Biscuit Girls

by Hunter Davies

  The water biscuits were hot, straight from the oven, but like most of the women at the time – before health and safety took over so much of working lives – she didn’t wear the gloves, preferring to get used to burning her fingers.

  ‘The first year was the worst. I was put on the six to two shift. I don’t remember being offered any other shift. I just accepted it, pleased to be in work. But it meant I had to be up at five each morning to get there. That took some getting used to, after doing normal day shifts in the other jobs I had had.

  ‘When I got home at 2.30, I felt so tired. I would have a rest, then get up and have a cup of tea and a wash. It felt a bit funny at first, not knowing what to do with yourself for the rest of the day. But I soon settled down. I liked the six to two shift. It was no bother.

  ‘I did dream a lot about biscuits that first year, not quite nightmares, but a bit worrying. I would dream that the biscuits were running off the band [the conveyor belt] because I had been too slow to pick them up. They were all just falling down… then I would wake up.’

  She didn’t find being on water biscuits all the time too boring. Dorothy manages to cope and smile and be cheerful about most things in life.

  ‘Oh, but there was some variety. There were large water biscuits and small water biscuits and then later on we had special water biscuits which had garlic in or pepper. What was strange, when you were handling them, you couldn’t smell the garlic, but everyone else in the factory would say, ooh what’s that smell. When we moved away, we could smell it as well, but not when we were close up. Funny that.

  ‘It was very hot. The forewoman would have a thermometer and when it got too hot she would make us all drink a glass of saline water. We had to drink at least one a day, to keep up our salt content, with all the sweating. You could drink more, which some lasses did. I just drank one glass a day. The saline water was kept in big buckets. Sometimes we also got given glasses of lemonade, or perhaps it was lime, which was nice. I never complained. That was just your job, how it was.

  ‘Another funny thing, I can’t remember how much I started on at Carr’s – or how much I was being paid ten or twenty years later. Yet I can still remember my first wage at fifteen, straight from school: £2 7s 3d. I suppose it was because it was my first and it seemed enormous.’

  On the six to two shift, most of the girls would go to the canteen for breakfast, some having a full fry-up, others just cereal, but Dorothy never did. She took her own sandwiches.

  ‘You’ll laugh at this, when I tell you my favourite sandwich was lettuce! I love lettuce. Sometimes with tomato or an egg, sometimes just lettuce. I love lettuce in the summer. And in the winter, now I think about it. I could have been a rabbit.’

  She enjoyed the work, liked all the other girls, chatting to them as they packed away. While it could be noisy at times, it was never as noisy as it had been when she had worked in the textile factory as a machinist, where the machines ruined any chance of talking.

  ‘There were a few disagreements on the water biscuits, but I would never say rows or fighting. It was usually when some lass wanted to stand at a certain place, saying she had stood there yesterday and wanted to change. I was upset by any bad language, which a few girls used all the time. It used to make me cringe.’

  She pursed her lips and sucked in her breath, demonstrating how she used to react to swearing, not that it made much difference to the swearers.

  She joined the union when she started at Carr’s, the General Workers Union, but only because it was compulsory. When it ceased to be compulsory, she left.

  ‘I don’t really believe in unions. I know they do some good, but it seemed to me they didn’t do a lot. When there were rumours of takeover bids, and we might close, I suppose they would have fought our case, but they didn’t need to, as we never went on strike or closed. My dad was anti-union, so perhaps I got it from him. He had a friend, a big union man, but when he fell on hard times, they didn’t help. I never knew the details, but it was a story my dad told. I always held that story against the unions.’

  Unlike Dulcie, Dorothy didn’t seem to suffer any physical ill-effects from all that hard work, the constant standing, constant bending, leaning backwards and forwards, plus the heat.

