Biscuit Girls

by Hunter Davies

  ‘When I first joined Carr’s, health and safety issues were still fairly lax. Girls supposedly had always to have their hair tucked under their caps, but many pushed their cap back to expose their fringe, or let bits hang out. They wore jewellery when they were not supposed to. They were allowed to wear anything or their feet, like sandals or flip-flops, which was so dangerous. There were a lot of accidents – people tripping, falling over. The workplace was very congested and old-fashioned with lots of metal steps and piles of pallets left lying around.’

  The union, according to Ann, was very supportive of all the new health and safety measures when they came in, though many of the girls didn’t like them. Some moaned about the safety shoes when they were introduced, which from then on they all had to wear. Many complained that the shoes, black and rather lumpy and heavy, like policemen’s shoes, looked awful and that they hurt their feet.

  After a year or so as a shop steward, still working on the Bourbon line, Ann was asked to become convenor. This meant working with all the shop stewards in the factory, the first woman at Carr’s to have that position. She now had her own little office and did the job full-time, but Carr’s still paid her wages, under a union agreement.

  She now had to attended regular national meetings of other convenors in the McVitie section of United Biscuits – which now consisted of biscuit factories in Harlesden in London, Tollcross in Glasgow, Ashby de la Zouch in Leicestershire, in Manchester and Carlisle.

  She was expected at these meetings to convey what was happening at the Carlisle factory, then come back and tell the ten Carr’s shop stewards the latest on any group negotiations or developments with the main United Biscuits management. Their headquarters was at Hayes in London.

  A lot of her time as the factory convenor was spent on discipline problems at the Carr’s factory. When the management gave warnings and suspensions, the third of which usually ended in the sack, it was the job of Ann and the other shop stewards to find out what had happened and defend the offender, if appropriate. They would represent the workforce in such disputes – as long as they were paid-up members of the union.

  ‘We had to be honest with them. If we looked at their record, and heard both sides of what had happened, we would often have to say they were likely to end up with a warning. Most of the discipline problems we dealt with were to do with absence.

  ‘A lot of the girls would whine and would often say, “I hate it here.” But of course they didn’t leave. They knew they were well paid and wouldn’t get a better job anywhere else in Carlisle. That’s why Carr’s has always had so many long-service workers, who stay for decades.’

  There were occasionally more serious discipline problems than staying on the sick too long. Such as fights. One fight involved two women who had been arguing over another woman. They were both sent home. In the subsequent investigation, the factory manager at the time listened to their defence, then said that’s it, you are both sacked.

  ‘There were always lots of difficulties when the summer holidays came, as there always is in factories with a lot of women. Women with children have such trouble getting cover in the long summer holidays.

  ‘They would come to the shop stewards and say could they have a different shift for the summer, and we would say yes, if they could get a swap.’

  There was never a strike in Ann’s time as convenor at the Carr’s factory – or before or after, as far as she was aware – but she says they got near it a few times. Action would be threatened, then, as the deadline approached, an agreement would be reached.

  ‘The arguments were usually over pay and conditions, the usual problems in any factory or workplace. We wanted pay to be linked to inflation and they would say no, they couldn’t afford it and would refuse. Then we would dig in our heels. Or it would be about shifts. They always caused a lot of complaints, with workers insisting their shifts were unfair and unreasonable, and saying if they had to do them they should be better paid. The company would say no. So it went on, but we never actually downed tools.

  ‘It was challenging at times, but we always thought we had a good working relationship with the local management…’

  Chapter 16

  Ivy

  In the 1980s, Ivy was offered another promotion. Unlike Barbara, she was never ambitious. It just seemed to happen. So she says. She never asked or applied.

  With being there so long, knowing how everything worked, she seemed a suitable person to be given a bit more responsibility. Especially as she was still unmarried, and so could be more flexible than many of the married women or those with children.

  Her work as a trainer of the new girls had clearly gone so well, Ivy being such a comforting, understanding soul, always with a joke or a laugh.

  At the age of fifty-three, Ivy decided that she should learn to drive. Being a single woman living at home, she didn’t have any children to support or many house bills, so felt she could afford the lessons.

  ‘I loved going out in the car with my instructor. But I failed twice, which was disappointing, even though I had spent every spare moment reading the Highway Code.

  ‘But I passed the third time – and felt on top of the world. When I got into work they all congratulated me.

  ‘I decided to buy my own car, even though I knew people would be jealous of me, which they were. I could not have been happier. It felt amazing. Now I could go wherever I wanted to.’

  The car she bought was a second-hand Triumph Herald, red and white, which cost her £250.

  Ivy’s little car was smart for Carlisle, and rather jaunty for a single working girl in her fifties.

  It came in very useful when out of the blue she was offered a new job – working in personnel.

  It was not an office job, as such, more of a going out of the office job, leaving the factory to go and see workers in their homes, or visiting the sick in hospital, acting as a sort of factory social worker. Many of the workers knew her by then, as an old hand of over thirty-five years, and a long-time charge hand. And she knew them, and understood the sort of work they had been doing.

