by Lynn Russell
Attitudes were fast changing but, like with illegitimacy, there were still traces of the old stigma attached to divorce in those days, and it was not a pleasant experience for her. ‘It wasn’t good, that’s for sure,’ she says, suppressing a shudder even now at the memory of the acrimonious divorce, and the financial hardship and social problems it caused her. Divorced women in those days were often regarded with suspicion, if not outright hostility, by other women. There was a crude stereotype of divorcees as ‘fast’ and predatory towards married men, and now that Maureen was separated from her husband, the reaction of some women she’d thought of as friends was hurtful. However, others rallied round and supported her through those difficult times as she went through with the divorce, got herself a council flat and moved there with her two sons.
Despite the continuing problems in other areas of women’s lives, that in itself was an indication of how far women had progressed. There is a gap between all generations, but arguably there has never been such a gulf as that which separated the pre- and post-war generations. Only twenty years separated Madge and Florence from Maureen, but it might as well have been a century, given how much the lives of women had been transformed in that time.
There was still a long way to go, but access to reliable contraception meant that, though it had not vanished entirely, for the first time the fear of unwanted pregnancy had been greatly diminished. When single, Maureen had been free to have a number of boyfriends without being labelled as ‘easy’. When her marriage did not prove successful, divorce was no longer seen as a personal disgrace, and nor was Maureen as utterly financially dependent on her husband as Madge had been on hers. The rights of married women to have their own money and their own bank accounts, to work full time and pursue long-term careers if they wished, and to receive maintenance for their children from their former husbands and support from the state if it was needed, were no longer in doubt.
Despite these changes in society’s attitudes, in practice life as a single parent on a low income was never less than a struggle for Maureen, but she coped, and within two years she was married again, though this time, she says, the decision to get married owed more to a lobbying campaign by her mother and grandmother than to her being head over heels in love. By now her brothers and sisters were old enough to babysit for her, but her parents, determined that she should have no opportunities to bring further unhappiness on herself nor ‘shame’ on her family through extra-marital affairs, continued to play a powerful role in her life and would only allow her brothers and sisters to babysit for her on nights when she was being chaperoned by her parents. ‘I was only allowed to go out if I went with them,’ she says. ‘I could go to the working men’s club with them at the weekend, but I had to stay at their house on those nights to rule out any chance of a bit of “hanky panky” with anyone I might have met while I was out, not that there was much chance of that when I was only out at a working men’s club and under the constant, watchful gaze of my parents.’
However, she did meet her second husband, Michael, at the club. He was out for the evening with his brother and sister-in-law and they all got talking together. Maureen’s parents approved of him and his relationship with Maureen developed from there. She went out with him a few times, but things might not have gone any further than that, had it not been for ‘a bit of pushing’ from her mother and grandmother. Maureen got on well enough with Michael and he was a pleasant, kind man, though undemonstrative and perhaps even a little dull; there was certainly no fire burning in Maureen’s heart, just the words of her mother and grandmother echoing in her ears: ‘Those boys need a father. When you’ve got two kids, you can’t afford to be too fussy. He’s a nice man and he’s got a nice car, so what are you waiting for?’ In the end she bowed to the pressure, convinced herself that they must be right, and married him.
They had two children together – a boy, Glen, and a girl they named Beverley – a brother and sister for her two sons from her first marriage. Maureen had gone back to work in 1974 when Beverley was two, mainly because she wanted, but could not afford, an automatic washing machine. She had a twin tub, but washing for four children, including nappies for the youngest, was hard work, so she thought, ‘Right, if I want an automatic, I’ve got to work for it,’ and she went back to Rowntree’s twelve years after she had walked out. They were pleased to see her; there were still overlookers there who remembered her as an excellent worker, and in any case, although the dark clouds of world recession were looming, the last echoes of the boom years of the 1960s and early 1970s meant that Rowntree’s were still hiring almost anyone who came through the door at the time.
Increasing affluence, falling prices and much greater availability of consumer goods and labour-saving devices were changing women’s daily lives in ways that would have been barely credible to their parents’ generation. Central heating was no longer found only in the houses of the well off, almost every home contained a television, even if many were still the old black-and-white sets rather than the newer, more expensive colour televisions and air travel and holidays abroad were no longer the exclusive preserve of the rich. Fridges and freezers had replaced meat-safes and larders; boilers, washboards, possers and all the other paraphernalia of hand-washing had given way first to twin tubs and then automatic washing machines; hand-operated carpet sweepers had been replaced by electric vacuum cleaners; and convenience foods, disposable nappies and a host of other things were making the tasks of keeping a house and raising children far less all-consuming and exhausting than had been the case in the pre-war years.
Although a married woman with children, Maureen was also now able to work full time if she chose. Rowntree’s policy of only employing single women for full-time work had been creaking from the 1950s onwards. In the immediate post-war period, with the country almost bankrupt and crippled with stupendous debts, the domestic economy had stagnated for a while, but there had been such a desperate need for hard currency that there was a frantic export drive from all branches of British industry, including Rowntree’s. Rationing continued for several years after the war, but Rowntree’s avoided some of the problems caused by sugar shortages by helping to develop a new artificial sweetener, and as soon as restrictions began to be lifted, demand for confectionery soared as people flocked to indulge themselves in the little luxuries that had so long been denied to them.
