Biscuit Girls

by Hunter Davies

  The natives of Carlisle are neither English, Scottish nor Irish but a mongrel breed betwixt the three. They are possessed of low cunning but are often outwitted. They pride themselves on their feats of deception and will chuckle over the misfortunes of a person they may have been principally instrumental in bringing to ruin.

  There was something else Jean was immediately aware of when she first arrived in Carlisle.

  ‘I noticed straight away the lack of coloured people – and you still don’t see many. At school in Liverpool, my best friend was coloured and there were others in my class. They were pure Scousers who just happened to be descendants of the African slaves who had been dumped in Liverpool. We also had a lot of Chinese. No one bothered. They were just like us really. But here in Carlisle, they have never been used to outsiders.

  ‘I once had words at the school gate with a woman. Something silly, saying my son had done something which he hadn’t. She turned round and said, “You want to go back where you come from – you foreigner!” The funny thing was she was Scottish. I said it’s you who should go back to Scotland. Carlisle is in England, haven’t you noticed.’

  Perhaps it had been Jean’s Scouse accent that had initially put local people off? She doesn’t think so.

  ‘Actually I never had a strong Liverpool accent. When I was at school in the 1940s, at the secondary not the grammar, we had elocution lessons to tone down our Scouse accents. Yes, that was surprising.

  ‘But it is true that when I first arrived I couldn’t understand them – just as much I’m sure as they couldn’t understand me.’

  Chapter 10

  Dulcie

  In 1974, when Dulcie returned to work at Carr’s, after two marriages and two daughters, United Biscuits were the new owners. The Carrs had all gone, including Allen Carr, the one she had good-morninged in her earlier period as a messenger girl in the 1950s.

  Dulcie was joined at Carr’s by her profoundly deaf daughter Louise – making her the third generation of the females in her family to work on the lines at Carr’s. Her years at the special boarding school had helped her with reading and writing and sign language, but talking was difficult.

  One day, Dulcie was told that Louise was having a spot of bother. While packing biscuits, a woman working alongside Louise had upset her and had her in tears.

  ‘She had apparently complained about Louise. “I dunno what she’s on about, she can’t talk properly.” She was an older woman as well, someone you would have thought would have known better. But you always have one or two of these people everywhere. It’s ignorance, really.’

  Dulcie arrived and when she heard what had happened gave the woman a piece of her mind, which resulted in a heated argument.

  ‘I didn’t hit her. All that happened was that her face walked on to my fist…’

  They were both sent home and in the subsequent investigation Dulcie was decreed to have been in the wrong, which she accepted. Dulcie and the woman were separated and she and Louise were ordered home, to await an investigation.

  ‘We then got called to this office which seemed to be full of people. There was the personnel manager, several plant managers and a union rep. We told them what had happened, gave our side of the story, and they all listened and asked a few questions. It was pretty frightening, as we stood there in front of them all.

  ‘The upshot was that Louise was suspended for a week and I was given a final warning about my behaviour. We were then both marched out of the office, out of the factory and escorted off the premises. I did laugh at that. It was funny because it was so out of proportion to our crime.

  ‘As we walked out, one of the managers said to me, “Your daughter is lucky to have a job at all.” Meaning, because she was deaf. That made me really mad. “And you’ll be lucky if you have a job after I’ve reported you…” so I told him.

  ‘But I never did. I meant to, but didn’t. With hindsight, I should have done. There should have been a deaf interpreter there. Otherwise how could they have properly heard Louise’s side of the story?

  ‘Even now I wished I had lodged a formal complaint. But at the time I just accepted that we had both been wrong to get into a fight.’

  Another time, Louise herself got into a squabble with another girl in front of one of the management, not a wise thing to do. Dulcie arrived to help out, and translate what Louise was trying to say, but it was too late. A certain amount of pushing had taken place between Louise and the other girl.

  ‘Me and Louise were escorted off the premises like petty criminals. She got suspended but I didn’t, as I had done nothing.’

