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

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СКАЧАТЬ back,’ and she was as good as her word, and in fact lived for many years after that, dying at the ripe old age of ninety-five. However, her husband had died of a stroke some years before Ted came home, and was never to see his son again. A few years after that visit, Madge and her sister Ginny went out to Australia together and stayed with Ted and Maud on the farm, which by then they’d inherited.

      When Madge started at Rowntree’s in 1932, Ginny was working as a tour guide, showing visitors around the factory. There were seventy women working in the Guides department, a reflection of the huge popularity of the Rowntree’s factory tours. School parties, clubs and all sorts of other organizations – 70,000 people a year in total – took the free tours, coming from all over the North of England and far beyond, by train, charabanc and later, as affluence increased, by car. People coming by train arrived at Rowntree’s Halt and the guides, dressed in cream overalls edged with brown piping and wearing navy-blue court shoes, would walk through the factory to meet them there. Other arrivals were dropped off by bus outside the guides’ office in part of the Dining Block.

      Ginny was a lively character and very popular with the visitors. Their dad used to say, ‘There’s always one devilish one in a family,’ and in the Fishers it was Ginny, though Madge herself was not far behind. Ginny was, Madge says, ‘a real devil, always cracking jokes, playing tricks and bending the rules whenever she could’. Rowntree’s tour guides were strictly forbidden to accept tips, but many visitors, especially the Americans, were accustomed to tipping everywhere they went and Ginny was certainly not going to look such a gift horse in the mouth. As she was showing the visitors around the factory, she would glance behind her to make sure there were no supervisors or managers within earshot and then say, ‘We’re not supposed to accept tips, you know, but in case you’re interested, that’s my pocket right there!’

      As a tour guide, Ginny often had to work very long hours. The tours didn’t start until 8.30 a.m. but the guides still had to turn up for work at 7.30, and spent the first hour of their day working on the production lines. They then assembled in a long line and were given one of the five routes: A, B, C, D or E. Each guide would take a small group, usually about eight people, and lead them on a three-mile walk around the factory that took two hours to complete. One tour started at the Card Box Mill, another in the Gum department, another at the Cream Block, another at the offices, and the last one at the Melangeur Block. The name Melangeur (the workers pronounced it ‘mullanja’) had been adopted from a term used by the French and Swiss confectioners who had perfected the art of chocolate-making. Mélangeur meant ‘mixer’ in French and the Melangeur Block was where all the chocolate for the factory was made.

      As well as the general public, Rowntree’s also used factory tours to strengthen the company’s links with wholesalers and retailers. Once a year a train would set off from London and ‘stop at just about every station’ to pick up local shopkeepers and bring them to York for a factory tour. The guides would go down to Rowntree’s Halt to meet them and show them around the factory, and then serve them tea. There were evening tours too, and dinners, and Ginny would sometimes work till midnight, having been there since 7.30 a.m., though if they worked that late, Rowntree’s did at least pay for taxis to make sure that all the guides got home safely.

      While Ginny led factory tours, Madge and her sister Rose were hand-making fancy boxes, but their other sister in the Card Box Mill, Laura, was at the machine end of the room, doing much less interesting work, making plain boxes and the ‘outers’ – the large cartons in which the completed boxes were shipped. She would have loved to have been working in the same section as Madge and her other sisters, making boxes of all shapes and sizes, as it was interesting work and very skilled. There were heart-shaped boxes for Valentine’s Day, and special ones for Christmas and Easter, as well as for one-off presentations. When Madge was eighteen she was chosen to make four beautiful boxes to be presented to Queen Mary and her three ladies in waiting during a visit to the factory, all in ruched satin with drawers with silk tassels, and each box a different colour: gold for the Queen, and red, green and blue for her ladies in waiting. The Queen spent some time standing at the end of the bench, right next to Madge, watching her work, and it was all Madge could do to stop her hands trembling with nerves.

      Even though Madge and the other girls had stools at their workbenches, they usually used them to hold their work because, with boxes stacked while they waited for the glue to dry, there wasn’t enough space on their benches for everything. They preferred to stand anyway – it wasn’t possible to do the work while sitting down – but they were more than ready for a rest and a sit down by the end of the day. They had a ten-minute break in the morning – there was no afternoon break – but they did not have time to go to the dining hall during break time, so they would all buy a mug of tea or cocoa, or a glass of milk or squash from the trolley brought round to each department by one of the servers from the Dining Block. Rather than sit on their high stools in full view of the overlookers, Madge and the other girls used to lay their stools on their sides, flat on the floor next to the machines, and then perch on the legs and chat until they finished their drinks. Sometimes they would even crawl underneath the benches where they worked, out of sight of the overlookers, but they had to crawl back out as soon as the bell went to signal the end of the break, and get cracking again straight away.

      As they were doing hand-work, Madge and her workmates could go for a short toilet break whenever they needed one, whereas Madge’s sister Laura at the other end of the room had to wait for break time. Like those at many other factories, she and her workmates could only leave their work stations during official rest periods, because if anyone left at other times they had to stop the machines. ‘You all had to go to the toilet together,’ one of them recalls. ‘We worked from half past seven to half past five, and you kept working until the conveyor stopped.’

      Another woman, Kath, who worked in Cream Packing, putting the chocolate assortments into the boxes that Madge and her workmates made, recalls that:

      We used to get a ten-minute toilet break when they’d stop the machines and we all had to go to the toilet together, because when the conveyor was running you had to be working. One charge-hand was a real stickler. She would look at the clock and say, ‘Right, ten minutes, no longer,’ and then turn the machine off. Precisely ten minutes later, whether or not everyone was back from the toilet, she’d turn the machine back on again. Down would come all the chocolates, and the last few girls would be scrambling to get back to their places in time. With the time it took to get there and back, you’d only have six minutes’ break time, but it was amazing what you could get up to in those six minutes, especially my friend Joyce. She used to draw black lines on bits of white paper, stick them on her eyelids, like giant false eyelashes, and walk down the aisle between the machines, fluttering her eyelids at the men she passed going down the room.

      The girls were not allowed food on their workbenches, so if they wanted something to eat at break time, they either had to eat it sitting on the floor or go downstairs to the room where they kept their coats. Again, as soon as they had finished eating, they had to rush to the toilets and then be back at the machines ready to start work as soon as they started running. ‘If you weren’t there,’ says one of them, ‘that was your lookout and you’d be struggling to catch up.’

      Some of Madge’s workmates in the hand-work section took advantage of their relative freedom compared to the machine box-makers stuck at their workplaces on the conveyor belt, and they often used a toilet break as an excuse to go for a crafty smoke outside, since smoking was forbidden anywhere within the factory buildings. Madge did not smoke, but her friend Alice would often pretend to have period pains in order to take a break; if the overlookers had been more alert, they might have noticed that she appeared to be having two or three periods a month.

      There was a rest room as well, where women could go if they weren’t feeling well. They could have an hour’s sleep and then, if they still didn’t feel any better, they could go home. This was also open to a certain amount of abuse, and sometimes Madge or one of the other girls would either elude the overlookers and sneak СКАЧАТЬ