Biscuit Girls

by Hunter Davies

  She is therefore living on her savings, which she put into a building society during her last years at Carr’s, along with a small sum when she took her pension.

  ‘I hope there’s enough left to see me through, then that’s it. But don’t you worry yourself – you can have a ham tea at my funeral…’

  In the last ten years she has started travelling – usually on an Irving’s coach from Carlisle, on an all-inclusive holiday, with people she knows, usually to Devon or Cornwall.

  She went abroad to Canada with a friend for the first time a few years ago.

  ‘Well, she wasn’t a close friend, just someone I knew. She was going with someone who dropped out at the last moment and I heard myself saying, “I’ll go with you.” But it didn’t work out well. That taught me a lesson.’

  She did later go on another foreign holiday, to the Algarve, with a younger woman with whom she used to work, who always refers to Ivy as Aunty. She invited Ivy along, with her own family – and it turned out a big success.

  More recently Ivy had been on a train excursion – a day trip to Oban in Scotland. ‘I just saw it advertised in the paper and thought that would suit me champion. I was about four hours on the train there, four hours back. I only had two hours in Oban, but I loved it. I might do it again. I think I’ve now got up the courage to travel alone on the train.’

  She usually has some sort of biscuit in the house, mostly rich tea and Kit Kat or any other sort of chocolate wafer biscuit. ‘I always have a biscuit after my evening meal, not during the afternoon. After I’ve eaten, I like a nice cup of tea and a biscuit to finish it off.

  ‘I never buy Carr’s water biscuits. I never liked them. But they’re good for diabetics. Miss Spence, who was my boss in personnel, and then went on to do something in the cathedral when she retired, she was big in the church, she used to eat baked water biscuits. She was diabetic.

  ‘I once had one of the high-ups from London come to visit me at home, from personnel. I wanted to give her a nice biscuit with a cup of tea, so I went out and bought some Kit Kats. “Why have you not got Carr’s biscuits?” she said. She never let me forget that.

  ‘At work, when I was working on the line, I used to try all the different biscuits, though you were not supposed to. I would pop one in my mouth when no one was looking. I liked chocolate tea cakes and Sports biscuits, they were my favourites. I don’t know why they stopped making Sports biscuits. They were lovely. I said this once to one of the bosses. He never said anything. I said you’re missing out there.

  ‘I also liked the cheese crisps, they were lovely as well, but I never liked celery biscuits. I don’t know why they made them. Nobody seemed to like them, but they didn’t do them for long. Garlic water biscuits, ugh, I didn’t like them either. I don’t like garlic.

  ‘I loved the Victoria tins of biscuits – they were all chocolate. You can still get them, I think. You would open the lid and be disappointed if you couldn’t immediately see your favourites.

  ‘One of my jobs when I was in personnel was to go round the pensioners at Christmas and they each got a Victoria box of biscuits. Some years the staff all got a box of biscuits as well, but towards the end of my time I think they stopped that.

  ‘We were allowed to buy tins of broken biscuits quite cheaply. If they gave you them in an old tin, you couldn’t take it back, but if you got them in a new tin you could take it back and get money. Just after the war there was still a tin shortage so there was a deposit on them. I think you got one and six back on a new tin.’

  Ivy goes most weeks to a coffee morning at the local church, but never goes to church itself, though they are often asking her.

  ‘I was never sent to Sunday school, like most of my schoolfriends, because my mother was not religious either. In my own heart, I think I am religious, but I think I get more out of going to Carlisle cemetery than I would from going to church. I go most weeks to tend the graves of my mother and father. I cut the grass, make it look nice, and sit for a bit and remember them.’

