The Sweethearts

by Lynn Russell

  In winter, she would sometimes complete her round of the outside route without seeing more than a handful of people, but in summer the factory was a hive of activity. Every summer teams of painters would strip down the iron railings around the site, clean off any rust and repaint them in the Rowntree’s dark blue livery. The three flagpoles on the roof of the Cream Block and the cream frieze around the top of the building were repainted and the giant ten-foot-high letters of the ‘Rowntree’s Cocoa Elect’ sign on the face of the top storey of the Elect Block were also refurbished. Visible for miles around, they were formed from highly glazed bricks, which stood out vividly against the cream painted brickwork. One summer morning, as Eileen walked underneath and looked up towards where her dad was working as usual near the hoist, she stopped to watch as a man on a plank cradle, slung between two ropes, washed down and polished the lettering until it gleamed, and then began repainting the bricks around it to throw the sign into even sharper relief.

  The factory route began in the corridors of the Cream Block and, like most of the factory, it was always immaculate. As soon as Eileen stepped through the doors, she could smell polish and often fresh paint, mingling with the delicious aromas of chocolate and roasting nuts. There were carefully tended baskets of flowers hanging on chains from the high ceilings in the corridors, and in every reception area and office there were vases of fresh cut flowers that were renewed or replaced on a daily basis by the Estates department. One London worker, visiting Rowntree’s in 1934, said that it was ‘impossible to conceive an industrial establishment more varied in its processes or more cheerful in its appearance than Rowntree’s. The rooms and corridors, overhung with baskets and foliage, provided a startling contrast to the depressing aspect of our East End factories.’ Even when the company was on the verge of bankruptcy in the early 1930s, the Estates department still provided cut flowers at the same lavish rate.

  The factory route was her favourite one, she says, ‘because some of the girls used to throw chocolates into my bag as I walked past and I used to take them back and share them out with the other girls.’ However, that was not without its risks, because there used to be a factory detective in those days called ‘Peddler Palmer’, and it was not because he rode a bike. He was a huge man who had acquired his nickname because, despite his job, if even half the rumours about him were true, he was one of the biggest crooks in the place. One day Eileen had just walked through the Machine Room where they made and packed the chocolate assortments, and she was coming down the stairs with some chocolates in her mail bag when she bumped into Peddler Palmer. Taking chocolates was a sackable offence and she was terrified that he was going to search her. Her guilt must have been written all over her face, but luckily he let her pass and she got away with it, though her heart was still beating wildly when she got back to the post room.

  It was something of an education for her to see all the different processes that were involved in making Rowntree’s products. The areas where the confectionery was produced were as clean and hygienic as they could be made in that era, but some of the other parts of the factory, such as the Mould Shop where the tinsmiths worked, were ‘like something out of Dickens’. There were drop-stamping machines clanking and banging as they pressed out the moulds, tinsmiths trimming off the excess metal; others were soldering the parts together, with soldering irons glowing red hot, and everywhere there were clouds of smoke and the stench of hot solder. It was a side of the factory that people did not really think about or see; as well as the sweets and chocolates, and the fancy boxes with ribbons and tassels, there was heavy industry there, too.

  One of the tinsmiths, Horace Woodcock, was always inventing things and coming up with ideas on how to do things better. Rowntree’s had a suggestion scheme, where employees could fill in a form with their suggestion and if the company wanted to make use of it, they’d offer a sum of money as a reward for the idea. When they were launched in the 1930s, Smarties were made on moulds that pressed out half the shape, with a flat bottom, and then the two were brought together to make the finished shape. Horace had the bright idea of designing two sets of flexible moulds, fitted to two rollers that would press out the complete shape in one operation, doubling the rate at which the factory could produce them. He put his suggestion to Rowntree’s, and having evaluated it they offered him sixty pounds for his idea, which was an awful lot of money in those days – the equivalent of about £1,200 today – but Horace held out and said, ‘But I’m giving you an idea that will double your production. It ought to be worth more than that.’ They then called him into the office and offered him double the money: £120. Even that didn’t seem like a lot of money to him, but after thinking it over, he accepted. In fact, a Dutch company was already beginning to manufacture a machine that worked on similar lines, and in the end Rowntree’s made no use of Horace’s invention and bought one of the Dutch machines instead, so as it turned out, he did pretty well for himself.

