The Sweethearts

by Lynn Russell

  Despite his high public profile, like his fellow directors, Harris was an almost invisible presence around the factory. Dorothy never saw him in her department, and sometimes she would read a story about him in the paper and think how strange it was that, even though she spent every working day within a few yards of him, people who read the local paper knew as much about him as she did.

  Harris remained as chairman for eleven years, but his behaviour became increasingly eccentric and arrogant, and the final straw came in 1952 after Harris was issued with a parking ticket in the centre of York. Having harangued the policeman who had issued the ticket, saying, ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ and telling him that a man of such importance to the city should have been exempt from the parking restrictions applied to mere mortals, Harris then announced that he was going to contest the ticket in court and conduct his own defence. Nothing could have been further from the traditional Rowntree’s virtues of dignity, humility and service to the community, and his fellow directors resolved to remove him from the board without delay. As he arrived for work one morning, Harris was confronted in the car park by the directors, flanked by Rowntree’s security men. He was presented with a unanimous vote of no confidence and a resignation letter for him to sign. Only when he had done so was he allowed into the building, and then only to clear his desk. It was a less than glorious end to the career of a man who had helped to rebuild Rowntree’s fortunes and launched some of its most iconic brands.

  The fall of Harris did not lead to the Rowntree family retaking control of the company that bore their name, and Seebohm Rowntree’s son Peter became the last family member to serve on the Rowntree’s board of directors. It was now purely a business, controlled by shareholders and directors who were motivated by the balance sheet and not by the combination of the profit motive and the zeal for social reform and philanthropy that had marked the Rowntree family years.

  10

  Florence

  Florence and Arthur, the young soldier she had been stepping out with, wrote to each other all the time he was away, and at the war’s end, as soon as he was demobbed in 1946, he contacted her and they resumed their relationship. It was a long-distance one at first, because he was working near his home in Wolverhampton, and after the years he had been away at war the long wait was almost unendurable for Florence, but early the following year, he at last came back and moved in with her family. Just before he arrived, in the depths of one of the coldest winters of the century, with York’s rivers frozen solid from bank to bank, snow piled high along every street and icicles like stalactites hanging from the gutters, Florence’s father died in bizarre and tragic circumstances. ‘My mum had told me that he used to cut his toenails with a piece of broken glass,’ she says. ‘It sounds bizarre but she swore it was true, and one time when he was doing it, he cut his toe quite badly with the glass. He didn’t get it treated; he hated making a fuss about anything and he never had time off work or went to the doctor, no matter how ill he felt.’ Florence’s father was far from alone in that attitude, and often it was less from fear of doctors than the cost involved.

  The Labour Government elected in a landslide victory in the ‘Khaki Election’ of 1946 that saw Winston Churchill ousted, had pledged itself to slay the ‘five giants: want, disease, squalor, ignorance and idleness’ that had blighted life for so many in pre-war Britain. One of the most significant results of that pledge, the National Health Service, offering free medical treatment to the entire population, came into existence on 5 July 1948. It lifted a huge burden from the poor, eliminating the constant background fear of the financial consequences of illness and disease that troubled even the most robustly healthy families, but the NHS came too late to save Florence’s father. The wound to his foot became infected and, left untreated, it then became gangrenous. Eventually a doctor was called in, but by then the only treatment he could offer was the amputation of the leg in a last-ditch effort to save Florence’s father’s life. The leg was duly amputated but the gangrene had spread too far by then and he died not long afterwards, in January 1947.

  Florence and Arthur delayed their wedding for a period of mourning for her father, but they were married in October of that year. For many women marriage not only marked a farewell to single life but also to Rowntree’s as well, thanks to the company’s continuing policy of refusing to allow married women to work full time. Florence, however, had no intention of stopping work, for her husband’s wage alone would not have been enough to support them. Even though the Rowntree’s rules meant that she would now only be allowed to work part time, even half her former pay was better than none at all.

  When women workers got married, the company always gave brides-to-be the privilege of being able to entertain their friends and workmates with a celebration party in the Dining Block. They brought presents and were served cake and tea, and speeches were made, but they also took the chance to play practical jokes on the bride-to-be. Many a prospective bride left the canteen to find the arms of her coat had been stitched up, or her pockets filled with cocoa powder, and one woman was tied to one of the pillars in the canteen while her friends made her face up like a clown.

  Even without the excuse of an impending wedding, workers at Rowntree’s, like those in most factories, played endless practical jokes on each other. One woman who was leaving the Kit Kat department to join the cleaning staff was grabbed by the men working in her section. They trussed her up with parcel tape so she couldn’t move a muscle and then placed her on a steel trolley and wheeled her into the Wet Room, where they cleaned the chocolate containers that they used. They filled one of the big sinks with water, sat her in it, and then poured gallons of liquid waste chocolate all over her. Another woman, Kath Webster, recalls how she and some of the other girls took their revenge on an unpleasant, overbearing overlooker. ‘We got some fudge chocolate,’ she says, ‘mixed it all up and shaped it to look like a pile of dog poo and left it in the middle of the aisle. When the overlooker came by, she went mental. In fact she went mental twice, the first time when she thought it was dog poo and she was tearing her hair out trying to work out how a dog had got into the building undetected, and then she went crazy a second time when she realized how we’d tricked her.’