  Dulcie admits there was a time in her life when she did a lot of swearing, living up to the image of how many assume, quite wrongly of course, that women factory workers generally talk and behave.

  ‘There were girls who did swear – because they wanted to sound big. So if you answered them back the same way that took them by surprise. I could sometimes sound like a fishwife. Bob [her husband] used to say that I must have fallen off a potter’s cart. I would do much better in life if I stopped swearing. But I didn’t do it all the time. Only in arguments. But swearing is part of the rich tapestry of life. Even more so now…’

  In Carlisle slang, ‘potters’ refers to tinkers, rag-and-bone men, or anyone assumed to be part of the great uneducated, the great unwashed, most of whom traditionally had lived in the slums of Caldewgate, near the factory.

  Dulcie’s occasional use of swear words doesn’t seem to have held her back much, being of a cheerful, outgoing disposition. It also helped that back in the seventies, many of the bosses had started like her, on the line, or as barrow boys. She had known them growing up, and they knew her.

  But once reorganisation in the biscuit industry took place, and Carr’s became part of a group, with sales and finance and other departments being controlled from the group’s headquarters in London, more management suits arrived from outside, not all of them aware of the character of Carlisle, or its workers, or of Carr’s history, manners and mores.

  However, Dulcie, despite her colourful tongue, got promoted. She was given a post as timekeeper, along with another girl. There was no more money, but it was in theory a pleasanter, less physical job. It meant a bit of paperwork, keeping a record of what was happening and what was being produced on each shift. She had learned typing at the Margaret Sewell School, so office practices were not a mystery to her.

  ‘For about three months or so I was timekeeper in the Jews. That’s what we called the department that made the Passover food, which had to be specially supervised by the rabbis. They were there all the time, during all the shifts, with their big beards and tall hats. They usually came up from Manchester, as I don’t think we even had rabbis in Carlisle, not that I ever heard of. They were all very pleasant, but they did keep a very sharp eye on everything. You had to be on top of your work. Their job was to check every process and every ingredient was in accordance with Jewish law. In the Jews, they used only the best stuff.’

  The history of the Jewish connection goes back to the early twentieth century and was another of Theodore Carr’s initiatives. (It was during Theodore’s reign that Carr’s Flour Mills had been separated from the biscuits works, for complicated financial and legal reasons.)

  In 1910, Theodore organised the purchase of Rakusen Brothers of London who made kosher biscuits and Passover cakes – or matzos, are they are more commonly called. A new company, Bonn & Co, was created to run the kosher business, with Theodore as chairman. The Jewish ecclesiastical establishment were concerned at first that a Gentile-owned firm could be entrusted with the task of making sure all the ingredients and the process was correct, but they were soon won over. Regular inspections had to be made, to ensure the flour was unleavened and all the ingredients kept separate from Carr’s other lines, but it turned out a big success.

  Over the next few decades, as can be seen from the pages of the Topper Off, chief rabbis were regularly photographed visiting from other co
untries, inspecting the process and blessing the biscuits and the workers.

  The kosher work was seasonal, with a big push every New Year to get production ready for Passover in April, around Easter time.

  In the tape-recorded, oral archives of Carr’s workers from the past there are countless mentions of the Jews room, which clearly fascinated the Carlisle workers, not being used to Jewish people or customs.

  A Miss Raven, born in 1905, who joined Carr’s aged fourteen in 1919, talked about her memories of the Jews room just after the First World War – revealing that there actually was a Mr Bonn, who was nominally in charge of the firm, though it was owned by Carr’s:

  ‘Folks look at the biscuits and think it’s just flour and water, but they don’t know all that goes on behind it. First of all the seeds of the corn, the wheat for making the flour, that is blessed, they are very keen on blessing it, kosher they call it. The wheat is put into very clean bags and taken to the flourmills. Have you been to see the flourmills? You ought to, it’s very interesting. There hasn’t to be a particle of dust anywhere. They would go round with a microscope. It had to be cooked to the very second of the Jewish law and if it was a second over, the shomerine or overseer would discard it.