  ‘One day I had to go and see this woman who had taken a funny turn at work and been sent home. She lived in Cumwhinton, a village out in the country, in this lovely cottage with roses by the door and a pretty garden. I knocked at the door and she appeared. I asked her how she was and said much better, thanks.

  ‘She then shouted for her sister, she was living with her, and I got invited in. They set the table with their best tablecloth and got out the best china and gave me tea and cakes and scones.

  ‘We were sitting at their little front window, looking out at the garden, chatting away, having tea and scones, and I remember thinking to myself “This is it really, Ivy. How can anything be nicer than this? If they could see me now, back at the factory!”

  ‘I felt so lucky to have such a nice job. It had been hard, mind, for many years, physically hard, but now it wasn’t hard any more. It was all pleasure, getting out and meeting people – and having tea and scones!’

  One of her jobs in personnel was to represent the company at the funerals of ex-workers. Sometimes she found herself doing two or three funerals a day, leaving the crematorium door, then turning round and going in again for the next funeral.

  Not long after she had joined the personnel department, she was directed one day by the medical department to visit a sick worker, to check on his condition. ‘And I was also told to bring back one of his stools. I thought that was queer and funny, but I did what I was told to do. I picked up one of his kitchen stools and took it back in my car and presented it to the factory nurse. I never heard the end of that. I had never heard the expression “stools” before. I was told to say nothing, but to go back and return the kitchen stool at once.’

  Working in personnel led to one of the big excitements in her life – her first aeroplane flight. This happened in the late 1980s, by which time she was approaching sixty but had still not been abroad or flown in a plane.
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br />   Once United Biscuits had taken over the factory, the ceremonies that were put on for long-serving staff where they would be honoured for all their good work no longer took place in Carlisle, as in the old days of the Carr family when one of the Carrs would personally hand over a long-service award and their photograph would appear in the Topper Off. Now they were part of a large group with its headquarters three hundred miles away in London.

  ‘I was given the job of accompanying a couple of long-service workers down to London. I drove them across to Newcastle, got the plane to London, and then went to the headquarters. That first time we went, I was too scared about the thought of London that I decided to do it all in one day. We could all have stayed overnight in a hotel, the company would have paid for it, but I was nervous.

  ‘I got in a queer panic one time. When we got to London, they sent a chauffeur, but he had been given the wrong directions and we got lost, which wasn’t my fault. When we got there, the Chairman of United Biscuits was standing outside waiting for us. I felt terrible.’

  By 1990, still working in personnel, Ivy had notched up over forty years since she had started working in Carr’s just after the war. Those forty-odd years had seen huge changes in the ownership of Carr’s, with the end of the Carr’s family connections and then two takeovers. Control of the factory had moved to United Biscuit’s corporate headquarters in Hayes, west London.

  There had also been huge changes in the nature and organisation of the biscuit industry as a whole – on what we were eating, on who was producing it and where.

  Competition had always been intense, long before any takeovers or amalgamations, right from the early beginnings in the nineteenth century, with all the well-known brands, like Carr’s, McVitie’s, Crawford’s, Huntley & Palmers being deadly rivals. Their salesmen, out in the country at large, and then the world, would try to outdo each other with special offers and promotions, offering discounts if you took a certain number of biscuits, or give you a special mahogany and glass showcase to put on your shop counter.

  Grocery stores would be visited twice a week, so grocery owners had to be quick to fill up their free Carr’s or Crawford’s showcase with the correct brand, till the salesman had gone. In London in 1900, the Meredith & Drew salesman used to boast that an order posted before midnight would be delivered the next day anywhere in the London area. This was at a time when there were up to five postal deliveries a day.

  The rival companies, desperate to get extra orders, targeted all the local grocery shops whenever they had a special promotion, handing out samples, posters, displays and other inducements. So many of the gimmicks and sales promotions, advertising and offers, which we think now are terribly modern, were all being done well over a hundred years ago.

  Even after many of the major brands combined – as McVitie’s and Price and McFarlane Lang did in 1948 to mark the start of United Biscuits, joined by Carr’s in 1972 – the rivalry remained fierce, knowing that failure or falling behind, even temporarily, would have the accountants and investment bankers deciding to pull out, selling off any half-decent assets or closing down the unprofitable factories.

  In the past, almost all the long-established biscuit firms, with their well-known names, had been family created and run, with grandchildren and great-grandchildren, like the Carrs and the Langs and the Crawfords, continuing to be involved in the family firm or the biscuit world until well into the 1960s and 1970s.

  Family businesses, on the whole, tend to think about the future as much as the present, planning for continuity and continuation rather than short-term gains. They are concerned about the welfare of the workers more than feeding the shareholders. Profits tend to be ploughed back into the firm, not into dividends.