  One of the most alarming, though ultimately harmless, pranks was perpetrated on a young apprentice during the summer shut-down for the factory’s annual holiday. It was a time when the entire factory site was deserted, save for the caretakers, nightwatchmen and the teams carrying out the annual maintenance and deep cleaning of the silent machines and empty rooms. The unfortunate apprentice had been detailed to help the team unblocking sections of pipe partly blocked by chocolate that had set, by sending a ‘pig’ through it. The apprentice was stationed beneath the open end of an overhead pipe, which had been disconnected from the next section, and was told to stand there, stock still, holding a galvanized bucket above his head, covering the end of the pipe, ready to catch the pig when it emerged.

  All was quiet for a moment, and then the pipe began to shake and he heard a rattling sound. There was a jet of steam and a spray of semi-liquid chocolate and then what sounded like a gunshot. Driven through the pipe by steam under extremely high pressure, the pig emerged from the pipe at such a velocity that it punched a hole straight through the bottom of the bucket, went through the window beyond it and even smashed through the window of the next block as well, before coming to a halt against the far wall. The apprentice toppled over backwards, still holding his bucket, but though frightened out of his wits, he was physically unhurt. Had any of the perpetrators of that prank been caught by the management they would probably have been sacked on the spot, but as it was, the broken windows were hastily replaced, the apprentice kept quiet about it, and both he and the rest of his workmates lived to fight another day.

  Florence’s friends were much gentler with her, contenting themselves with pinning balloons all over her coat and giving her an armful of small gifts for the wedding. Florence and Arthur
were married at Heworth Church, but they had the reception at her home, because, she says, ‘we didn’t have the money for anything fancier’. She even borrowed her wedding dress from a friend at Rowntree’s. It was velvet and had been folded up in a cardboard box for some time so she had to hang it up to steam in the bathroom to get all the creases out of it. ‘We didn’t even have a wedding cake,’ she says, ‘because we couldn’t afford it, so we had a few sandwiches and buns my mother made. My sister tried to help by making custard to go with them, but she burned it!’ Even though the war had ended, rationing was still in force, so they had to do without custard because there was no sugar with which to make any more.

  Rowntree’s had traditionally given women employees a china tea set when they got married – a tray, a dozen cups and saucers, two bread and butter plates, a cream jug and a sugar basin – but Florence’s wedding came a little too late, because the company had stopped that particular tradition shortly before. However, they did give her a set of cutlery; it saw heavy duty over the years and now, sixty-five years later, she is down to the last two knives.

  Florence and Arthur went to Morecambe for their honeymoon. They stayed in a bed-and-breakfast guest house which cost them eleven ponds eleven shillings for the week; she still has the receipt among her family photographs and souvenirs. When they came home, they lived with her mother at first; back then most couples lived with one or other of their parents when they got married, because there weren’t many who could afford their own house straight away. Two of her sisters had married and moved away by then, so there was a little more room in the family house than previously, but when their daughters Carol and Beryl were born there, all four of them had to share the same bedroom. They saved every penny they could for a place of their own, but even though their names had been on the waiting list for a council house from the day they got engaged, they simply had to wait until their turn came, and with slum clearance, bomb damage and six wartime years when virtually no new houses were built, not to mention the post-war baby boom, there was no shortage of other people competing for what housing there was.

  In the end they had to wait for over five years, because their eldest daughter, Carol, was already four years old by the time Florence and Arthur were finally offered a council house of their own. The one that they were allocated was at Acomb, which was a long way out of town on the far side of York from the factory, and that made it difficult for them to get to work. However, if they had turned it down they might have had to wait another five years, so they took it and then began looking for someone living closer to the city centre who might be interested in a swap. Eventually they traded their council house at Acomb for a two-bedroom prefab in Foss Way. It was not a like-for-like swap; the prefab was a definite step down on the housing ladder, but it was at least more solidly constructed than many of that era, and it did have a bathroom, though there were no other mod cons, and certainly no fridge or washing machine. Florence had to scrub the washing on the wooden table every week and then put it in the boiler to wash.

  Apart from its close proximity to their work, the house in Foss Way had one other significant advantage: it was just across the road from her mother’s house. Florence had three children by then, the two girls and a boy, Malcolm, born seven years after Beryl. With money always tight in the household, Florence went back to work at Rowntree’s within six months of the birth of each one, though from then on she only ever worked part time. Fortunately one of Florence’s sisters did not go out to work; she had always stayed at home to help their mother, so she looked after the kids who were not at school when Florence was out at work.

