Biscuit Girls

by Hunter Davies

  Occasionally when they went home after a day’s shift there might be the odd comment about a new aroma lingering in the air, picked up from the new and exciting product or ingredient which had been added to Carr’s traditional range, such as curry-flavoured water biscuits. Both Jonathan Dodgson and Theodore would doubtless have welcomed such innovations. They were always on the lookout for new lines, new temptations.

  In the case of Ivy, having finished on the production lines, now shepherding pensioners to get their deserved long-service awards, she was not too bothered by all the changes. After all these years she felt she had done her bit.

  In 1993, Ivy herself had the honour of receiving a long-service presentation at the United Biscuits headquarters. It was a compulsory retirement, having reached the age of sixty. She had completed forty-five years of continuous service – apart from nine months off when she had cared for her dying mother.

  Ivy receives her award for 45 years of long service in 1993, aged 60

  Chapter 17

  Dulcie

  Dulcie in 2013

  Dulcie, Dorothy and Jean, the other three women who, like Ivy, had been born pre-war, were also soon coming up to their sixtieth birthdays, although none of them had been there as long or as continuously as Ivy. They had had breaks for various reasons, such as marriages and children, or been employed elsewhere for a period of time.

  Dulcie, the one who had been married twice and had the daughter with hearing problems, had begun to suffer from back and shoulder pains in her fifties, plus the dreaded bakehouse legs.

  In 1998, aged fifty-nine, she decided to retire. She had done almost thirty years at Carr’s – five as a teenage messenger girl – then later she did twenty-four consecutive years. They included a couple of short spells as a timekeeper and as a clerk in the office, but mostly she had been working on the line, packing crackers. She felt her body had had enough.

  She and her husband Bob were still living in the old farmhouse about ten miles from Carlisle which they had bought many years ago in the sixties and had managed, eventually, to convert most of it.

  But then in 2002 her husband Bob died. Heart problems had forced him to retire prematurely from work, and then he developed pancreatic cancer.

  Fortunately, her daughters came to live either side of Dulcie, in converted barns that had been part of the old farmhouse. But Dulcie had never passed her driving test. So when Bob died, she was left without a car, deep in the country.

  ‘I had thought a few times over the years about learning to drive, but just sitting in a car at the driving wheel made me nervous.’

  Both Elizabeth and Louise could drive, so they were able to help take their mum to town when necessary or to bingo.

  Dulcie went on to enjoy some exciting holidays since becoming a widow, often with her daughters and grandchildren or with friends. She has been on two cruises – one to the Mediterranean and one to the Caribbean – and has photographs to prove it, of her laughing and joking with the captain.

  On holiday in Egypt in 2011 she found her back was giving her discomfort. She had been taking paracetamol for some time, but it didn’t seem to be helping any more. ‘I was going up these steps from the dining room and the pain was suddenly agonising, the worst ever. When I got home, I went to see the doctor. He gave me more painkillers, then did an X-ray which showed nothing. But the pain was getting worse so he put me on morphine.

  ‘Eventually I was sent to the RVI in Newcastle. A scan showed malignant tumours on my spine. They operated and I was in for two weeks. Then I had a week of radiotherapy. That was horrible. It made me feel sick all the time.’

  Two years later, she was down to a check-up every three months and felt fine, though she had recently been put on steroid tablets, not for the pain, but to help build her up. She was walking with a stick, but was otherwise fit and as lively as ever and even swearing now and again, as she did in her heyday on the line at Carr’s, especially when protecting her daughter. She had no computer but managed to acquire a mobile phone, though hadn’t quite mastered it.

  She keeps up with popular music, listening to CFM, the local commercial station. ‘My grandchildren are always amazed that I know the latest songs.’

  Dulcie has little interest in politics, but she always votes, just as mother always voted. ‘Mind you, I never knew how she voted. I vote Conservative, not that I think much of politicians these days. I quite admired Mrs Thatcher. J.F. Kennedy, I did like him. I felt safe when he was alive.’