  Carlisle cemetery, on the south side of the town, with the main entrance in Richardson Street, dates back to 1855 and is a classic Victorian cemetery, covering thirty-eight hectares, with chapels, ancient and impressive gravestones, but also hills, woods, little rivers and bridges. The main stream through the cemetery is known as the Fairy Beck. There are wild orchids, wild violets, butterflies, dragonflies and a variety of small mammals. It was one of the first cemeteries in the UK to introduce woodland burials, which have minimal impact on the environment, the graves being marked by an oak tree. In 2008 it was named the UK’s cemetery of the year for the third year running. People visit it, just to visit, as it is like a large nature reserve, studded with Victorian monuments. You can easily get lost in it, with all the hills and trees. From the end of the cemetery, there is a clear view of the Caldbeck Fells and the Lake District mountains.

  Behind it, further down Dalston Road, is the crematorium, which is much more modern and more like a municipal park. This is where Dorothy’s parents are buried, and is the one she visits.

  It now takes Ivy two buses to get right across town to the old cemetery, but she thinks it is worth it and an interesting outing in itself.

  ‘I get off at the Dalston Road bus stop and walk down Richardson Street to the main entrance. I always love going. When I had the car, I used to take a lawn mower with me, putting it in the boot, an old-fashioned hand mower which you pushed. Nowadays, when I have the energy, I carry a pair of shears in a plastic bag, but I now find them a bit heavy to trail all that way. I go through the main entrance, over the bridge, then I turn left through the woods. And there they are, my mother and father, both in the same grave. I suppose I’ll end up there as well.

  ‘I suppose it was the unhappiest time in my life, when my mother passed away. Apart from that, I tend only to have good memories. I was always happy as a child, with my parents and my brother. We seemed to have such fun times, especially going to Silloth on the train.

  ‘At school I was happy as well. Though I was always very shy and nervous when I was younger. At primary school I could never have been in the choir as I was far too embarrassed. But I got better as I got a bit older, as a teenager. I was so proud when I was chosen to go and get the milk for the teachers. I had to collect it from Messenger’s Farm at Morton Manor, where Sir Robert Chance used to live, then bring it back to school.

  ‘Today, I do speak up for myself, if I have to. I like to think I treat people as I liked to be treated myself.

  ‘But I do worry of course what will happen when I get poorly and I can’t manage to do things for myself. I do wonder who is going to look after me…’

  She has two nephews, now grown up, the sons of her brother Tommy, who died in 2012 aged eighty-five. They are her only blood relations.

  ‘I have chosen the hymns for my funeral, but I haven’t made a will. Why should I? I have nothing to leave. No house, no property, not even my car as that has gone. But it doesn’t worry me.

  ‘I always assumed I would get married, but it didn’t happen. No one asked me. I suppose it was because I was never pretty enough. I also have quite a big mouth, and say what I think. Then of course I spent a long time nursing my mother till she died. But I don’t regret not being married. It doesn’t bother me.

  ‘If I had got married, I would have been a widow by now, I’m sure of it. Women outlive men, don’t they? So I would now be on my own anyway.

  ‘I am quite happy in my little house, as long as I’ve got my health and strength.

  ‘I often think I am probably a pleasanter person, not having been married. You come across a lot of people unhappy in their marriage. And you get all these women who have been abused. No one has abused me. I have always felt strong.

  ‘I do feel I have had a good life. No complaints, no regrets. I never asked for things but I think I did get a lot in the end. It was hard, mind, for many years, hard physically. I wouldn’t like to do some of those jobs again. Not tha
t I could, at my age. But the last years in personnel, going out visiting people – that was lovely.

  ‘So yes, overall I loved working at Carr’s. And yes, I would do it all again.’

  Afterword

  Carr’s Today

  The main sign at the entrance to the factory says McVitie’s, which is what it is officially called today, so technically you should never call it Carr’s. But look high up on the main building and you will see there is a large logo with the word Carr’s and an image of the famous water biscuits. The good people of Carlisle can therefore justify continuing to call it Carr’s. And probably always will, as long as it is there.

  It still plays a large part in the life of the town – and in the life of women. The day of my visit – in July 2013 – the wife of the current Mayor of Carlisle was a Carr’s employee, Cath Wilson, a supervisor in assortments.