  The economy had been booming throughout the 1950s – as one dour Yorkshire industrialist later commented: ‘If your business couldn’t turn a profit in the 1950s, there was something seriously wrong with you’ – and rapidly rising wages were now allowing many working-class families to live at a level above mere subsistence for the first time in their lives. The average annual wage in 1940 of about £200 had more than doubled by 1950, and doubled again by 1960. Five-day working, pioneered by Rowntree’s in 1919, was now almost universal, and paid holidays, which had been restricted to one week a year for most pre-war workers, had been increased to two or three weeks a year, greatly increasing leisure time for working families. In line with the rising incomes and increased time off, a wealth of new ‘luxury’ and ‘lifestyle’ products were introduced to satisfy demand from a new class of mass consumers, for whom shopping was ceasing to be merely a matter of necessity and becoming a pastime instead. Rowntree’s own modest contribution to the trend was a new luxury product, After Eight, the first ‘thin mints’.

  Florence had been put to work in Cream Packing when she went back part time, and in 1962, when After Eights were first introduced, she was put on the production line for them. Some of the women put the chocolates into their little individual waxed paper envelopes, while Florence’s job was to put them into the boxes, but she did not last long on that. ‘There had to be exactly twenty-six mints in each box and you had a little clicker – a hand-tally machine – that you clicked to make sure you put the right number in the box, but I was always too busy talking and kept losing track of how many I’d put in. Every time I checked, there was a different number on my clicker than there was in the box, so in the end I said, “Oh, I think I’ll go on day work instead,” [taking all the materials round to the other women], so I could do day work and chat to them to my heart’s content, while they put the After Eights in the boxes.’

  Although most of the boxes Rowntree’s used were now mass-produced by machine, unique ones, like those that Madge had hand-made, were still made for Easter, Christmas and other special occasions. Deluxe ‘red box’ editions of After Eight were also made, packed in a beautiful padded box and including sugared almonds and other confectionery, but no thin mints. One of the packers remembers Rowntree’s putting a man on night security while they were being produced to stop pilfering of the sugared almonds and the other expensive items. However, they did not prove popular and the red box edition was discontinued.

  Florence’s husband Arthur had never worked at Rowntree’s, and instead had a series of jobs working as a book-keeper at offices in and around York. Florence says:

  He had a real good head for figures, not like me, I was a real dunce! But at least I have a sense of humour to make up for it, whereas Arthur would sit through the funniest joke you ever heard and never even crack a smile. Not that he was grumpy, he was anything but that, but he just didn’t get the joke. I said to him many a time, ‘Arthur, you’ve no sense of humour.’ He’d always deny it but it was absolutely true. He’d been training to be a chartered accountant before the war, but Hitler put an end to that and afterwards Arthur had to settle for office work and book-keeping, though he kept moving to different jobs because he was always trying to better himself. It was the same with houses. Once we’d scraped enough money together to buy our first house, a tiny little terrace, he was always on the lookout for a slightly better house in a slightly better area, or one that we could improve and then sell on, and every time he found one, we would be on the move again. We moved so many times, twelve at least, that I lost count in the end. We’d just get everything ready, the house decorated, the garden planted and tidied and all, and then he’d come in and say, ‘Right, we’re moving,’ and we’d be off again. It got so it felt like it was hardly worth unpacking the suitcases!

  He was trying to better himself all the time and it wasn’t easy because the office work he did was not that well paid and he didn’t have a pension scheme or anything. He was a grafter though, he used to work all day long and then he’d come home and do book-keeping in the evening, just to try and make a little extra money. I don’t think he ever got the rewards he deserved and his work was hard. I remember one time when he was working at Micklegate Motors, a salesman came in with an adding machine. It was nineteen pounds but it would have made his work so much easier and quicker. However, he had to tell the sal
esman, ‘I can’t make a decision on it. I’ll have to ask my boss, Mr Eric, and let you know tomorrow.’ But when he asked his boss if they could buy it, Mr Eric just said, ‘No, old man, it makes the brain lazy,’ and he wouldn’t buy it for him, so Arthur had to keep slogging away, keeping the books the old-fashioned way, with brain power, pen and ink.

  Arthur was as meticulous with the household accounts as he was with his book-keeping. He had a green box with compartments for all their household expenses: rent, rates, gas, electricity, the weekly food bill, clothes and shoes for the children, and there were also sections for holidays, Christmas and birthdays. Every week when he had been paid his wages, and even after he had retired and had his pension, Arthur would sit down and carefully divide his money between the compartments. By the time he had finished, there would be very little left over, but although they lived a simple life, rarely went out and had few, if any, luxuries, they never went hungry, were never in debt and always managed to have a few days’ holiday every year.

  Many of Florence’s friends would go back to the same place and the same boarding house for their holidays year after year, but within the limits of their budget, she and Arthur used to like to ring the changes, and over the years they went to almost every east coast resort, from Scarborough as far south as Great Yarmouth. Another time they borrowed a car and went to the Lake District, but the car broke down and they found themselves standing on the forecourt of a garage counting out the cash that would have been their holiday money to pay for the cost of the repairs. They had to cut their holiday short because they had run out of cash, but while they were waiting for the car to be repaired, they took Malcolm to a stream across the road from the garage and sat on the bank while he threw stones into the water to make a splash or skimmed flat pebbles across the surface. He loved doing that so much that as they were driving home later that day, he turned to his mother and said, ‘That was the best holiday we’ve ever had.’