The Sweethearts

by Lynn Russell

  Despite the strict company rules and regulations, like fashion-conscious women in all industries, Rowntree’s employees tended to push the boundaries of what was permissible, and Maureen was no exception. The main reason for the company rule requiring women to wear turbans was not so much the fear that stray hairs would get into the product, though that certainly was a concern, but that loose, unbound hair might become tangled in the machinery, with potentially fatal consequences. Women on the production lines were instructed to wear their turbans pulled right down so that no hair at all was showing, but if Maureen was planning to go out in the evening (and now she had made some friends and had a boyfriend she usually was), she went to work with curlers in her hair, covered by her turban, but always with a bit of her fringe showing; all the girls she worked with used to do the same thing. If they were not wearing curlers, they used to wear their turbans pushed right back on their heads, with even more of their hair showing. Later, invisible hairnets were introduced, and then the girls back-combed their fringes and wore their turbans so far back on their heads that they were almost invisible from the front.

  On Saturday afternoons Maureen and the rest of the girls would go into town:

  … with our gondola baskets and a plastic flower stuck on the side – we all did the same thing – and stilettos that usually needed heeling. We even wore stilettos to work, everybody did it. A lot of the girls had their hair back-combed as well, but I never could because my hair was too fine. Even one of the overlookers, I think her name was Gloria, used to have her hair back-combed once a week. Her hair was blonde and she had two kiss curls at the front and her hair piled up in a ‘beehive’, and it always looked immaculate. Mind you, she put so much lacquer on it that it would last a week like that before it had to be done again. She would take her turban off after a day’s work and there was still not a hair out of place. I think she went to bed with a pair of knickers on her head to keep her hair right, but that was quite common then, I did it myself often enough. Lots of the girls had their hair in beehives, and some of them would lacquer it and keep it like that for weeks on end. There were always rumours going around that someone had seen beetles or cockroaches inside a girl’s beehive, though I suspect that it was just a bit of an urban myth.

  I really liked the fashions in those days and used to love getting dressed up. I was pretty good at dress-making and could make all my own clothes. We wore stockings and suspenders, stilettos, and we always wore gloves, usually white ones, and shoes and handbag to match. We all wore skirts under our overalls and hooped petticoats. My digs were just over the bridge from Rowntree’s and the boys used to love watching me run down the bridge in the morning! I was never late for work, but I usually cut it pretty fine and often had to run the last couple of hundred yards. The hoops would ride up while I was running so there’d be a lot of wolf whistles from the boys and some of them would get a right eyeful.

  When we were going out dancing at night we had the big full net petticoats, layers of them, which would flare out around you as you danced and looked fabulous. I loved those, worn under a skirt with a tiny nipped in waist and a big flared skirt. I was still living in digs when tights came in and we all thought what a great invention they were, though I don’t think the boys were as keen on them as we were – stocking tops were a big deal for boys! Then it went to hot pants with a little dress over the top and big platform shoes, and miniskirts of course, which I loved as well.

  When miniskirts came into fashion, the younger Rowntree’s girls used to sew their skirts ‘as tight and as short as we dared’, as one recalls. ‘We’d pluck our eyebrows down to almost nothing, because that was the fashion then, and dye our hair – I had mine two-tone for a while, blonde at the front and brown at the back – and then back-comb it right high.’

  Surprisingly, given the strict rules and regulations covering most areas of their employees’ working lives, Rowntree’s did not seem to concern themselves too much about even the most extreme fashions. The girls could wear pretty much whatever they liked under their overalls, and were even allowed to totter round on stilettos or platform heels, which on a factory floor surrounded by fast-moving and highly dangerous machinery would give a modern safety officer heart failure. The only thing that Maureen remembers the overlookers being very quick to clamp down on was love bites. ‘If anyone came in with a love bite showing – and it was something I never had – they had to wear a scarf or a polo neck, or they would be sent home, or sent to the Medical department to have a huge plaster put over it. Because we were making things that people were going to eat, they were very hot on skin complaints of any sort, but I think the fuss about love bites was really more of a moral thing than any concern about broken skin near the chocolates.’

