The Sweethearts

by Lynn Russell

  There was always a powerful, heady aroma of liquid chocolate in the Cream Packing room and some of the girls couldn’t bear the smell of it. One of them found it sickening after a while, but it never put Dorothy off. ‘I think when you were amongst it you got so used to it that you almost didn’t notice it,’ she says, ‘but when you came out, your clothes really smelled of it. My grandma always said she could smell it on me as soon as I got home.’

  After setting the chocolates, she next learned how to pipe (squeezing the swirls onto the top of the Black Magic chocolates with a piping bag). There were ‘light pipers’ who added an identifying flourish to some of the Black Magic range, including the Cherry Cups, and ‘heavy pipers’ who worked on the Chocolate Whipped Cream Walnuts, surrounding the nut with a piped chocolate swirl, like a miniature helter-skelter.

  Dorothy is left-handed but she was forced to learn to pipe right-handed, because space was so tight alongside the conveyor belt and the pipers sat so close together that, had there been right-handed and left-handed girls next to each other, they would have been forever getting in each other’s way and bumping into each other. Dorothy was sent to the back of the enrobing machine to learn piping, practising on the uncovered chocolates until she could do it. ‘I can remember being really upset about it,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t used to using my right hand and I made a real mess of it to start with, but I didn’t want to be moved out of there because the women I worked with there were brilliant, so I persevered until I could do it right.’ Gradually she was able to match the skill and the speed of the others, and there was a real pride in the work they did. ‘I look at a box of chocolates now,’ she says, ‘and I think to myself that they’re nowhere near as nicely presented as when they were hand-piped.’

  One of the juniors was given the job of keeping the pipers supplied with piping bags of warm chocolate, each new bag thrust into their hands as the previous one was emptied. The junior did nothing else but refill the piping bags when they ran out because the machines were running all the time, non-stop. Dorothy can remember working till nine o’clock at night sometimes. She was paid overtime – known at Rowntree’s as ‘extended hours’ – for the extra hours she worked, but there was no choice about whether to work or not, and the extra hours sometimes made an already long day almost unbearable.

  In the periods from September to December, and February to March or April every year, preparing for and dealing with the Christmas and Easter rushes, Dorothy worked until seven or eight o’clock almost every evening, and if she did not want to work the extended hours she had to produce a doctor’s note to say why she was unable to do so. She and her workmates were allowed just half an hour for tea at the end of their normal day’s work, which was not enough time to go home. If they knew they would be doing overtime in advance, most of them brought in packed meals to eat, but if the company wanted them to work overtime and had not warned them the day before, they issued tickets that the girls could take over to the Dining Block and exchange for a free meal. However, the food they were given was neither as filling nor as appetizing as the lunches served in the dining hall. One woman remembers that she and her workmates were given a saucer of chips and some beetroot for their evening meal on more than one occasion, and if they wanted bread and butter with it, to bulk it up a little, they had to remember to bring their own to work with them.

  The pipers would give the juniors a very hard time if they were too slow to fill their piping bags or messy about how they did it. ‘There was one team of women in particular,’ Dorothy recalls, ‘a married women’s team, and they were monkeys to us, they really were. You had to go to the back of the machine and fill their piping bags up with chocolate – the liquid chocolate was running all the time – and if you got any chocolate at all on the outside of their piping bag, they used to go absolutely spare, but despite that, I thoroughly enjoyed my time there; I absolutely loved it.’

  The community of women employees spent so much time together that they got to know each other almost as well as they knew their own families, and Dorothy could discuss problems with her workmates that she would never have dared to talk about at home. ‘We used to talk about all sorts of everyday things that were going on around us,’ she says; ‘problems with our families, money worries, falling out with boyfriends, everything. The majority of them, especially the married ones, would help you if they could. You could talk things over, often more with them than you could at home. I mean, I couldn’t have told my grandmother much about what was going on in my life! Though, having said that, she was still a really good grandmother and she was lovely and kind to me.’

