The Sweethearts

by Lynn Russell

  11

  Dorothy

  In 1952, the same year that George Harris had been forced to resign, Dorothy reached her sixteenth birthday. She had been working at the factory for two years by then and was judged to be ready for a transfer to the Cream Block, where hundreds of girls and women were employed. They made the different-flavoured centres, covered them with chocolate, hand-piped or hand-marked distinguishing patterns onto them, placed the different centres into the correct compartments of the boxes, wrapped them in Cellophane and then packed them into the ‘outers’ that usually contained a dozen boxes.

  Dorothy was put to work in Enrobing, the part of the production line where the centres of the chocolates were enrobed (covered) with chocolate. All the different chocolates for the Black Magic assortments, twelve in each box, were produced in the Cream Block, but there was no single continuous production line. Within the huge iron-pillared rooms, a series of areas were sectioned off from each other, where different centres were produced before they were all brought together in Enrobing and Cream Packing, where the boxes were filled, wrapped and despatched.

  Dorothy and the other girls had to undergo a ‘pin inspection’ once a week. The overlookers would say, ‘Come to the end, ladies,’ and they would line up all the girls at the end of the machines and then check their overalls, including their lapels for what they used to call ‘foreign substances’: pins, hair clips or anything else that might drop in the chocolate. The Rowntree’s rules about what workers could and could not wear were even more strictly enforced in the Machine Room, and the girls were checked for pins, brooches, earrings or even pearl buttons. Wedding rings were permitted, but they could not wear a ring with a diamond in – not that any of the girls could afford one – in case it came out of its mounting and fell into a chocolate, though unless they broke a tooth on one, it’s hard to imagine too many customers complaining if they found a diamond instead of a soft centre in their Black Magic assortment.

  Even too heavy a perfume was forbidden, because that could affect the taste of the chocolate. ‘We all knew that they didn’t even like you wearing make-up,’ Dorothy says, ‘but even so, there were the odd few girls who wore it to work. I remember one girl in Enrobing who came in with full make-up on every day, like a doll really, and with her hair done up and her turban tied in a special way as well, but she was very much the exception. Strict as they were with the rest of us, the overlookers never told her to wash it off; I don’t know how she got away with it, but somehow she did. Over the years, things got a lot less strict anyway, and by the 1960s and 1970s you’d see girls coming in wearing full make-up and all sorts of strange outfits under their overalls.’

  Smoking was also banned in the factory. That did not bother Dorothy as she was a non-smoker, but some of her workmates found ways to smoke a crafty cigarette from time to time. One of them, Sue Mizzi, says:

  There were four of us and we were all about sixteen or seventeen, and what we used to do – they can’t sack me for owning up to it now, can they? – was to go and smoke in the toilets at dinner time. I’d go in the toilet, climb on the seat and open the window and a couple of girls would keep watch while I had a cig out of the window, and then we’d swap over. Every now and then someone would say, ‘Look out, the overlooker’s coming,’ and then we’d be throwing the cigarette out of the window, and fanning the air with our hands or a towel to try and get rid of the smell. And the overlooker would come in and say, ‘Is someone smoking?’ and we’d all be looking like butter wouldn’t melt in our mouths and going, ‘Oh no, there’s no one smoking here.’ I think that’s why in later years they decided to have smoking rooms at Rowntree’s; they couldn’t stop it, so they decided to control where it happened.

  Near the end of the production line there was an x-ray machine, like a primitive version of a modern airport security scanner. A versatile worker like Dorothy was regularly moved to different roles within the department, and she worked for a time with a small team of women operating the machine. She had never been in hospital nor had an x-ray, so it was the first time she had ever seen an x-ray machine and she was astonished at what it could reveal. She was itching to take an x-ray of herself, just to see what she looked like on the inside, but that would have required her to be on both sides of the screen at once, so she had to content herself with examining the chocolates instead.