The runaway demand at home and abroad – production almost doubled between 1950 and 1960 – left Rowntree’s struggling to keep pace. With the rest of the British economy booming as well and jobs around every corner, it had become increasingly difficult to hire enough workers and the company experienced such a shortage of labour that it began actively recruiting workers from other districts, and even from overseas. The company was also willing to vary its normal working hours to accommodate the women who formed an ever-growing proportion of the workforce, and the evening ‘twilight shift’ from 6 p.m. to 9.30 p.m. was introduced, specifically to cater for married women with young children. ‘They were that desperate for staff,’ one of them recalls, ‘that you could practically choose your own hours.’
In 1964, Miss Vale of the Rowntree’s Employment department had even gone all the way to Malta to recruit girls to come and work at Rowntree’s, because there were just not enough girls in Britain willing to work at the factory. She returned with a contingent of Maltese girls, some of whom worked for a year or two but then went back, while others made York their permanent home. Miss Vale was the head of the Women’s Employment department but, like her predecessor, Miss Sherlock, she had been able to rise to those heady heights within the company only because she had chosen to remain single. Had she married, her career at Rowntree’s would have peaked at a much lower level. However, the pressure to find more workers at last led to the policy of barring married women from full-time employment being ended in 1966. The Miss Vales and Miss Sherlocks of the future would now be able to combine marriage with a career.
Miss Sherlock was a leg
endary character and, as well as being head of the Women’s Employment department, she also organized everything from the rents for the Rowntree’s allotments to the company holidays. Workers would sign up for a holiday in Belgium, France, Switzerland or wherever that year’s destination was to be, and would then contribute a weekly amount to the holiday fund to pay for it. Rowntree’s also ran trains to Scarborough once a year for the annual works outing, with several trains needed to carry the numbers of employees who took part. Individual groups of workers would also organize trips on their own behalf, independent of anything Miss Sherlock and Rowntree’s might be planning. The foilers (the women who wrapped the Kit Kat bars in aluminium foil) organized a trip to Blackpool one year that was known as ‘The Foilers’ Follies’. They arrived back at four o’clock in the morning, half asleep and already hungover, but still clutching their sticks of souvenir Blackpool rock.
Maureen went back to work on the Smarties production line in 1974, but she found that times had changed and it was no longer the same quiet workplace she had been used to. When she had first started at Rowntree’s, it had all been hand-work, but by the time she went back for her second spell, the work had become heavily mechanized, and the noise of the machines meant she had to shout to talk to her neighbours on the line. However, unlike many married women, who tended to struggle when they returned to the factory after a long absence, she had no trouble getting back up to speed and seemed to pick it up straight away. Her job was often to stand in what was called ‘the hole’, topping up tubes of Smarties that the machines had not filled correctly. There was also a section on the floor above, used to pack the giant-sized Smarties tubes, where the work involved filling and weighing the large tubes and capping and Sellotaping the tops to seal them. The women moved around, swapping roles to alleviate the boredom of the work, and one of Maureen’s preferred jobs was doing ‘bitumen wrapping’ – wrapping the outers in waterproof tar paper to protect them from damp while in storage or transit – which still involved some elements of skill and variety that had been almost entirely eliminated from other stages of the production process.
Every now and again there would be a new product, and workers from different departments would be transferred to the new line ready for the launch, sometimes in an air of secrecy that MI5 would have struggled to match. Some did not take off and were discontinued, but others, including the Yorkie bar, launched in 1976, were huge successes. Aimed at men, it was marketed as a chunkier, more ‘butch’ alternative to Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, with television advertisements showing lorry drivers biting into Yorkie bars as if they were Desperate Dan eating a steel girder or a cow pie. A huge billboard was also erected at York railway station, greeting arriving passengers with the slogan: ‘Welcome to York, where the men are hunky and the chocolate’s chunky’. The word ‘York’ was formed from a three-dimensional image of a Yorkie bar, with the ‘–ie’ part missing, as if bitten off by a giant.
Maureen worked at Rowntree’s for another five years, until she left again in 1979. ‘I worked evenings from 6 p.m. to 9.30 p.m.,’ she says, ‘and I found it a bit of a struggle getting the tea over with and the kids settled, and then setting off to work, and when a job came up at a York hospital, working during the day, in school hours, I took it.’ In retrospect, it was probably not the best time to join the public sector, because the effects of the ‘Winter of Discontent’ were still being felt, including strikes by train drivers, refuse collectors, gravediggers, ambulance drivers and NHS ancillary workers, who blockaded hospital entrances in pursuit of their pay claim and forced many hospitals only to admit emergency cases. Margaret Thatcher’s election victory that year heralded a relentless round of cuts to public expenditure, and though Maureen spent ten years as a hospital worker, the health authority, struggling to balance its budget as the squeeze on public sector spending tightened, was laying off an ever increasing number of workers. The consequence for those who remained in employment was that more and more work was piled onto them and, in the end, in 1989, Maureen said, ‘“I’m not having this,” and I gave a month’s notice.’