  After about six months, new office girls were considered to have served their unofficial apprenticeship and were allocated to an office in one of the departments. Eileen was sent to the sales office on the fourth floor of the Wigginton Road block (a building that no longer exists, for it was demolished in 2009). She worked in the offices there until 1952, but then, chafing at the prospect of totting up accounts and ledgers in the same room with the same people, in the town where she had grown up, for the rest of her working life, and eager to see at least a little bit more of the world, she resigned.

  Eileen had made up her mind to join the forces and would have liked to have joined the WRENs (the Women’s Royal Naval Service), not because seafaring was in her blood, but mainly because she liked the uniform! However she needed O levels for that and, thanks to marching out of school on her sixteenth birthday, she did not have any. She knew that she did not want to join the Army and, with the WRENs ruled out, that only left the RAF, so as one of her friends had joined the RAF a year before, she decided to follow suit.

  Ironically perhaps, having left one job totting up accounts and ledgers, she found herself doing another, working in the Pay Accounts department on an RAF base in Wiltshire, but it was where her skills and experience lay. ‘I joined Pay Accounts because I was good at maths,’ she says, ‘it was my top subject. After I had taken the entrance test for the RAF at the recruiting office in Leeds, the wing commander called me into her office and said, “Has anyone told you what this test is about?” I said, “No, why?” “Because you got 98 per cent,” she said. “And we’ve never, ever had a woman score so highly.”

  ‘I said, “Actually, it was the same kind of test that I took when I went to work at Rowntree’s, so I’d already had a bit of practice!” Although the IQ tests were not identical, there were similarities in the kinds of questions asked. It must run in the family because when my son, Alan, took his test on joining the RAF, he scored 100 per cent.’ To this day, Eileen is a very modest woman and although she shows an obvious and understandable pride at her son’s achievement, all she will say about her own outstanding performance is: ‘I don’t remember feeling particularly pleased with myself at doing well in the tests. I was just grateful to have passed. I think I said, “Thank God I got in.”’

  Those serving in the RAF came from all over the country, but when she was off duty and exploring some of the villages around the base, Eileen sometimes felt as if she was a foreigner in her own land. Her Yorkshire accent and dialect words like ‘snicket’ (a narrow path) and ‘ginnel’ (a passageway between two buildings) proved as impenetrable to the natives as their Wiltshire burr did to her, and she found shopkeepers speaking … very … slowly … to … her … as if she was a particularly backward child, rather than an adult who just happened to come from a different part of the country. Nor was there always the warmth and friendliness she had been used to in her home town. Some locals were very friendly, but others often seemed startled if she spoke to them, and would sometimes scuttle away without even replying. She was a little
homesick at first, but her work kept her occupied and she soon made friends on the base and settled into service life.

  While in Wiltshire she met her first husband, who was also serving in the RAF, and after their marriage in 1954 she moved to Sussex with him and had two sons, Chris, born in 1954, and Alan in 1957. Eileen is tight-lipped about that time in her life – it was not a happy relationship and in 1961, after seven years together, the marriage ended in divorce. She returned to York after that and went back to work at Rowntree’s. Soon afterwards she met her second husband, though he did not work at Rowntree’s, but as a printer at a local firm. They were married in 1966.

  At this time, Eileen’s dad was still living in York and still working at the factory. He kept doing that heavy physical work right up until he was fifty-five, when he had what was either a heart attack or a very severe attack of angina. At that point a visitor from St Dunstan’s came to see him and said to him, ‘Come on, Arthur, that’s enough now,’ and eventually persuaded him to retire.