  Most of the biscuit girls, with age, did begin to feel their backs and shoulders and legs beginning to ache, which is little wonder. It’s hard to think of many other jobs in which everything is done standing up. Office workers might get backache and repetitive strains, but at least they are sitting down, taking the weight off their legs. Lorry drivers get aches, with sitting in the same position, but they have relatively comfy, well-designed seats to sit in. In jobs that require people to be on their feet all day, like shop assistants, or street sweepers, or traffic wardens, there is a chance to move around, walk somewhere, but a biscuit packer on the line is stuck, rooted to the same spot, often a very cold, concrete, uncomfortable spot, from which they had to perform unnatural, back-breaking sideways and backwards manoeuvres.

  Dorothy was one of the rare ones who never seemed to feel the physical strains. Perhaps it was with being brought up on a farm, helping with the harvests. Or perhaps it was because of her placid, laid-back temperament.

  However, as the years went on, and she reached her late fifties, she was beginning to think she had had enough. She had worked twenty-two years in the same department at Carr’s, as well all the years in her previous jobs.

  ‘I had been working non-stop since I was fifteen, so that was coming up to fifty years of work all together.’

  Dorothy was still unmarried, still living at home with her parents, but both were fit and well. ‘I began to think that perhaps I had done my bit…’

  But she decided to carry on, for a bit longer anyway. Despite beginning to find some parts of the job more tiring than she had felt earlier in her Carr’s career, such as packing the tins, especially the larger, heavier ones for export, she hoped she could manage to keep going till perhaps she was sixty.

  ‘I liked to think we were packing biscuits that were going to go all round the world. I was always quite proud of that.’

  One of the jobs which the barrowmen and boys were there to do was hump the boxes and tins away when full, to the loading bays, but while packing them, either with packaging to protect the biscuits, or the biscuits themselves, the women had to move them around, often giving themselves some nasty cuts.

  Tins had been used at Carr’s from the early decades. However, it is generally accepted among biscuit historians that packing biscuits into tins probably first started in the 1840s with Huntley & Palmers of Reading. At least that is what the firm has claimed. Immediately all the rivals started doing the same, but Carr’s had an advantage in having one of the most innovative tin makers right on their door step, Hudson Scott, up to date with the latest developments.

  Being able to decorate the tins, by sticking on elaborately printed labels, made them more attractive, for customers and the trade. As early as 1847 Carr’s was boasting about its pretty tins, according to an advertisement in the Handbook to the Lancaster and Carlisle Railway: ‘Packed in neat tin boxes of three and five pounds, labelled with an engraving of the City of Carlisle, the Royal Arms and the maker’s name.’

  Biscuit tins had first come in solely to protect the biscuits, just as tins were being used to transport and protect mustard, tobacco and tea, all of them perishable goods, keeping them safe and dry over long journeys, or over a length of time. But once tins could be decorated, made to look pretty and attractive in themselves, they became an important selling tool. All sorts of other kinds of goods started to appear packed in tins, when often the use of tin was not strictly necessary – such as corsets, make-up, and even nails. A decent-looking tin, so it was thought, could make any old product desirable.

  Nice, well-made biscuit tins could also be used by shopkeepers for display, and not just for transport, especially if they had a glass top or a glass side, through which the customer could peer and og
le at the tasty contents.

  The big breakthrough in tin decoration came in the 1860s when direct printing on to the tins themselves became possible, thanks to new techniques and inventions. Hudson Scott, with their expertise in printing acquired before they went into tin making, established a reputation at the top end of the market, becoming known for the fine quality of their tins. They hired some well-known designers of the day, such as John Bushby, to do the art work.

  Biscuit tins became works of art in their own right, especially at Christmas, when special efforts were made by all the biscuits manufacturers to create presentation tins, with fancier than usual assortments and also much fancier decorations and designs, such as the latest art nouveau styles.

  And of course well-made tins were pretty useful – and not just among our brave imperial soldiers who filled them with sand to build barricades. People began to save the prettier tins, and reuse them for their own purposes, such as sewing boxes, or to store jewellery, stationery and stamps, or their precious savings.

