The Sweethearts

by Lynn Russell

  ‘He won the walking race at the Rowntree’s Sports Day on the bumpy grass field at the Haxby Road sports ground about three times as well,’ Eileen recalls, ‘and every time he won it he got a suitcase as his prize – we hadn’t room to stack them all! I remember there was another blind man at Rowntree’s who was a really good swimmer and, like my dad, he won a lot of races. He used to swim breaststroke and they’d always put him in the lane next to the side of the pool, so he could just brush the side with his fingers on each stroke and keep himself on course.’

  8

  Madge

  Madge was twenty years old and seven months pregnant when she and Bill got married. It was the day after Remembrance Day, 12 November 1938. The wedding reception was a very homespun affair, back at her mum and dad’s house with a few home-made sandwiches and cakes. The very next morning, Madge went into labour and her baby, a little boy, was born two months premature in the front room of her parents’ house. It was a difficult birth and although he was alive and perfectly formed, the baby was in a very frail condition.

  Immediately after the birth, the midwife who had delivered him had a muttered conversation with Madge’s mother. Exhausted from the birth, Madge did not hear what was said and was too weak to intervene, but she formed the impression that ‘the midwife never really seemed to bother with the baby after that’.

  Madge had given up her job to have the baby, and with no money and a husband also out of work, her immediate prospects were less than bright. The midwife and Madge’s mother may have reached the conclusion that, on top of all that, an ailing, premature baby to look after might have been too much for the family to cope with, but whatever the reason, after living for just five hours, her son died. ‘In a way it was a good thing,’ she says now, a faraway look in her eye, ‘because we had no money and nowhere to go but that little room,’ but there were many times in the years ahead when she fell silent, staring into the fire, and thought about the son she had lost and what might have been. She went on to have three wonderful daughters, but there was never to be another son.

  Miscarriages, stillbirths and early deaths are tragic in any era, but they were far more common then, in the days before the National Health Service. Women were less well nourished and much harder worked, and the high cost of calling in a doctor meant that many women would often shut their eyes to warning symptoms until it was too late. Muriel, who began working at Rowntree’s not long after Madge, lost three children in a row:

  We were trying for a family, but first I had a miscarriage and then I had two stillbirths, both boys. After that we decided to adopt. My doctor wasn’t really in favour of it, because he said there was nothing physically wrong with me and I could have kept trying for a child of my own, but I just couldn’t bear the thought of going through all that again. So we adopted a girl, when she was a month old. I never met her parents, I just didn’t want to, so my auntie and uncle went and picked her up from Leeds instead. When we went to court for the adoption, they told us that when she was old enough to understand, we should tell her that she was adopted – ‘better for her to hear it from you than to be told by someone else’, they told us. So when she was about seven years old, I told her a little story about where she had come from. I said that we got her from a home for children who didn’t have a mummy or daddy, and I told her about my two little boys who’d died at birth. After I told her, she was crying and crying. I was still crying myself when my husband came home from work, and I said to him, ‘I hope I haven’t done the wrong thing, because she’s so upset.’ As I was settling her down to sleep that night, she was still crying and I said to her, ‘But you are happy with us, aren’t you?’ And she said, ‘Yes, but I’m crying for your little boys.’

  Madge had only a few days to recover from her own tragic loss before she went back to work in her old job at Rowntree’s. There was no option but to do so, for her wage was the only money that she and her new husband were bringing in. She and Bill carried on living with her parents for a couple more months, but he was still out of work and making little effort to find any, and finally Madge’s father, who was, she says, ‘very keen on working’, gave her an ultimatum: ‘He’ll have to go. He isn’t trying to get a job, he’s just staying in bed. You can stay, but he’ll have to go.’

  When she told Bill, he said, ‘Well, what are you going to do about it?’

  She said, ‘I’m married and you’re my husband, I’m coming with you.’

