Biscuit Girls

by Hunter Davies

  ‘When miniskirts came in and were all the rage; all us girls wore them and our dads used to say, “You’re not going out in that” along with “You can get all that muck off your face”. In true teenage fashion, we took the make-up with us and put it on later.

  ‘I did make some of my own clothes from paper patterns, mostly blouses and skirts. We were taught how to do this at school. I was also shown how to sew by my grandmother and often used her old Singer sewing machine, which had a treadle to control the speed.

  ‘I was always doing my hair, it had to be just so. I occasionally used to go to the local hairdresser’s, which was located at the back of the newsagent’s where I had been a paper girl. They did a good job. When I was feeling flush or wanted something a bit different I might go to one of the more expensive salons in town, but mostly I did my own. My mother and grandmother often used to get me to do home perms for them, using something called Twink or Pin Up. I can’t really remember how much it cost at the hairdresser. I think maybe about 10s–15s for a shampoo and set.

  ‘I have tried most styles over the years but my hair has mostly been short. As a child we girls – me and my two sisters – were not allowed to have our hair long. It always had to be a short back ’n’ sides, so to speak, for all of us.

  ‘But as a teenager I used to backcomb my hair till it was as high as I could get it, then use loads of hairspray to keep it in place. I also used to perm it myself. I once bought a wash-in-wash-out colour shampoo which was chestnut brown and my brown hair went orange. I washed my hair about ten times that day before it looked sort of OK. I never bought that colour again.

  ‘I enjoyed most of the popular music of the day, the Beatles, the Stones, Marc Bolan, the Who, the Drifters, Union Gap and yes even Cliff Richard, and of course the instrumental music of the Shadows like “Apache”. I never went to any pop concerts but did have pictures of Paul McCartney and Marc Bolan.

  ‘As a teenager I used to listen to Radio Caroline and I think Radio Luxembourg. I used to listen mostly on a small pocket-size radio with headphones, usually under the bedclothes when I was supposed to be asleep.

  ‘My favourite film stars were Robert Redford and Paul Newman and also Roger Moore and Sean Connery. I thought they were all good-looking. At the time anyway, when I was young and impressionable…’

  Barbara went to dances, coffee bars, mainly with her girlfriends, and through mutual friends started going out with a young forklift driver, David Waugh, who was working at 14 MU. She was eighteen, and he was her first serious boyfriend. ‘I was wearing my favourite outfit, my midi skirt and peach top, on a night out at the Border Terrier pub when I was first asked out by David.’

  They got engaged in 1973 and married in 1974.

  Waugh is a common Cumbrian surname and pronounced ‘woff’, with no connection with the posher, literary family of Waughs from the south who pronounce their name ‘war’.

  They rented a small house while they waited for their name to come up on the council list. ‘We had no family money on either side, no one to help us financially, so our ambition was to get a council house, but the only ones that came up were in Raffles. I didn’t want to move there. It had begun to get a bad reputation by that time. That year forty-two council houses became vacant at Raffles and only four at Morton Park – which was a sign of the changes that were happening.’

  They then heard about a new development being planned, some two-bedroom flats £5,950 for a ground floor flat and £6,200 for upstairs.

  ‘They had not yet been built, so all you had to do to secure one was put down £25 on the plot.’

  They had £25, which Barbara had got for her twenty-first birthday. The arrangement was that later they had to pay a £300 deposit, 5 per cent of the price.

  ‘I had put our savings from our joint wages in the Cumberland Building Society and I had a small endowment policy which I cashed. We were also entitled to a tax refund, this was “the married man’s allowance”. Putting everything together we managed to raise the deposit. We then managed to secure a mortgage from the Cumberland, where I had been saving, which came to £28 a month.’

  So at the age of only twenty-one, Barbara had become a property owner, unusual for such a young couple at the time with no capital and no family money, one of them in unskilled work, but it was not unknown. There was a housing boom on at the time and mortgages with low deposits were being offered to reliable-sounding couples. Their first child Neill was born in 1976, two years after they were married.

