Biscuit Girls

by Hunter Davies

  Towards the end of his life, he gave up being a Quaker, supposedly in support of two of his sons who had left – possibly asked to leave – the Society of Friends. J.D. then joined a local Presbyterian church in Carlisle, where he was active and still involved in many good works till the end of his life.

  Jonathan Dodson Carr had a stroke in April 1884 and died a week later, aged seventy-seven. Over 500 people attended his funeral and he was buried in Carlisle cemetery. He left behind his wife, three sons and two daughters and seventeen grandchildren, of which twelve were boys. More than enough to carry on the family firm into the next century.

  Chapter 5

  Dulcie

  Dulcie, despite being on ‘good morning’ terms with Allen Carr, Jonathan Dodgson’s great-grandson, decided that after four years as a messenger girl at Carr’s she had had enough. She didn’t seem to be getting anywhere, so she slowly came to the conclusion that she should try for a proper office job.

  In 1959, she managed to secure one at Rickerby’s, a long-established Cumbrian firm that sold and repaired agricultural machinery. While there she started going out with Bob, who was eight years older than her, tall dark and handsome.

  ‘I didn’t know what his job was. All he seemed to do was walk around. I think maybe he had something to do with lawnmowers.

  Dulcie had gone out with quite a few boys since the age of fifteen, putting on her best clothes for the occasion. ‘I liked shopping at Richards and Eve Brown. My favourites were a circular felt skirt, tight black straight skirt, and white broderie anglaise blouse worn with a cameo broach. I longed for a Hebe Sports suit, but they were far too expensive.

  ‘I had nylons, but I didn’t wear a corset, which my mother did. But I do remember wearing a Playtex foundation garment. You had to put talcum powder in to help you get it on.

  ‘I didn’t go to the hairdresser much, only to have it cut or perhaps a bubble perm. I had it permed all over, curly all over, and sometimes bleached the front with peroxide.

  ‘Rock Hudson was my idea of a handsome man. I couldn’t believe it when later we found out he was gay.’

  Boyfriends would often take Dulcie to the pub, where she would have a Babycham or perhaps a shandy, feeling daring. Pubs were male strongholds in the post-war years, and fairly dour and cheerless, with nothing to eat. Old men in flat caps sat in corners with their whippets and glared at any young people who came in, especially young women, considering them to be no better than they should be. Pubs were not considered fun places, but were meant for serious drinkers only. Especially in Carlisle.

  ‘I don’t think I ever went to a pub on my own. Girls didn’t. In fact, I hardly went to pubs. It wasn’t something you did. The only time might be on a Saturday night when I went to the dance at the Cameo Ballroom in Botchergate. I would get a pass out and perhaps go with a boy, and sometimes just a girlfriend, to the Cumberland pub nearby. We’d have a Babycham and then come back and carry on dancing.’

  Carlisle was unique in England, perhaps in the whole world, outside communist Russia, for its system of public houses – for they were all state controlled. The landlords were civil servants. The buildings were owned by the government. All profits went to the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

  This strange arrangement began during the First World War when massive munitions works were being created at Gretna, about ten miles away on the Scottish border. On Saturday evenings, up to 5,000 workers, most of them Irish navvies, would come into Carlisle on the train for the sole purpose of getting drunk. They would pour out of the Citadel station and head for the nearest pub where the landlord would already have lined up a hundred glasses of whisky on the counters. They usually had a brief drinking period, because of the train times or their shifts, so had to get as much down as possible in a short time. The result was bedlam.

  ‘Drunkenness among munitions workers,’ said Lloyd George, Minister of Munitions, ‘is doing more damage in the war than all the German submarines put together.’

  So it was decided to nationalise all the pubs and hotels in Carlisle and the surrounding district. Only a small, select handful of licensed places stayed in private hands, notably the Crown and Mitre. Navvies would not have gone there anyway. Grocers lost their licence to sell beer and spirits, so you could only buy alcohol in the state-owned premises – and at very restricted opening times.

