by Lynn Russell
At home time each day, Madge and her sisters would hurry down from the Card Box Mill and, like the hordes from the other departments, they would line up by the time clocks, waiting for the siren that signalled the end of the working day, and then it was mayhem. They were not allowed to leave their departments until the charge-hands told them they could go, and then there was a rush for the stairs to get to the cloakroom and put on their hats and coats, but then, with the exception of invalids, they had to stand in the corridor outside the timekeeper’s office until the timekeeper said they could go, at which point there was a stampede for the gates.
The time clocks would rattle out a symphony of ‘pings’ as the women jostled to blick-out, and then Haxby Road, deserted one minute apart from the queues of works buses lined up and waiting, would be deluged the next moment with a flood of people pouring out of the factory, thousands on foot and thousands more on bicycles. The footpaths and the two bridges would be jammed with people, and the roads were wall to wall with bikes, half of which – including Madge’s – didn’t seem to have any brakes. ‘If you had any sense,’ she says, ‘you wouldn’t have been trying to go against the tide of people at home time or you might have been killed in the rush.’
Madge had little spare time during the week. It was a long working day and by the time she had eaten her evening meal and done her share of the household chores under the eagle eye of her mum, there was little time to do anything else before curling up in bed. At weekends, however, after the bliss of a lie-in on Saturday morning – albeit a very brief one, because Madge’s mum thought that laziness was a habit that was easily acquired and very hard to lose, and chased them out of bed if they lingered there – Madge and Laura would often buy a yard or two of cloth from the market and make clothes for themselves and their sisters. Laura was a very good seamstress and she and Madge used to make exotic hats for everybody, a bit like the ‘fascinators’ women wear to weddings and glamorous occasions today.
‘We inherited that creative streak from our mother,’ Madge says, ‘because she was very good at making things. She showed us how to make little dolls. The arms, legs and body were made separately from scrap cloth and stuffed with rags before being sewn together. We would buy little shaped faces ready-made from a shop called Booth and Barr and stitch them onto the heads, and spend hours making outfits for them. There were shortages of everything after the war, and there was a real demand for the dolls because people just could not get hold of things like that unless they made them themselves.’
Madge’s mum also used to make beautiful paper flowers. She would cut out squares of paper and then carefully concertina them into strips, using a bit of wire to pinch each strip in the middle. She then pulled out the concertina at either end and finished up with something looking like a carnation. She could make roses, too, by fixing paper flower petals round and round a central stem. Using thread, the flowers were fastened together into a long string with real greenery woven in as well; trying to dodge the thorns, Madge and Rose would pick the leaves from a sprawling rambling rose in the orchard beyond Parson’s Wall. On special occasions, like street parties or coronations, Madge’s mum would hook the strings of paper roses up with a couple of nails banged into the wall outside and, Madge says, ‘We had to keep hold of her as she hung out of the bedroom windows to fix the flowers and crinkled paper twists into place.’
Madge still has a photograph of herself and her sisters, with their mum and dad, all grouped together on the doorstep outside their house on the day of King George VI’s coronation, 12 May 1937. All are dressed in their Sunday best clothes with the hats that Madge and Laura made perched on the girls’ heads. There is a flower basket hanging above the door under a framed picture of the King and Queen, beautifully decorated flower boxes on all the windowsills, paper garlands and streamers, and her mum’s paper flowers arranged up the walls like the stems of climbing roses.
When Madge had finished work for the week, she loved to go dancing more than anything else. She would sometimes go to the Rowntree’s dances – the girls called them the ‘Penny Hops’ – in the gym on Friday nights (though Friday was usually hair-washing night), but on Saturday nights Madge and her friends always went dancing at the New Earswick Folk Hall or the Assembly Rooms in York. It cost sixpence to get into the dance and the girls would share a bottle of port between them that cost two shillings and elevenpence. ‘I’d smuggle in the port inside my handbag,’ Madge says, ‘and we’d hide it in the toilet, because you weren’t supposed to be drinking there at all – we were too young to drink legally and anyway the New Earswick Folk Hall was strictly teetotal – so we’d have a dance for a while and then we’d go to the toilet and have a drink of port, and then we’d go back and dance a bit more.’
One night she and a girl she was friendly with were coming home together from a dance at New Earswick. It was about 12.30 a.m. – the dances finished at midnight – and they were walking home because there were no buses at that time of night. When they reached the end of Rose Street, they heard a commotion and saw a group of people singing and dancing in the middle of the street. Madge’s friend had to carry on walking home – she lived in Burton Stone Lane a mile or so away – but never one to turn down the offer of a party, Madge joined in the singing and dancing with the group of people, who were celebrating George VI’s coronation. One of Madge’s neighbours had dragged his piano out into the street, and a lot of them were singing and dancing round the piano. Many of the other neighbours were standing on their steps to watch while their children were peeping out of their bedroom windows.