  In 1977, when Neill was just seven months old, Barbara went ‘up street’ one day, into the centre of town in order to go to Granada TV Rentals and pay the weekly rent on their new colour TV. She was paying it in cash, as direct debit had not generally come in and many working people still did not use chequebooks.

  Most people by then owned a black and white TV, but colour was new and they were expensive, so people rented. TV rental was a good business to be in. The renters very quickly paid as much as they would have paid for a new TV, but TVs were not as reliable as they soon became, or as cheap, so people feared the cost of repairs and preferred to play safe and rent.

  Barbara left her baby at her mother-in-law’s, saying she would be back in an hour. She paid the TV rental quickly and then decided to have a quick look round the shops as she still had half an hour to spare.

  She chanced to look in the window of the Job Centre, where there was a card offering part-time evening work. The rates sounded quite good, but the name of the firm was not mentioned. She went inside, asked for details, and found out that it was packing biscuits at Carr’s. She filled in a form, was asked various questions, a phone call was made, and she was told she could go there and then and have an interview.

  She rushed back to her mother-in-law’s, said something had come up, but did not give details, asking her mother-in-law if she could look after the baby for another hour or so. Then off she went to the Carr’s factory in Caldewgate.

  ‘I was interviewed by Tommy Walker in personnel. He was very pleasant and asked me if I had relations working at Carr’s. I hadn’t, but lots of my husband’s family had worked there. I gave their names, and he seemed to know some of them. My fingers got examined – if you had bitten fingernails you did not get the job.

  ‘I gave my date of birth and other details. When I revealed I had a baby, he asked who would look after the child. I said that as the job was going to be part-time evening work, my husband would look after the baby, when he came home from work. That satisfied him. He said go and get your overalls, you can start next week.’

  Barbara rushed back to her mother-in-law’s and waited for her husband to arrive home from work. He was due to have his tea at his mother’s, as he did once a week. They all had tea together, without Barbara mentioning what had happened.

  It was only on the walk home to their little flat, with Barbara pushing the pushchair with the baby that she revealed what she had done.

  ‘By the way, David, I’ve got myself a job, starting next week.’

  ‘Oh aye,’ said David, ‘where at, like?’

  She told him the details, saying it was just a thirteen-week contract, but that it would enable them to save enough money to buy the £150 G Plan sideboard they had been ogling in the shops. He liked the idea of that, and didn’t seem phased by having to look after the baby every evening.

  Why had she not told him straight away?

  ‘Oh you don’t do that sort of thing with men, well certainly not with David. I knew what he was like. When he came straight from work he didn’t like being bombarded with things. A lot of men seem to be like this, they can’t take it in. “Let me at least get me coat off, woman, before you start.” So I waited my time.

  ‘Usually you plant a few seeds in advance, so when they get round to it, they think it’s their idea. It’s terrible what we women can do. But this time it had just been a sudden whim. I really had no intention of looking for a job that day. I was just putting in time.

 
‘But I suppose subconsciously I must have been thinking of it. We needed more money, for all the things we wanted – and we had to get it by ourselves. There wasn’t the “Bank of Mum and Dad”, which so many young couples have today, even ordinary working people. You had to make your own arrangements about things like babysitting, which is why Dave had to do it. There were few nurseries and you certainly didn’t get help paying for them. Unlike today. They are dumping babies all the time today, what with their breakfast class or after school clubs. I always gave my own children their breakfast and picked them up from school, even though I was working.

  ‘There was also no maternity leave. It was just being introduced – so when I had finished work to have my baby in 1976 I wasn’t paid. There was a grant of £25 and an allowance for eighteen weeks – eleven weeks before the birth and seven weeks after, then there was nothing. My job was not guaranteed for when I came back. Family Allowance had not come in either yet – you only got that for a second child, and it was done as a tax allowance against your husband’s earnings.’