  Some pubs did offer alcohol for sale to take away, but this usually consisted of a cubbyhole in the wall at the end of the bar. When you knocked on it, and eventually someone appeared, and you asked to buy a bottle to take out, they would usually say ‘sorry, pet, we’re closed’.

  On the other hand, the drinks were slightly cheaper in the Carlisle and District State Management area than elsewhere as they had their own brewery, producing their own brands of beers and stouts, and also their own whisky, Border Blend.

  It all came to an end in 1971, when the pubs were all sold off. Their demise was hardly mourned by most locals. Today, however, the story of Carlisle State Management has become an interesting small footnote in England’s social history. Books have been written about this period and in Carlisle there is a permanent exhibition to the State Management in the city museum at Tullie House. The bottles and beer mats had their own logos and artwork, while the pubs themselves were mostly custom built and were interesting architecturally, with their own individual style.

  All our young women, when growing up, should they have been bold enough to go for a drink on their own or even when invited by a beau, would have been unaware of the history and how unusual the local pubs were – and they considered them a fairly unattractive proposition for a night out. ‘I actually worked in a state-management pub at one time, just for a few months,’ said Dulcie. ‘It was the Ship Inn at Thursby, as a barmaid. It was quite easy really as of course there were no bar meals.’

  Dulcie, suitably dressed up, used to go dancing at the Cameo a lot, and went to the Market Hall when any of the big bands of the day were performing. She remembers going to see Eric Delaney, a drummer and bandleader, born 1924, who was very popular in the 1950s and ’60s, appearing on the radio and the Royal Variety Show.

  ‘There was another famous band I went to with a friend of mine, Syd Lawrence and his Big Band. My friend went home with one of them, took him to her house. I asked her why she did this when he was so much older and not very attractive, though he was nice enough. She said it was because he had a big car. It wasn’t a romantic interlude. Just ships that pass in the night.’

  Her own romance with Bob was going well, till it came to the annual Rickerby staff dance. Dulcie wanted him to take her – but he refused.

  ‘He said, “I see all these people at work all the time, why do I want to see them at a dance?”

  ‘So, just to show him he wasn’t the only pebble on the beach, I went off and married someone else.

  ‘I had met this boy earlier at a dance and he was a soldier. I decided to marry him. My mam was very upset, in fact really furious, but I said I’m going to, don’t care what you say. So I did. And me mam did give me a church wedding and a do at the Co-Op.

  ‘After two weeks, the marriage was over. It was a stupid mistake. I was a silly girl, only twenty-two. What actually happened was that after two weeks he was sent abroad, to Germany. I thought to myself that’s it. Once he’s gone, he’s gone.

  ‘I probably was a bit hard-faced in them days, but you were considered a scarlet woman in the fifties and sixties if you lived with a man you were not married to. So marrying seemed the thing to do. My mother was disgusted with me.’

  She then got back with Bob, her real love, and they soon moved in together, managing to rent a flat, pretending they were a married couple.

  Dulcie then got pregnant, and had to confess it to her mother, going into the Fusehill Maternity Hospital to have the baby.

  ‘I had to tell my mother that when she comes to visit me, be sure to ask for Mrs Pitt, a name I’d just made up.’

  Louise was born in 1
965. A year later she and Bob did get married, at a register office, and moved into a rented house in Nelson Street. By then they had another daughter, Elizabeth, born in 1966.

  In 1969, Bob had a fancy to move out into the country, though Dulcie was never keen, preferring the bright lights and fun of the city. He bought a derelict farm and barn near Thursby, about six miles from Carlisle, for a bargain price of £3,000. His fantasy was to do up all the outhouses, convert and sell them.

  Dulcie and her husband had just the two children. ‘With my first husband, we did use condoms now and again, but I hated them. With Bob, I wanted children, so didn’t bother much. Then when we’d had the girls, I did go on the Pill for a while, but that was really to regulate my periods. I was always told the Pill was bad for you, if you stayed on it too long.

  ‘The best form of contraception is of course “GERROFF!” You know, Gerroff, your time’s up.’