  She cooked for her girls when they were growing up, and her husband, making much the same sort of meals that her mother did, but today does no cooking. ‘It’s my legs. I can’t stand. The most I ever do is beans on toast. I rely today on Elizabeth to do some cooking for me.’

  She usually has biscuits in the house for visitors, and herself, and still enjoys chocolate biscuits best, wishing that Carr’s Sports biscuits had never been discontinued. They were her favourite.

  Sports biscuits were a bit like Penguin, a chocolate-coated biscuit bar, which in the post-war years were immensely popular. Sports sold well for Carr’s and were heavily promoted, with lots of associated merchandising and souvenirs, such as special tins and sets of cards showing footballers. In their wisdom, United Biscuits appeared to think that there were too many other similar chocolate bars, such as Lunch and also Club, produced by Jacob’s, also now in the United Biscuits empire.

  Penguin, the brand leader, was created in 1932 by William McDonald of Glasgow and in the long history of biscuit creations, its birth was unusual. Most of our classic biscuits were first produced by well-known biscuit manufacturers, usually family firms, but William McDonald was a salesmen, on his own, working in the biscuit trade. One of his specialities was importing foreign biscuits, then selling them on to the trade.

  When he hit upon the idea of coating biscuits in chocolate, which had not been done before, he put up his own money to open a factory. His early versions were round in shape, till he hit on an oblong cream-filled biscuit, coated with chocolate. It was only after the war in conjunction with an advertising agency, Colman, Prentis and Varley, that they were given the name Penguin.

  From then on, they were promoted purely on their name – with the product being pushed, not the firm, which again was unusual in the biscuit world. We still today think of Carr’s Water Biscuits or Jacob’s Cream Crackers whereas Penguin, well, it’s just a Penguin, who knows who produces them? Today it is in fact United Biscuits, under the McVitie’s name. Little wonder Sports biscuits eventually disappeared from the Carr’s portfolio, much to Dulcie’s regret.

  ‘When I worked there, I liked all their biscuits, they were all good. Yes, we were not supposed to eat any while we were working, but we did, discreetly. I never cared for the fig rolls, which I know some of the girls loved. I was very fond of custard creams and wholemeal digestives, the ones half-coated with chocolate.

  ‘In my day, the staff could still get so called cheap biscuits at the factory shop, but in the end, they weren’t all that much cheaper. I used to find Littlewoods sometimes did cheaper ones. We did get a box of chocolates at Christmas, but not every Christmas.’

  Looking back on her life, she regretted two things – not learning to drive and being so awful to her mum when she was young with her wild, impetuous love life. ‘I can’t bear to think what I put her through.’

  In the end she had a long and happy marriage to Bob. ‘As happy as marriages can be…’

  Workwise, she had no regret about all the years spent at Carr’s, and didn’t think that with her talents and education she should have tried harder to get and retain an office job rather than spending so much time in unskilled work on a factory floor.

  ‘The factory girls were terrific. I have nothing against them. I made some great friends, which I still have.

  ‘But to be honest, I did it for the money. The money was always good for Carlisle and was the main reason for staying all those years. But I still enjoyed it, otherwise I would
have left.’

  On the whole, she considered she had a happy life. ‘I’ve always been a happy sort of person. I suppose the only bad time was when we discovered Louise was deaf, and then when she had to go off to that special school. That was hard.

  ‘I don’t like being ill and not being able to do much, but my nature is not to worry about the future, just take each day as it comes. I’m lucky having Elizabeth. I don’t know how I would have survived, living out here and not being so well, without her. She is my rock. So I’m happy in that sense, as happy as I can be.’

  She thought about getting a tattoo. It’s the sort of daft thing she used to do many years ago when she was younger, she says, but her poor health distracted her in the last few years from too many wild indulgences.

  ‘I remember when I worked at Carr’s, I suppose I must have been in my thirties, going out with my girlfriends dressed as scrubbers and the next evening dressed as flappers. I once shaved my hair, right up the back, not at the front. Can’t remember why or what the style was called.