  The biscuit and tin manufacturers, ever alert to what their customers were liking and doing, then began to dream up biscuit tins which looked like something else, or were ready to be converted to a secondary purpose, once the biscuits had been consumed.

  With improving techniques, they could produce much more unusual shapes and designs rather than the basic rectangular tins, in which biscuits were simply laid out. Biscuit tins that could then be used as glove boxes and handkerchief boxes were fairly obvious developments, but some were not so obvious. Such as money boxes.

  Around 1900 Carr’s had a biscuit tin in the shape of a money box with a handle on the top and a lid which could be locked. It was black and looked more like a small safe than a biscuit tin, and came complete with a key. They also had a biscuit tin that could double up later as a small kit bag.

  Naturally, all the rival companies competed to produce unusual but desirable biscuit tins. If tins were kept after the biscuits had been consumed, on display in your house, or carried around in your hand as a bag, or on your back as a kit bag, you were of course a walking advertisement for the manufacturer.

  The women of ‘Canal Block Packet Section’, taken around 1929

  Huntley & Palmers had a biscuit tin in the shape of a bookcase, with five pretend books lined up. You couldn’t actually do much with it, after you had eaten the biscuits, apart from putting it on the shelf and say look, children, a little pretend bookcase.

  Children became a big market, once the manufacturers also realised that biscuit tins could be turned into toys. If you made them in the shape of London buses or lorries or trains, they became excellent free toys for playing with, as long as you didn’t cut yourself.

  During the First World War, and the Second, biscuit tin production practically ceased, as tin was needed for other more vital purposes, but once the wars were over, fancy biscuit tins reappeared. In the 1920s, reflecting the flappers and high society, cocktail biscuits appeared. Inside the special tins were recipes for cocktails.

  After the last war, in the 1950s, biscuit tins returned but were never as artistic and elaborate as they were in the Victorian age. The designs and printing were cheaper and they tended to show TV or film stars or old-fashioned rural scenes. Royal weddings, though, have always produced a flurry of special biscuit tins.

  Today there is a great demand for vintage biscuit tins among collectors, even the ones that Ivy was packing back in the 1940s and 1950s. Victorian ones are especially desirable, or those from the 1920s. It is possible to trace a lot of our social and political and design history by collecting in biscuit tins.

  They now command good prices, especially in the USA, though even in little local British auction houses unusual ones always get snapped up. In September 2013, a very nondescript bashed-up tin, with a badly reproduced Venetian illustration on the lid, had several collectors bidding against each other at Mitchell’s auction in Cockermouth. It went for £150. The attraction was that on the bottom you could clearly see the words Carr’s of Carlisle and also the name Hudson Scott – names to savour if you happen to be a biscuit tin collector. It was thought to have dated to the 1890s.

  The glass-topped tins that appeared on grocers’ counters can go for several hundred pounds each. Even more expensive, up to a thousand pounds, are the large display cabinets, the ones with mahogany surrounds and shelves and glass doors. Those inscribed with Carr’s of Carlisle and their Royal Warrant are particularly desirable.

  Easier to find, and cheaper to buy, are little sample tins, hundreds of thousands of which were given away before the war. They contained just three or four biscuits, handed out in the street or put through selected letterboxes, as part of local promotions to encourage you to go to your local grocers to buy them. The collectible ones have of course to have the name of a well-known biscuit manufacturer or brand, usually long since gone, but fondly remembered.

  One of the commonly seen sample biscuits tins today are the little red Carr’s tins with CARR’S CARLISLE on the top. Around the sides it usually says Biscuits, Chocolates, Toffees or Celebrated Biscuits. The same little red tins were used for twenty years, which is why so many have survived. All of them are pretty and worth collecting. They’re bargains at between £10 and £20, depending on condition.

  If only our biscuit girls, the ones who started just after the war, could have salted away some of the Carr’s biscuit tins they were packing back in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, they would have done wonders to their pension funds today.