She was already working in a pub in the evenings to earn a little extra money, but she was beginning to feel she had been hasty in quitting her main job without another one to go to, when a friend told her that Rowntree’s were taking on temporary workers for the Christmas rush. So she went back to the factory once more, although this time she worked in the Cream Packing department. The notorious overlooker, Noreen, was still in charge, but ‘She was okay with me,’ Maureen says, ‘mainly because I think she’d grown old and mellowed quite a lot by the time I was in Cream Packing, so I didn’t really see the worst of her. I knew her by reputation though, and Shirley had worked under her for a while when she really was the dreaded Noreen.’
Rowntree’s had been taken over the previous year. After the Swiss-German confectioner Jacob Suchard had carried out a ‘dawn raid’ on Rowntree’s shares in 1988, Suchard’s Swiss rivals Nestlé, the world’s largest food producer, launched a rival bid. There was vociferous opposition from the Rowntree’s board of directors, the workforce, the people of York, the City Council, Labour and Conservative MPs and the trustees of several of the Rowntree’s charities, but despite pressure from many of his own backbenchers, Lord Young, then the Secretary for Trade and Industry, refused to refer the bid to the Monopolies Commission and the takeover duly went ahead. By the time Maureen returned to the factory the following year, she could detect a marked difference in the working atmosphere.
Shirley had also gone back to Rowntree’s with Maureen and they worked together on the conveyor belt. Once more they had no trouble in picking up the pace of production line work, but Rowntree’s blanket recruitment of workers to cope with the seasonal demand for chocolates meant that, either through a lack of skill or simple laziness, a lot of the other new recruits were not up to the job. Maureen says:
Without bragging, we were two of the hardest working people there. There were a few older women there who were top dogs and didn’t normally like working with temps, but they didn’t mind us because we were grafters. We could keep pace with them and we never took time off, so they’d even ask for Shirley and me to go on the machines with them, but they didn’t like most of the temps, and with good reason, because a lot of them were bone idle. We’d been brought up to be hard-working and to take pride in what we did, but most of the temps were just there for the money and would do as little as they could get away with. You could be off sick for two days on full pay without having to produce a doctor’s note, and some of them were taking days off almost every week, whereas in all the time we worked there, Shirley never took a day off at all and the only day off I ever took was my very last day before I finished, when I had a really stinking cold. Yet we weren’t treated any better for working hard than some of the temps who were skiving and taking days off all the time. Nonetheless, the money we were earning was amazing and we would have stayed as long as they wanted us, but unfortunately we were only temps and as soon as the Christmas rush was over, we were laid off.
Sadly, by then Maureen’s second marriage was heading for divorce. She was now in her late forties and she and Michael had been married for twenty-five years, but although they had been happy enough in the early stages of their marriage, it was never a Burton and Taylor romance, and as the years went by they found that they had less and less in common, and spent less and less time in each other’s company. ‘By the time we’d been together a few years, there was more life in a tramp’s vest than there was in our bed at night,’ Maureen says with a mischievous grin. ‘We’d had separate bedrooms for a few years and when it got to our silver wedding, he said to me, “What do you want to do?” I didn’t have to think about that for long, and I just said, “I want to get a divorce. We owe it to each other.”’
They had an amicable divorce and soon afterwards Michael met somebody else, got engaged and then remarried. ‘I wasn’t bothered about any of that,’ Maureen says, ‘but Michael just didn
’t bother about any of the kids after the divorce; they never saw him at all. Beverley has a little girl, Millie, of her own now, who’s going on for four years old and he’s never even seen her, but he’s the one who’s missing out, because she’s gorgeous.’
To make ends meet, Maureen had found a steady job in a cake shop, albeit at a lot less money than she had been earning at Rowntree’s, but when they contacted her to ask her to come back again as a temp for the Easter rush, she turned them down at first, feeling it would be foolish to give up a full-time job for the precarious prospect of temporary work at Rowntree’s, no matter how well paid it might be. However, in the end she decided to risk it and went back to the company for a fourth time. This time she was working in the Melangeur department, where the chocolate was made, but she found the work monotonous in the extreme, and there was even less of the camaraderie with the other women that she had so enjoyed when she had first worked there thirty years before, and in the end she left the factory for the final time in 1995, and spent the last ten years of her working life on the checkout at a Sainsbury’s supermarket, before retiring in 2005.
Epilogue
Many of the women workers at Rowntree’s believed that the sense of being part of a family business and a caring community of workers and managers was lost when the Rowntree family’s close personal connection with the company ended; as one of their women employees said, ‘It was never the same place after that.’ Fears for the future were heightened when Rowntree-Mackintosh was the subject of a hostile takeover. Suchard made the first bid, but Nestlé then stepped in as ‘white knights’ and bought the company on much more favourable terms for Rowntree’s shareholders and employees. Although many in York opposed any takeover at all, it is undeniable that the Nestlé bid was the more palatable option. (When Suchard, as part of Kraft, took over the other York chocolate factory, Terry’s, they closed it down altogether.) The company was known as Nestlé-Rowntree for a number of years, but the Rowntree branding was eventually dropped.
