The Sweethearts: Tales of love, laughter and hardship from the Yorkshire Rowntree's girls. Lynn Russell

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СКАЧАТЬ was rooted in a family tragedy. Sheila Hawksby’s great-grandparents came from Derbyshire, where they had worked as domestic servants in a country house, but both caught cholera and died, leaving Sheila’s grandmother and four other children as orphans. The three oldest, including her grandmother, were old enough to work and so moved to Yorkshire in search of jobs, but the two youngest, aged just five and seven, were taken in by Barnardo’s and then sent to Canada. Once there, the two children were separated and sent to homes thousands of miles from each other. Sheila’s grandmother never saw either of them again.

      Before she moved to York and found work at Rowntree’s, Sheila’s early life had been spent among the coalfields of South Yorkshire. After years in the grimy colliery districts, with the smoke-belching chimneys, the clanking winding-wheels at every pit head, the black dust that coated every surface no matter how many times the house was swept and cleaned, and the pall of smoke that seemed to hang permanently over the pit villages, York was a revelation to her. ‘I thought it was a beautiful place,’ she says. ‘Going down Coney Street with all the lovely shops, I’d never experienced anything like that before. I thought York was a wonderful city, and I still do.’

      Even though Florence had lived in York all her life and nearly all of her family already worked at Rowntree’s, she still found it ‘quite a scary experience’ when she went into the factory for the first time for her interview. Blonde-haired and so petite that she looked even younger than her fourteen years, she drew a little comfort from the fact that a large number of other young girls were also being interviewed at the same time. Boys tended to be taken on sporadically at the factory, on an ad hoc basis, but Rowntree’s need for female workers had steadily increased to cope with the rising demand for their new Black Magic assortments and Aero and Kit Kat bars, and they tended to recruit them at mass interviews and hirings, usually coinciding with the end of the Easter and summer terms, when the fourteen-year-olds were leaving school.

      Most of them would have been as intimidated as Florence by the sheer scale of the Rowntree’s factory and the vast numbers of people already employed there. ‘There were so many people pouring in through the gates,’ Florence recalls, ‘and the whole place was so huge – even the rooms were enormous – that I couldn’t imagine how I was ever going to find my way around the place.’

      Like the other girls applying for jobs, Florence went through an interview, a ‘very stiff’ medical examination and also underwent a psychological evaluation. Her medical history and general state of health were assessed, and the nurse examining her searched her scalp for nits, checked her teeth and eyes, and examined her skin, taking a very close look at her hands and arms. ‘They wanted to make sure that you were good and healthy before they took you on!’ Florence says. She was also weighed to make sure she was not too thin for her height. Another girl, Lillian, remembers them ‘playing steam’ with her for being underweight – she was only six stone ten at the time.

      The industrial psychologists then took over, with a series of tests designed to evaluate Florence’s memory and her basic mathematical abilities – packers had to be able to count the number of chocolates going into certain products and also weigh items to ensure they were not below the minimum weight printed on the outside of the box. They also assessed her hand-eye coordination, her attention span – how long she could carry out a monotonous, repetitive task before she grew bored and began to make errors – and her ability to spot and reject misshaped or otherwise defective chocolates. Florence was given ‘quite a few other tests as well. There were practical tests to see how nimble you were with your fingers and that sort of thing. There was a box filled with all different shapes that you had to quickly put into the right compartments in another box, and there was a test for piping, too, making shapes and patterns by squeezing chocolate out of an icing bag, but my hand was shaking that much through nerves that I made a right mess of it.’

      The tests, first introduced by the Institute of Industrial Psychology in 1923, were continually being refined and developed by Rowntree’s industrial psychologists, and since Madge’s interview they had added new sections to test interviewees’ reactions and agility. In the reaction test, they recorded how quickly Florence responded to a red light as it flickered on and off. She did that well enough, but the agility test was a larger version of the child’s game where you have to move a metal hoop along a wire. If you allowed the hoop to touch the wire, it completed an electrical circuit and sounded a buzzer. Just as in the piping test, Florence’s hand was shaking so much from nerves that her attempts to move the hoop along the wire were accompanied by a relentless succession of buzzing noises, each of which only served to make her nerves worse and her hand shake even more.

      ‘There were quite a few other things I had to do,’ she says, ‘and after they had tried you out with all these different things, they then decided what sort of job to offer you. When I finished, they must have decided that I was all thumbs and much too clumsy for the production line, because I saw them write on my paper in block capitals “NO MACHINE WORK” – no piping or setting chocolates, or any of the other jobs in the Machine Room.’

      3

       Madge

      Madge was almost too excited to sleep the night before her first full day at the Rowntree’s factory, and although she knew that she had dropped off for a while during the fleeting hours of summer darkness, she was wide awake as the morning sunshine grew brighter on the edge of the curtains, listening to her two sisters breathing steadily on either side of her. Being the youngest and smallest girl, Madge had to sleep in the middle of the bed between her sisters and there were many times that she cursed her misfortune at having to do so, but not that morning. She felt cosy and safe and warm, lying next to her sisters as she thought ahead to what the day might hold. She smiled to herself when she heard the knocker-up rattling their bedroom window with her long pole, as she pictured the familiar figure of Mrs Ettenfield standing in the street below. Ample-bosomed and no more than four feet ten inches tall, she was almost as tall as she was wide, and Madge’s dad always joked, ‘She needs a pole to reach the parlour window, never mind the bedrooms upstairs.’

      Mrs Ettenfield was the last of a dying breed, one of only a handful of knocker-ups left in the whole of the North of England by the early 1930s, and very few of them were women. Before that time, not many families in the street owned an alarm clock, because even the cheapest ones were quite expensive and unreliable, and with stiff financial penalties for being late for work, a lot of families relied instead on the traditional knocker-up to rouse them. Knocker-ups were often the older residents of a neighbourhood, doing one of the few jobs still open to them, earning a few extra coppers by banging on doors and windows to wake people up in time for work; or the lamplighters who came round the streets lighting the gas lamps in the evenings and extinguishing them again at dawn; or even the local policemen, supplementing their wages on their early-morning beats. Now clocks were becoming cheaper, and within a few years the knocker-ups, like parlourmaids and rag and bone men, would fade into history.

      Madge got out of bed, provoking a sleepy mumble of complaint from Rose as she clambered over her. By the time she went downstairs, her mum was already busy, riddling out the ashes and coaxing the fire back to life to boil the smoke-blackened kettle she had filled. Madge washed her face and hands at the sink, shivering at the chill of the water. She dressed in her new overall and spent ages tying and retying her turban in front of the mirror in the hall, but each time it looked a mess. ‘I just can’t seem to get it right,’ she said, as her sister came clattering down the stairs.

      ‘Here, I’ll do it for you,’ Rose said, ‘but you’ll soon get the hang of it.’ She retied it, gave a nod of satisfaction and then hurried through to the kitchen. Madge submitted patiently to her mum’s inspection, then walked up to the factory with Rose, both of them eating a slice of bread as their breakfast on the way. Madge’s gums were still sore and she tore the crusts off her bread and gave them to her sister.

      Haxby СКАЧАТЬ