  In February 1961, Maureen’s sister Shirley started work at Rowntree’s as well and began sharing the room that Maureen rented. Although they were not making any greater use of the facilities, such as they were, the landlord promptly put up the rent by 50 per cent to fifteen shillings a week. Shirley was eighteen months younger than Maureen, and before leaving school she had been quite emphatic that, whatever else she did in life, she would not be going to work in a factory like her big sister, because she wanted ‘a bit better than that’ for herself. She had learned typing at school and could have tried for an office job but, realizing that the typing pool at an office or a small factory, or a job answering the phone and typing letters for a country solicitor, would not pay anywhere near as much as she could earn working on the production line at Rowntree’s, she shelved her reservations, swallowed her pride and applied for a job at the factory.

  Other girls, like one of Maureen’s contemporaries, Sheila Hawksby, defied their parents’ hopes that they would ‘better themselves’ when they opted for the higher wages at Rowntree’s rather than higher status but lower paid work elsewhere. Some of Sheila’s friends were already working at Rowntree’s and she decided she wanted to work there too, even though it was not what her parents, and her mother in particular, had wanted for her after her expensive private education. When she told them, although her father reluctantly accepted her decision, her mother ‘went berserk’. However, Sheila did not back down and now says, ‘I’m only sorry that when I finished at Rowntree’s forty-two and a half years later, they weren’t still alive to see that it hadn’t worked out too badly for me after all.’

  Like Maureen before her, Shirley was desperately homesick and lonely at first. From being part of a large family in a small village to being virtually on her own in a huge factory in a strange town, and having to live in digs as well, was a real shock to her system. Even though she was sharing with her sister, Maureen was rarely there in the evenings and, without any friends of her own, Shirley spent night after night on her own. ‘I remember the loneliness more than anything,’ she says. ‘My sister was living the life, out with her boyfriend every night until midnight, but I was very young and very shy, and my first few months at the factory were absolutely miserable.’ With very little money, she could not go out much even if she had made friends to go with, so instead she just stayed in on her own every night, sitting up in bed, writing her diary, mostly written in pencil as pens were expensive in those days, and reading book after book.

  She had no money to spare for buying books, but the works library proved a godsend for her. Set up by Joseph Rowntree in 1885 with some of his own money and a grant from the Pure Literature Society to purchase ‘suitable’ books, it was a typically philanthropic gesture by Joseph, albeit one that was slightly tarnished by his insistence on deducting a penny a week from the wages of every employee to help pay for the upkeep of the library.

  However, like Maureen when she started working at Rowntree’s, Shirley had every reason to be grateful for Joseph Rowntree’s legacy, because almost every day she would go to the works library at lunchtime or after work and collect two new books from the well-stocked shelves. At the foot of the stairs in the library there was a large portrait of Joseph’s son,
Seebohm, with eyes that seemed to follow you as you passed it. Shirley found the portrait a little disconcerting, if not sinister, unlike one of the cleaners who used to strike up a conversation with the portrait as she swept the stairs every morning, telling Seebohm’s image, ‘You would turn in your grave if you could see the place now.’

  Having selected her books, Shirley would take them back to her digs. After a frugal tea of bread spread with potted meat (she bought a loaf of bread and two ounces of potted beef every Monday for one shilling and fivepence halfpenny – about one pound ten today – that lasted her until she went home for the weekend on Friday night), she would tuck herself into bed with a hot-water bottle, read her books and ‘cry for my family’ until she fell asleep.

  When Shirley had gone for her interview at Rowntree’s, Maureen had told her, ‘You’ll be okay so long as you’re not in Cream Packing,’ so Shirley’s heart sank when they told her that was where she would be working. Overlookers, charge-hands and teachers had always been promoted from the production line and, in most departments, relations with their workmates remained fairly friendly even after they had ‘crossed the line’ to join the bosses. Maureen had found all of the teachers and overlookers in the Smarties department to be quite amicable, but there was a very different atmosphere in the Cream Packing department.