  ‘The rabbis stayed at the Crown and Mitre hotel when they came to Carlisle. Mr Bonn saw to their catering. The ovens and the pans had to be checked so they wouldn’t touch anything that had been touched by Gentiles. Later they used to have their food in the overseer’s house. They wouldn’t partake of any food in a Gentile’s house. Mind you, the Jewish food is very good. Mr Bonn used to bring us some and it was very good.

  ‘The chief rabbi of Ireland came over one year and he was very charming, educated at either Oxford or Cambridge, I can’t remember which. He used to talk to us while he was waiting for his boat to go back over to Ireland. He ended up being the first chief rabbi of Palestine, so I was told…’

  According to Miss Raven, and others who worked on the kosher biscuits in the pre-war years, the rabbi in charge, watching the process, would jangle a pocket full of half-crowns and if the production was ready on time, or even earlier, and all was correct, he would present the charge hand with half a crown, to share among the girls.

  Dulcie has no memory, alas, of ever being given a half-crown during her spell in the Jews room, but she did enjoy it there and found it most interesting.

  After a couple of years as a timekeeper, it was decided that two timekeepers were not strictly necessary and that one was enough. Dulcie was moved back to packing.

  Dulcie returned to the line, working on Bourbon biscuits, still one of the most popular biscuits today, a best-seller in all supermarkets. They are the ones with the chocolate fondant filling sandwiched between two oblong dark biscuits. Genuine ones have the word Bourbon embossed on them and have two lines of five holes, for reasons too mysterious to fathom.

  They were another of the inspired creations by Peek Frean – who had given the world the Garibaldi biscuit in 1861. Bourbons, originally called Creola, were launched in 1910 and named after the French-European royal dynasty, thus conveying an air of class and distinction. John Carr – J.D.’s younger brother – did not die till 1912, so possibly he had a hand in the creation of the Bourbons as well as the Garibaldis.

  Dulcie was also on custard creams, which originated around the same period, just before the First World War. They have remained a particularly British delight, not quite as known or as scoffed abroad. Like the Bourbon, it is a sandwich, with white cream between two rectangularish biscuits. It is decorated with an elaborate baroque design, which looks equally mysterious at first, but if you study it carefully you can see it is in fact a fern motive.

  Names do seem to help in the success and popularity of certain biscuits. Iced Gems, for example, sound enticing – and have been enticing biscuit lovers for over a hundred years. The gem part goes back to the 1850s and refers to the fact that they were small, little gems of biscuits, but they happened partly by accident. Mr Huntley, of Huntley & Palmers, was trying out some new recipes and the results were coming out shrunk. He liked them all the same, and decided to christen them Gems. The iced part came a few decades later, when icing machines – one of Theodore’s contributions – were established in all the main biscuit factories.

  Ginger nuts are spicy biscuits, with a long history, though the strength of the spice can vary. The best known and most popular today are those produced by McVitie’s. It is not clear if the nut part came from the description of a red-haired person being a ginger nut – or the other way round, that red-haired people got so called after the success of the ginger nut. Hob Nobs and Jammy Dodgers, both excellent names, are more recent British creations. McVitie’s introduced the Hob Nobs in the 1980s, a crunchy oaty biscuit with a knobbly surface. ‘One nibble and you’re nobbled’ was an early slogan. It’s now a modern classic – and you wonder how it took so long to get invented.

  Carr’s girls at work icing biscuits in the 1920s

  Jammy Dodgers go back to the 1960s and were created by the Burton biscuit company in South Wales. They are a shortbread biscuit with a jam filling, which you can just peek at through a heart-shaped hole. The name is supposed to have come from the Roger the Dodger character in the Beano comic. The heart-shaped hole conjures up images of the Queen of Hearts, the one who baked the tarts, which the Knave of Hearts, i.e., the Jammy Dodger, stole away. Jammy Dodgers are regularly voted the most popular biscuit among children.