  Arthur and Alice stayed together for the rest of his life and he never let his blindness slow him down or stop him from doing the things he wanted to do, whether it was at work or in his time off. He loved his racing and his rugby league and he used to go to ‘Glorious Goodwood’ and Brighton races every year – he liked to go to Sussex once a year to revisit St Dunstan’s, and, says Eileen, he and Alice, ‘went there seventeen years on the trot’. When he went to Goodwood, he would stand near the rails, and although he could not see the horses, he could feel the thunder of their hooves through the turf, hear the commentary over the Tannoy and the roar of the crowd, and he could describe the race afterwards so vividly that you would have sworn that he had watched it.

  He used to ‘watch’ the racing on the television every week, listening to the commentary and picturing the race in his head. One Saturday he was sitting on the sofa, having just switched the television off after listening to a race, when there was a knock at the door. A local child had gone missing and the police were going from house to house in the street asking everyone if they’d seen or heard anything. Eileen’s dad invited them in, and one of them asked him, ‘Where were you at three o’clock last Saturday?’

  ‘I was here, watching the racing on the TV,’ Arthur said. ‘I do it every Saturday.’

  The policeman did a double-take. ‘But you’re blind,’ he said, as if he was Hercule Poirot, catching out a master criminal in a lie.

  ‘That’s right,’ Arthur said, ‘but I still watch the racing on TV,’ and he rattled off a description of the race he had just heard, as if it was being run in front of his eyes. The policeman didn’t say anything else, he just thanked him and left.

  Eileen’s dad also loved to go down to Wembley with his mates for the rugby league cup final every year, and he was treasurer of York Rugby League club as well. He played dominoes in the pub with his mates, and he could even play darts; Eileen has photographs of him doing so. She says:

  He didn’t let his handicap stop him from doing anything. And I never once heard him complain or say, ‘Why me?’ Although once, when I asked him if he often thought about what it had been like when he could see, there was a catch in his voice as he said, ‘There isn’t a day when I don’t wish I could have my sight back just for an hour,’ so that, just once, he could see his wife, his son-in-law and his grandchildren, and see again the places around York that he had known so well. Strangely enough, even though he’d never seen them, when I once said to my dad, ‘What do you think the two boys look like, Dad?’ he described them to me almost perfectly, but the opposite way around. When he told me what he thought Chris looked like, he could have been describing Alan, and when he talked about Alan he was drawing a near perfect picture of Chris.

  In the early 1960s Eileen’s dad suffered a real blow to his confidence when there was a break-in at his house. He was in his fifties by then and he and Alice had gone out for the evening to a presentation dinner in the dining hall at Rowntree’s, where Arthur and a few other employees were given awards to commemorate their twenty-five-year service for Rowntree’s. As he and Alice were leaving the house, all dressed up in their best outfits, they passed a scruffy-looking young man. Alice did not recognize him, and though it was unusual to see a stranger in a street where everyone knew everyone else, she thought nothing more of it at the time.

  However, he must have noticed them coming out of the house, realized from their clothes that they were going to be out for the evening, and had then gone round to the back of the house and broken in by smashing the bathroom window. He trashed the house and stole jewellery and other valuables. ‘He took my mum’s engagement ring and Alice’s ring,’ Eileen says, ‘though he didn’t dare take my dad’s watch – a Braille watch would have been too easy to trace, I suppose – and he knew my dad was blind, because he’d tipped his spare glass eyes out onto the bed while he was searching their room, but it made no difference, he robbed them anyway. They had a coin meter for the electric and he had broken into the meter and stolen the money from that as well.’

  When Arthur and Alice got back and put the key in the lock, they could not open the front door because the thief had dropped the latch to stop anyone disturbing him. When they went round to the back, Alice saw that the back door was wide open and realized at once what had happened. They did not know whether there was anyone still in the house, so Arthur sent Alice upstairs to check while he stood at the bottom of the stairs, blocking the way and saying in a loud voice, ‘If anyone’s here, they’re going to have to get past me if they want to get out,’ but the house was empty. The thief had got what he wanted and gone.