  She had warned Shirley about one notorious overlooker in particular, a woman called Noreen, who was ‘an absolute dragon’ and ruled the Cream Packing department with a rod of iron, although in her defence, with a roomful of teenage girls to control, her job cannot always have been easy. She was quite tall and, though she was not particularly powerfully built, she had a look about her that would have curdled milk. ‘Everybody talked about Noreen,’ Maureen says, ‘and you’d be hard put to find anyone with a good word to say for her. She was a complete cow without any redeeming features at all, as far as we could tell. If you were nice to her she was suspicious, and if you didn’t behave you got into trouble.’

  As a result of Maureen’s warning, Shirley was wary of Noreen when she started, but even so, she felt that Noreen was ‘on her case’ more than any of the other girls, though she admits that most of the other girls also felt singled out and victimized by Noreen, and sometimes Shirley didn’t do herself any favours. One of the greatest crimes in the Rowntree’s rule book was to be caught eating the chocolates, and when Shirley was working on Easter eggs, one of her workmates threw a piece of broken egg at her while they were having their tea break. Shirley broke off a piece and ate it before throwing the rest of it back. When she looked up, the dreaded overlooker, Noreen, was bearing down on her. ‘Are you eating?’ Noreen said. Shirley could feel her face going red. Her mother had always told her that the worst possible thing was to tell a lie, so she quickly swallowed the chocolate then opened her mouth wide and said, ‘Pardon?’ Noreen gave her a filthy look and stalked off towards the other end of the room.

  Shirley and another young packer were also hauled up before Noreen when two of the Black Magic boxes they had been packing were found to be missing the makeweight chocolates that were supposed to be added when the boxes were light. For some reason, the Brazil nut centres always caused problems and the check-weigher who stood at the end of the conveyor belt and weighed their work to make sure that they had packed the right quantity of sweets or chocolates, and that each box had the necessary minimum weight printed on the outside of it, would be calling out ‘lights’ or ‘heavies’ as the boxes passed her. Whenever the call was ‘lights’, another packer had to add an extra chocolate as a makeweight.

  On this occasion, Noreen accused Shirley and the other young packer of eating the makeweights and gave them a warning that any repetition would lead to a suspension, though that threat, whether or not it was subsequently carried out, was often used as much to send a warning to the others as to punish the wrongdoer herself. ‘People were always being suspended or threatened with suspension,’ Maureen said, ‘and it was a big thing for them, because they’d lose a day’s pay.’ In Cream Packing you could even be suspended for singing. Working in the Smarties department, Maureen and the other girls used to sing all the time, and it was the same in most of the other departments – workers could sing all day long if they wanted to, because it was felt to be good for productivity and morale. But in the Cream Packing department, Noreen would only let the girls sing for the three-quarters of an hour that Music While You Work was playing over the loudspeakers.

  Although there was a programme of the same title on the BBC Light Programme (the forerunner of Radio 1 and Radio 2), Rowntree’s Music While You Work was home-produced, from a room in the main corridor, where originally a woman employee, and later a man, played records that were relayed over the Tannoys to the various departments. Workers could leave requests, and if it was someone’s birthday or anniversary the Rowntree’s disc jockey would play them a record. Employees could also take in their own records and ask for them to be played, and there was huge excitement in 1962 when Sue Mizzi’s husband, who was in the Army and stationed on a base with US soldiers, sent her a copy of the new Elvis record ‘Return to Sender’, which hadn’t been released in Britain at the time. Sue took it into the factory and as soon as it was played, she was surrounded by girls asking her how she had got hold of it and whether she could get them a copy, too.