  He went out to find them a place to live and met a couple who offered them a room for eight shillings a week – and that was all it was: one room in a decrepit slum house in Union Terrace that also housed several other families. Madge and Bill had a little coal fire on which she used to boil a kettle, their bed, a second-hand table and two chairs, and a rickety old wardrobe for their clothes – not that they had many – all in that one room. There was a sink with a cold tap at the end of the hall, shared with the other families, and in the yard at the back there was an outside toilet that they also had to share, not just with everyone in their house, but with the occupants of three other houses as well. Going outside to use it almost invariably meant joining a queue.

  They had so little money that Madge found it hard to put anything by to save for things, and anyway, if she’d had any savings at home, her husband would almost certainly have spent them on drink or gambling, because he had already shown himself prone to both of those vices. However, there was a savings club at Madge’s work. It wasn’t run by Rowntree’s, it was just done between the women themselves and run by one of her workmates. They used to put in twelve pennies – one shilling – each over the course of the week, and after twenty weeks they then had a pound that they could spend on whatever they wanted. ‘It sounds like nothing now,’ she says, ‘but back then it was a small fortune.’ Madge used her first pound to buy a washing tub, a rubbing board (a ridged board – the washboard used by 1950s skiffle groups – on which washing could be scrubbed), a posser (a hand-operated tool with a long wooden handle and a perforated copper dome at the bottom that was used to agitate the washing in the tub), a scrubbing brush for doing the floors, a floorcloth, a clothes line and three dozen pegs. When she told her sister Rose, she said, ‘That’ll do for a wedding present, then!’

  There were few laughs at home for Madge. It was a miserable existence, and not just because of their living conditions. They did not have a happy marriage at all, and her husband was, in her words, ‘a bit of a rum one’ to say the least. He was not a good husband to Madge and he was not a good father to their children when they arrived. Although he was not tall, no more than five foot five and only a little taller than Madge herself, he was very broad-shouldered and powerful. Madge says:

  I was quite strong myself, but he could outdo me. I had more than a few bumps from him over the years, but then, he was a bad ’un. Before I married him, my mother had said to me, ‘Get rid of him,’ but unfortunately I didn’t listen. He was all right up until we got married, but it all changed after that. He was a devil for ‘acting on’ – picking an argument over nothing – and he wouldn’t give in. I had a mind of my own and I wouldn’t be told, so no wonder I suffered. He used to go mad, and maybe he didn’t realize how much he was hurting me, but I had black eyes, a broken nose and bruises everywhere, but still I kept on with him. I didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t leave him. I had no money and anyway, I was really frightened of him. He used to say to me, ‘I’ll do you in, if you leave me.’

  Among the handful of possessions that they had taken with them when they moved out of Madge’s family house was a beautiful clock that she had won in a baking competition just before she left Park Grove School. Madge had been chosen to represent her school and had to bake a sponge cake with custard. It turned out perfectly, but the competition was open to girls from all the schools in the area and even when they got down to the final half-dozen competitors, she still did not imagine for a moment that she might win. However, ‘Everybody else had made the custard very swee
t,’ she says, ‘and I was the only one who hadn’t put any extra sugar in. The judges said to me, “You can always add more sugar, but you can’t take it out,” and they gave me the first prize. The whole school gathered in the big hall for the presentation. It was quite a do. The Lady Mayoress came and presented me with my prize, and I remember looking out and seeing Mam and our Linda watching me.’

  Madge’s prize was a carriage clock made from heavy brass with glass side panels that allowed you to see the movement ticking away. It was inscribed ‘York Gas Company 15th Annual Cookery Competition for Elementary Schoolgirls, 17 June 1932’. Her dad was so proud that he told Madge, ‘I’m going to put it on my bedside cabinet, so it’s the first thing I see in the morning when I wake up.’ All the time she lived at home, her dad kept it on his bedside cabinet, and Madge was going to leave it for him when she moved out, but Bill insisted that they took it with them. When she next saw her mum, she told Madge, ‘Your dad’s heartbroken that you’ve taken that clock.’ So Madge said, ‘Tell him I’ll bring it back for him.’

