The Sweethearts

by Lynn Russell

  As well as their work, juniors had to do Day Continuation classes, but the hours had been reduced from when Madge started work. Boys now did one afternoon a week, while Florence and her fellow juniors just did two hours: one hour of English and one hour of Greek dancing. Like Madge, Florence was taught by Miss Birkenshaw, who took her for English, ‘and a few lessons were certainly needed in my case,’ she says, ‘though I must have been a hopeless case because I’m no better at it now.’ Her other lesson, Greek dancing, was a rather more surprising one. ‘I can’t remember who took us for that,’ she says, ‘some Greek goddess, I suppose! God knows why they taught us that, but there was no choice about it, that’s what we had to do.’ Florence and her friends had to wear green slip-on tabards with slits up the sides, and the infamous shorts like navy-blue knickers, and then go across the road from the girls’ gym room to the Rose Lawn in front of the factory and do their dancing there. ‘All the workmen used to be whistling at us,’ she says, ‘and we used to feel such fools. When we’d finished we had to go back to the changing rooms and we were all supposed to have a bath in the slipper baths before going back to work, but they didn’t give you time to bath, dry yourself and put your clothes on. The teacher would always be shouting, “Aren’t you ready yet girls?” when you hadn’t been in there two minutes. So we often just used to dip our feet in the water, stamp around on the duckboards to make them wet and pretend we’d had a bath, but she used to peer through the gap under the door from time to time and say, “I can see you’re not having a bath, you know.”’

  Greek dancing was the only dancing Florence ever did, because, unlike most of the other girls, she never used to go dancing in her free time. Even when they were on night shift and had their ‘lunch’ break at one o’clock in the morning, Florence would go over to the Dining Block for her meal with the other girls, but after they had eaten, when the rest of the girls put records on and started dancing, Florence would just sit and watch. However, she insists it was not because of her shyness. ‘I used to love to watch so much that I never really learned how to dance properly – though I can dance by myself all right!’ At weekends most of the other girls would go to dances at the De Grey Rooms or the Assembly Rooms in the centre of York, or walk or pedal their bikes to New Earswick for the dances at the Folk Hall there, but Florence never joined them. She and her best friend rarely had any money to spend anyway, and so they used to walk round the streets in the evenings instead. There was always the thought, never voiced, that they might meet a couple of boys while they were out walking, but although they might risk a glance from under their eyelashes, both Florence and her friend were so shy that they never actually dared to talk to any of the boys they did pass on the streets.

  5

  Madge

  Working in the Card Box Mill, Madge and her sisters never saw a chocolate or a sweet while they were at work, except when their sister Ginny was showing visitors around the factory. Ginny would sometimes fill her pocket with chocolates in the Cream Packing department, and when the tour reached the Card Box Mill, she would put her hand in her pocket as she got to Madge’s workbench and discreetly drop a handful on the end of the bench as she walked past. Madge didn’t mind which chocolates they were, because she liked all of them!

  Apart from that rare treat, all Madge and Rose usually encountered at work was cardboard and foul-smelling glue balls, but once in a while, when the orders for fancy boxes dried up, Madge and Rose were transferred to other departments for a few weeks. Near Christmas every year extra girls were drafted into the Fresh Fruit department to pack the crystallized orange and lemon slices that came in a round box with a little wooden fork. Madge and Rose were also sometimes sent to the Machine Room, where the chocolate assortments were packed into the boxes they had made, and the two girls even spent a few weeks working on the production line for a brand-new chocolate assortment called Black Magic, introduced after one of the most extensive – and expensive – market research campaigns that had ever been mounted at that time.

  Seebohm Rowntree had not lost his faith in industrial psychologists and in 1931, even as Rowntree’s struggled to survive at all, he had been so impressed by the ‘psychological approach to market research’ of a precocious young Cambridge graduate and self-proclaimed genius, Nigel Balchin, that he promptly hired him as a consultant to the company. Seebohm’s judgement was rapidly vindicated, because Balchin proved to be one of the saviours of Rowntree’s.

  Balchin’s talents were not confined to industrial psychology. He was already writing humorous articles for Punch magazine and would later become a highly successful novelist and Hollywood screenwriter, but while at Rowntree’s he also turned his prodigious imagination to developing new products. He at once pointed out that, while new products were introduced after extensive consultations with the company’s different departmental heads and its experts in design and production, the opinions of the public who were expected to buy them were rarely, if ever, canvassed.