  She had to take all the bars out of one of the outers, chosen at random, and put them through the machine. The x-ray pictures came up on a big screen and she had to check them to make sure that there were no foreign bodies in the chocolates. She and the other women who operated the machine were amazed at the things that they found stuck to the underside of chocolate bars or buried deep within them, including bits of metal, buttons and sometimes an odd coin on payday when the girls had been sorting out their wages. Every so often the overlookers would come round, brandishing a chocolate that contained something that most definitely should not have been there, though it was not always the girls’ fault. It was not unknown for a small part of one of the machines to break or come loose and fall off. ‘If you weren’t careful,’ Dorothy says, laughing at the thought, ‘you might get a bolt as well as a nut in your chocolate!’

  Even stranger and less pleasant things could have been found in chocolate in the nineteenth century, though an x-ray machine would not have detected them. Unscrupulous food and drink manufacturers routinely substituted ingredients with cheaper ones to bulk up their products, and added flavourings and colourings that were at best questionable and sometimes harmful or even poisonous.

  Tea and coffee merchants sold ‘tea’ made from the dried leaves of other plants, or bought spent tea leaves and coffee grounds from hotels and coffee shops and adulterated them. Used tea leaves might be boiled with sheep dung and ferrous sulphate, and then coloured with Prussian blue, turmeric, verdigris, tannin or carbon black. Used coffee grounds were revived by mixing them with roasted and ground carrots, beans, turnips, chicory or acorns, further bulked with sand and coloured with red lead or ‘black jack’ (burned sugar). Cocoa was bulked with wheat flour, arrowroot, Indian corn (maize), sago, potato flour, tapioca or chicory, and coloured with red ochre, Venetian red or various compounds of iron. Ground glass was sometimes added to sugar, and unscrupulous confectioners used irritant or poisonous ingredients to produce the vividly coloured sweets that attracted children. Yellow sweets were coloured with gamboge, a gum that was a violent irritant and purgative; red sweets could be dyed with vermilion or red lead; white sweets might contain china clay, and green sweets could be coloured with verdigris or copper arsenite. The sweet wrappers were also dyed with the same poisonous materials. Despite repeated legislation, the use of poisonous additives in food and drink manufacture was not finally outlawed until 1899.

  Given this unsavoury background, it was not surprising that Quakers like the Rowntrees, seen as people of integrity and strong morality even by those who did not share their religion, should be more trusted to supply wholesome food and confectionery than their venal competitors. If even Quakers were not always above bulking or flavouring their cocoa – potato starch, flour, sago and treacle were ingredients in Cadbury’s cocoa in 1861, and Rowntree’s used flour, sago and arrowroot – they could at least be relied upon to stop short of using poisonous ingredients.

  By Dorothy’s day, the principle concern of the overlookers in the Cream Packing department was not poison but dirt. At the start of every working day, she and the other girls had to wash their hands and nails and then present them for inspection to make sure they were clean. Any girl who had dirty nails would be sent to clean them at once and warned that any repetition would lead to suspension or worse. The factory nurses also used to come round at intervals and inspect the girls’ hands, arms and nails, and if they found any sort of skin complaint, the unfortunate girl would be taken straight off the production line and sent to the sick bay for treatment. The overlookers were so strict on cleanliness and hygiene that girls were not allowe
d to go to work without wearing ‘proper stockings’, and no sandals or bare feet were allowed. One of Dorothy’s workmates, Beryl, recalls, ‘They’d also ask you intensely personal, quite embarrassing questions like: “When was your last period?”’ Being rather shy about such matters, Dorothy never even asked why they wanted to know.

