Biscuit Girls

by Hunter Davies

  The factory which fifteen-year-old Ivy entered was still owned and run by the Carr family, but few of them had remained Quakers. Fortunately for all their new young healthy, eager post-war workers, the insistence on chastity and temperance had ceased to be applied. No contract had to be signed promising not to commit fornication or visit playhouses or play dice.

  However, the company still tried to be benevolent, carrying on the family tradition of treating the workers well, more or less, depending on the new post-war economic and social times. And young women like Ivy were pleased, nay quite proud, to be employed at Carr’s factory, the ‘Home of Biscuits’, as it proclaimed outside on the factory wall.

  Ivy did not keep a diary or any account of her first year working at Carr’s, and has to rely on her memory to recall exactly what she did, what she wore, what the factory was like in 1948 – but by chance there is an account of a visit to the factory that very same year by a young schoolgirl. She was on a school visit to the factory, which many local schools enjoyed at the time and for many decades afterwards, though it has largely died out, thanks to that modern practice of health and safety and also the unwillingness of factories in these straitened times to devote staff to acting as guides.

  The age of the schoolgirl is not known, but it would appear she was probably around fifteen, nor is her name, but she was a pupil at Dalston, a village five miles to the south of Carlisle. Presumably the teacher asked all the pupils to write an account of their visit – and this one was sent to Carr’s and appeared in the factory magazine.

  MY VISIT TO CARR’S

  On Monday, the 22nd March 1948, we, the scholars from Dalston National School, went to Carlisle on the 1.45 p.m. bus to Carr’s biscuit works.

  On arriving at the works we were a little early, so we were ushered into the café to await the arrival of one of the directors and the guides. The corridor and the café were both panelled in lovely oak wood and the wooden block floors were highly polished. The room itself had big windows which made the room very light, and the beautiful pictures which hung on the wall were lovely country scenes painted in exquisite colours.

  About 2.30 p.m. one of the executives, a Mr Sarginson, came in and gave us a description of the origin of the firm. He said that the works, which were over a hundred years old, were founded by J.D. Carr in 1831. He first started with a small bakery business in Castle Street; the business grew and so he had to find larger premises. In 1834 he invented the first machine in the whole world to stamp out biscuits. In the year 1841 he was granted a Royal Appointment to Queen Victoria. Then he went on to say that Carr’s exported to nearly every country in the world, and they had all sort of trades like engineers, printers, joiners and electricians.

  We were divided into groups of six each under a separate guide. Our guide, Miss Tomlinson, explained everything wonderfully and she told us everything.

  First, we went across the yard into the room where all the ingredients were mixed up into a dough. Next we entered the room where the biscuits were cooked. The ovens were 160 feet long and were really marvellous modern ovens. We stood quite a while watching two women making oatcakes. We were really fascinated by their efficiency, expertness and quickness of hand. The rooms were not sombre, dark, and miserable. They were light, cool and a happy atmosphere hung in the air wherever we went.

  Upstairs where the girls packed the tins for export the tins were all covered over in brightly coloured labels of all kinds. The making of the chocolate biscuits was really very interesting, the way they mixed all the ingredients together into a stiff paste. When we had been in that room we went into the room where the biscuits were put on the chocolate and another layer of chocolate on top. As the biscuits came through, a girl who sat on one side of the machine separated the biscuits with a needle so they wouldn’t stick together.

  Some of the export biscuits were carefully packed in tins with shavings down each side to keep them firm. Then they were passed on to another girl who soldered round the top and marked her number on the side. After this they were taken to another two girls who dipped them in a large tank full of water to see if they were airtight, and if they weren’t they were passed back to the girl.

  Journeying on we came to the print room where girls fed machines which printed magazines and all kinds of labels. We then went to see the guillotine, a machine which a man operated by pressing down a lever which brought the guillotine down, and so cut through the paper, and just as he pressed the lever a guard flew out to keep him off it.

  The process I thought most interesting was the first one where the ingredients were all mixed together into a stiff dough, rolled out into sheets, and put on to a machine, and as it passed through each roller the dough got thinner and thinner until just the right thickness. Then it went through a machine which stamped out the shape of the biscuit. It was then cut to the shape and the waste went below and back to the beginning while the biscuits moved on into the vast ovens.

  Passing through the rooms with the ovens we looked through one of the little doors, and gas jets were at the top and bottom to bake both the top and underneath of the biscuits.

  From here we came to another room where the now lovely cooked golden brown, rich appetising biscuits waited to be packed by the girls.

  I wouldn’t mind working in the offices as I would like to do general office work, but I wouldn’t like to work in the factory as I don’t think I would be quick enough.

  The account is well written, well punctuated, a tribute, some might suggest, to the post-war education system. At the end, the magazine editor says that he has printed it exactly as she wrote it, but says she made one mistake. The date of the first cutting machine was 1849, so he says, not 1834. It could of course not have been 1834 as the factory did not open till 1839, but it is more likely to have been 1839 than 1849. In fact this date has never been properly agreed upon.