  Dulcie, once she had been moved on from Bourbons, found herself for a long time on assortments, a complicated process that necessitated careful packing into tins.

  ‘The first girl on the line would put in lining paper at the bottom of the tin, then each of us would be on a different biscuit, milk chocolate digestives, custard creams or whatever. We would each add ours to the tin, then the last girl would close the tin and seal it. Rover Assortment, that was the name on the tin.

  ‘I enjoyed it. They were all nice girls I was working with. Factory girls do have a poor name, but they come in all sorts – like a biscuit assortment. You do get every type, which outsiders don’t realise. Just a few of them swear…’

  One day, a manager whom she had known as a barrow boy told her there was a vacancy for a clerk – why didn’t she apply? By then she had worked for almost twenty years on many different production lines. So she applied and got the job.

  ‘I was in a little office, beside the bakery. There were five of us in the office, all women, a woman manager in charge and four of us clerks. We had to keep the records of who was working on each line, their hours and if people were off sick to move people around. We each looked after a different department. I was on assorted packing. Then there was the chocolate, the bakehouse and I’ve forgotten the other one.

  ‘We each had a computer, a very early one I suppose it was, can’t remember what sort now, but it was more than just a typewriter. I did know how to use a keyboard, so it wasn’t too hard to pick it up.

  ‘The girls were fine. They didn’t look down on me because I had come off the line. We all sat at a desk, so it wasn’t as hard as standing packing, but we still had to wear the usual white uniform. We had a white cap as well, but we didn’t need to wear that when we were typing, only if we went through the bakehouse. For hygiene reasons.

  ‘Then I seemed to lose interest after a while. It was quite demanding work. It wasn’t like being on the line where you had no responsibilities at all. It was a bit stressful. I missed working on the line.’

  So, after two years as a clerk in the office, Dulcie returned to the production line. She then began to be troubled by aches and pains in her legs and arms, which many of the packers on the lines have suffered from during the last 150 years or so.

  ‘By then I’d done over twenty years at Carr’s and the work was suddenly becoming so hard. I was getting sore shoulders and neck and for a time I wore a collar as I had spondylitis. I was also getting what we called bakehouse legs – which Louise got as well.
It really just means varicose veins, but they look awful, bits sticking out of the back of your legs. Bob [her husband] had retired, as his health had become poor.’

  Her daughter Louise had left Carr’s by then, having got married and had two children. Elizabeth, her younger daughter, had also got married and had a child.

  ‘I began to wonder whether it was worthwhile carrying on. Or whether it was time to pack up or do something else…’

  Chapter 11

  Dorothy

  Dorothy, the girl from the country, brought up on a farm, started at Carr’s in 1976, not long after Dulcie had returned. She was trained by Ivy for the first few weeks, who was still helping to teach a new generation of biscuit girls the tricks and tips.

  Dorothy, having spent many years previously in the confectionery business, was by now aged thirty-seven, quite old compared with some of the girls who had come straight from school. She did meet quite a few woman of her own age, though, most of whom were married with children.

  When first moving to Carlisle, she had gone to dances, at places like the Cameo and the County. She was quite happy living at home with her parents and quite happy, she says, with her own company. ‘I did have men who asked me to go on holiday with them, but I said no. I had boyfriends, but nothing serious.’

  She walked to work on the first day, found she could do it just fifteen minutes, and walked back and forward every day afterwards, thus saving money on bus fares.

  Like most new workers, Dorothy was overwhelmed by the size of the factory, and all the old bits, scattered around, at the end of corridors and across yards. She often got lost in the first few weeks and had to ask someone the way to where she was supposed to be working.

  Dorothy was put on Table Water Biscuits, where she had to pack twelve packets into a box and then, if they were for export, she had to pack three of the boxes into a much bigger box, which would then have thirty-six packets in each.