  ‘I had a basket,’ she says, ‘that was the fashion then, and I tried to smuggle the clock out of the house in the basket with a cloth draped over it, but my husband spotted me and said, “What have you got there? I know what you’re trying to do. Get it put back.” And he made me put it back on the mantelpiece. I was frightened of him, so I had to do what he said.’

  Even now, Madge never uses Bill’s name, always referring to him as ‘my husband’, a reflection of the deep psychological scars of that long, abusive relationship she endured. As she says now, ‘To know lovely chaps like Peter Luger, and then to marry one like I did … but then I wouldn’t have had three lovely daughters if I hadn’t, would I? So a very good thing came out of a bad one.’ Madge had been desperately unhappy almost from the moment they were married, but they were never to divorce; people just didn’t then, the way they do today. It was not just Bill’s threats to her, chilling though they were; there was virtually no help for women wanting to leave their husbands then, no women’s refuges or social security payments, very little childcare, and what little there was was very expensive. If you had no money, there was little prospect of getting any, particularly if your children were too small to leave at home on their own while you went to work, always assuming you could find any work.

  Like the majority of firms in that era, Rowntree’s would not consider married women for full-time employment; as soon as a female employee got married, she was obliged to leave her job. If that seems overbearing and paternalistic to modern eyes, the company could at least offer a coherent rationale for the policy. In an era largely devoid of ‘ready meals’ and modern labour-saving devices, the work of raising children, cooking, cleaning, washing and keeping a house was unrelenting, and Rowntree’s management believed it was fairer on a married woman, as well as on her children, if she did not have to combine a full-time job at the factory with another full-time job at home. They also believed that married women might be taking jobs from those who did not have a husband to support them or, even worse, from men who had families to support. However, whether Rowntree’s directors should have been making such decisions, rather than allowing the women to make them for themselves, was another matter altogether.

  Many women workers at Rowntree’s understood the rationale behind the policy, even if they did not always agree with it. ‘Life was hard then at work and at home,’ says Muriel, one of Madge’s workmates. ‘At work it was all heavy, old-fashioned machinery and a lot of lifting and carrying, and at home there were no labour-saving things like there are now. I used to be down on my hands and knees in the backyard trying to get the oil stains out of my husband’s overalls by scrubbing them on the grate over the drain. Mind you, I’ve never had a washing machine; even today – and I’m eighty-six – I still wash everything by hand.’

  Those women who disagreed with Rowntree’s policy adopted their own pragmatic response to it by concealing their marriages from the company and all but a handful of trusted friends, and continued to work there as ‘single women’, at least until they became pregnant.

  Even if they had no children, married women would still have struggled to make ends meet if they left their husbands. Madge had no money and no job, so leaving Bill and setting up on her own somewhere else, especially once she had children, was never going to be an option. She had made her bed, as they used to say then, and she just had to lie in it.

  Madge’s parents were desperately worried about her, but powerless to intervene, and the whole family also had to deal with a double tragedy. Madge’s sister, Marian, a quiet, kindly girl with never a bad word for anybody, was only twenty-three when she was diagnosed with meningitis. Doctors told her parents that even if she survived, she had already suffered irreparable brain damage, but in the event she died.

  Not long after that, Madge’s brother, Richard, died in equally tragic circumstances. A handsome man and a very smart dresser, with a beautiful camel-hair overcoat, he was much older than Madge, but very fond of his little sister. When Madge was in her teens he would sometimes take her to the Empire cinema as a treat, and as they walked down the street, Madge can still recall swelling with pride as she watched all the girls’ heads swivelling when they caught sight of her handsome brother. He married a London girl and when war broke out he was working in a fruit and vegetable shop in Croydon while awaiting his call-up for the Army. When the first fire-bomb raid on London began, he went out of the shop without a helmet, and when a bomb struck a nearby building a beam fell on him. Before ambulance crews could reach him, looters had stripped him of everything: his wallet, his shoes, his identity card and even the cufflinks from his shirt. His frantic wife knew only that he had not come home that night, and she began touring hospitals in the area, showing his photograph to people, hoping against hope that he was safe somewhere, injured and unrecognized. When she eventually reached the hospital where he had been taken, one of the staff recognized him as a patient from the photograph, but by then Richard had died of his injuries and his wife could only go to the morgue to identify his body.