  Whether such questions were designed to identify girls who were pregnant or for some health-related reason, with a working population of several thousand girls and women of child-bearing age, it would have been surprising if unwanted pregnancies had not been a regular occurrence. ‘It was a more innocent age then,’ Dorothy says. ‘You were brought up quite naive really, and you certainly weren’t told the facts of life or anything like you are today.’ Given that naivety and the lack of effective contraception, it was inevitable that some young girls at Rowntree’s ‘got into trouble’, but although they might have been censured by the self-appointed moral guardians outside the factory walls, their fellow workers usually had nothing but sympathy for them. ‘If girls did get into trouble,’ Dorothy says, ‘people were generally supportive. It was just what went on and we knew that it could happen to anybody in any family. There was a feeling of “There but for the grace of God …”’

  After a brief spell of enrobing, Dorothy was next put on ‘setting’ – putting the centres into the Black Magic assortments. She and the other girls had to place the centres onto waxed paper bases, and they then passed through the enrober to be dressed with a covering of liquid chocolate. The enrobed chocolates then passed along the line to the pipers, who used piping bags to hand-decorate chocolate swirls onto the top of each chocolate, or the markers, who used a tool like a thin wire fork to mark their surface, giving each chocolate its own identifying mark. The finished chocolates were then cooled, and some would be left to mature for a few days, before they were returned to the line for ‘cupping’ – putting the chocolates into separate compartments, originally frilled paper cups but later vacuum-formed from a single sheet, of the Black Magic box. The work was not as delicate as it might sound and newcomers on cupping always got sore fingers from the constant friction of the paper cups into which they put the chocolates. It took a few weeks of toughening up their fingers before they became accustomed to the work.

  After the box had been packed with chocolates, another girl would give their surface a good polish with a soft brush to remove any finger marks, and then she closed the lid and put the completed boxes on the conveyor. When they first started work, Dorothy and the other new girls in Cream Packing had to leave their boxes open so they could be checked by the overlookers before being sealed, and the end of their unofficial apprenticeship was signalled when the overlooker told them that from then on they could close the box lids as they completed them. The boxes were check-weighed, sealed, wrapped in Cellophane and placed in the outers – large cardboard boxes that held a dozen individual boxes. A man with a trolley or a bogey would come and take them down to the landing stage for packing and despatch, originally by rail, but in later years by lorry.

  The production processes were often complex and some of the work was highly skilled, but Dorothy learned to do all the different jobs on all the different machines – and there were twenty-one of them in all – from setting the centres at one end of the line to enrobing and piping at the other, and she used to fill in for any of the women who needed to ‘spend a penny’ outside break times, because the work stations had to be manned every minute of the day as the machines never stopped running. However, like all machines, they did occasionally break down and a group of mechanics were always on call if they were needed. At such times, rather than standing idle, Dorothy and her workmates were sent to make the cartons for Dairy Box or Black Magic, while the engineers repaired the machine.

  New girls were usually put to work for half a day on one of the different centres, to see if they could keep up with the pace of the other women. ‘They showed you how to do it a couple of times and then you just had to get on with it and have a go,’ Dorothy says. ‘When I first went on there, the line was going and the belt was moving, and it was all happening so fast. There was one bar, a little hazelnut log thing called “Speed” that we did as a makeweight in Dairy Box, and it was well named because it used to go that fast that I was thinking, “Oh, my God!” I was staring down at the belt, almost hypnotized by these ranks of chocolates marching past me on the belt, and I started to fall behind. I was feeling really dizzy staring at the chocolates and I thought, “This is not good,” and began to panic.’

  Dorothy had been warned that new girls sometimes turned dizzy and fainted at the belt, and had to be taken to one side and told to stare at something that was not moving until they recovered, but she had forgotten the warning until one of the other girls caught sight of her and said, ‘Dorothy! Just look up. Look at the wall, look at the wall, don’t look at the belt.’ When she did what they said, she began to feel less dizzy straight away, and as she began to pack the chocolates almost automatically, rather than thinking too much about what she was doing, she found she could do it and keep pace with the speed of the belt. Her workmates helped her through it and within a couple of weeks she was ‘into it and as blasé as anybody else about it’.