  Family Allowance had been introduced in 1946, worth five shillings a week per child, but not for the oldest child – just for the others. It was in 1977 that Child Benefit was introduced for all children, including the eldest. In 1979 mothers received £4 for every child. The big change, the one that really mattered, was that Child Benefit was paid directly to the mother, which was a huge benefit, giving all mothers more independence, even for those who might well have gone on to spend it on clothes or treats for themselves.

  ‘I think working women have it easier today, whether it’s those who want to do ordinary work or those who want to have a “proper” career. The government actively encourages them and gives them help. Mothers in my day, back in the early seventies, with young children, had to do it all on their own, get our husbands or mothers to help out, not rely on the state to make it easy.’

  So on 20 June 1977, Barbara started work on the factory floor at Carr’s, assuming it would be just for thirteen weeks. She was not bothered about any ideas of it being beneath her, despite having previously been in office work. She was thinking only of the money, which she considered excellent for Carlisle.

  She was to get a basic £18.07 a week working part-time for just over twenty-one hours a week, plus £4.52 per week for what was called a flat rate payment, according to the contract she signed. The one-page contract of employment was from ‘United Biscuits Limited (Carr’s of Carlisle)’ and described her job title as ‘process worker’. It stated that she had to join the General and Municipal Workers Union. Another clause warned that ‘in cases of serious misconduct, the right of immediate dismissal is reserved’.

  The big attraction for Barbara was the thought of earning around £22 a week part-time, which was almost as much as her husband was earning working full-time as a driver. He was on only £34, yet putting in twice the number of hours. Just the previous year, working full-time in the office at the engineering firm, Barbara had been getting only £27. So £22 for part-time at Carr’s seemed excellent, though at this stage she did not know exactly what she would be doing.

  Sufficient, though, so she hoped, to secure that highly desirable G Plan sideboard…

  Chapter 13

  Ann

  Ann in her twenties, still working as a hairdresser

  Ann, another post-war baby, four years older than Barbara, was born into a family of Carr’s workers. Her mother and father both worked there, as had her uncle and her great-grandfather. She has a photograph of him from the 1880s in a flat cap and with a big bushy moustache, standing in the factory with a couple of cats. He acted as an official rat catcher, while working in the boiler room. Ann suspects the cats did most of the rat catching.

  Not surprisingly, as a young girl growing up, she had no intention of working at Carr’s. While at school, her ambition was to become a hairdresser.

  Ann was born on 1 September 1949, and brought up on the Raffles estate, the traditional home over the decades since the war of thousands of Carr’s employees.

  She went to Newtown Primary School and remembers the Eleven Plus with horror. She was never good with tests or examinations, but her main fear was the thought of being split from her friends. ‘That’s what the Eleven Plus did – separate you from friends you had been with since the age of five.’

  Fortunately, she did not pass and progressed to Ashley Street Girls, the school Ivy had attended some twenty years earlier. And just as Ivy did, she remembers the sweet smell of the Carr’s factory.

  ‘We had this really strict teacher, Mrs Templeton, and I was terrified of her. She once told me to take off a signet ring, which I had been given as a Christmas present by my mother. Now I knew jewellery was not allowed at school, or earrings, but for some reason signet rings were. I knew the rules and would not have disobeyed them. I would have been frightened to do anything not allowed. But she ordered me to take it off. It wouldn’t come off, so I went to the lavatories and tried to get it off with soap. Still it wouldn’t come off. I was in agony and started crying. In the end it did, but I can still feel the pain and terror of trying to get that bloody signet ring off.’

  Ann considers she had a fairly idyllic childhood in the Raffles, living in Raffles Avenue in the 1950s with her parents and her younger brother Keith. It was still at that time, as far as she was concerned, a safe, pleasant, happy place. ‘When I was growing up, people didn’t lock their doors. You could go off to Silloth for the day and leave your door unlocked. And if it rained, your neighbour would come and take your washing in. Of course there were some poor people. My gran used to say, “We hadn’t much, but they had nowt.” But everybody tried to help each other. My old clothes were given to families who couldn’t afford new ones, and no one took offence at being helped.