  The building is large, commanding, the tallest and most impressive in that part of Caldewgate, but a bit of a hodgepodge. The entrance building beside the main gate is low and cheap and modern, like a petrol station forecourt. Then there are some nondescript botch-job structures from the 1960s round to the side.

  As you leave the entrance area, having gone through the various passport controls and East European-type barriers, that’s if you happen to have arrived in a car, there is a little fountain and ornamental pond, easy to miss as it could do with a clean. But I had a quick look, just in case Ivy’s fish was still swimming around, the one supposedly named after her. No sign of it, though.

  Behind, across a yard, is a vast prison-like structure, the archetypal Victorian factory building. On a good day, and Carlisle does get them, and in clear light, it can seem handsomely austere, almost as grand and imposing as Carlisle’s nine-hundred-year-old castle, just a few hundred yards away, through what were once the old gates into the city.

  Above my head as I went through the main gates were an assortment of seagulls making a terrifying screeching sound as they swooped down, like cries of help mingled with cries of rage and vengeance. You forget, while in the middle of Carlisle, just how near it is the sea – though on the map, it appears to be right on the Solway Firth.

  The factory employs a hawk to keep the seagulls away. They are of course vermin whose droppings could easily poison a million Bourbon biscuits in one fell swoop.

  Getting into the factory proper was harder and took longer than getting through Heathrow airport. Apart from the endless security checks, you have to get kitted out. All visitors to the factory areas, like all workers at whatever level, even the manager herself, have to wear a white overall, black clunky safety shoes and a mob hat made of some gauze-like material. The staff hats are blue. Visitors wear red.

  A notice above a wooden box announced ‘Beard Snoods’. I thought of that fashion among footballers a few years ago for wearing woolly snoods in the winter to keep their precious necks warm. I stopped smiling when I was ordered to wear one. Beard Snoods are for moustaches as well as beards. They have to be covered up in case of, well, I was not sure why, my moustache is incredibly clean I hardly spill anything on it. I wondered how the rabbis cope, with their full head of facial hair, when they visit the factory. The reason, of course, is to prevent any hairs getting into the biscuits.

  Rabbinical inspections are still made, as they have been since 1910, in fact they had been the day before and I had just missed them. Matzos, the special Passover unleavened bread, are no longer produced at Carr’s, but all their small Table Water Biscuits are declared kosher, a rabbi coming up from Manchester every six weeks to make sure all the ingredients conform with their rules, and that no traces of seafood, pork, rabbit or any other forbidden items have crept into the process. On each packet there is a symbol to show it is kosher – a large U inside an O, which stands for Orthodox Union.

  I was in sandals and bare feet that day, as Carlisle was tropical, which meant I had to wear the safety shoes with no socks. As I clunked round the factory, my feet got heavier and more uncomfortable, as if I was space walking. But the worst part was my moustache snood. I could hardly breathe in it.

  The first production lines I came to, Bourbon biscuits, seemed much as I had imagined them – probably much as the production lines had been back in the 1840s. Rows of silent women, working away. But there was one surprise. Background music, pounding out on all the production lines from CFN Radio, a local commercial station. None of the biscuit girls had mentioned that. Apparently it has only been introduced in recent years. Let’s hope it does not inhibit all the chatting among the lasses.

  The girls on the Bourbons were concentrating hard, unsmiling, getting on with the job, endlessly picking up twenty Bourbons at a time from the millions flooding towards them down the tracks, then feeding them into wrapping machines, just as they have done for decades.

  There seemed to be an enormous wastage of Bourbons that day, with the waste bins at the end of the line filled to capacity. The unusually tropical weather was not allowing all the chocolate cream to set as it should. But there is no real waste, my guide stressed. All the offending biscuits get recycled.

  In the creamery area there was another compulsory safety measure: ear plugs. Everyone has to wear them, workers and visitors. Presumably they don’t want people suing for loss of hearing.