  The girl describes some of the jobs which Ivy herself had to do at that time, such as stuffing paper shavings into tins as packaging. The schoolgirl also describes activities which Ivy never mentions, or perhaps was unaware of, such as girls soldering tins and dipping them into water to make sure they were airtight. Also, separating biscuits with a needle. Could she have got that right? Sounds very primitive for what was supposed to be an up-to-date factory.

  She also graphically describes the biscuits being stamped out, a process created over a hundred years earlier by Jonathan Dodgson Carr.

  On their tour, the girls clearly received a bit of company PR, given some of the stirring history of the firm, but the schoolgirl reporter ends by saying that while she would like a job at Carr’s, she would like to be in the office, not on the production line. She carefully does not suggest this is because she must have seen how hard, how tedious, how back-breaking packing biscuits could be for women like Ivy, but nicely turns it against herself, saying she would not be ‘quick enough’.

  Chapter 3

  Ivy

  When Ivy started at Carr’s in 1948 the works were very much as the Dalston schoolgirl had described – except she went first into the office block, noticing the lovely oak wood and the wooden block floors. The ordinary workers, like Ivy, never had occasion to go into the posh, impressive office area.

  The main entrance, which had a clock tower, was through an arch beside what had once been an old granary. In the entry yard was an ornamental fishpond, stocked with fish. The office workers went left into the office block while the workers processed down a long, rather prison-like concrete corridor leading to the factory buildings, where the biscuits were mixed and made and baked.

  There were lots of little separate buildings for the various processes, such as the chocolate room, the cream room, the custard cream room, now morphed together into one large factory area, with the corridor now much longer than it used to be, joining up the various areas. The object now is to keep all those involved in food processing under one roof and today this long and bleak green-painted concrete corridor is known by the worke
rs as the Green Mile – a nickname taken from the Hollywood film based on the novel by Stephen King – which is about death row.

  In the forties and fifties, the corridor was not as long, but still fairly intimidating and scary for a young girl, though the business of washing hands and tying up hair was not as intensive as it is today. And when Ivy started, individual lockers had not come in, as workers took their own uniforms home.

  The plant itself covered over seventeen acres, with many different buildings and departments, yards and alleyways, all very confusing for new workers. Apart from the office block, the main buildings included the boiler house, the training centre, the engineers’ department, plus the different biscuit-, chocolate- and cream-making areas. The sickly sweet aroma of the biscuits, which could be smelled out in the streets of Caldewgate, and in the playground of Ivy’s old school, became more intense as you walked down the long corridor. The strongest smells in the forties and fifties were of chocolate. Water biscuits, by comparison, have little smell, even in the heart of the baking and packaging process.

  When Ivy started, the old canal that led to the sea had long been filled in, but the canal basin could still clearly be seen and workers walked along it, as Ivy had done. The little railway siding connected to the main line especially for Carr’s was coming to the end of its life, but Ivy can remember one old engine when she first started – which was in fact still in operation until the 1960s. It was a fireless steam engine, the water heated up from the factory boilers, which could run for a few hours at a time in the yard, shunting wagons.

  ‘I have a memory of the engine getting out of control one day, bursting out of the yard and into the street, terrifying everyone in Caldewgate. It must have been a queer sight. I never saw that happening, at least I don’t think I did. I think someone told me. It was a long time ago.’ (She had probably been told about a well-known incident from the 1920s, photographs of which still exist, when some railway wagons did run out of the yard and into Caldewgate.)

  There was constant noise, not just from the machinery but from large lorries going in and out all day, delivering raw materials and taking away the finished biscuits.

  The whole, sprawling factory had an institutional feel, like a Victorian school, with all the brick buildings, but of course much bigger than any school that Ivy or any other Carlisle girl had ever experienced. When Ivy first started, there were around 2,500 to 3,000 people working in the factory. All pretty frightening and confusing for any young girl starting out in her adult working life.

  ‘It all seemed so big and daunting. I was very nervous, worried about speaking to anyone, or doing the wrong things. I never answered back to anyone who might tell me off. I did what I was told, which was to stay on my line and not leave it.’

  Ivy’s first job was on the Tuppenny Packets, a simple, obvious, basic sort of job most girl beginners started on in the 1940s which was relatively easy to learn and hard to do much damage, either to yourself or the precious biscuits. The rate for a fifteen-year-old girl at the time was thirty-four shillings (£1.60p) a week – as detailed in an official weekly rate sheet issued by the factory on 14 November 1947. There was an agreed bonus rate that could get you up to thirty-four shillings if you achieved your piecework rates, depending on how many pieces of work you completed in a set time. At the age of sixteen, it jumped to forty-one shillings while the top basic rate, for a woman of twenty-one years of age zoomed up to sixty-five shillings.

  ‘All I had to do was put four shortcake biscuits or four ginger nuts, or whatever it was that day, and put them in a packet, fold the ends and seal it. It then went on for someone else to do the netting, which was what we called putting the labels on. You had to be quick, mind, and keep up the work rate, to earn your bonus.’