  In July 1932, the same month that Madge began work at the factory, Balchin persuaded Seebohm and the cash-strapped Rowntree’s board to invest the then considerable sum of £3,000 – up to a quarter of a million pounds today – in a survey of 7,500 people, asking about their tastes and preferences in chocolate assortments, from the chocolates themselves to the design and colour of the box. The survey identified the types of centres the sample customers preferred and the ones they hated, and revealed the previously undiscovered or disregarded facts that chocolate assortments were primarily bought for women by men, and that younger men and women preferred a modern Art Deco-inspired design, hinting at luxury, albeit at a mass-market price, rather than the traditional floral and pictorial boxes that Rowntree’s had been producing. The survey also showed that consumers of both sexes wanted a diagram inside the box to identify the different chocolate centres, something which, surprisingly, had not been provided before.

  Balchin found a temporary ally in another highly egotistical character, George Harris, who had married Henry Rowntree’s granddaughter and, as a member of the extended family, had been given a job by the company in 1923. He was sent to America to study the confectionery business there and had formed a friendship with Forrest Mars, whose great innovation was to develop a brand – the Mars bar – with a strong identity and ‘personality’ distinct from that of the parent company. When Harris returned to York, he was appointed as Rowntree’s Marketing Director in 1933, and began to put his new-found ideas into practice, applying American-style market research, product testing, marketing and promotion to the development of distinctive new brands that, promoted by relentless marketing and advertising, would sell through their associations with glamour and a relaxed, modern, carefree lifestyle.

  Commonplace today, those ideas were something of a revelation to 1930s industrialists, and a radical departure for Rowntree’s, but the directors were eventually persuaded to test the waters with a new brand of chocolate assortment – Black Magic – and a new form of ‘aspirational’ marketing, featuring affluent-looking, elegant couples in upmarket settings. Boxes of chocolates had previously been hand-made and priced well beyond the reach of ordinary families; they were so expensive that a box of chocolates was a significant gift – giving a box of chocolates to your girlfriend was tantamount to a marriage proposal! However, boxes of Black Magic were reasonably priced and the marketing emphasized that they were to be regarded as an everyday gift, not just a rare treat for a special occasion. After an uncertain start, Black Magic became a huge success and, along with a series of other aggressively marketed, new ‘niche’ brands, transformed the company’s fortunes.

  Harris and Balchin both had great talents but even greater egos, and both loudly proclaimed their own primacy in the success of Black Magic. They were even louder in their claims as to their roles in the development of the chocolate bar that became Rowntree’s most successful brand ever – but in fact it owed its origins completely to chance. There were suggestion boxes at various places
around the factory and any worker who came up with an idea that was subsequently utilized was paid a cash reward of a few pounds. One of the suggestions put into the box in the early 1930s was: ‘Why can’t you make a bar of chocolate that a man can put in his “pack-up” (lunch box)?’

  The result of that question was the Kit Kat bar. Retailing at twopence, it was marketed as ‘The biggest little meal’ and ‘The best companion to a cup of tea’. It was a cheap product to make because the wafer it contained was much less expensive to produce than the chocolate that surrounded it, but the wafer also had an unexpected and very valuable side effect. Wafer is a palate cleanser, and eating it partly neutralized the cloying, slightly sickly effect on the palate that eating a solid bar of chocolate could produce. As a result, people could eat more of them, more often, without feeling full.

  Launched in 1935 and originally called Chocolate Crisp, the first Kit Kats (the name came from an eighteenth-century club whose members met in a tavern owned by Christopher Catling and which adopted his abbreviated name ‘Kit Cat’) were wrapped in very austere, plain packaging, like a modern supermarket own-brand. The Kit Kat name had been trademarked as far back as 1911, and was probably used as a result of the debacle that surrounded the name Rowntree’s had given to their new Aero bar when it was launched. It turned out that the name had already been registered as a trademark by Cadbury’s, and the Rowntree’s board had to make a humiliating, cap-in-hand pilgrimage to Paul Cadbury’s office and beg for permission to use the name. The two firms’ shared Quaker heritage and Paul Cadbury’s personal acquaintance with the Rowntree family did not prevent him from keeping them dangling for quite some time before he finally agreed to allow them the continued use of the name, in exchange for two of Rowntree’s own registered brand names. Had he realized at the time how successful Aero would prove to be, he would probably either have refused altogether or demanded an eye-watering sum of money in compensation.

