The Sweethearts

by Lynn Russell

  The baths, in a series of small bathrooms, were compulsory and had already been run for them when the girls returned to the changing rooms, and unlike some of their workmates at Rowntree’s, they were not rushed in and out of the baths within two minutes, so they had plenty of time to enjoy the hot water. A bath was a rare treat for Maureen and Shirley, since unless they paid through the nose for it, there was no provision for them to have anything other than a cold-water wash at their digs. Other employees were also allowed to use the baths on payment of a modest fee, though fewer now needed to make use of that facility than in the pre-war and immediately post-war years when, with few houses having bathrooms and greedy boarding house keepers charging their lodgers as much as a shilling for a bath, Rowntree’s workers could use the baths at work for just twopence, though they did have to provide their own soap and towel.

  If Rowntree’s attempts to give their young employees a continuing education were generally welcomed, the company’s concern for their welfare could sometimes be over-intrusive. More than one young girl was reported to her parents by her overlookers for being spotted ‘mixing with the wrong type of person’, even if the sighting had occurred outside working hours in the girl’s own free time. Maureen and Shirley escaped such unwelcome attention, and that was perhaps just as well, because in addition to going to the ‘respectable’ dances at the New Earswick Folk Hall, Maureen also once took Shirley to the De Grey Rooms, a place their mother had forbidden them to go because she had heard bad things about it and thought it was a den of iniquity. They went anyway, but took the precaution of telling their mother that they were going to a dance at the Folk Hall.

  Maureen wore a brand-new yellow shift dress that had cost her nineteen shillings and elevenpence (about eighteen pounds today) and a new pair of shoes that were three pounds. Her mum always insisted that Maureen got her shoes from Saxones, which she felt was better quality than most of the other stores, but three pounds was more than Maureen’s entire weekly wage, so she went in and chose a pair, put a deposit on them and then went back every week to pay off a bit more until she had cleared the cost and could take them home.

  The De Grey Rooms were by then some way past their prime, with peeling wallpaper, damp stains on some of the walls and moth-eaten curtains at the windows, but with the lights turned low and a spotlight sparkling from the revolving glitter ball hanging from the ceiling, they had a certain tawdry glamour. Maureen and Shirley had a great time, dancing non-stop all evening, but it turned out that their mother might have been right, if not about the De Grey Rooms, then about the surrounding area, because her daughters were ‘kerb-crawled’ as they walked back through the darkened streets afterwards and were scared out of their wits, though in the end they got home safely. It was a long time before either of them could be persuaded to go back to the De Grey Rooms after that.

  Maureen had three best friends: Rita, Helen and Maggie. Rita and Helen were country girls like Maureen; they used to like going to classes and were rather quiet and shy. Maggie was much more interested in a good night out. Maureen says:

  She was totally different to me, but we got on like a house on fire. I have never smoked and I didn’t touch alcohol until after I was married, whereas Maggie used to drink and smoke, had her hair dyed blonde, and did all the things that my mother used to hate. She went to dance classes with Shirley and me just once, because it wasn’t her sort of thing at all, but we’d go to the Empire ballroom together, another place that my mother certainly did not approve of. Maggie was very slim and a tiny little thing, and a real magnet for boys. She had a baby outside marriage to a man who was a gorgeous-looking lad. He looked like a pop star and she was determined to have him, and by the time they eventually got married, she already had a daughter by him and was pregnant with another child, a son. However, they didn’t stay married for long because her husband had a serious drink problem and eventually became one of York’s ‘famous alcoholics’. I saw him not so long ago. He came up to me, breathing alcohol fumes all over me even though it was only half past nine in the morning, and said, ‘Don’t I know you?’ So I said, ‘I don’t think so,’ and just kept on walking.

  14

  Dorothy

  In 1956, while she was working in Cream Packing, Dorothy met a good-looking, dark-haired young man called Rodney Pipes. He had been away doing his National Service for two years, but when he came out of the Army, he began working at Rowntree’s and was assigned to the machines in Dorothy’s department on shift work. He came from Crayke, near Easingwold, and he used to cycle into work every day, nearly thirty miles there and back. If one of the girls on the machines failed to turn up for work, one of the men would often be put on the conveyor to make up the numbers. It was the first time in Rowntree’s history that men had ever been on the machines; it had always been women’s work before then.

  Dorothy found herself working next to Rodney one day. They chatted away and, she says:

  Rod and I just seemed to click. From then on he was always following me about, wherever I’d go, he’d be there as well. I was already going out with a boy at the time, but I gave him up to go out with Rod. The other girls had seen us looking at each other, and put two and two together, so they’d try and fix it so that he had to come on the machine where I was – even the overlooker was in on it! After a while they took Rodney off that job and he went on to taking the goods away from the end of the machines, but when Music While You Work was on – and us girls used to sing our heads off to it – if a soft song came on that both Rod and I liked, the girls would all say, ‘He’s here!’ and I’d look up and he’d be stood at the end of the machine, waving to me.