  As we did our tour, Christine, my guide, proudly pointed out two areas where they had recently spent small fortunes – £5 million in all – installing robots. Unlike the Bourbons, the ginger nut department is now automatic. Giant hands now pick up ginger nut biscuits and speed them on their way. So no need for as many women packing ginger nuts.

  The other robot area is one that is making life easier for the male workers. Most of the man-powered barrows and heavy wooden pallets have been replaced by robots which lift up the heavy tins and send them for what seems like miles around the factory on a miniature railway line, plonking them straight into the delivery wagons. The result is that there are no warehouses, no biscuits at all remain on the site, they are whisked straight away, off to the four corners of the world. The factory still works round the clock, with three shifts of eight hours, but almost every biscuit leaves the factory the same day, zooming off the minute a shift is finished.

  The bakehouse has eight ovens. They are still mainly run by men, as in the old days. The ovens are enormously low and long, stretching about two hundred feet, much as that Dalston schoolgirl described them in 1948. They sit like rows and rows of squatting, interconnected dishwashers, through which the dough passes in minutes, and comes out baked.

  On all the production lines I saw, in all the departments, except the two robot areas which appeared empty of humans, it still mostly appeared to be women workers. Their average age seemed to be in their fifties, and they were stocky and sturdy and confident. The handful of younger girls working among them looked thin and worried by comparison. Perhaps they were new. As Barbara said, if you can last to your first pay packet, you’ve cracked it.

  One of the women who had cracked it was Angela Gibbs, the current manager of Carr’s and only the second female manager in the history of the factory, whom I joined for lunch in the canteen after my tour.

  She comes from Barnsley, took a degree in engineering at Aston University, worked in various firms, including Quaker Oats and Gillette, before joining United Biscuits in their Leicestershire factory. She was promoted to Carlisle in 2010 – a much bigger site, producing 84,000 tons of biscuits a year as opposed to 18,000 tons at Leicester.

  That day, when I visited, there were 665 on the permanent payroll, with another hundred on temporary contracts hired through an agency. Depending on the season and the demand, such as coming up to Christmas, they normally have between 100 and 250 extra agency workers. So today there is a total of around 800 workers at any one time, around half of whom are women.

  Ten years ago they were having recruitment problems, sending some of their personnel people to Portugal, Poland and elsewhere to hire more staff.

  Their recruitme
nt problems today are mainly to do with attracting and retaining young staff. They also have a high absentee rate – with 6 per cent being off at any one time. They do have a relatively old age profile – and of course they always did, as traditionally Carr’s workers stayed on for decades. Young girls today, says Angela, would like money and fame, so it’s hard to recruit them. Many do disappear on the first day, after their first break.

  The hope is to make the job more attractive, getting away from the ‘cracker packer’ image, stressing all the new automated machinery, calling the workers ‘technical operators’ or ATMs, which stands for Advanced Team Member. They hope that offering sexy-sounding jobs working with the robots will appeal more than standing on a production line sorting biscuits by hand.

  The main products today at the Carlisle factory are ginger nuts, seven million being made each day, followed by six million Bourbon biscuits and six million custard creams. Over the year, around twenty different types of biscuits are produced. A new one recently introduced is Flat Bread, an oblong cracker, a bit like a Ryvita.

  Water biscuits are not made in the quantities they once were – and most of them are exported, the Carr’s name still being recognised all round the world among biscuit eaters. They make small water biscuits and also flavoured ones – garlic, sesame seed and black pepper. Only the savoury biscuits, as they call their various water biscuits, carry the imprint of the Carr’s name on the biscuits and the packaging. With all their other biscuits, such as the Bourbons, the Carr’s name does not appear.

  I then learned some dreadful news, which I had not been aware of. It had somehow not made the London papers. Two years ago, Carr’s lost their Royal Warrant for their water biscuits, an honour they have had since Jonathan Dodgson Carr achieved it in 1841. The Royal Household, apparently, no longer uses them. It has made little difference to sales, so Angela maintained. Instead of the royal coat of arms on the packets they now have the equally impressive Carlisle city coat of arms.