  When Louise was aged five, Dulcie and her husband were out with her one day when she ran away, just down a street, and they shouted after her – but she took no notice. They shouted again – and she appeared not to hear anything they had said.

  ‘We took her to the doctor and he says to me, “Does she look deaf?” I said I don’t know. What does deaf look like? Anyway she was sent for tests – and was pronounced to be profoundly deaf, and had been since birth. There was a great enquiry about this, how on earth had she slipped through the net.

  ‘The school in Thursby knew she had problems speaking, but not what the problem was. A social worker had told me she could be autistic, but it might get better.

  ‘I suppose we had suspected something was wrong. For some time when we had made noises we realised she didn’t seem to hear them. But we had no experience of anyone being deaf. No one in our families had been deaf. We didn’t understand what deaf meant, what happened, how it affected you.

  ‘It was very upsetting when it got confirmed but then we just felt we had to get on with it, that was how it was. We had to live with it, hope for the best, see how it developed.’

  Louise didn’t get better and aged six until the age of fifteen she was sent away to the Northern Counties Deaf School, a boarding school. It did help her to read and write – but she hated it.

  ‘Every time she came home for the weekend she would accuse me of not loving her. She said, “Elizabeth sleeps here seven nights a week and I only sleep here two nights a week. You just want to get rid of me.” I had to explain to her it was for her own good. She could never learn anything if she stayed at home and went to the ordinary school.’

  When Elizabeth, her younger daughter, was seven and established at the village primary school, Dulcie decided to go back to Carr’s. She took a shift that went from 9.30 to 3.30, which fitted in with having young children. The work was on the line, packing biscuits, as her mother was still doing, but it was an unusual shift whereby you moved round all the time, filling in for girls who were on their half-hour breakfast or lunch break.

  ‘It didn’t have a name – just the 9.30 shift. We were not very popular. The other girls were doing the same job for eight hours at a time, but we just arrived, did it for only half an hour, then we got moved on somewhere else. They said it was because we couldn’t cope, we were not good or quick or clever enough to do the same thing for eight hours, which was probably true.’

  So, despite the advantage of having been at the Margaret Sewell School, one of the chosen ones, if not quite the first eleven, Dulcie had returned to work at Carr’s. And she packed biscuits, just like her mother.

  The biscuits which Dulcie was packing included many relatively new lines such as Café Iced, Varsity, Emblem Assorted, Coconut Macaroons, Capri, Lunch, many of them long gone. There is a good full-colour illustration of the current biscuits being produced in the Carr and Company Limited Annual report for the year 1960. A photograph shows some of the girls at work, looking immaculate in their uniforms but also wearing low heels as they stand on what looks like gleaming parquet floor in front of their machines. They are not on the production line but in the accounts office, working a new punched card system, which clearly the company was very proud of.

  In the chairman’s statement at the front of the 1960 booklet, Allen Carr reveals that while demand for biscuits has remained steady, and turnover has increased by 3 per cent, and that they have installed more labour-saving equipment, there are some worrying factors outside their control, such as currency and import restrictions in several countries, the rising price of cocoa beans and also political changes. He mentions Cuba as a market that has closed. This was due to the Cuban revolution of 1959 when Castro took over and trade relations with the USA and the West generally came to an end. He says that they are now going to try harder in more settled markets, such as Canada, the USA and the West Indies.

  But the biggest threat, which had been there since the 1840s, was from rival firms, which was one of the reasons why all biscuit manufacturers were continually trying to think of new, tempting lines to attract the population.

  The number of Carr’s lines had been jumping all the time, from just two at the beginning in 1839, to twenty by the 1840s. By the 1860s, a retail list of Carr’s biscuits, produced for the trade, lists 145 different named varieties. Amazing that they could have produced so many in just one relatively small factory.

  The names make fascinating reading, betraying some of the social and political fashions of the times. Captain’s Thin is still there, plus digestives and Rich Desserts, but there are lots of names with vaguely royal or aristocratic overtones, such as Albert biscuits, Balmoral, Clarence, Osborne, Prince of Wales and Victoria Drops. Quite a few exotic names have appeared, taken from foreign parts, perhaps inspired by places that had been featured in the newspapers, such as Smyrna, Java, Riviera, Madeira, or the use of foreign words to lend a certain sophistication, such as Croquette, Demi Lune, Eclaire, and Pain D’Amandes.