  The Tannoy system was normally used only to play music, but Rowntree’s made an exception in 1955 when the local football team, York City, which had spent most of its life in the basement divisions of the Football League, got to the semi-final of the FA Cup – it was the first time in its entire history that the club had done so. Rowntree’s broadcast the semi-final match against mighty Newcastle United live over the Tannoys at the factory. ‘Every single person in the factory was listening,’ Dorothy says, ‘even if, like me, they didn’t really like football. It was a real novelty.’ When York drew the first match, Rowntree’s also broadcast the replay, but the fairytale ended there as Newcastle won two–nil.

  Once a year in March, everyone who worked at Rowntree’s was paid a bonus, a share of the profits the company had made that year, in proportion to their normal earnings. It was a very welcome lump sum, because few of Rowntree’s employees were able to save much out of their modest weekly wages, and the bonus often enabled them to pay the deposit on a ‘big ticket’ item, like a holiday or a washing machine. ‘I used to laugh at my grandmother at bonus time,’ Dorothy says, smiling at the memory. ‘My dad had still kept on living at my grandma’s, and when it came to the time for the profit share, she always had her clean pinny on and there’d be something special for his dinner. But he always looked after her anyway, he really did. He never remarried, and because she’d taken care of us while he was away in the Army, he made sure to look after her; I think he felt very beholden to her.’ Thanks to the bit of extra made from the profit-share scheme, at Easter their dad always made sure that there was something extra for their grandmother, and a shiny new pair of shoes for the girls.

  ‘That bonus was a nice, tidy sum of money,’ Dorothy says, ‘and at Easter 1957, Rod and I got engaged with our share. I was twenty-one on 4 July 1957 and Rod and I got married on the twenty-seventh, at Clifton Church.’ In her flat near the city centre, among all the photographs of her children and grandchildren, Dorothy still has a lovely wedding photograph of her and Rod cutting the cake on their big day. They are both breaking into laughter and look as if they could not possibly be any happier. She did not have the luxury of buying a new wedding dress and instead obtained her dress from one of the girls at work, but you would not know that to look at it – it fits her as if it was made for her. She looks radiant in the white
, high-necked gown with long sleeves and dozens of satin-covered buttons running up the front of the dress to a satin collar.

  ‘It’s funny,’ she says, ‘because the first time I ever saw that photograph of us cutting the cake was when it appeared in the local paper. Like Rod’s family, the wedding photographer, Mr Caperly, also came from Crayke. He was very keen, in fact perhaps too keen, because he even followed us down to the station when we set off on honeymoon, and he was so pleased with that particular photograph that he put it in the window of his shop to advertise his services. He didn’t even do us a copy of the print and I didn’t get hold of it for years. When I finally did, it still had his advertising label stuck across the bottom of the picture.’

  The reception was at a church hall in Water Lane, and because they did not have much money, all the food was home-made. Rod’s mum and a lot of her friends and neighbours all got together and baked, and they arranged some transport and brought it all through to York from Crayke. ‘They’d gone to a lot of trouble,’ Dorothy says, ‘with sandwiches and savouries, and they even brought little jellies with piped cream on top. They were set in little waxed paper bowls and somehow they all survived the journey in one piece. So that was our wedding.’

  Dorothy and Rod went to Torquay for their honeymoon, and they had deliberately timed their wedding so that they could go on honeymoon during the Rowntree’s holiday week, so they did not have to take any extra time off work. It was an attitude that would have delighted Joseph Rowntree, whose strong social conscience went hand in hand with a truly Victorian determination to extract, not just the last grain of cocoa from his raw material, but also the absolute maximum amount of work from those in his employ. One of his granddaughters used to delight in telling the tale of one of Joseph’s employees who asked him for time off work because he was getting married the next morning. Joseph was said to have replied, ‘Very well, and as it is such an important occasion, I won’t expect you in until the afternoon.’

  Dorothy and Rod may have had the holiday week for their honeymoon, but they set off with nothing at all in their pockets, Dorothy says, ‘because we’d already spent almost all our wages and spare money on the wedding, the train tickets and the bed and breakfast for our honeymoon. I had kept a few shillings back for spending money, but just as I was leaving the house to go to the station, my grandmother asked me for the money for my keep. As I’d just got married, I thought she might have let me off it that week, but no, so that cleaned me out as well.’

  When they got on the train to Torquay, there were three girls from the same department at Rowntree’s as Dorothy, who had all had the same idea and got married on that same day. So they all finished up in the same carriage, on the same train together, going to Torquay for their honeymoons. The guard who came round to check their tickets got chatting to them and when he discovered that they worked at Rowntree’s, he told them another tale about Joseph Rowntree. ‘My dad knew him,’ the guard said, ‘and he said he was the most upright man he ever met. One of the other guards ushered Mr Rowntree into a first-class carriage of a crowded train one day. When he protested that he only had a third-class ticket, the guard said, “It’s all right, Mr Rowntree, don’t let that worry you, sir,” and he slammed the door and waved the train off. You couldn’t change carriages once the train was moving, so he just had to sit there, but do you know what?’ He paused to make sure he had their attention. ‘The next time Mr Rowntree caught the train, he bought a first-class ticket and then insisted on sitting in third class to make up for the other journey.’