  ‘My mother did most of the family cooking when I was growing up. She would shop at the local butcher’s for meat, sausages, eggs, etc. and use the local Co-op for general things. She would make stews, tattiepot, mince and dumplings. In winter there would be homemade soup and always a Sunday roast. Summertime was salads, new potatoes. Dad didn’t do much cooking at home because he worked shifts. When I was young I didn’t like stews and wasn’t keen on veg. We did have alcohol at Christmas and if we had family parties.’

  With both parents working, their family was relatively well off, having enough to pay for Ann to go on a school trip to Austria. ‘Mind you, it only cost £10. We went all the way by bus, boat, and bus, and stayed in a real hotel. It was wonderful.’

  As a girl she joined the Brownies, moving on to the Guides and went to meetings connected with St Luke’s church. She made campfires and did Bob a Job. She was also a member of the library, the children’s library at first, getting books from a mobile library which came round the estate, mostly books by Enid Blyton. When she got older she was in Morton Library and also went into Carlisle to Tullie House – Carlisle’s major Jacobean building which had been converted into a museum and public library.

  At home, her father got the Daily Mirror delivered every day plus the Sunday Post. Her mother got Woman’s Own and the People’s Friend, all of which Ann read when growing up.

  ‘I loved “The Broons” in the Sunday Post and used to get the Broons Album every year for Christmas. I remember reading the letters in the Sunday Post. There seemed to be such a lot of them.’

  Ann applied to be a hairdresser the moment she left school in 1964 and waited for an opening. In the early 1960s there was plenty of work around, but hairdressing had suddenly becoming highly popular for working-class girls. Mary Quant and Vidal Sassoon had made the latest fashions available to all and girls everywhere wanted to look good and up to date, even at the risk of being known as dolly birds.

  After six months of looking, she was taken on as an apprentice hairdresser at Dorothy’s in Spencer Street, in the middle of the town, round the corner from the main post office and the main cinema, the Lonsdale. Her wages were £1 17s 6d a week. Her apprenticeship was for thr
ee years, plus two years during which she was termed an Improver.

  The salon had around fifteen staff, was busy and bustling, with a wide range of clientele, including local shop owners and lots of hard-working girls from nearby factories, including a lot of Carr’s workers. ‘You could smell them when you did their hair – their clothes smelled of biscuits, a sweet sickly smell, so you knew they’d just come from work.’

  Dorothy, the owner of the salon, was considered a hard taskmaster, and the girls used to warn each other when they could hear her heels clipping towards them, but she was liked and admired.

  Ann was known as Anita at work, because there was another girl already there called Ann, and it was as Anita she did some modelling. She was told one day she had good hair and was chosen by Joseph, Dorothy’s son, along with several other girls, to be models when the salon entered hairdressing competitions.

  ‘That was so exciting, going down to London. We didn’t get paid, as such, just our normal wages, plus expenses. We did win a prize in a world championship one year, I think around 1965. I wasn’t actually the model that day.

  ‘I had my hair done every colour you can think of at one time – red, green, blue, everything, and in every sort of style. My mother would say to me, “You are not going out like that!” And I didn’t really, not in Carlisle. It was too much for Carlisle. If I was going out in town and was having my hair done at work, I would tell them I was going out in town, so not to make it too fashionable.’

  Ann loved most of the sixties pop groups, but the Beatles most of all. ‘I found the Stones a bit loud, a bit bashing, but in fact the Stones were the group I did manage to see when they came to Carlisle. And they were brilliant.’ The Rolling Stones came to Carlisle once in the sixties, at the ABC Lonsdale on 17 September 1964 when they did two performances.

  The Beatles appeared twice in Carlisle the year earlier while on their early English tours. On 8 February 1963, they played at the Lonsdale with Helen Shapiro, aged sixteen, top of the bill. Ann was just thirteen at the time. She queued up for ages with some schoolfriends, but they failed to get any tickets. The Beatles returned eight months later on 21 November 1963 – which was the concert that the young Carr’s worker had managed to get into and wrote about in the Topper Off. Once again Ann failed to get tickets, despite queuing for several hours.