  As a result of that near disaster, when Harris cast about for a new name for the Chocolate Crisp bar – so as to give it a proper brand name, rather than its temporary descriptive one – Rowntree’s thought it safest to use a name that they had already registered, and Kit Kat, which had previously been tried on an unsuccessful chocolate assortment, was brought out of retirement, dusted off and put back into use. The rest, as they say, is history. Customers liked Kit Kats, ate more and more of them, and a phenomenon was born; it is still one of the UK’s most popular confectionery brands today.

  Other brands were developed and manufactured in conditions of such secrecy that it bordered on paranoia. Ivy Marshall, whose father Herbert worked all his life as the timekeeper for Rowntree’s, went to work at the factory herself in 1933, aged fourteen, and was put to work in the Walnut Whip section. On her first day, Ivy was surprised to discover that the door to the room where they were made was locked. She was even more startled when, having unlocked the door to let in Ivy and her workmates, the overlooker immediately locked the door again behind them. If they wanted to leave the room for any reason, they had to wait for the overlooker to come and unlock the door. Such was the fear of a rival manufacturer stealing a march on Rowntree’s by copying the product or the production process that Ivy was also told that, on pain of dismissal, she and her workmates were not allowed to discuss any aspect of their work with other Rowntree’s workers, let alone with any outsiders, and ‘certainly not to tell them what they did or how they got that walnut in the bottom’. According to her daughter, Ivy took the lesson to heart so much that ‘she never even told me – that’s how well she kept the secret!’

  Nigel Balchin was probably too mercurial to be comfortable for long within the staid confines of the corporate world, and also too much of a loose cannon to be tolerated indefinitely by Rowntree’s directors, and he eventually parted company with them in 1935, on his way to Hollywood fame and fortune. The company he left behind also went from strength to strength. Black Magic, introduced in 1933, ushered in a Golden Age for Rowntree’s as a raft of other new brands was launched. Not all took off – Cokernut, Three Aces and Barcelona Caramel sank without trace – but Aero, launched in 1935, closely followed by Kit Kat in the same year, Dairy Box in 1936, and Smarties in 1937, were spectacular successes, and the near bankrupt and moribund company of 1932 was a hugely profitable enterprise before the end of the decade.

  The new Black Magic assortments were only just beginning production when Madge and Rose were sent to pack chocolates in the Machine Room, where they worked on orange creams. The centres came down the belt in rows ten to twelve deep across the conveyor and the two girls, standing either side of the belt, had to arrange them so that they all faced the same way before they went under the enrobing machine that covered them with chocolate. But the conveyor belt moved very fast and, not being used to the work, Madge was a bit slower than the others and kept dropping behind. The charge-hands would come round, stand behind Madge and nudge her in the back, saying, ‘Go on! Quicker! Get two hands going!’ but even with practice, Madge found the speed of the conveyor belt so fast that she had ‘all on’ to keep pace with it, and she didn’t even have time to get her money out for the union woman when she came round collecting the subs for the week. Instead, Madge just kept working while the union rep put her hand in the sailor bag round Madge’s neck and helped herself to the money.

  A lot of Madge’s fellow workers refused to join the union, and disputes at the factory were very rare. Madge could only remember one strike in all her years at Rowntree’s, and it was, she says, ‘a bit of a giggle anyway. It was the first strike ever at Rowntree’s, as far as I know, and it only lasted four hours. I couldn’t even tell you what it was about now, but the machines were all stopped and the charge-hands and overlookers came round and told us we all had to go out of the building, but then we all just milled around in the yard for a while, with no one really telling us what was going on. We were all giggling about it and eventually, a couple of hours later, they said it was all settled and we all shuffled back inside, the machines started up again and we all got back to work.’

