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

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СКАЧАТЬ of the men were on bicycles, with the women on foot, a tide of white-overalled and turbaned workers flooding through the gates. They slowed to a jostling queue as they passed through the double doors into the main building. Rowntree’s rules on timekeeping were strict. Everyone had to record their exact starting and finishing times by putting their time card into one of the four clocking-in machines by the timekeeper’s office inside the main entrance, or in the time clocks in the individual departments. The process of clocking-in was known to the girls as ‘blicking-in’, because the Rowntree’s time clocks were made by a company called Blick Time Recorders Ltd, and the word ‘BLICK’ was prominently displayed in block capitals on the face of the clocks. To encourage good timekeeping, Rowntree’s gave a ‘Blue Riband’ award to those with 100 per cent attendance over the course of a year.

      There was a ‘ping’ sound as each employee’s card was time-stamped by the machines, and the whole entrance lobby echoed with the tinny noise. Madge gave her name to the timekeeper, who riffled through a handful of new blicking-in cards and handed her one with her name and department typed neatly at the top. Rose could have showed Madge the way to the Card Box Mill, but the company rules about introducing new employees to their workplace were as precise and unbreakable as every other aspect of Rowntree’s operations, so Rose went on ahead while Madge was greeted by her designated guide and led through the factory towards the Card Box Mill.

      It was a long walk, because the Card Box Mill was at the northeastern corner of the factory site. The corridor that led to Madge’s workplace was windowless, flanked by offices all the way down the right-hand side, and by a vast, concrete-floored storage area on the other side. At the far end they took a staircase up to the first floor, the main card box production area, where the beautiful fancy boxes for the chocolate assortments were made. As Madge reached the top of the stairs and looked around the vast room, she was met by a wall of sound. The noise of the clattering machines on every side was deafening, and the women working there were shouting above the din just to make themselves heard.

      Built ten years before, the Card Box Mill housed about 500 workers, the vast majority of them women. They worked in a huge, wood-floored open space, interrupted only by the steel pillars supporting the roof, with electric lights hanging from the steel girders that spanned the full width of the enormous room. The overhead lighting was harsh and it was always bright in there, and often extremely hot. Along with the eye-watering smell of the glue they used to stick the boxes together, there was also a rather fusty odour, suggesting a lack of care in cleaning and dusting that would never have been tolerated in the food production areas. The same applied to the pigeons that often found their way into the Card Box Mill and became trapped there. As fast as one lot were caught or killed and removed, others found their way in through broken windows or gaps around the roof edges, or by flying in through the main doors that were always left open in hot weather to provide much-needed ventilation, for it was one of the least comfortable places in the entire factory to work.

      The roof – a series of steep-pitched ridges and troughs – was entirely glazed, and as a result the mill was freezing in winter, while in summer the heat was almost unbearable. Every door and window was left open to try to create a draught, and the women workers wore nothing but underwear or even swimsuits beneath their overalls, but it had little effect and sweat dripped steadily from their foreheads as they worked. Even when the glass roof was eventually whitewashed to reflect the sun’s rays a little, the Card Box Mill remained ferociously hot.

      Madge’s guide stood over her while she pushed her card into the time clock and then showed her where to place it in the wooden racks. She then handed Madge over to the teacher – there was one in every department – whose duties included showing new girls how to do the jobs to which they had been allocated, and inspecting the work that all the women were producing, checking it for quality, making sure that materials were not being wasted and that the girls were working fast and neatly enough; ‘And they soon let you know if you weren’t!’ one such worker, Muriel, recalls with a rueful smile. As well as the teacher, there were examiners, overlookers – Grade A and Grade B – and charge-hands, and all of them were women. The various grades were distinguished by the different coloured bands on the caps they wore: teachers had a red band, Grade A overlookers a blue one, and Grade B overlookers a green one.

      In the employment of women, as in much else, Rowntree’s had always been more progressive than almost any other manufacturer. The Quaker belief that God was in everyone, men and women alike, gave women as much right as men to testify or take part in the ministry at gatherings of the Society of Friends, as the Quakers were properly known, and also to seek employment if they chose. As a result, women had always worked alongside men in the Rowntree’s factory – albeit on lower wages and with fewer privileges than their male counterparts. Rowntree’s was also one of the first factories in Britain where women were allowed to progress beyond menial tasks to supervisory and managerial roles; the first, a ‘Lady Welfare Supervisor’, had been appointed by Joseph Rowntree as far back as 1891. He also allowed production line workers a say in the appointment of their immediate supervisors – charge-hands and overlookers – an example of industrial democracy that few modern industrialists have been willing to contemplate even to this day.

      The teacher took Madge to an empty space on a workbench, talked her through the work she was to do and showed her how to do it once, then left her to learn it properly by watching the woman next to her and following her instructions. The cardboard pieces were cut for them, and Madge and the other box-makers’ job was to fix them together, cover them with glue – there was a pot of glue and a brush on each bench – and stick the lining paper to them, pulling it taut and shaping it to fit the curves and angles of the box they were making. She had to fashion the lid in the same way, glue the printed illustration to it, and add any ribbons or decorations that were needed.

      As she watched the quick, sure movements of the woman alongside her as she created a beautiful box, lining it, shaping the lid and fixing ribbons and tassels to it, Madge had a sinking feeling. If she did the job for a hundred years, she could not imagine how she was ever going to be able to make something as perfect as that. She was so disheartened that the thought of leaving and finding other work somewhere else crossed her mind for a moment, but the thought of the volcanic reaction that would provoke from her mother was enough to dispel that idea, and she buckled down to the task of learning the job.

      For the first few days, as the newest junior in the department, she was kept busy on subsidiary tasks, keeping the box-makers supplied with card, paper and the other materials they needed, and topping up their glue pots with the foul-smelling liquid glue they used. The glue pots sat bubbling away on small Bunsen burners and the fumes would not only get on the girls’ chests, but also left a foul taste in their mouths. The smell and the fumes made Madge feel nauseous at first, so much so that she nearly had to run to the toilet to throw up at one point, but slowly she got used to them as she began to learn the craft of box-making.

      Her first few efforts were something of an embarrassment, with the paper lining full of lumps, bumps and creases, the folds in the card not sharp enough or in the wrong place, and with dribbles of glue on the outside, but she rapidly improved and before long her work was drawing admiring glances from her fellow workers and even compliments from the overlookers. Although there were no formal apprenticeships for women in the factory, as there were for the men learning skilled trades like carpentry, bricklaying, painting, decorating and electrical engineering at Rowntree’s, work such as box-making was highly skilled and a genuine trade, and despite her earlier misgivings Madge ultimately proved to be one of the most skilful of all. The skills that she and the other Rowntree’s girls acquired at work increased their self-confidence, and that confidence often extended into their home lives as well. Many felt more able to stand up for themselves and argue their corner with a father or husband, though a woman who was thought by men to be too ‘pushy’ or ‘gobby’ was often deemed a ‘factory girl’ – shorthand for a loud, crude and foul-mouthed woman.

      Rowntree’s paid workers a week in hand – the girls were paid on Thursday afternoons for the work they had done the previous СКАЧАТЬ