  ‘I don’t think my dad ever really recovered from that burglary,’ Eileen says. ‘It wasn’t so much the money and the possessions they had lost, as the knowledge of how vulnerable he now was, and I think it was the first time he’d ever felt that way. He was getting older and he knew now that he wasn’t safe even in his own home. It really did make a big difference to him and the way he was.’ It was a growing worry for Eileen and Alice as from then on, Eileen’s once fiercely independent father became increasingly dependent upon them.

  When Eileen had started working at Rowntree’s again, she had only wanted to work part time, and as a result she had no option but to go into the factory because there was no part-time work in the offices. Perhaps a little to her surprise, she found that she loved working on the line and ‘did everything’, including packing Dairy Box, Black Magic, After Eight mints and Smarties. She had to pack a certain number of boxes an hour to earn her money, keeping up with the rate that had been set for the job; if she fell behind she risked being first ‘clock watched’ and then sacked if she did not improve. Eileen had no trouble keeping up and even ‘made the rate’ on one line – being timed by the ‘time and motion’ man to set the rate that everyone else would have to achieve. As another packer, Muriel, notes with a wry smile, ‘When the timekeepers used to come with their stopwatches and clipboards, to set the rate for the job, the machines never stopped when they were around and nor did we!’

  Eileen worked in the factory until 1967, when she left to have her third child and only daughter, Karen. It was the ‘summer of love’, but although hippies were beginning to appear on the streets of York, and the hair of male workers at Rowntree’s – now tucked under hairnets – was beginning to lengthen, the all-pervading aroma at the factory remained chocolate, not marijuana. In any case, ‘flower power’ largely passed Eileen by; she was too busy earning a living and having her children. Soon after giving birth to Karen, Eileen went back to Rowntree’s and carried on working the ‘twilight shift’ in the evenings – a shift specially introduced to aid married women with young children – until just before the birth of her third son Stephen in 1969. After he was born, she went back to Rowntree’s again and carried on working there until 1980, but this time she worked as a cleaner because, she says, ‘I was getting older then and I couldn’t keep up to speed on the line. I was a supervisor, a charge-h
and and a shop steward as well, so I did everything really.’

  Eileen’s children have maintained the family’s military tradition. Although her daughter Karen did not join the forces herself – she is a bank manager – she did the next best thing and married an RAF officer, while both of Eileen’s elder sons followed in her footsteps and joined the RAF and became career officers. Chris was a flight lieutenant, Specialist Aircrew, and Alan was a wing commander.

  When Alan was in line for promotion to squadron leader, one of the things he had to do was make a presentation to a roomful of officers, including some very senior ones. Alan chose to do his presentation on the Battle of Anzio. Around the time of Remembrance Sunday a few years previously, there had been an article in The Press, the York newspaper, about men who had been wounded in the war. It was illustrated by a photo of Eileen’s dad going into his garden shed, where he used to do joinery. Alan decided to use that photograph and, Eileen says, ‘He asked Dad to tell him about Anzio, because as a rule Dad didn’t talk about the war at all, but he told Alan about it.’

  When Alan did his presentation, he put up the photograph and said, ‘This is my granddad, he fought at Anzio.’ He went on to describe the battle and then, at the end, he showed the picture of Arthur again and said, ‘But what of Granddad?’ and then he signalled for all the lights in the lecture room to be switched off. After leaving his audience sitting in darkness for a few seconds, he said, ‘Ever since Anzio, this is all my granddad has seen for the last fifty years.’ The presentation obviously had a considerable impact on the audience because for weeks afterwards, Eileen says, ‘People were coming up to him and telling him that they’d heard about the presentation he’d given. Chris even heard about it and he was serving at an entirely different base, at Brize Norton.’