Biscuit Girls

by Hunter Davies

  That first time the Beatles came to Carlisle has passed into Beatles lore. They were staying in the Crown and Mitre, Carlisle’s smartest hotel, and after their performance at the Lonsdale, they had gone back to their hotel and wandered into the ballroom. Ringo started jiving with Helen Shapiro while the other Beatles spotted the buffet and started helping themselves.

  They had not realised they had chanced upon one of the social events of the Carlisle calendar, the annual dinner dance of Carlisle Golf Club. Everyone was in evening dress. The Beatles were all scruffy. A golf club official eventually spotted these ill-dressed young interlopers and speedily ejected them.

  The story made the front page of most of the national papers next day, though the wording of headlines referred to ‘Helen Shapiro and her instrumental backing group the Beatles’.

  When they returned to Carlisle in November, they were top of the bill this time with number one hits behind them – but they still stayed once again at the Crown and Mitre, holding no grudges.

  Nor did Ann, despite not getting tickets. She joined the Beatles Fan Club and subscribed to Beatles Monthly, which appeared from August 1963 to 1969. Paul McCartney was her favourite and she had his photograph stuck on the inside of her wardrobe door. Her other pin-up in the sixties was Sean Connery in his James Bond films. She also liked Elvis and saw all his films.

  ‘I loved Sundays after Radio One began [in 1967] and you had the top thirty or the top forty, or whatever it was. We were all desperate each week to find out who was on top.’

  Once she had started work in 1964, Ann had money to buy her own clothes. ‘Carlisle had lots of boutiques in the sixties, well, I thought we had. I spent a lot of time looking round them. Eve Brown, that was one I went to a lot. And I went to Stead and Simpson for shoes. I did buy stilettos, when they came in, though my mother was against them. They were so uncomfortable, having to push your toes into the pointy bits.

  ‘I also bought platform heels when they became fashionable. I was a bridesmaid once and I insisted I was going to wear my platforms, even though they were hell to wear and you either fell over or they came off. All the bridesmaids had to wear long dresses, so I was able to use elastic bands under my dress to keep the platforms in place, tying them round the ankles.

  ‘Going out to dances, you would wear panty girdles and suspender belts to hold up your nylon stockings. I bought my nylons from Marks & Spencer – American Tan they were called. I can’t quite remember when tights came in, but they were a huge change.’

  The general use of tights by young women was a great relief for most of them, though men rather missed suspender belts, if they ever got to see them, which was rare back in the sixties, at least in Carlisle. But miniskirts did focus on legs, which was some sort of compensation.

  ‘I loved miniskirts – and I also liked maxi dresses when they came in. I suppose my favourite style when I was young was wearing a mini skirt with knee-high boots, wet-look boots they were called, covered in a sort of plastic.

  ‘I studied all the pop stars to see what fashions they were wearing, like Cilla Black and Sandie Shaw. Later on I probably loved Lady Diana best. She always seemed very fashionable.

  During the sixties, Ann went to lots of dances and had good times on package holidays with her girlfriends. Aged nineteen, in a holiday snap taken in Majorca with some of her girlfriends, she can clearly be seen to be sporting a beehive, still dead smart in Carlisle.

  The carefree, good times with the girls came to a sudden end in 1973 when at the age of twenty-four she fell pregnant. She knew the relationship wasn’t going anywhere, but she wanted to keep the baby.

  ‘I was so scared and didn’t know how to tell my mam and dad. I couldn’t tell me mam, as I knew what she would say. I told the mother of a friend first, and she said I had to tell my mother.

  ‘At work, we were having some new uniforms made for all the staff. Until then we all wore sort of blue smocks but we were now going to wear smarter, more fashionable and tighter pink uniforms. I knew my bump would soon be showing if I wore the new uniform, so I said don’t bother with me, I’ll stick to the old outfit for the moment. All the other girls immediately went into the new smart outfit.