  ‘I’ve just got these false nails, nice, aren’t they, to make my hands look better. Me and Louise have exactly the same swelling on our index finger of our right hands – look, it’s a huge lump. We both put it down to working on the line at Carr’s, lifting up hot biscuits for all those years.

  ‘Having done my nails, I think a tattoo will be next. On my shoulder or on my hand. Someone suggested the design should be a Carr’s custard cream, you know, with the fern pattern. That would be funny, but I think I’ve had enough with Carr’s. I’ll probably go for something pretty, like a butterfly.’

  Chapter 18

  Dorothy

  Dorothy in 2013

  Dorothy, born like Dulcie in 1939, also retired in 1999, but her service to Carr’s had not been as long as Dulcie’s, nor of course Ivy’s. Dorothy had had all those years after leaving her country school working in a bakery shop and then as a machinist.

  But unlike Ivy and Dulcie, she had not experienced or been offered or desired any promotions or changes of job. During her twenty-two years at Carr’s she had been working on the same morning shift, six to two, and in the same department, packing water biscuits.

  ‘Towards the end of my time, I suppose in the 1990s, we had quite a few men, old men and young men, working on the line with us. No, it didn’t bother me, working with men for a change. The older men tended to be good workers, better than some of the new young lasses we were getting. Older men were finding it difficult to find work at the time, so were grateful.

  ‘I had paid all my stamps, so when I discovered when I got to fifty-nine that I would get a good pension, I decided to leave. I felt I had had enough, done enough work. I wasn’t ill, I was still fit, no problems, just feeling a bit tireder. I had been working since I was fifteen. After forty-five years, I thought I had done enough.’

  She was still unmarried, still living at home with her parents when she retired, though she had learned to drive by then and bought a little car.

  Unlike Ivy, she did not have the problem or duty of being the grown-up daughter still at home who had to look after an ailing mother. Dorothy’s mother died suddenly in 2010, aged ninety-two after heart problems, so she had little nursing or caring to do. Her father had died in 2004.

  She inherited their house in Carlisle and lived there for a while, but got fed up with the parking problems.

  ‘I was a woman on my own and always felt hemmed in. Everyone in the street now seemed to have two cars. I was always asking them, “Can you move your car?” I decided to move somewhere where I had my own garage. I had always fancied a bungalow as I would be able to clean all my own windows.

  ‘My mum had wanted a bungalow, but my father had never wanted to move. So two years ago I bought this bungalow. No, I don’t want to tell you how much or how much I got for my parents’ house. That’s private.’

  Her bungalow is in a cul-de-sac, all very quiet. Her garden is immaculate, all done by Dorothy, just a mile to the west of the Carr’s factory.

  She goes swimming in the Carlisle baths twice a week, and once a week she plays bingo, going with Dulcie. She had never been particularly close to Dulcie while they worked at Carr’s, as Dulcie had moved around while Dorothy stayed put, but since retirement, they have become good friends.

  They go to Workington for their bingo night out, some thirty miles away from Carlisle, out on the old industrial coast, which seems a long trail, when Carlisle is well appointed with bingo halls.

  ‘I like the bus ride there. We go on the bus, with our free bus pass. It puts in the day. We might look round the shops as well.’

  Her normal expenditure on a bingo day is £10 but she is up on the year, having had a good win of £350. She spent it on new blinds for her front window.

  She has never paid much attention to the changing styles and fashions, making a lot of her own clothes from patterns. ‘I remember once liking the look of a Coco Chanel dress, her little black dress, but I never had one. I did wear nylons when they came in, with seams up the back, and something to keep them up, which I suppose was a girdle or perhaps suspenders. Something anyway. My mother wore a corset but I never liked the idea of them. I remember tights coming in, but I never wore them. Not sure why. I’ve never liked trousers, but I do have a pair and might wear them in the winter on Sunday mornings when I’m going swimming.’

  As a teenager and young girl, she cut out photos of Elvis, Tommy Steele and Roy Rogers the cowboy. ‘I also liked the Dave Clark Five and Freddie and the Dreamers, but I never went to any live shows. Living in the country, you couldn’t really get to things like that. Modern music, well it doesn’t bother me either way. It’s all right I suppose, up to a point.