  Although television was now more widely available, few of the production line workers could afford a set. Most went regularly to the pictures, and as they worked on the production line Dorothy and her friends would tell each other about the films they had just seen and describe the plots and the characters. ‘When I was on with the pipers or the markers,’ Dorothy says, ‘if you got in with the right crowd and one of them had been to the pictures the night before, they’d tell you the whole story of the film they’d been to see while you were working. In return, as we were all on piecework, we would all do a bit of extra work to keep up the output of the girl who was telling the story, so she wouldn’t lose any money. After that the music would come on over the Tannoy and we’d all have a sing together; old-fashioned songs like “My Gal’s a Yorkshire Gal” and “Pal of My Cradle Days”. As long as the work was getting done, they didn’t mind you singing and talking as much as you wanted.’

  When the chocolates left the pipers, they went through one cooler and then there was a girl on what was called ‘halfway’, who took them off that conveyor belt and put them through a second cooler. It was the job that Dorothy liked least. ‘Sometimes the chocolates would get stuck to the conveyor belt,’ she says, ‘and there were these little wires stuck in the belt. If you weren’t careful, they’d catch your fingers as you were trying to get the chocolate off, and if you cut yourself on those it didn’t half sting. Or sometimes it went too far and you’d have to stop the machine or you’d tell the operator “Missed one sheet!” because otherwise they’d come through stuck on the belt and that was another mess to be cleaned up.’

  Every so often there was a hand inspection by the overlookers, though on these occasions they were less concerned about how clean the girls’ hands were than how hot they were. If someone’s hands were too warm when they were piping, the heat would affect the chocolate, and when it got too warm, by the time it got to the end of the line and started to cool down again, it would have gone white, so it all had to be stripped off. The overlookers used to come along and say, ‘Change your bag,’ and the pipers would all start again with a fresh piping bag.

  Sometimes it was not just the pipers’ hands that were too warm. In very hot weather, the entire Cream Packing staff would sometimes be sent home because the chocolate would get too warm and turn white or even start melting out of shape. One of Dorothy’s fellow pipers, Sue Mizzi, still remembers gazing wistfully out of the window on a hot day, watching kids in Haxby Road heading for the swimming pool or the banks of the river, while she willed the mercury in the thermometer to rise a couple of degrees higher. She kept muttering to her friend every few minutes, ‘What’s the temperature? Are we there yet?’ At the start of the lunch break at 12.30 p.m. they would hesitate, hoping that the overlooker would come round to tell them not to come back in the afternoon, but often they’d be disappointed and would have to turn up again at 1.30 p.m., ready for the afternoon shift, only then to be told, ‘It’s too hot, go home.’ However, if there was a prolonged hot spell, the company would try to claw back at least some of the lost production by bringing the start of the day shift forward to 6.00 a.m. instead of 7.30 a.m. Work would begin in the cool of the early morning and continue until around lunchtime when, if necessary, the girls would once more be sent home as the temperature again began to climb too high.

  In summertime, kids used to cool
off with a swim in the Ouse or York’s other river, the Foss, and in the 1800s a 100-yard stretch of the bed of the Foss had even been laid with flagstones and enclosed with wire netting at either end to create an open-air swimming pool known as ‘Yearsley Bath’. However, tragedies were not unknown when inexperienced swimmers went out of their depth, got into difficulties in the strong current, or became tangled in underwater debris or vegetation, and in the early years of the new century there had been an incident when a young boy drowned. The boy’s father, Jack Crosby, worked for the Rowntree’s Fire Brigade and he was determined to do all he could to avert such tragedies in the future.

  He was helped by another member of the Fire Brigade, Wilf Woodcock, who was one of the best swimmers in York, a winner of the annual York River Swim, which was held between the site of the modern Clifton Bridge on the River Ouse and Blue Bridge a mile and three-quarters away. Wilf had once used his river swimming ability to save a young man’s life. He happened to be pedalling his bike along the bank of the river near Clifton Ferry when he saw a young man on the far bank slip and fall in. The young man could not swim and would have drowned had Wilf not dived in, swum across the river and rescued him.