  Such tragedies put Madge’s own sufferings into perspective, but they did not make her life any easier to bear. She and Bill continued to live in that one room for almost two years. By then, war had broken out, and with a labour shortage as more and more men enlisted or were called up, Bill had at last found work back at Rowntree’s. Young, fit and strong, he should have joined the Army himself, and ‘I wish he had done really,’ Madge says, ‘because it would have done him good, but he got out of it. He said he had a bad heart, but I don’t know that he really did.’ Bill Burrow never did join up, and though there was a strong suspicion that he was ‘swinging the lead’, his claims of poor health were never put to the test and he continued to work at Rowntree’s right through the war.

  With the coming of war and the need for every pair of hands to be put to work, Rowntree’s relaxed its rules a little, and though married women were still not permitted to work full time, there were increased opportunities for them to work part time or as casual workers, and from then on, women employees, including married women in casual or part-time employment, formed an ever more significant proportion of the workforce.

  When married women rejoined the company, they were segregated from the single girls and worked in teams with other married women. They were sometimes seen as a ‘bad influence’ on the young, single girls, who were presumed – by Rowntree’s management at least – to be innocent and virginal young maidens. But, contrary to the belief of many of the women, their segregation was not only because the married women might prove to be a dangerous, corrupting influence upon them, with their often bawdy banter about themselves and their husbands, and the quality, or lack of it, of their sex lives. Some girls from sheltered backgrounds did find working with the married women an eye-opening and sometimes intimidating experience, and new girls were often the butt of most of the banter and practical jokes. Some even went home and cried themse
lves to sleep after their first few days at work, but most soon adapted and in time came to value the camaraderie with the other women. Rowntree’s actual reason for segregating the married from the single women was on the more humdrum but practical grounds that married women who had spent some time away from the factory bringing up their children would no longer be able to keep up with the speed that the single girls could maintain on the production line. In their own interests and to prevent rows and disputes breaking out with those who felt they were losing money because of the slowness of their workmates, the married women were allowed to work together at their own pace.

  There were inevitable disagreements between individuals at Rowntree’s, but there were few splits between whole groups. One of the few sources of potential tension was between the women with husbands in well-paid jobs, who worked part time just for ‘pin money’ to buy luxuries – a minority – and those who worked out of absolute necessity. The difference was summed up in the comment that could often be heard around the factory: ‘We work for need; you work for greed.’

  Madge was now able to go back to work, but even with two wages coming in, she and her husband were still existing on just twenty-eight shillings a week between them. Bill smoked, so he kept two shillings a week pocket money for his cigarettes, and after the rent was paid they had just eighteen shillings on which to live, and much of that was spent by Bill on drink and gambling. They had even less money when Madge fell pregnant again and once more had to give up work.

  Her first daughter, Fay, was born in 1940 in that cramped room in Union Terrace, but soon afterwards they had the chance to rent a little two-up, two-down house in Townend Street in the Groves, a slum district just outside the walls on the north side of the city. Her two other daughters, Hazel and Lynne, were born there over the next few years. The rent – five shillings and ninepence halfpenny a week – was lower than they had been paying for their one room in Union Terrace, but it accurately reflected the very poor condition of the house. Like many inner-city districts of York, such rows of cramped terraces had been constructed by nineteenth-century jerry-builders to cash in on the surge in demand for housing fuelled by the booming populations of Britain’s industrial towns and cities.