  Her uniform consisted of her long white overall, buttoned down the front, reaching almost to the knees. She was given two sets for which she was responsible, having to wash and repair them herself. A charge hand, the next grade up, wore a pink overall; a forewoman wore a blue overall while a supervisor, the top position for an ordinary worker, as opposed to management or office staff, wore blue and white overalls. The uniform varied over the years, and the job titles, but it meant it was easy to see the bosses hovering from a long distance away.

  ‘We were also issued with a white cap and told that our hair had to be tucked under our cap. No hair at all had to be showing. If you had quite long hair, you had to pull your cap right down. Some of them looked queer and funny. There was one girl wore her cap right down and she looked as if she was in a cowboy film, you know, sitting on the wagon trail.’

  The brim of the cap was stiff and Ivy’s mother used to starch it for her, to keep its shape. Ivy was insistent her overall had to be washed each week and complained if it was not getting clean enough, even when it was done at her grandmother’s wash house with its ace boiler. Sometimes her mother would spare no expense and send it to the Lakeland Laundry.

  After a week or so on Tuppenny Packets, Ivy was moved to lining tins – putting greaseproof paper inside empty tins, which would then be filled by other girls. Then she had a spell putting paper shavings in the tins, padding to protect the biscuits on their long sea journey to the ends of the known world. There was none of the sort of stuff used to protect fragile goods today, no inflated plastic bags or polystyrene pellets. For a while she was on netting, given a pile of labels and a pot of glue, sticking them on packets or tins as they processed past.

  During her first year, she was moved round quite frequently on to different production lines, but always basically doing the same – packing biscuits and crackers, most of it done by hand.

  When Ivy moved on to slightly messier jobs, involving liquid cream or chocolate, she took to wearing what she called a belly band – a piece of material which she tied round her middle and fixed with tape, so that any grease or liquid chocolate or hot cream or other sticky runny sweet stuff did not ruin the front of her precious overalls.

  She worked surrounded in the various packing rooms by between ten and thirty other girls or young women. The only men around were the barrowmen, who came in at regular intervals to wheel away the filled tins, some of which were enormous, holding about ten pounds of biscuits.

  She didn’t find it boring or even monotonous. Some rooms could be very noisy, if they were near heavy machinery, or very hot if they were near the ovens, but Ivy was mostly spared such places. Girls were not supposed to move from their station, unless told.

  She joined the union as soon as she arrived at Carr’s but can’t remember what it was called. ‘I just did it because of my mother. The moment I started she said, “Now, don’t forget to join the union, Ivy.” Everyone did in them days.’

  While doing her work a lot of her time was spent talking, laughing and singing with the other girls, though not of course when a charge hand or supervisor was around. ‘You were meant to concentrate on the job in hand, not muck around or enjoy yourself.

  ‘You were also meant not to walk around, but stay in your department. When I came into work each day, I used to love looking at the fishpond. I got it into my head that one of the fish, a very white fish, was called Ivy, and it had been named after me. I used to tell all the other girls that – and they believed it.’

  The girls didn’t swear back in the 1940s, according to Ivy, at least she only heard the F-word once: ‘It was a girl called Daisy – and she was off the fairgrounds. She came out with the F-word one day and I said to her what my mother used to say. “A decent man wouldn’t swear in front of a lady, let alone a lady in front of another lady.”’

  One of the features of the pre-war years at Carr’s, which had started back in the very early years of the factory, was a works outing. Quakers, though they were tough on slackers and those with loose morals and laid down very strict working conditions, were always keen for their workers to enjoy some sort of communal fun day, usually a grand outing.

  Another Quaker firm and one of Carr’s major competitors
was Huntley & Palmers of Reading. They had their annual do in the factory itself, tastefully decorating it with flowers and plants, then sitting everyone down at long wooden tables for a good tuck-in. Husbands and wives were invited, plus guests. These factory suppers, usually held in April, finished with some sort of entertainment, such as a magic lantern show.

  At Carr’s, they always had proper outings, for the whole factory, which J.D. first started in 1840, at which time the workforce was still quite small and manageable. They became so famous in Carlisle that workers elsewhere were resentful that they did not have such treats.

  The 1850 outing, with the whole factory being closed for the day, started at 4.30 in the morning when the entire workforce, which by then numbered 111, plus husbands, wives and children, plus all the Carr family, including J.D., his wife and six children and other relatives, gathered at Carlisle railway station, with the younger children wildly excited at the thought of their first train ride. They steamed off to Cockermouth thirty-seven miles away, where ten large horse-drawn coaches were waiting to take them to Derwentwater where they had breakfast in the grounds of a hotel, hampers having been unloaded and the food laid out on tables in the garden. The bread, baked by a volunteer staff the night before, was still warm. It was eaten with ham and cheese and plenty of boiled eggs. No alcohol was allowed with any of the meals that day.

  They then split into different parties, doing different activities, from climbing Skiddaw to sailing on Derwentwater, plus games, entertainments, and lots more eating and drinking, tea and lemonade being provided all day. It was almost midnight before they all rolled back into Carlisle railway station. Next day, not one person was late for work. The whole outing had cost J.D. £40 – which he knew was worth it ten times over in the pleasure it had given and the goodwill it generated.