The Sweethearts

by Lynn Russell

  York Minster escaped serious damage in the raid, but the city’s ancient Guildhall was set on fire and left a ruin, and Rowntree’s original factory at Tanners Moat, just off North Street, also fell victim to the German bombs. Used as a warehouse since production had been moved to the Haxby Road site almost fifty years before, it was packed full of sugar, and burned with a ferocious intensity. Firemen were still damping down the smouldering ruins two days after the raid.

  Families whose wives, mothers or daughters were working on the night shift at Rowntree’s on the night of the raid faced a long, anxious wait until they came home. One of them, Joan Drake, remembers that because of the bomb damage and the hordes of people out in the streets seeking news of friends and family, it took her a lot longer than usual to cycle home along Dodsworth Avenue. ‘I vividly remember,’ she says, ‘my sister and her husband waiting anxiously, looking out for me in Burnholme Avenue, and when I got there, I got the biggest hug of my life.’

  The war had further strengthened the already strong community feeling among those who worked at, or even just lived near, the factory. Joan Drake benefited from that when the chain broke on her bike as she was cycling along Dodsworth Avenue to work the next day. A man she did not even know offered to lend her his own bike and repair hers for her while she was at work. Joan had a moment of blind panic when she came out of work that night and, confronted by hundreds of bikes in the bike racks, could not remember what the one she had borrowed looked like, but fortunately there was a vaguely familiar-looking bike in her normal space in the rack, which turned out to be the right one, and when she reached Dodsworth Avenue, there was the man waiting for her with her own, fully repaired bike. ‘I’ve often looked back on how trusting we were even of complete strangers in those days,’ Dorothy says, ‘and thought to myself that it was perhaps a bit naive. Maybe we were lucky, but I can’t ever recall someone being taken advantage of and I think perhaps people were just kinder and more honest back then.’

  Dorothy’s father had been in the Royal Artillery during the war, serving with the 70th West Riding Field Regiment. They went to France as part of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), and while the remnants of the BEF were being evacuated from Dunkirk, leaving almost all of their equipment behind, James Birch and his comrades fought their way to Cherbourg and were evacuated from there with all their guns and equipment intact. He later fought with the big guns in Tunisia, Italy and Greece, where he suffered a serious wound to his arm. With the rest of his regiment, he was awarded the freedom of the City of Bradford when he came home at the end of the war, and Dorothy has vivid memories of going to see the ceremony in September 1945.

  The city, ‘the wool capital of the world’ as its citizens liked to call it, made a vivid impression on her. As their train breasted a hill and rattled down towards the city in the valley bottom, the sky seemed to darken into twilight even though it was the middle of the morning, and as she stared, fascinated, out of the train window, it seemed to sprawl to the horizon with its forest of smoke-belching mill chimneys piercing the skyline, each adding their contribution to the pall of smoke that hung over the city.

  As they came out of the station, Dorothy had never seen such traffic or heard such noise. In the cobbled street behind the station, intrigued but more than a little frightened and clinging tightly to her grandmother’s hand, she peered into the yard of a textile mill, and even from the great iron gates she could hear the thunder of their battalions of looms, while the sweating men manhandling great bales of wool towards a hoist were shouting to make themselves heard above the din. It was a windless autumn day and as they walked from the station to the town hall square where the ceremony was to take place, a rain of tiny smuts and soot fell from the skies like winter snowflakes. The majestic buildings they passed were all of stone, but so smoke-blackened that they could have been carved from coal. A brass band played as the soldiers, immaculate in their dress uniforms, marched into the square and formed up in front of the town hall steps, and Dorothy, breathless with excitement, scanned the ranks of faces, searching for her father. None of the faces looked familiar and she was almost in tears when in the end her grandmother had to say, ‘That’s your dad,’ and pointed him out to her. ‘I didn’t recognize him at all,’ Dorothy says, ‘but then I hadn’t seen him for six years and I was only three when he went away.’

  Her dad moved in with them at his mother’s, leading to a fresh reshuffle of the sleeping arrangements as he took one of the bedrooms and the children were squeezed even tighter into the remaining rooms. He slipped straight back into the routine of the house and returned to work at Rowntree’s almost as if the war had never happened, but the six years he had been away had created a gulf between him and his younger daughter that was never to be completely closed. ‘I was never really able to sit down and talk to him,’ Dorothy says. ‘I knew he was my dad, of course, but there wasn’t that closeness between us that there was between him and my sister, but then she’d been that much older and she had had a lot more contact with him before he’d gone away to war.’

  By her fourteenth birthday, in 1950, Dorothy was a tall, slim and beautiful young girl with a ready smile, and she was even more eye-catching because she wore her hair in an unusually short style for that era, while her friends all wore their hair long. ‘I’ve had short hair all my life and I’ve never had it long,’ she says, smiling at the memory. ‘I got into the habit when I was young because my grandmother would never let me grow it long. With all those children in the house, I think she was frightened of us getting nits, because they were around then just as they are now, and I suppose it was just easier for her and one less thing to worry about if we all kept our hair short.’