  One immediate consequence of such incidents was the Rowntree company’s decision to construct the Yearsley swimming pool so that the children of employees and of York people generally could swim in safety. Completed in 1909, the Yearsley swimming pool was at once donated by Rowntree’s to the City of York. Lifeguards were permanently on duty and a sign on the diving board warning ‘Fancy diving prohibited’ offered further reassurance to hesitant swimmers. However, in summer kids continued to swim in York’s twin rivers, and in an attempt to ensure that no other parents would have to endure the heartbreak of seeing their child drown, Wilf and Jack put together a squad of men from the Rowntree’s Fire Brigade to teach all the local kids to swim.

  In his own time and at his own expense, Wilf trained to be a lifeguard, winning a gold award. He then brought the rest of the Fire Brigade members up to the same standard, and they went on to teach as many children as possible how to swim and how to lifesave, too. Over the years several children who got into trouble swimming in the Ouse and the Foss, and who would otherwise have drowned, were rescued by people trained by the men of the Rowntree’s Fire Brigade.

  12

  Eileen

  Eileen left school on the day she reached her sixteenth birthday. ‘I’d always been considered a bright pupil at school,’ she says, ‘but I left without even taking my O levels, mainly because I had a bit of a bee in my bonnet about the headmistress. I hated her, absolutely detested her, and that feeling only got stronger when she made me serve her dinner to her every day for a year. That was a punishment after I had asked her if I could leave school because all my friends were older than me and they had all already left. She said, “No,” so I said, “Right, the very day that I pass my sixteenth birthday, I’ll be walking out of school.” So I did, stupid though it was, when I look back now.’

  She immediately joined her father at Rowntree’s. It was 1951, and a good time to be starting work. The Festival of Britain that same year signalled the start of a revival in British morale and the beginning of a decade-long boom in the economy after the long years of austerity that Britons had endured during the war and for years after it. Aged sixteen, Eileen could not even remember a time when rationing had not been in force in Britain. It had been imposed soon after the outbreak of war, when she was just five, and although rationing of bread, potatoes, eggs and petrol had now been abolished, ration coupons were still required for sweets, sugar and meat until 1954.

  Despite her lack of O levels, Eileen had had a good education at a York grammar school, but at the time she gave little if any thought to possible alternative careers, having always assumed that she would start work at Rowntree’s straight from school. The offices at the factory were seen as the place to work at the time, because they paid the best wages in York – two pounds twelve shillings and sixpence a week, which was much higher than shop work and a very good wage for a young girl in those days (equivalent to about £200 a week today). And just in case Eileen was harbouring any different thoughts, as soon as she left school, her dad said to her, ‘You get yourself to Rowntree’s offices.’

  ‘You had to have a grammar school education to work in the offices,’ Eileen says, ‘and you had to pass quite a strict exam to get in as well.’ The exams had been devised by the latest generation of the industrial psychologists that Rowntree’s had been employing since the 1920s to advise on recruitment strategies, assess the potential of interviewees and, in line with the industrial psychologists’ mantra of ‘a place for everyone and everyone in their place’, to steer them to the most suitable part of the factory for their particular skills.

  Girls interviewed for office jobs underwent a much more searching examination than those applying for work on the factory floor, after which they were unofficially graded ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, ‘D’ or ‘E’. The industrial psychologists also patronisingly and offensively – if sometimes accurately – categorized less able women into types, which included ‘muddler’ and ‘careless’. ‘A’s would be offered work in the office without hesitation, and often ‘B’s would be employed there too, but ‘A’s and ‘B’s were unlikely ever to be offered work on the production line, since the industrial psychologists subscribed to the theory that the more intelligent candidates would have a short attention span and would soon become bored by production line work and either quit or, even worse, stay and make trouble. By the same token, even if their formal education had been limited, the more intelligent applicants for production line jobs might find themselves steered towards office jobs instead. Production line jobs were reserved for ‘C’s but, if there was a labour shortage, then ‘D’s were often hired as well, sometimes over the strenuous objections of the industrial psychologists. That happened in the mid to late 1930s when demand for Black Magic really took off, but the rate of subsequent sackings of unsuitable employees also rose sharply to as much as 20 per cent, no doubt to the private satisfaction of the industrial psychologists who had advised against employing them in the first place. ‘E’s were regarded as hopeless cases, too clumsy and unintelligent to be trusted with even the most basic production line work, and they were invariably shown the door.