  There was a moral element to many of those founding families. A lot of them, like the Carrs, were Quakers, who tried to create model conditions for their workers, promote their health and spiritual needs and improve their housing, as well as their pay packets. The Scottish biscuit families, while not Quakers, were often God-fearing and kirk-going.

  And yet at the same time, those long-lasting biscuit dynasties seemed to have been able to produce enterprising and entrepreneurial figures in every generation, if not in the direct descendants then among cousins and second cousins. Theodore Carr, for example, was just as keen on harnessing and developing the latest inventions and methods as his grandfather J.D. had been. When it’s your family firm, you can act quickly, even sometimes just on a whim, without having to worry too much about meetings or market research.

  After the 1970s, once the biscuit firms found themselves part of groups, and then later when companies went global, it became nearly impossible to work out who exactly owned which brand, which product and where exactly they operated from. And of course the fear always was, in a faraway place like Carlisle, that the decision makers would have no personal knowledge or little personal interest in a little local factory that made Table Water Biscuits.

  And yet these long-established family firms – with the same families working in them over the decades, not just the same families owning them – had survived two world wars, adjusting to the new conditions, aiding the war effort as much as they could and helping their workers survive.

  With the arrival of the big groups, and lots of factories under the same umbrella, it was vital to have some sort of edge, some sort of speciality. The mass-selling, popular biscuits, such as custard creams and Bourbons, could be spread around, made anywhere, all to the same format, the same packaging, so you didn’t know where they originated.

  Carr’s of Carlisle were fortunate that they had built up such a reputation with their Table Water Biscuits. But they too were affected by changes in taste over the years, with new variations coming, such as the garlic water biscuits that Dorothy had found created such a smell.

  Rich, sugary biscuits had always been the mainstay of the trade in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and remained so, but tastes did change with people wanting lighter, crispier, healthier biscuits. Cheese sandwich biscuits became very popular in the pre-war years, with firms boasting that they were using the best possible, tastiest, spreadiest cheese. ‘A Meal for a Penny’, was a slogan that lasted for many years.

  One of the big rivals to biscuits, sweet or savoury, which scared the hell out of many of the biscuit men, was the rise of crisps. The origins are vague and disputed, but frying thin slices of potato had been around in some form for centuries. American legend has it that ‘potato chips’, as they’re called there, were invented in Saratoga Springs in 1853.

  In the UK, we appear to have taken the idea of crisps from France rather than the USA. In 1909, a London merchant grocer on holiday in Paris noticed a street vendor outside a Paris theatre doing a good trade in ‘perles de Paris’, which turned out to be potato wafers which he fried in oil. He bought the vendor over to London, got him to explain his methods, and set about working out a way of creating crisps on a larger scale. Eventually, Meredith & Drew took over his crisp business and expanded it. So early on, the biscuit makers did have a stake in crisps, which was just as well for their continued survival.

  The biggest crisp makers in the UK became Smiths, founded in Cricklewood in 1920, famous for their invention of inserting a little twist of salt in a greaseproof piece of blue paper into each bag of crisps. (Smiths were later subsumed into Walkers, today’s biggest UK maker of crisps.) After simple salted crisps came all the variations on a theme, with cheese and onion and barbecue flavours, plus dozens of other flavours, some highly unlikely.

  Packets of nuts and raisins also had great success, providing more competition for biscuits. As with crisps in the early decades, their sales were mainly through licensed premises, that is, in pubs. In the post-war years in the UK, crisps and nuts were about the only edible items you could buy in most pubs.

  One of the attractions for United Biscuits when they took over Meredith & Drew in 1966 was to get access to their crisp production and sales. Two years la
ter, in 1968, they also took over KP Nuts. The name comes from Kenyon Produce, an ancient jams and pickles firm in Rotherham, founded in 1853, who turned to peanuts in 1953. By this time, crisps and savoury snacks were becoming huge business, just as biscuits had been a hundred years earlier.

  The other big threat and worry for the biscuit world was the rise of the supermarkets. From the 1960s onwards, they were springing up in most towns, if not quite as quickly in Carlisle as elsewhere. The main threat that supermarkets posed was the creation of own-brand products. Marks & Spencer was about the first, with their St Michael label.

  Many of the traditional biscuit firms refused to manufacture own-brand biscuits at first, being proud of their own long-established names, but with over-production in the biscuit world, several factories realised it was an easy way to get steady bulk orders. It also saved on their advertising budgets. Once own brand became common, the supermarkets were able to beat down the manufacturers on price, making their profit margins thinner and thinner.

  Increased interest in healthy eating has created a market for low-calorie snacks, prompting manufacturers to create new dry crispbread biscuits, and the nation’s growing taste for Indian or Thai foods has ensured that biscuit manufacturers always have to be on their toes.

  Such changes and developments, competition and trends in the industry, and in the national habits as a whole, did not worry our six biscuit girls unduly, as they worked away in the Carr’s factory. Their normal working day went on much as before.

  New lines did of course regularly come in, but the process of packing them continued, with only minimal improvements in the systems, as automatic machines which might save them labour were usually too expensive to install.