  Like Madge and Florence, there was no question of Dorothy continuing her education beyond the legal requirements, and she left school as soon as she was old enough. She left at the end of July and, along with a friend of hers, went straight to Rowntree’s for a job. They passed the medical and all the tests they were given and were both taken on. When she came home and told her dad that she had got a job at Rowntree’s, he snorted and said, ‘I’ll give you a month.’ He must have thought she would be too scatter-brained and too impatient to stay the course, ‘But I lasted a fair bit longer than a month,’ she says, ‘twenty-six years in total, not counting the time I had off to have my children.’

  On her first day, as she walked into work, she passed stacks of baskets and crates of fresh fruit waiting to be taken into the Gum Block. ‘The smell of fruit when I went into work in the morning was wonderful,’ she says. ‘They had every kind of fruit you could think of there, ready for the Fruit Gums and Pastilles being made.’ She blicked-in at the time clock and, wearing her white overalls, started in the Nut Room, inside the Almond Block, where all the nuts were processed for the different chocolate blocks and assortments, and where they also made marzipan. There was also a Raisin Room where the dried fruits were sorted; girls working there had to sort seventy pounds of raisins an hour. The charge-hands would check batches at random and if they found more than three of the tiny raisin stalks, the whole seventy-pound batch would be rejected and the unfortunate girl would have worked an hour for nothing.

  Dorothy was put on sorting different nuts – almonds, hazelnuts, Brazil nuts – for different parts of the factory. ‘When I started work for the first time and went into the room I’d been allocated to,’ she says, ‘I just stood there, open-mouthed. There were all these people rushing about, the machines and conveyors were clanking and rumbling, everything was happening at top speed and the noise was absolutely deafening; I think that’s why we all talk so loud even now, because you had to shout over the noise of the machines. On that first day, I just stood there looking round and thinking, “Goodness me, how am I ever going to be able to do this?”’

  The Nut Room was a fearsomely hot place in which to work, because it was directly above the Hot Room, which, as the name suggests, was so fiercely hot that there were signs on the door warnin
g those with pacemakers, high blood pressure or other ailments not to enter. The men who worked in there were permanently drenched with sweat and drank pint after pint of water in their break times to replace the fluids they had lost. In winter they would work all day in conditions like the jungles some of them had fought in during the war, but then emerge, sweat-soaked, at night, into what might be a snowstorm or several degrees of frost. Given that, it was scarcely surprising that the men who worked in the Hot Room averaged more days off work with ill health than any other group of workers in the factory.

  The heat in the Hot Room was necessary to melt chocolate that had solidified inside the pipes or machines when production had been halted. Whenever that occurred, the only solution was either to fire a steam-driven ‘pig’ – a steel cylinder slightly smaller in diameter than the pipe – through the pipes to clear them, or else dismantle the sections of pipe, separate them and take them to the Hot Room to melt the chocolate. The pipes or machine parts were then hosed clean with scalding hot water in the adjoining Wet Room that was tiled from floor to ceiling.

  There were two overlookers in the Nut Room, one man and one woman, and, says Dorothy, ‘If they saw us with any make-up on at all, they’d make us go and wash it off before we started work. I didn’t wear it at work anyway. I didn’t think it was good for my skin in that hot, humid atmosphere, and my grandmother definitely would not have approved. My dad didn’t like me using it either, except for a little bit if I was going out. Later on, when I was a bit older, I used to get pancake make-up that was sold in a stick but again, I’d never wear it to work, only when I was going out.’

  One of Dorothy’s first jobs in the Nut Room was to sort blanched almonds. There was a large stainless steel hopper where the nuts were steamed, and then a man brought them to Dorothy’s work station in a tub and tipped them onto the table for her and the other girls to sort. They had to work their way through them, taking out all the skins and picking out the bits of shell, and then they were put into huge ovens to be dried. There was another room where the nuts were roasted, and if she was sent in there to sort them, she used to come out covered from head to foot in brown dust from the effects of the roasting process. ‘It was heavy work,’ she says, ‘because we were only small – I was seven stone wet through then – but I loved it.’

  There were also what were known as ‘pan almonds’, which all had to be a certain size, so Dorothy and her workmates had to sort them and grade them by size. ‘We used to like that,’ she says, ‘because if you got onto those pan almonds, you earned your money fairly easily, and we were often set to work on them on a Friday, so it made for what we called an easy day.’

  They also had a break from their normal working routine when they went over the road to do their Day Continuation classes. Dorothy still has a scar on her hand from her attempts to master woodwork. ‘It was nice to get a change from the conveyor belts,’ she says, ‘and we all had a laugh, but while some of the ladies who did it before us used to make wardrobes and all sorts of things, I couldn’t even make a table, to be honest.

  ‘Every Friday when we got paid, they used to come round with your pay packet and a tin for charity and you’d put a penny in, and they’d go round all the machines for people to put money in. That was a very Rowntree’s thing to do.’ Wages had risen since Madge and Florence started at Rowntree’s, and Dorothy was paid one pound ten shillings a week. She had to give it all to her grandma who would keep most of it for her board, but give her five shillings back to spend on herself. ‘I had to put half of it into my uncle’s mail order catalogue every week to buy clothes,’ she says, ‘and I could easily spend the rest. There was never anything spare.’