  ‘We never got a daily paper either, as we were too far from a shop, but my father did buy the Cumberland News each week and also the Westmorland Herald, which was the Penrith paper.’

  Today, she still does not read a daily paper, but she buys the Cumberland News on a Friday and on Sunday always buys the Sunday Post after she has been swimming. Interesting how the Sunday Post, an old-fashioned Scottish paper, featured in so many of the childhoods of our biscuit girls, and is still being read today.

  Dorothy is not a great biscuit eater – in fact she finds she doesn’t eat a lot these days since her parents died.

  ‘When I was young, my mother made her own biscuits, and I loved them, especially her ginger biscuits. When we went to town, we would often go to Woolworths and buy a pound of mixed sweet biscuits. You could go round the tins and take a handful of each sort you fancied, till you had enough for a pound. I liked anything with jam in it, that was a treat. You didn’t get many sweets during the war, so all children loved anything sweet.’

  While working at Carr’s, she always sampled whatever line she was working on, even though it was against the rules. ‘I liked to try them all – Garibaldis, fig rolls, Morning Coffee, any sort of chocolate biscuits. I liked custard creams but I never liked Bourbons. I thought their filling was a bit dry.’

  Today, she will buy the odd packet of sweet biscuits when she is shopping, if she remembers, usually digestives or shortbread, just to have them in the house for visitors. She never buys Carr’s water biscuits, despite all those years spent packing them.

  ‘Well you wouldn’t would you, they are for parties, and I don’t have parties. They’re for putting stuff on top, stuff like cheese, to hand round. You couldn’t eat them on their own. Anyway, they’re a bit plain for my taste.’

  Dorothy, living on her own, does all her own cooking and tries to eat regular meals, knowing she should, to keep up her strength. She does most of the plain, old-fashioned dishes which her mother made, such as hot pot. ‘I usually have fish once a week as well, white fish. We didn’t often have fish when I was a girl, living out in the country. I usually have it with parsley sauce. I buy it in a packet, and add milk.

  ‘I suppose now I think about it, I do have a slightly different diet from my parents. I don’t r
emember any sauces as a girl. Everything really was plain. I have more variety in the meals I make compared with my mother. I often make a sauce to go with whatever I’m having, which she never did. If I’m out say with my sister, which isn’t very often, I will order salmon with a sauce, just to see what it tastes like.

  ‘Once a fortnight or so I do have a Chinese takeaway. There are so many of them round here, open all the time and very reasonable. I’ve grown quite used to a Chinese. But I’ve never had Indian or Thai and I don’t eat Italian or French. The idea of eating frogs’ legs or octopus, ugh. I don’t even like pasta.

  ‘But I keep on meaning to try a Thai restaurant, as people say they are nice. I would have to go with someone. Well, I might order something and not like it and it would be wasted, wouldn’t it? I’d need the other person to eat it up.

  ‘I don’t drink, never have done. I don’t like the taste of wine. But I do usually have a bottle of rum in the house, like my mam did. I use it for making rum sauce for the Christmas pudding. That’s the only way I like rum.’

  She still doesn’t like fried tomatoes, her one hatred as a girl, but has now added to it runny cheese. ‘I mean wet cheese, you know, when they put it on the top of things, and it’s all runny. I don’t even like toasted cheese. What I like is dry, natural cheese.’

  Dorothy has no interest in politics and doesn’t vote. ‘I have no idea how my parents voted. Or if they did. Politics were never discussed at home. I still don’t really understand politics, but it seems to me they just think about themselves. I quite liked Mrs Thatcher. She would say no to people. The others never seem to be able to say no to anyone.’

  She never read much as a girl and doesn’t read books today. She never joined any library, or the Brownies or Guides. Living in the country made those sorts of activities difficult.

  She goes to the Carr’s pensioners club each month, where she meets Ivy, who used to be her trainer, Jean, who was at one time her charge hand, Ann, who was her union rep and Dulcie. She doesn’t attend church, despite being brought up as a Methodist and having had to go to chapel every Sunday as a child.