinée idol,’ Florence says, trying not to sigh at the recollection, ‘and quite a few of the girls had crushes on him.’

  The overlookers were a different matter. There was a strict hierarchy in each department. The production line workers were at the bottom of the pyramid, and above them were the teachers who taught the new employees how to do their jobs, supervised them to make sure they were doing it right and also made sure that the work of the existing workers was up to standard. Next in the hierarchy were the examiners and check-weighers, who checked the completed products coming off the end of the line, and then there were the charge-hands and finally the overlookers, who ruled the roost on the production lines and reported directly to the departmental manager.

  Rowntree’s policy of promoting women to supervisory roles was still unusual in that era, but although welcomed by most women, it could also prove a source of friction. Some preferred male bosses and did not like being supervised by another woman, though in some cases that might have been because of resentment that the woman had been preferred to them for promotion. Even the overlookers’ high stools – necessary so that they could see everything that was going on in the room – were strongly resented by some workers, one woman complaining that a particular overlooker was ‘like the Queen of Sheba’ as she kept watch over them.

  The overlookers had all worked on the line themselves, but a feeling of ‘us and them’ usually began to develop with their former workmates almost as soon as they were promoted. Room examiners, check-weighers, charge-hands and overlookers had more status but little more pay than their fellow workers, and after being promoted out of the ‘ranks’, they were separated from the community of girls on the machines and conveyors and so missed out on much of the gossip and the tales. ‘We didn’t really socialize with the charge-hands and overlookers anyway,’ Florence says, ‘but most of them were all right, though there was one with delusions of grandeur who started elocution lessons as soon as she became an overlooker! She didn’t want to know us then, but when she retired she was suddenly keen to spend time in our company again.’

  One of Florence’s contemporaries, Joan Martin, who ended up as a teacher, still harbours regrets that she accepted promotion instead of remaining an ordinary worker on the production line. ‘I’d rather have stayed in packing really. You had to be a bit keen on how they did things if you were a teacher and there was sometimes a little bit of friction. I didn’t really enjoy that. I’d rather have stayed as just one of the workers.’ Another called it ‘like a prefect type of thing. Some of them got carried away with it. We used to say, “Look at her. She’s got a few more brownie points today, she’s told off someone.”’

  Another of Florence’s workmates, Dot Edwards, also became a teacher, even though she also says that she did not really want to:

  I was happy just looking after myself, rather than looking after others, but it was a choice between becoming a teacher or going into the Machine Room and I couldn’t bear the smell of chocolate flopping [the curtain of liquid chocolate constantly falling inside the enrober]. It sounds strange for someone working in a chocolate factory, but I wasn’t the only one; that sweet, sickly smell could be overpowering. I worked in piping for a bit but I’d only been there for a short while when I offered to leave. I’d only gone in as a volunteer and I said, ‘I’ll never volunteer for anything again in my life.’ I went in the office and said, ‘I can’t bear the smell of that chocolate flopping,’ so they sent me back to packing and I became a teacher there instead. When you started, you didn’t get long to learn how to do it, you got shown by the teacher and then you just had to get on with it and some teachers were better than others. A friend of mine was being taught by a man and I said to him, ‘She’d learn a lot quicker if I showed her how to do it instead.’

  Even though one newly promoted overlooker, Brenda Gray, was told, ‘Although you’re a supervisor, you’re still a worker,’ – which she took to mean ‘Don’t be getting too big for your boots and start thinking you’re better than the others’ – some of the overlookers lorded it over the girls working on the line. All of them were strict and one of them, called Mabel, was particularly fierce, with a very fiery temper. When she first started at Rowntree’s, Florence kept her head down and wouldn’t have dreamed of answering back to any of the overlookers, least of all to Mabel, but as she grew more mature and experienced, she felt more able to stand up for herself. There was a vivid demonstration of how much Florence had grown in self-confidence from the shy, timid fourteen-year-old she had been, after an argument developed between her and another fiery overlooker one day. The overlooker had been promoted only recently and was perhaps keen to make her mark, so she shouted at Florence and then threatened her, saying, ‘I’ll knock your block off.’

  Florence matched her look for look. ‘I don’t think you will,’ she said. ‘I’m stronger than you, so if anyone is going to get their block knocked off, I don’t think it’s going to be me.’ There was a long silence and then the overlooker backed down and stalked off, muttering to herself, while Florence’s workmates crowded around to congratulate her. The overlooker steered a wide berth around Florence from then on.

  At the end of the working day Florence would join the jostling crowds of men and women walking or sprinting out of the gates. ‘There’d be buses galore parked up and down the Haxby Road,’ she remembers, ‘and bikes galore and people galore, and as soon as that buzzer went at the end of the day, they all used to run and there was a mad rush to get out of the gates. The Haxby Road bridge was only a little one then and it would be absolutely choked with bicycles.’ Some girls cycled from the far side of York. Dot Edwards used to bike to Rowntree’s from Dringhouses on the south side of the city, beyond the Knavesmire racecourse, leaving home at 6.45 a.m. and getting to the factory just in time to start work at 7.30. The bikes she and the other girls rode were heavy, steel-framed machines with fixed gears and, she says, ‘It used to be hard work in bad weather, and that Mount [virtually York’s only hill] seemed to get higher every day.’

  The parts of the factory where continuous production was needed operated on a three-shift system – 6 a.m. to 2 p.m.; 2 p.m. to 10 p.m.; 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. – but, like most of the workforce, Florence’s normal hours of work were 7.30 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Monday and Friday, and 7.30 a.m. to 5.30 p.m. on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. With an hour for lunch each day, that made the normal working week one of forty-four hours, with Saturdays off. When the five-day week was introduced at Rowntree’s in April 1919, it was highly unusual (most factories treated Saturday as another working day) and at first Rowntree’s introduced it only on a six-month trial basis. As a young woman, Florence’s mum had always worked Saturday mornings in the factory and she told Florence that she wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. ‘Why would I have wanted to be at home doing chores and housework for nothing,’ she said, ‘when I could be at work and ea
rning?’ One of the reasons for Rowntree’s caution was the thought that many employees might feel the same as Florence’s mum about substituting unpaid domestic drudgery for paid work at the factory, but the five-day week proved popular with almost everyone and was permanently adopted at the end of the six-month trial. It was not introduced for the vast majority of other British workers until after the Second World War, over a quarter of a century after Rowntree’s had pioneered it.

  As a junior, Florence was paid eleven shillings for her forty-four-hour week. Like Madge, she used to give it all to her mother, who would keep ten shillings and give Florence the odd shilling back as pocket money. She used to go to the pictures once a week on a Saturday afternoon. It was threepence to get in and Florence and her friends used to call it ‘The Threepenny Rush’ because there was such a mad scramble to get the best seats when the doors opened. She spent another penny on a Mountain Maid – a bar of toffee with chocolate on – to eat during the film, and she kept the rest of the money to see her through the remainder of the week, although if she and her friends were feeling rich on a Saturday night, they used to live the high life by going to the fish and chip shop for a tuppenny (fish) and a pennorth (of chips).