  The generally friendly relations between management and workers did not prevent women from being laid off if demand for Rowntree’s products fell. There was a company rule that if work was short and there was more than one member of the family working there, the youngest had to leave, and in times of recession many young girls who had only just been taken on at Rowntree’s found themselves thrown out of work again. Nor were older workers immune from being sacked. One woman remembers being one of 300, all aged over fifty and with many years’ service to the company, who were abruptly sacked without compensation when sales of chocolates failed to match the company’s expectations. There was also a general and perhaps correct belief among the women that the unions in that era were more interested in defending male workers’ rights than those of women. ‘It was still very much a man’s world then,’ one says. ‘It wasn’t a woman’s world at all. And I’m not sure how much it’s changed even now.’

  On another occasion, when orders for fancy boxes had slowed, Madge and Rose were sent to the Gum department to pack Fruit Pastilles. They had to put the pastilles into the tubes, always in exactly the same sequence of colours, and every now and then the overlooker would come down the line, pick out one tube out and check it, and if Madge had one colour in the wrong place, the overlooker would reject the entire box and make her repack all of them. They were on piece rate and had to complete a certain number of boxes in an hour to make their money, so to achieve the rate they had to work fast – ‘be sharp’, as they used to say in Yorkshire. Having a box rejected was a potential disaster.

  The sugar crystals on the pastilles were another unexpected hazard. By the end of the day both girls’ finger ends were red raw from rubbing against the sharp crystals. There were no rubber gloves then, so Madge and Rose just had to put up with the soreness until the skin on their fingers toughened up. On that first day, by the time they got home, they had covered every one of
their finger ends with bits of tape to protect them from any further damage when they were doing their chores at home.

  Like the other girls, they had to clean their machines at the end of their shifts and, after they had done so, a Hygiene Adviser went round to check them. If she was not satisfied, Madge and Rose, who by then had already gone to the changing rooms or the snack room, found themselves rounded up and taken back to their machines to finish the job properly.

  Just as in Cream Packing, women working on the Fruit Gum and Fruit Pastille production lines were not supposed to eat any of the sweets, and the charge-hands and overlookers were always ‘very keen’ to keep a close watch on them. Though she could take or leave chocolates, Madge used to love gums and pastilles, and she was dying to eat one, so she palmed one from the conveyor belt, got herself down under the bench, out of sight of the overlooker, and popped it into her mouth. Rose saw her do it and was hissing at her, ‘Stop it, our Madge. Stop it. You’ll get into trouble. They’ll finish you if they catch you.’ Fortunately they didn’t.

  It was a rare flash of defiance from Madge, because she was usually so shy that she would keep a very low profile. The boss of the Card Box Mill, Peter Luger, was a suave and good-looking man with a ‘right posh’ accent, as they called it on the production line. He was also a gifted pianist in his spare time, and Madge had a serious crush on him. The overlooker for Madge’s section was a woman called Fanny Hall, who sat at a high desk so she could watch everything that was going on. Her desk was directly opposite Madge, and although she was fond of her, Fanny also had a strong mischievous streak; knowing how shy Madge was, and how keen she was on Peter Luger, she would lose no opportunity to send Madge to his office on some errand or another.

  ‘Madge,’ she would say, with the hint of a smile, ‘just a minute. Would you mind just going and telling Peter I want to see him?’ And poor Madge would already be blushing crimson as she put down her work and set off along the room, between the machines, with the ribald comments of her workmates ringing in her ears. She would try to compose herself, knock on Peter Luger’s office door, go in and pass on the message, the words tumbling out of her as she tried to end the ordeal as quickly as possible. ‘MrLugerMissHallwantstoseeyouaboutsomething,’ she would say, scrambling her words together as she rushed to get the sentence out before her face got any more crimson with embarrassment, and then she would scuttle back to her workbench, still blushing like mad. Peter Luger would come out of his office, walk to the overlooker’s desk and start talking to Fanny Hall, but they would keep looking across at Madge and chuckling to themselves while they were doing so. She could tell they were talking about her, which only made her blush even more. ‘Peter Luger actually thought a lot of me,’ she says now, ‘and I think that he would have liked to have taken me out, but I used to be so shy then – and perhaps he was, too – that it never happened.’ Though she was painfully shy then, she insists that she’s over it now: ‘I’m not shy now! I’m a little devil and I speak my mind!’