  Even though Dorothy was now mature enough to have a full-time job and go to the cinema or dancing at night, her grandmother would still always give her an extra job around the house that she had to do before she could go out. ‘Mind you,’ she says, ‘I didn’t go dancing or anything much when I lived at my grandmother’s, because she and my dad were very strict, though I was very shy anyway. For all that I worked at Rowntree’s among all those people there, I hated going to youth club or something and walking into a room with all the people there. Even when I had grown up and was getting married, when I was going out with my husband, if we were going to the pub or something, I’d walk in his shoes! My sister could walk into a pub on her own and have a drink; I could never have done that. I couldn’t walk into a crowded room, it was torture for me. It was all right if I was the first there, I didn’t mind people coming in after that, but I couldn’t bear it the other way round. Even now, I don’t like doing things by myself.’

  Whether partly as a result of her own troubled childhood – having lost her mother at such an early age and then seen her father away at war for most of her childhood – Dorothy valued her family above everything else and was never happier than when she was surrounded by family members, a feeling that has persisted to the present day. When she went out, although pubs were firmly off her itinerary, she loved the cinema and used to go regularly with her friends:

  We used to get all dressed up. I never liked the big, circular skirts, so I always used to wear the straight pencil skirts, and it was interesting getting on the back of a motorbike in one of those! I’d put on as much make-up as I thought my grandmother would let me get away with, and my friends and I would go to the pictures two or three times a week – the programme changed on Monday and Thursday and there was a different one on Sunday as well. It was always a laugh because there used to be two films on and in the interval between them, when the organ played and the ice-cream girls came round, everyone would get up and parade around. We’d all have a good look around and see who was there and what was going on. We didn’t want to miss anything. It used to make me smile when I’d see girls who had been sitting with one boy before the interval, settling down with a different boy as the lights went down again.

  The film was not always the main attraction, and sometimes she did not even bother checking to see what picture was showing:

  If you were in the back row, it didn’t really matter what film was on. All you had to do then was watch out for the ushers coming round and shining torches along the row to make sure you weren’t up to anything your mother wouldn’t like! We’d go to the Clifton Cinema sometimes, just because if you went upstairs, there used to be double seats in the back row up there, which were even better. There were at least a dozen cinemas in York and we went to them all at one time or another, though to be honest, some of them were pretty terrible. There was a real fleapit on Clarence Street called The Grand, and it was anything but grand. It was a real dump and you were never going to see a film if you went there because the seat-backs were so high you could barely see over them to look at the screen.

  There were also film shows every lunchtime in the Joseph Rowntree Theatre next door to the Dining Block at the factory, but given the staunch Quaker morality of the Rowntrees, there was not much likelihood of any heavy breathing being tolerated in the back row. One of Dorothy’s workmates, Beryl, remembers that:

  After you’d had your dinner in the Dining Block from about 12.30 to 12.45 or thereabouts, they had a film in the cinema that you could go and watch. They were short films, most often a serial, something like Flash Gordon, which you could watch over a few days, and you had to go the following day just to see what happened next. But sometimes they’d show a feature film and you’d watch it over four or five days, broken up into twenty-minute sections. It always seemed to stop at a lovely part and you had to wait until the next day to see what happened next. If they’d ever shown a really long film like Gone With the Wind, it would have taken the best part of a fortnight to watch.

  There was a billiards room as well, where employees could go and play a frame or two of snooker or a game of billiards at lunchtime or after work, and Rowntree’s pensioners used to come in and play there as well. There was also a film show every Monday evening after work. The girls could go home, have their tea
and change, and then come back to the factory. They would watch a film in the theatre from seven until nine, and then go into the lecture hall next door and dance to records until ten o’clock, when the dancing ended in time for everyone to catch the last buses home.

  Although many of the old Rowntree’s traditions were still being observed when Dorothy began work there, the Rowntree family’s control of the company that bore their name had been progressively diluted ever since Joseph Junior’s death in 1925. His son, Seebohm, had succeeded him, but he lived in Buckinghamshire, and while he remained in nominal charge, his work on political and social reform preoccupied him and left room for others to manoeuvre to supplant or succeed him.

  Among them was George Harris, one of the architects of the new brands and new business philosophy that had transformed the company in the 1930s. Whatever his qualities as a visionary marketeer, Harris was a divisive, abrasive character with a strong anti-Semitic streak, but his significant contribution to the company had led him to lobby for and then demand a place on the board. To give added weight to his campaign, he spuriously claimed to have been offered a place on the board of Marks & Spencer, adding, ‘But I’ve turned it down because, frankly, I don’t think I could spend the rest of my working life working with Jews.’ Seebohm then wrote to his fellow directors, conceding Harris’s talents but urging them to reject him because of his ‘Hitlerite tendencies’. Seebohm’s views prevailed at the time, but when he retired in 1941, Harris became his successor, the first non-Rowntree to chair the company.