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

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СКАЧАТЬ in the Card Box Mill, pushing a trolley along the aisle between the clanking machines and pausing at each workbench to hand out a pay packet. A man walked alongside her, his eyes darting everywhere, as if he was riding shotgun on a wagon train and expecting an attack by outlaws at any moment.

      The system of paying wages had been rather less formal in Rowntree’s early days. In the old factory at Tanners Moat, everyone kept their own note of the hours they had worked and at the end of each week the foreman went round with a hat full of coins, asked each of them, ‘How much time has thou got?’ and then paid them accordingly.

      Madge had been trying to imagine what it would feel like to hold her first ever pay packet, and the feeling did not disappoint. She signed her name in the ledger to show that she’d received her wages, and then held the small brown paper packet unopened in her hands, savouring the moment. She turned it over and was about to rip it open when Rose called across to her, ‘Tear off the corner and check it first. Once you’ve opened it, you can’t go to the pay office and complain, even if your wages are short. They might just say you’ve pocketed it and are trying it on.’

      Madge tore off a corner of the pay packet and fingered the edge of one crisp, new ten-shilling note. She shook the packet, heard the rattle of a coin and tipped the packet to let the coin slide to the top so that she could make sure it was a shilling. She turned the packet over again, ripped it open and took out her wages. The ten-bob note, the first she’d ever had in her hands, was pristine, straight from the bank and without a crease in it, and it almost felt like sacrilege to fold it up and put it in the little blue sailor bag hanging around her neck, where she kept her money for her tea because they were not allowed to have pockets in their overalls.

      Madge had been taken on as a junior at the minimum Rowntree’s wage of eleven shillings a week, and she didn’t even see much of that because, like all her sisters and brothers, she had to march straight home on pay day and hand her wage packet to her mum. She would keep ten shillings (fifty pence) for Madge’s keep and then give her back the odd shilling as spending money. From then on, every week Madge spent sixpence (two and a half pence) on the price of admission to a dance at the New Earswick Folk Hall or the Assembly Rooms in the centre of York, and used the other sixpence to buy make-up: ‘I always loved my make-up,’ she says, ‘and I would far rather spend my money on that than the sweets, drinks or stockings that my sisters often bought with their money.’ However, Madge didn’t even have a shilling to spend during her first few weeks at Rowntree’s, because she had to pay for her own uniforms for work – the white overall and turban to cover her hair – and she had to have two of them, so that she had one to wear while the other was in the wash.

      As in most other industries of that era, the rules about uniforms for work were more strict for women employees than for men, and the male authors of the Rowntree’s rule book also made patronizing attempts to link the requirements of food hygiene to attractiveness and style, including the comment that: ‘A Clean Cap and Overall Properly Worn Make an Attractive Uniform. A Workmanlike Appearance is the Best of Styles for the Workroom.’ Although admittedly far less men worked on the production lines, rules about covering hair with a cap were not applied to them until 1953, and it is probably no coincidence that from that date onwards, the company itself provided and paid for staff uniforms, whereas previously, women employees had been expected to provide their own, at their own expense.

      The women didn’t wear hairnets – the rules requiring them to be worn at work were not introduced until the 1960s – but without exception, all the women production workers, even in areas like the Card Box Mill where no edible items were produced, had to wear turbans, and as Madge had discovered, there was an art to tying these. There was also often a conflict between the factory regulations and the dictates of fashion: the rules stated that all the woman’s hair had to be tucked under the turban, but most women left at least a fringe of hair exposed, and often much more than that.

      During Madge’s early days in the Card Box Mill, an overlooker came marching along the production line one day, brandishing a couple of hairs that had found their way into a completed chocolate box. Madge’s sister Rose had beautiful, lustrous long hair, and when not at work had it arranged in ringlets down her back – ‘She used to win prizes for it at the Rialto,’ Madge says. Rose was now singled out and told to report to the manager’s office.

      She returned to the house that lunchtime in floods of tears. Their mum looked up from her cooking and said, ‘Now then, our Rose, what’s wrong with you?’

      ‘I’ve been told off about my hair,’ Rose said. ‘They found a hair in one of the boxes and they think it’s one of mine.’

      Madge’s mum gave her a look that was somewhat lacking in sympathy and then said, ‘Come here a moment, then.’ Rose gave her a puzzled look, but did as she was told, and Madge’s mum immediately took out her kitchen scissors and cropped off all of Rose’s long ringlets, saying, ‘There you are. Problem solved!’ However, when she’d finished snipping away with the scissors, and saw all those beautiful ringlets lying on the floor, Madge’s mum joined in with Rose’s tears and sobbed even louder than her daughter.

      Juniors like Madge were paid lower rates when they were young, and they didn’t go on to the full adult wage until they were twenty-one. Like many other manufacturers, at times when there was no shortage of labour Rowntree’s used to save money by getting rid of workers when they were old enough to qualify for a full adult wage and taking on another fourteen-year-old instead. Men received higher pay than women, even when performing exactly the same task, but they were just as vulnerable to being sacked as soon as they qualified for the full adult wage. Madge’s three brothers were all fired by Rowntree’s when they reached their twenty-first birthdays. One of them, Ted, the second eldest, couldn’t find other work around York and in the end emigrated to Australia. That was in the days of the ‘Ten Pound Poms’, when it cost you ten pounds to emigrate there on voyages that were heavily subsidized by the Australian government. Neither Ted nor his parents had that kind of money, but their neighbours heard about it, held a collection in the street and raised seven pounds for him. Madge’s dad then told Ted, ‘I’ll give you the other three pounds.’ So Ted and another boy from the street went out to Australia together on a steamer packed with Ten Pound Poms. It was a ten- to twelve-week journey, and once out there the emigrants had to remain there for at least two years or repay the full cost of their passage – the huge sum of £120. As a result, most emigrants did not return to Britain for many years, even for a brief visit, and some never came back at all.

      Madge was nine years old when Ted left. It was to be forty-seven years before she or any other member of the family saw him again, and it was several years before they had news of him at all. Madge’s mum wrote regular letters to the last address she had for him, but they all came back unopened, because neither his family nor the Australian authorities had any idea where he was. Like thousands of others in those bitter years of the 1930s, he was unemployed for a long time, wandering the outback trying to eke out a living and find some work somewhere, even if it was just an hour or two’s labour in return for food or a roof over his head for the night. Without work, Ted was reduced to eating out of bins, or anything he could find. He did not write to his family, partly because he didn’t even have money for a stamp, but also because he didn’t want to write with a tale of failure, preferring to leave them in ignorance of the dire straits he was in.

      However, Ted came to an outback farm one day and asked the farmer’s wife for work or something to eat. She pointed to a pile of logs and told him that if he split those for her, she’d give him some food. He chopped the logs for her and did a few more odd jobs around the farm over the next few days, and eventually he was taken on as a permanent worker. The farmer’s wife had a daughter, Maud, and she and Ted started courting and in time they got married.

      Madge was a married woman with children of her own long before Ted returned to Britain, but finally, forty-seven years after emigrating as a Ten Pound Pom, he came home on a visit, bringing Maud to СКАЧАТЬ