  Chapter 12

  Barbara

  Barbara, middle, as a schoolgirl in the 1960s

  Barbara was in the next generation of Carr’s biscuit girls. Unlike Ivy, Dulcie, Jean and Dorothy, all born in the 1930s, Barbara was born after the Second World War was over. By her own account, she was an excellent student, which in one way makes it unusual that she should ever have become a worker on the biscuit production line, as in the post-war decades young girls were slowly being encouraged to be more ambitious, assertive and independent.

  ‘Oh yes, I was in the top three in the class all the way through. Maths came easy to me, and English. I wasn’t so good on creative writing or imagining things, but I could spell properly and I understood grammar, which of course we were taught in those days, not quite like today.’

  Barbara was born in George Street, Carlisle on 23 December 1953, a street which was indeed Georgian, but is has long since gone, swept away by the mad dash for modernisation, with ring roads and multi-storey council blocks which back in the sixties so many local authorities thought they ought to have. In George Street at the time was a medical centre and mini-hospital, which was where Barbara was born.

  Barbara’s father was a Geordie who was in the army doing his national service and stationed at Hadrian’s Camp just outside Carlisle when he met Barbara’s mother. She was from Carlisle, had gone to the Margaret Sewell School and had become a typist till she got married. After the army, her father became a lorry driver and they lived in a council house in Harraby, going on to have four children in all.

  ‘At home, my parents used to get the Daily Express delivered and I think the Mirror. As a child, I used to get the Dandy and Beano and another I think called the Topper. Then when I became a teenager, I got Jackie magazine. As a girl I was in the Girl Guides. We used to meet in Trinity Parish Hall which was at the top of Stanhope Road.

  ‘My mother cooked really well but generally we had good wholesome meals that were relatively cheap and easy to prepare as she also worked part-time to support us four kids and of course the household in general. We usually had cereals or porridge for breakfast. Of course, us kids had to have sugar on the Scott’s porridge oats whereas my dad said it should have salt on, both probably a definite no-no today.

  ‘In the winter after breakfast, just before we went to school, we all had a most unwelcome extra, the daily spoonful of – urrrrrgh! – cod liver oil.

  ‘All us kids had school dinners which were usually a mea
t ’n’ two veg type meal followed by a pudding such as a jam roly-poly or syrup sponge and of course most people’s favourite – chocolate chip pudding and custard. Another school favourite was chocolate pudding with white sauce or on rare occasions chocolate custard.

  ‘At home, we didn’t have the same meal on the same day every week, except for Sundays. Sunday was different; we had a cooked breakfast, the full Monty you would say nowadays, bacon, eggs, sausage, tomato, beans, black pudding, mushrooms and fried bread or potato scones. This was followed much later in the day, maybe around 3 p.m, by a Sunday roast with all the trimmings and Yorkshire puddings with whatever the roast was, just cos we all liked them. If there was ever anything left over, even if it was just gravy, my dad would have it with a slice of bread. Teatime was maybe a sandwich and always cake and biscuits.

  ‘On weekdays we might have shepherd’s pie or mince and dumplings or good old egg ’n’ chips or fish finger ’n’ chips. In the summertime there were strawberries fresh from the garden and new potatoes. Dad also grew cabbages and carrots and onions and rhubarb. Mam used to bake usually once a week. Apple and also rhubarb plate cake were our favourites but also rock buns and coconut castles, iced buns and Bakewell tarts. Mince pies were a must at Christmas.

  ‘There wasn’t much I didn’t like, but we didn’t really get a choice. You either ate what you were given or went hungry. I didn’t like liver and onions but that was not on the menu very often. If it was not going to get eaten, then my mother could not afford for it to be wasted. One of my sisters did not like turkey so at Christmas we all told her it was a big chicken, and of course she ate it.

  ‘There was never any drink in the house except at Christmas and then just a few beers, and maybe a bottle of whisky and the obligatory bottle of Harvey’s Bristol Cream. That was to offer to anyone that called round. Any drink that was left would still be there the next Christmas.