  ‘Dorothy had been to Eastbourne on her annual holiday and then popped into Blackpool on the way back, where she always had her fortune told. The fortune-teller said that when she got back, one of her staff would look different – and have something to tell her. She didn’t know of course what that meant.’

  When Dorothy got back, she immediately noticed that Ann was the only one in the old uniform. She took Ann by the arm and led her up into what she sometimes called her office, though it was really just the wig room.

  ‘Are you OK, Ann?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m fine thanks, Dorothy.’

  ‘Are you sure, pet?’

  ‘Yes thanks.’

  ‘Is there not something you need to tell me, pet?’

  Ann shook her head, but was clearly on the verge of tears. Dorothy then explained what the fortune-teller had told her, which now made sense, as she had guessed Ann’s condition.

  So it all came out – and Dorothy put her arms round Ann and was kind and comforting, but said she had to tell her mother.

  ‘My mother was really upset. She tried to persuade me to have a termination. In those days, there was a shame and disgrace about unmarried mothers.

  ‘My dad, he was always the quiet one. He did support me. But he did say to my aunty that he was surprised – because of my age. “At twenty-four, you would think she would have had more sense, but aye well, we are where we are so we’ll have get on wid it, like…”’

  The baby, a boy, was born in 1974 at the Fusehill maternity hospital in Carlisle, where most Carlisle women gave birth at that time.

  ‘He was born at 5.15 and 5.15 – I will always remember the coincidence. Born at 5.15 in the morning weighing exactly five pounds fifteen ounces.’

  She had been going to call him Matthew, but changed her mind the moment the baby was shown to her – and named him Adrian, a name that had just come into her head, for no apparent reason.

  ‘My mother adored him from the moment I got him home. He was her golden boy.’

  Ann was still living at home, but worked Saturdays at the salon when her mother could help out looking after the baby. Dorothy then fell ill and the business was sold, so Ann moved to another salon, not far away.

  When Adrian was five, Ann got a council house; the stigma of being an unmarried mother had lessened and officialdom was recognising that single mothers had needs and rights.

  In 1991 Ann was working full-time at the new salon, picking up Adrian from school at three o’clock. With Christmas coming up and needing a bit more money, she looked around for another part-time job.

  ‘Carr’s was the obvious place. I had the family connection and the money was good, about the best in Carlisle for unskilled work.’

  She had her nails checked, as per usual, and passed, but some others girls, applying at the same time, were turned away, told to come back when their nails had grown.

  ‘No one ever explained to you why they had this passion for short nails – but I later heard the theory was that if you bit your nails down to the quick, then bacteria could get in. I don’t know whether that’s true or not.’

  Her family tradition of service to Carr’s naturally played a big part in being taken on. Not many, after all, can boast they are descended from a nineteenth-century Carr’s biscuit works rat catcher…

  ‘But the reason I applied was because they were taking extra staff on for the Christmas rush. So I only got taken on as a temporary, for three months. That was all I intended to do, to get a bit of extra money.’

  And the reason they were taking on extra staff at Christmas time goes back over a hundred years, even before her great-grandfather worked there.

  Christmas had always been a great time for biscuits. Early Victorian workers had been starved of much that was sweet and sickly
, except on special or festive occasions. Their normal diet was boiled beef and carrots, plus potatoes, possibly turnips. There were no afters, no little sweet biscuits to go with their afternoon break in the fields. Only the well-off had fancy biscuits to dip in their post-dinner wine glasses.

  Once the industrialisation of biscuit manufacturing began, the price fell. Biscuits, after all, are cheap to make, compared with most cakes. Biscuits are basically flour, fat and sugar. Creams for filling and cocoa or ginger to add an extra taste came in later, when the competition hotted up, but inside every fancy biscuit there was still a basic one, quietly and modestly lying there underneath the icing, made of the stuff they have always been made of.