  While other workers carried on singing even after Music While You Work had finished – one of them, Joyce Burnett, says she and her friends ‘used to sing from going in first thing in the morning to coming out at night’ – in Cream Packing, as soon as the programme had ended, Noreen banned the girls from singing and threatened them with suspension if they carried on. Some of the girls responded with a defiant little ditty of their own:

  Music While You Work has ended,

  If you sing, you’ll get suspended.

  There were worse punishments than suspension for those who fell foul of the overlookers. Girls were sometimes sacked for taking chocolates, though there was a suspicion that this was used as a means of getting rid of poor or troublesome workers as much as a reflection of the crime. While working on the Kit Kat line, one woman, Joan Drake, noticed a worker being frogmarched away by two burly men. She later found out that they were private detectives hired by Rowntree’s, and the man was said to have had eighty bars of chocolate hidden inside his overalls. She never saw him at the factory again. On another famous occasion the police were summoned and a woman worker was actually arrested in front of her colleagues for taking chocolates, though in her case it was again not a matter of her pinching an occasional chocolate from the production line but of smuggling out large quantities and selling them. Once more, there was a suspicion that the arrest had been carried out in such a public way as a warning to the rest of the workforce.

  Sometimes there were other things than Noreen’s arbitrary rules, foul temper and threats of suspension for Shirley to worry about. She was working on the line one day with a stack of large wooden trays full of chocolates piled up alongside her work table. The girl across from her suddenly looked up and gave a scream. When Shirley followed her gaze, she saw that the chocolates that she was about to pack into the boxes seemed to be moving. When she took a closer look, she discovered that the tray was alive with brown beetles. They turned out to be flour beetles, which eat a wide range of foods, including chocolate. That batch of chocolates had to be destroyed, the production line halted and Shirley and the other girls transferred to other duties for the rest of the day, while the cleaning and maintenance staff cleaned everything until it shone and fumigated the storeroom where the beetles had been hatching.

  Until they got used to the work, Shirley and the other new girls on the production line in Cream Packing used to end each day with an aching back from stooping over their table or conveyor belt for hours on end; Maureen still sees women today who have a permanent stoop from the years that they spent working on the line at Rowntree’s. The work was hard and relentless with never a moment to relax, but Shirley tr
ied to console herself with the thought that since she never had time to bite her nails any more, after years of ugly, badly bitten nails, hers were now growing nicely; she even bought some nail polish to celebrate.

  Maureen was still often out with Peter in the evenings, but on other nights she and Shirley would go out together. The two sisters were very different, ‘chalk and cheese’, Maureen says, ‘but with only eighteen months between us, we grew up close and we stayed very close, best friends as well as sisters’. They did not have a lot of money, but they used to find ways to go out nearly all the time, doing things that did not cost much, or were even free, like cake-decorating classes at Rowntree’s and the dance classes that they went to five nights a week. They did not drink – their parents did not approve and they were too young anyway – so their only expense was an occasional glass of orange juice. There were many other ways of filling their off-duty hours without spending money. As an older employee, Dot Edwards recalls, ‘Rowntree’s laid on plenty of entertainment in your time, though not in theirs of course. There were all sorts: classes in just about everything you could think of, outings, films and plays, and sports and swimming galas.’

  Maureen and Shirley also did classes during Day Continuation at Rowntree’s, which now occupied one day a week for girls aged sixteen and under. First thing in the morning there was an assembly, and then a series of classes that might include PT, cookery, sewing, woodwork, singing, dancing, art, maths, biology or English. The classes were very popular with the girls, not only because they were a change from factory routine, but also because on Day Continuation they started the working day an hour or so later than usual and then went home at 4.20 p.m., an hour and ten minutes earlier than when they were working on the production line. ‘We loved our day release classes,’ Maureen says. ‘We had the chance to wear something nice for a change because, as we weren’t going on the production line, we didn’t have to wear the usual overalls and turban. We got a bit of a lie in because we didn’t start till half past eight or nine o’clock, we had a tea break in the afternoon as well as the morning, which we never got on our normal work days, and we finished early as well. They had a lovely gym there and we had a wonderful deep, hot bath at the end of PT.’