  The girls had no say about where they worked within the room. The overlookers sent them to wherever they were wanted that day, and Dorothy just looked at a sheet pinned to the wall near the entrance doors when she arrived in the morning to find out where she was working. ‘They’d say, “You’re on machine number so-and-so today,”’ she says, ‘so we moved round. You weren’t on the same machine all the time, but I never found the work monotonous anyway, there were always different people to chat to.’ If she was still shy in unfamiliar surroundings, Dorothy now felt right at home among the girls in Cream Packing. She had a mischievous sense of humour and an infectious laugh and she really enjoyed herself at work, sometimes more than she should have done, at least as far as one overlooker was concerned. ‘There was a very strict overlooker in there, very strict on your behaviour as well as your work, but we were young girls, so we liked to have a laugh, and we were often in trouble and getting told off for larking about when we should have been working.’

  There were six machines upstairs, another six downstairs and then four more in another, smaller room. Dorothy says, ‘We never liked to go in there because the overlookers in there were awful. One of them was only tiny but she was a fiery little thing. We used to say, “Oh, please don’t send us in there with her.”’ However, one of Dorothy’s workmates, Elsie Scaife, who worked in Enrobing piping chocolates, had a way of controlling even the most belligerent overlooker. Elsie’s sideline was telling fortunes by reading tea leaves, and the girls she worked with would even bring their tea cups back into the factory after their lunch break, so that Elsie could read their tea leaves for them. They would have to pack Elsie’s line of chocolates as well as their own while she told their fortunes, but all of them thought it was well worth it.

  One day the overlooker in charge noticed what was going on and called Elsie into her office. She tore her off a strip and told her, ‘You can’t be reading tea leaves on the company’s time.’ Elsie mumbled an apology and then turned to leave. ‘Wait a minute,’ the overlooker said, ‘I haven’t said you can go yet. Now, sit down and tell me what you can see in this,’ and she passed her tea cup over to Elsie. With one eye on her own future prospects, Elsie found herself able to predict great things and much impending happiness for the overlooker.

  The older women in Cream Packing were less easily intimidated by the overlookers than the juniors, and some were not even fazed by the strict Rowntree’s rules about not eating the chocolates. ‘There were chocolates going along the conveyor in front of you all day,’ Dorothy says, ‘but you weren’t supposed to eat any of them; you daren’t touch a chocolate when the charge-hands or overlookers were around. If you did and got caught, they jumped on you, definitely, though you could eat one if you were a bit sneaky about it. It didn�
�t bother me that much anyway because I’d never been a big chocolate lover; there was an odd one I liked, especially the Black Magic – my favourites were the Orange Point or the Montelimar – but I never ate a lot, even before I went to work at Rowntree’s.’

  Dorothy would go to elaborate lengths to sneak a chocolate from the conveyor belt when the overlookers and charge-hands were distracted or away from their posts, but some of the senior packers scarcely bothered to conceal what they were doing. One of them, ‘one of the old school’ who had been working there for years, had just helped herself to a chocolate and her jaws were still moving when an overlooker walked by, caught sight of her and said, ‘Are you eating a chocolate?’ The packer just looked at her and said, ‘Yes. Why, do you want one?’ and offered her the tray of soft centres she was packing into boxes. Stunned by this barefaced cheek and at a loss as to what to do about it, the overlooker turned several shades of red and finally hurried off without another word, with the packer’s laughter echoing in her ears.

  Another woman was even more enterprising. ‘I’m telling tales out of school,’ she says, ‘but I and a couple of my friends preferred pastilles to chocolates, so by prior arrangement with some ladies from the Gum department who preferred chocolates to pastilles, we used to go to the toilets at the same time. We’d take a few chocolates with us and they’d bring some pastilles and we’d swap with them. Mind you, you soon got fed up of them if you ate a lot, so we never ate that many. It was risky too, because they could search you coming in and going out, and if they caught you, they could suspend you or sack you.’