  ‘All right if we go first class to make up for that, then?’ Rod said, but the guard just smiled and moved on.

  When they got to Devon, Rod and Dorothy stayed at a bed and breakfast place just outside Babbacombe and, she says, ‘It was lovely. It was really hot that week and it was just like being abroad. I came back ever so tanned, but Rodney was very fair-skinned and he came back still looking just like a pint of milk. We really enjoyed it and we always said we’d go back to Babbacombe one day, but sadly we never managed to.’

  When they heard that Dorothy and Rod were getting married, her friends came from all over the factory to bring little presents for them. ‘We’d just got our first little house,’ Dorothy says, ‘a two-up, two-down terraced house in Nunnery Lane, and they were coming up and saying, “Make use of this, we don’t need it,” and just bringing us all sorts of things. They set us up in our home really.’ That house had cost them £500. They managed to save enough for the deposit and then paid the rest off at so much a week. There was no bathroom and an outside toilet in the yard, and no central heating of course, something only wealthy people could afford. There was just a coal fire in the kitchen, so in winter there was often ice on the inside of the windows as well as on the outside. They had a tin bath and, in later years, Dorothy used to put it outside in summer, like a paddling pool for the children to play in. There was a fire oven to cook with, and they had no labour-saving devices at all. The house was classified as slum housing and, says Dorothy, ‘I suppose it was pretty primitive by modern standards, but we were as happy as Larry there. We had to move in the end though, because they were going to pull the houses down, but a friend from work who lived up at Muncaster heard of a house that was coming vacant up there, and she told me about it, so we got in quick, got the house and moved up there.’

  Dorothy worked at Rowntree’s for another year after they were married. She could only work part time, though, as the company rule preventing married women from working full time remained in force, and she left when she became pregnant with their first child, a boy they christened Gary. She says:

  Before I left, the other girls were giving me clothes and all sorts of little things for the baby. That was what they were like, they were just really kind, generous people. I remember when Pauline Musgrave, who worked at Rowntree’s and was a really good swimmer, was picked to go to the Helsinki Olympics in 1952, and we had a collection for her, to fund her so she could go, because she wouldn’t have been able to afford it otherwise. We had very good healthcare at Rowntree’s, everything was there for you and you really were looked after. When I was pregnant, I wasn’t put on lifting or anything like that, I just did what I could manage to do, and they made sure I went for my medicals and things like that. Mind you, there was no swinging the lead. My dad had an accident at work and crushed his hand in the machine, so he was off work for a while on sick pay, but if you were off sick, you could only go out until a certain time of night. If you were seen out late at night when you were supposed to be off sick, they’d want to know why and they’d say, ‘If you’re well enough to go out, you’re well enough to go to work,’ and they would stop your sick pay.

  Fortunately for her dad, his injuries were treated swiftly by one of Rowntree’s team of nurses, who worked shifts so that there was always someone available if accidents happened during the evening or night shifts. He was then sent to the City General Hospital for further treatment, carried there in Rowntree’s own ambulance. His injuries, though serious, were not permanent and he was back at work within a few weeks.

  Gary was born in 1958 and a second boy, Graham, followed in 1961, but by then Dorothy’s father had died. He had never remarried and had never had a home of his own, preferring to live with his mother until she died, after which he moved in with Dorothy’s sister in Huntington Road. He was kind and loving to his daughters, but he was a reticent character who kept his thoughts and feelings very much to himself, and he took a lot of family secrets to the grave. Dorothy says:

  He was a quiet man, very tall and quite well made. He was a gentle giant and a lovely dad, but he was quiet. He never used two words where one would do; my grandmother used to say, ‘If words were coins, he’d not have spent his first pound yet.’ He never, ever spoke about the war and what he’d done in it, and he never told me anything about my mum either. I still don’t know the first thing about her. I was given a photograph not so long ago of my mother and my sister on the bea
ch at Scarborough before I was born. Although my mum has her arms folded in front of her, so it’s hard to be sure, I’d love to think she was pregnant with me when the picture was taken – my sister looks to be about five years old in the picture, and that’s the age difference between us. It’s one of the few photographs I have of my mum. Although my sister’s much older than me, she was still only seven when my mum died and she doesn’t really remember her either, so we know almost nothing about her. Maybe in later years my dad would have opened up more and told us things and we would have got to talk about her, but it wasn’t to be. I was just six weeks off having my second boy when my dad had a heart attack and died. He was only fifty-one.

  Dorothy decided not to go back to work again until 1967, when Gary was nine and Graham seven, by which time she’d been away from the factory for almost ten years. She had made a conscious decision to be at home with her family and to make the most of the boys’ early years. ‘I’d had quite a break,’ she says, ‘but I went back to Rowntree’s and after all that time there were still all the same women there, still doing the same jobs, so I was straight back into the swing of it. I began working in Enrobing, just doing afternoons, and I was paid one pound seventeen and six a week for fifteen hours, so it wasn’t a great wage, but it was a little extra towards the family budget, and I was back at home by the time the boys came in from school.’