  Eileen must have been graded ‘A’ because she was told at once that she had qualified to join the Rowntree’s office staff. The factory was a huge, sprawling place, but Eileen and the other new office girls soon got to know it as well, if not better, than most of the long-term employees, as they were put in the Post Office Messengers department to start with and given the task of taking messages round to all the different departments, so they soon got the feel of the layout.

  ‘Not all the departments had telephones,’ Eileen says, ‘and of course there were no emails or anything like that then, so a lot of the orders and messages went by typed or handwritten letters and memos that were delivered by the messengers – and it wasn’t just me; there were half a dozen of us taking messages round.’ The girls were taught the routes and accompanied the first few times they did them, but after that they were on their own and, like the postmen and postwomen out in the real world, they were expected to deliver the mail, come hail or rain, sleet or snow, storm or tempest.

  There were three different routes and the messengers did one route every hour. In between deliveries they sorted their mail, just like the workers in a general post office, and then went out to do another round. The first route was the office route, on which Eileen set off with her bag of letters and went to the Cream Packing department offices and all the other offices around the factory, ending at the Wigginton Road office block. Constructed in 1896, it was one of the first buildings in the area with electric lighting, and had something of the look of an auditorium or a chapel, the latter impression reinforced by a beautiful stained-glass east window featuring the white rose of York. The junior office employees worked in
a large semi-open area on the ground floor, overlooked by a circular gallery that opened onto the offices of the directors and senior managers. Perhaps in tribute to the potential for office feuds on the ground floor, under the gazes of spectators on the gallery above, it soon acquired the nickname of the ‘Bear Pit’. Underneath the ground-floor offices, and even lower on the works pecking order, were the cellar offices and storerooms of the ‘understairs staff’ – the cleaners and caretakers. To the north of the Bear Pit, and connected to it at first-floor level by a red-brick bridge, was another five-storey office building, and beneath it was the landing stage, the underground terminus of the Rowntree’s railway sidings where raw materials and supplies were unloaded and finished goods shipped out.

  The second route was the factory route, going round all the different confectionery production departments, and the third route was the outside route. On the latter Eileen walked down the Gum Corridor, and then went out to the Saw Mills, the Card Box Mills, the Power Plant, the Sugar Plant and the Elect Block. ‘As I went by there,’ she says, ‘I always looked up towards the top of the hoist, where I knew my dad would be working, but I could never see him there, he was too high up.’ She went on to deliver the letters to the plumbers, joiners, electricians and decorators and all the other tradesmen, and after that she was always glad of the chance to sit down for a few minutes while she sorted the next batch of letters and memos back at the post room, because it was a very long walk right around that circuit.

  She was outside most of the time and it could be miserable in bad weather, although even when the sun was shining, the outside route could be something of an ordeal for her. She was a beautiful girl, with shoulder-length dark, straight hair, and very slim, weighing only about seven stone at the time, and attracted a lot of attention as she delivered the mail. She could have found walking round the sprawling factory site intimidating, but she took it all in her stride. ‘You were on your own as you went through the routes,’ she says, ‘and on two of them you didn’t really see many people. You were usually just going to the edge of the rooms or the outside of the buildings where the mailboxes were, so you were always on the edge of what was going on. People used to shout at me and sometimes wolf whistle, but I just used to keep walking and tried not to take any notice, though I was probably blushing like mad.’