  Biscuits don’t require eggs, which can be expensive and awkward to transport, or fruits, fresh or dried, which can be expensive and seasonal. Once you have a successful biscuit, you can control and standardise production and keep turning it out for ever, till tastes change or someone offers a better, tastier bite.

  Once biscuits were mass-produced, they were priced and packaged and marketed to suit all pockets. The tuppenny packets, which Ivy was put on when she first started, had been a mainstay of all biscuit manufacturers since the late nineteenth century.

  Long before therapists thought of clever things to say to us in time of need or despair, the solution in most British households and in most families to a moment of stress or tension or disappointment was to say, ‘There there, I’ll make you a nice cup of tea and get you a biscuit, you’ll feel much better.’

  Looking at a plate of biscuits, deciding which to scoff first, or being offered your choice from a whole tin, being allowed to pick any you like, was solace in itself for tired minds and bodies. ‘Go on, it won’t hurt, I’ve heard biscuits are good for you’, so mothers have said for decades. Almost immediately, it took your mind off your woes. Biscuits as therapy, it does work.

  In work situations, biscuits have also eased the pain at moments of stress, but essentially in offices and factories they have served as a treat, a reward for good behaviour, putting up with two hours of some boring repetitious job, or some dreadful boss or superior. Biscuits in offices and other workplaces are a communal, bonding activity, particularly when bought jointly by the workers, although far-sighted and benevolent bosses might put them on the slate, as worker expenses. On a special day, such as someone’s birthday, a cake might be involved, but the workaday snack is a biscuit. After all, cakes need a knife to cut them, and perhaps a napkin, a plate, and even a fork with which to eat them. Biscuits can be passed around and eaten right out of the packet.

  The tradition of mid-morning coffee and afternoon tea had been a feature of the leisured classes in the eighteenth century, but in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the habit had spread to the growing middle classes. The change in habits was helped by the decline in large cooked breakfasts before a working day and also fewer people having hot, three-course lunches. Those who spent the first hour of their working day on a commuter train didn’t really need or deserve a full English to set them up. And while at work, there was often no time for a proper lunch. Instead, why not fit in a welcoming morning and afternoon biscuit break?

  The biscuit industry, helped by the cocoa and drinking chocolate makers, around the beginning of the twentieth century, managed to suggest to the nation that there was a third period in the day when biscuits might be in order – a late-evening pre-bed drink, such as cocoa or Ovaltine, accompanied by a biscuit. A late repast, so the advertising proclaimed, would help to ward off ‘night-time starvation’, a concept and worry most people had never realised they might suffer from. Very clever and ingenious.

  The phrase ‘that takes the biscuit’ was also cleverly used and adopted by the biscuit spin-doctors. Originally, it is thought to have referred to cake, not biscuits, and goes back to the plantation days in the USA. The black slaves had an event in which they walked round a table containing a cake and the one voted the most stylish would take the cake. In ancient Greece there was also a tradition where the best fighter was given a reward of a special sweetmeat.

  Biscuits are usually the first items any child learns to make, as the ingredients are simple and the baking process quick. Children, who have a sweet tooth anyway, therefore learn to love biscuits from an early age, and the simple act of making and even icing your own biscuits is an activity that becomes associated with childhood.

  Biscuits, as a treat or a snack, have survived changing economic and social conditions and how and where people work. But who could have predicted that biscuits would not just be something nice to nibble at home or work, but would turn out to be perfect gifts? J.D. Carr would have been so pleased to see the rise of biscuits as presents.

  The development of special tins did of course aid their appeal as gifts, making them extra desirable and worthy of being given and received, but it was still the contents that mattered most. If you could organise enough variety and richness and wonder inside a tempting tin of assorted biscuits, pack them suggestively and alluringly, with the possibility of even lovelier biscuits lurking under the top rows, then you had an Aladdin’s cave of biscuits, a veritable feast, a vast variety.