Among the revellers were six lads who had just arrived in York and had all been taken on at Rowntree’s. With demand for Black Magic, Kit Kats and the other new Rowntree’s brands still booming, the factory was short-staffed at the time and bringing men in from all over Yorkshire. A lady who lived a few doors down from Madge’s house used to take in lodgers, and all six of them were living there. Among them were lads from Hull and Barnsley, and one called Bill Burrow, who came from the mining district of Castleford. He was only slightly taller than Madge, but his powerful chest and shoulders suggested that he had already had a year or two working underground in one of the numerous collieries in and around his home town, before seizing the chance of a less demanding way of earning a living.
Madge was really enjoying herself singing and dancing with them, until her mum (who was at her usual vantage point, standing on the doorstep chatting to the lady next door) spotted her and called out, ‘Come on now, our Madge. It’s time you were in bed.’
Madge really didn’t want to go, but she knew better than to argue with her mum, so she went home, as meek as you like, said ‘Night, night’ to her mum, and made as if she was going upstairs to bed. Then, as soon as her mum wasn’t looking, Madge slipped out of the back door, crept along the back lane and joined up again with the lads out in the street. A while later her mum came out again and spotted her, and said, ‘I thought you were in bed. Get yourself home now.’ But as Madge got ready to do so, feet dragging and knowing that this time her mum would be keeping a very close eye on her, one of the lads, Bill Burrow, grabbed her arm and said, ‘Where do you generally go dancing?’
Madge gave him an appraising look and then said, ‘Well, usually we go to New Earswick or the Assembly Rooms.’
She said goodnight, then went home and up the stairs to her bedroom – she couldn’t sneak out again with her mum on the prowl – but a few minutes later, Bill and the other lads all appeared in the back lane, having noted which house Madge had gone into. They perched on Parson’s Wall opposite the back of the house, and were still singing away while Madge and Rose peered out of the window at them. ‘I was dying to go out again,’ Madge says, ‘but I didn’t dare because my mam would have scalped me if she’d caught me disobeying her again!’
On the Saturday night, Madge and her friend went dancing at the Assembly Rooms and there were the six boys, all dressed up in their best suits, waiting for them. Bi
ll and Madge spent most of the evening dancing together and from then on they were courting. She had a choice of two suitors, because another lad was after her at the time as well, but she chose Bill and, as she now admits, it turned out to be completely the wrong choice.
Before long she and Bill were lovers, and not long after that she discovered she was pregnant. Illegitimacy – or ‘getting into trouble’, as it was known – was a very big deal in those days, and in many cases, if a ‘shotgun wedding’ could not be arranged, the birth would be hushed up. The unfortunate girl would often not only leave her job, but leave the area as well for a while and have her baby adopted before coming back. In other cases, to avoid the disgrace of having a bastard child in the family, the girl’s mother would pretend that the new-born baby was an unexpected late addition to her own family, with the actual mother forced to maintain the pretence that her own baby was her sister or brother for years.
Madge kept her own pregnancy quiet as long as she dared, but her mum didn’t miss much and one morning she stared at her daughter for a few minutes, her gaze travelling slowly down over the suspicion of a swelling around Madge’s waist, and then said, ‘Are you late, our Madge?’
Madge shot her a guilty look and then nodded. ‘Yes, three months late.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘Well, get married,’ Madge said. ‘What else can I do?’
There were very few palatable alternatives. Back-street abortionists did exist and many desperate girls made use of them, sometimes at the cost of their ability to have children in the future, and sometimes even at the cost of their lives, but that idea never crossed Madge’s mind, and nor did the thought of being a single mother. She was pregnant: Bill would have to make an ‘honest woman’ of her, and that was that.
However, her pregnancy could hardly have been worse timed, as Bill had now lost his job, partly through his own poor timekeeping and partly because it was still Rowntree’s policy to bring in young workers as juniors when they were seventeen, and then sack them when they got to twenty-one and became entitled to the full adult wage. Bill was now twenty-one and he had been sacked. Madge and Bill had no money and no home to go to, yet whatever her own thoughts may have been about her daughter’s pregnancy and Bill’s suitability as a son-in-law – and she missed no opportunity to tell Madge that she thought Bill was ‘a wrong ’un’ – Madge’s mum told her, ‘You can live here and have the little front room and the little bedroom.’
6
Florence
Florence had only been working at Rowntree’s for two years when war was declared in 1939. As a result, the box-makers had to move out of the Card Box Mill because the Army took it over as a supply depot, while other parts of the factory were also converted from their peacetime uses to produce munitions and other war materials. This went against every pacifist principle that Quakers held dear, and must have provoked some agonizing soul searching in the Rowntree family members, but whatever battles they might have fought privately with their consciences, they were realistic enough to know that if the Government required their factory for war work, it would be taken whether the family agreed or not.
The company instituted an allowances scheme to ensure that the families of employees on National Service did not suffer financial hardship, and Christmas gift parcels were not only sent to the men and women serving in the forces, but also to their families at home. When Alan Rathmell, who had worked on the production line making the first Kit Kats before the war and whose wife worked in the offices, first went missing in action and was then later reported to be a prisoner of war, Rowntree’s made sure that his picture appeared in every issue of the monthly Cocoa Works Magazine, just to show his friends and family that he had not been forgotten. He still lives in York today.