  The list includes Garibaldi biscuits, which were named after the Italian general, Giuseppe Garibaldi, who made a visit to Tynemouth in 1854. He received even more enthusiastic attention when he visited London in 1864. Garibaldi biscuits were created in 1861 by Peek Frean, not by Carr’s, but every rival biscuit manufacturer soon added them, or something similar, to their portfolio. The inspiration behind the Garibaldis was in fact John Carr, the younger brother of J.D., almost twenty years younger, who had left Carr’s to run Peek Freans.

  Garibaldis, which consist of two thin oblong biscuits with a filling of currants, are still going strong. They often get a name check in TV shows and films, showing how popular they have remained.

  Abernethy biscuits were also on the list – named after a Scottish doctor called John Abernethy. He suggested them to a local bakery and restaurant where he regularly had lunch, saying they would be good for the digestion. They were adapted from the old hard tack ship’s biscuit, but more palatable.

  It’s interesting how several nineteenth-century doctors managed to create biscuits that have lived on to this day, usually doctors who were interested in healthy living, thinking up biscuits which might be good for their patients to eat. Bath Olivers were created by Dr William Oliver of Bath in 1750, which possibly makes them one of the oldest named biscuits. He bequeathed the recipe to his coachman, a Mr Atkins, plus £100 and ten sacks of best flour, who immediately set himself up as a biscuit maker.

  In the USA in 1829, Graham Crackers were named after a real person, the Reverend Sylvester Graham, a Presbyterian minister. He saw them as part of everyone’s healthy diet and believed they would help to suppress carnal thoughts or, even worse, the horrors of self-abuse. Other people over the decades have also believed that the right sort of wholesome food would lead to wholesome habits, such as John Harvey Kellogg, when he created his bland cornflakes.

  The worldwide attraction of biscuits has, however, tended to lie more in the joy of biscuits rather than any medical effects. It’s the stimulation and pleasure of the sugar rush, plus the addition of fruit, chocolate, spices and o
ther ingredients which has such appeal, and why ingenious manufacturers are still constantly thinking up ways to add to the basic biscuity taste and contents.

  Dry biscuits, crackers in all their various forms, the type that originated from the other historic source of biscuit, have always had their fans – nowadays usually eaten with the addition of cheese.

  Carr’s, like all the manufacturers, have always paid attention to producing both sweet and savoury biscuits, catering for the two basic human tastes, and were lucky that their Table Water Biscuits went on to prove so popular with all classes.

  The Duke of Wellington was known to keep a tin of Abernethy biscuits on his desk, ready to nibble them in times of stress or boredom or just greed. In the nineteenth-century novels written by Anthony Trollope, the women on train journeys keep themselves going on sweet biscuits. Station and railway refreshment was at the time rather inadequate.

  Oscar Wilde, when he was interned in Reading gaol in 1897, managed to get smuggled in a supply of Ginger Nut biscuits. He had fallen in love with them three years earlier when he had made a tour of the Huntley & Palmers factory in Reading. Biscuits do go with all occasions.

  Chapter 6

  Dorothy

  Country girl Dorothy as a teenager

  Ivy and Dulcie were council-house kids, born and brought up on one of Carlisle’s large estates, just a mile or so from the Carr’s factory, like the majority of the post-war Carr’s workers. Dorothy was different. She was a country girl.

  Dorothy was born as the Second World War broke out – on 31 August 1939 – on a small farm near the village of Sebergham, about ten miles from Carlisle.

  One of the factors that has always made Carlisle feel like an isolated town is that for roughly fifty miles around it is mainly rural, with no other similar-sized towns. Going west, you eventually reach the old West Cumbrian mining areas of Whitehaven and Workington some forty miles away. Going fifty miles east you hit Newcastle. Going a hundred miles due north, you eventually reach Glasgow.