  It was roughly around 1900, and then right up to the Second World War, and then again in recent years, that biscuit assortments became the answer to every Christmas present. Not the main present, but the most suitable gift to give to an aunt or uncle, a grandma or great-aunt, a child or teenager or to a whole family. How could they disappoint, containing as they did something nice for everyone, at every age and stage?

  Biscuit manufacturers like Carr’s put an enormous amount of energy and resources and invention into creating suitably exotic and alluring gift boxes of biscuits, tempting the public with exciting tins, often with new lines, new sensations alongside the old favourites, all done especially for the Christmas markets. Well-established lines, such as shortbreads, always get a makeover for Christmas, smartened up, making them somehow more special and luxurious and well, Christmassy.

  Books have always sold well at Christmas, a quarter of the year’s sales going in the last month, with publishers bringing out their best, most commercial, most enticing products for the Christmas market. Same with biscuits and for similar reasons. Biscuits, like books, make simple but universally acceptable presents.

  For over the last hundred years, Christmas became the best time of the year for all biscuit manufacturers. Each year thousands of temporary workers, like Ann, were grateful for the Christmas rush. It gave them some extra work, even if most of them assumed it would only be for a short time. So Ann started what she thought would be a short break on the shortbreads…

  Chapter 14

  Barbara

  Barbara, our other post-war baby, was struck on her first day at Carr’s by how many old buildings there were. She had known about the existence of Carr’s all her life but had not been aware of its history, or that the factory had been built in 1837. She had not worked on a factory floor before, being an ex-high school girl. She had worked in an office, till she left to have her first baby.

  ‘The old brick walls had been painted white, the floors were concrete, there seemed to be loads of machinery and it felt hot and noisy. But I had only come for the money, so that didn’t matter too much.

  ‘But I don’t really remember now what I thought of Carr’s when I first walked in. I do remember thinking it was not what I expected – whatever that may have been, cos I don’t really know.

  ‘It appeared to be a dreary-looking, old unforgiving sort of building and was very noisy once you got on to the shop floor. But once you were “placed” on a job it was far from dreary. The craic – Carr’s craic – kept you going through the mainly repetitive and boring task of packing the biscuits, plus it was good to talk to adults for a few hours after being at home with only two small children to look after all day.’

  Barbara remembers the date she started: 20 June 1977, aged twenty-four. As ever, she is precise on dates, facts and figures
and especially monies. She was given a nylon overall though linen ones came in later – and a cap she describes as lacy. There had been other organisational changes by the time she arrived. The rank of charge hand and supervisor had become the same thing, but they still wore pink, while above them was a forewoman who wore navy blue.

  She met Ivy, as most newcomers did, the old hand who had been there for so long, knew it all, and helped with training the new girls. Dulcie, for a while, was Barbara’s timekeeper. Her charge hand when she first began was Jean. Alas, none of them ever seemed to have had their photos taken together at work, or even singly, in their overalls and hats. Carr’s does not seem to have approved of photographs being taken in the workplace by the workers – except for official photographs for the annual report. Our six women, like most of the population of the time, tended not to have their photos taken regularly anyway, except on their holidays, and then the pitures usually turned out faint and blurry. Most ordinary working people did not have their own cheap cameras till the 1960s.

  Barbara’s ID card issued when she joined Carr’s in 1978

  At first Barbara was put on Shorties. A conveyor belt brought the biscuits from the ovens. They had to be flicked over by a flip roller and stacked. They were then picked up, between about fifteen and twenty at a time, and fed into a wrapping machine. Other girls would take them from the wrapping machine and put them in boxes, eight or ten packets at a time, until the box was filled. The box was then taped and palletised, which just meant putting on pallets for the barrowmen to barrow away.

  ‘You were told you had to keep the wrapping machine loaded all the time, or time and money would be lost. Jean, my charge hand, was tough but positive. “You’ve got to be faster,” she would say, “or you won’t make the grade.”