Florence and her workmates were sent to Cream Packing on the top floor of the Cream Block and made boxes there for a while, but wartime restrictions meant that production of fancy boxes soon ceased altogether and the numbers of plain cardboard boxes coming off the lines were greatly reduced. To get to her new workplace, Florence entered the factory along an avenue of trees running from the main gates on Haxby Road. At the end, she went through a porch with oak double doors and a sundial above it, into the Cream Block, where the chocolate assortments were now made. Running parallel to the Haxby Road, it was a huge, six-storey, red-brick building with large rectangular windows and a frieze at roof level, painted a cream colour, that looked like the icing on a cake. That impression was strengthened by the row of flagpoles, like birthday candles, along the top, from which flew the Union flag and also the national flags of any distinguished foreign visitors to the factory that day. It was a brand-new building, constructed in 1936 to accommodate the extra machines and workers needed to cope with the phenomenal success of Black Magic and the other new brands.
Florence walked along the entrance passageway and onto the central corridor, which ran through the entire building from one side to the other. Originally an open space between two separate buildings, the corridor had exposed brickwork to either side and a high glazed and whitewashed roof overhead to protect it from the elements. There were hanging baskets at intervals, and Florence would pause to catch the scent of the flowers as she walked underneath. Further on, she took a flight of stairs with glazed decorative tiles on the walls that led up to the main production areas of the Cream Block, a series of cavernous, open rooms, punctuated by iron pillars and overhead girders, and extending over the five upper storeys of the building. As you climbed the stairs, the rich, sweet and slightly cloying smell of liquid chocolate grew stronger and stronger.
Like other food production companies, Rowntree’s came under the direction of the Ministry of Food during the war, which imposed severe restrictions on manufacturers and a system of rationing for consumers. Cocoa beans remained reasonably plentiful throughout the war, but supplies of sugar and milk were drastically reduced, and although Rowntree’s continued to produce thousands of tonnes of cocoa, chocolate and confectionery, much of it was ‘vitaminized’ and reserved for the forces, some for sale through NAAFI canteens, the remainder ordered by the War Office for direct supply to troops. This included ‘Pacific and Jungle Chocolate’, adapted to suit hot climates, that was issued to forces serving in tropical areas. Parts of the factory were also switched from making chocolate to the production of more basic foods. Rowntree’s also made oatmeal blocks and fruit bars, and the Cream Packing department was turned over to the production of dried milk and the infamous dried eggs that those who lived through the war still remember with a shudder.
Under a system of switching food production between factories in different regions to minimize transport, Rowntree’s had been put to work making jams and marmalade for Frank Cooper Ltd of Oxford, and in the summer of 1940 Florence even went ‘strawberry plugging’ at Hunstanton for sixteen weeks, picking strawberries and pulling the hulls out of them. The work was hard and her back would ache after a couple of hours, and by the end of the day she could hardly straighten up, but she loved the chance to be out in the fresh air, feeling the warm sun on her as she worked. Unlike the Rowntree’s production lines, there was no one to tell her off if she helped herself to some of the goods she was handling, so she ate strawberries until she was sick of the sight of them. Once again, she and her fellow workers were being paid on piece rate by the weight of fruit that they picked, so once she had filled her buckets to the brim, she used to squeeze a few of the ripe strawberries in her hands and let the juices run into the buckets to make them weigh even more. The evenings in Hunstanton were like a return to her childhood in some ways, because she and the other girls were all in lodgings and there were so many of them and so few rooms that they had to sleep three to a bed. Even worse, one of the girls who Florence shared with snored louder than a German bomber passing overhead.
By the time the soft fruit was delivered to the factory, it was not always in the freshest condition. During the fruit season, the baskets and colanders
of strawberries, raspberries and cherries were stacked high outside the Gum Block, and sometimes there would be a white, fur-like mould all over them, but when Florence called out to the men handling them one day, ‘You don’t really use those, do you?’ they just said, ‘Of course we do, we just put a hose on them to rinse all the fur off.’
Florence worked in the Cream Block for two years, but as soon as she was eighteen, the minimum age for work on munitions, she was transferred from box-making on the top floor of the Cream Block to fuse-filling in the Gum Block Extension on the Wigginton Road side of the site, where, despite the name, they had made Smarties in peacetime. Next to it was the Gum Block itself, where non-chocolate confectionery such as Fruit Gums, Fruit Pastilles, Beech Nut chewing gum and, later, POLO mints were made. The Gum Block Extension was another brand-new building, constructed in 1937 to house the machinery for yet another of the new products created in the 1930s, albeit a product that had originally been produced as far back as the 1880s under the name Chocolate Dragees. The name was later changed to Chocolate Beans and in the 1930s they were relaunched as Smarties, and under that name became another huge success for the company, so much so that the Gum Block Extension, originally designed to be just two storeys high, had to be increased to five storeys to accommodate the extra production lines that were now needed.
