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

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      Until the age of eighteen, like all the other juniors at Rowntree’s, Madge spent a few hours a week at what were known as ‘Day Continuation’ classes, another of Joseph Rowntree’s liberal innovations, aimed at extending the education of his workforce for a few years beyond their schooldays. Employees had to attend classes one day a week for boys and one afternoon a week for girls. For the most part, the classes were not aimed at improving their working skills, but rather as an end in themselves, giving them a taste of music and drama, for example, that they might otherwise never have experienced.

      Miss Birkenshaw took the drama group, and while most of the girls and women at Rowntree’s wore plain-coloured, utilitarian clothes in more or less drab shades of green, brown, grey or black, she was an altogether more exotic specimen. Her hair was immaculately coiffed and she wore thick make-up with heavily rouged cheeks that made her look a little like a Japanese geisha, and she always dressed in heavily frilled blouses and suits in vivid shades of pink, red and orange. Her reading style was equally dramatic and her choice of mainstream, middle-brow books such as Jamaica Inn proved very popular with Madge and the other girls.

      Miss Johnson, the music teacher, was a much less flamboyant character but no less well liked by her pupils. She was a Scot, with a soft Highlands accent, and taught the girls everything from traditional Scottish ballads to light opera and classical music. She wore her long, dark hair in a bun, but as she waved her hands about conducting an imaginary orchestra while the music played, her hairpins would often fall out and her hair would tumble around her shoulders while the class collapsed in fits of giggles.

      The girls were also expected to improve their physical condition through PT (physical training) sessions, and Miss Birkenshaw often took those classes as well. In winter or in poor weather, the sessions were held in the factory gymnasiums – one for each sex – in the long glass veranda along one side of the Dining Block, but in summer the classes were held out of doors, often on the Rose Lawn near the main gates of the factory. Madge and the other girls, shivering and self-conscious, had to go outside and over the road, wearing their shorts that looked like navy-blue knickers, and they had to do their exercises on the lawn with everyone peering out of the windows at them, as one of them later recalled: ‘I always hated PT because of that.’ Those who were keener on exercise could also do fitness and athletics classes after working hours, some of them run by Audrey Kilner-Brown, who worked in the Personnel department but was well qualified to coach athletics, having won a silver medal in the 100 metres at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

      The Day Continuation classes took place in the Dining Block, where the junior employees were also taught skills for life. In the case of girls, such skills were often, though not always, linked to their supposed future roles as wives and mothers. In autumn 1938, the company’s house journal Cocoa Works Magazine noted ‘a strong demand for courses of instruction in the domestic field, helpful to brides to be’, and ten years later the magazine was still proudly claiming that they helped ‘the natural ambition of the normal girl for marriage and motherhood’.

      However, the girls’ classes were not confined to the domestic duties that wives and mothers were expected to carry out; they were also taught a variety of subjects that appeared to vary from year to year according to the skills, interests and sometimes the hobbies of those appointed to teach them. Many girls seem to have been taught English and natural sciences but, perhaps surprisingly in the context of the times, many also learned woodwork, making wooden trays, stools or other small items for their homes.

      Madge and her classmates were also taken to see the glazed hot house near the Dining Block, where the gardeners grew tropical fruits like bananas, as well as vanilla pods and cocoa beans, though the latter were for demonstration purposes, not for production. During the war years, when imports of fruit from the Caribbean virtually ceased, that hot house was one of the few places in Britain where you could actually find a banana. There were also grass tennis courts between the hot house and the Haxby Road, one of several leisure facilities that women employees on short-time working were encouraged to use, and behind the tennis courts there were flowerbeds where the gardeners grew the cut flowers for the vases spread throughout the factory.

      4

       Florence

      Like Madge, Florence was sent to work in the Card Box Mill, where they made the fancy cardboard boxes for the chocolate assortments, and the plainer ones for Black Magic and Dairy Box. Her heart sank when she saw her workplace for the first time that summer day in 1937, because there were so many machines and the noise they made was deafening. As if that wasn’t daunting enough for a shy girl like Florence, the overlookers were also very strict. ‘They used to sit in the middle of the room at right high desks,’ she says, ‘so that they could see everybody and everything that was going on, and when you were just starting and very young like me, I daren’t do anything wrong, because I was really frightened of them.’

      Two of the overlookers, Miss Price and Miss Sanderson, were ‘both tartars really’, according to Joan Martin, one of Florence’s workmates, who also worked under their hawk-like gaze:

      Everything had to be done just right or you were in trouble. Miss Sanderson was very tall and very straight-laced. She was in charge of inspecting your work and if you got one thin mint too many in a box, or whatever it was, you were in trouble. And if Miss Sanderson came round the corner and caught you putting a chocolate in your mouth, you’d really be in for it. Miss Price was shorter and tubbier, but pretty strict too, though the foreman, Mr Walker, was even worse. He was a holy terror and a lot of the girls were frightened of him. Miss Price and Miss Sanderson could be a bit too demanding, but they were nice enough away from the factory. They shared a house in Fountain Street, just off Haxby Road near the factory. They were living together, but in those days nobody thought anything much about that; if they thought about it at all, they probably just assumed they were friends.

      When Florence and the other new girls started work, Rowntree’s invited their mothers to come in during their first week, to look round the factory and see what their daughters were doing. In fact, although Florence had been interviewed on her own, throughout most of the 1930s the girls’ mothers or sometimes a friend of the family would sit alongside them during their interviews. The system was changed in 1938, so that girls were interviewed without their mothers being present, though they were still invited into the factory on the afternoon of their daughters’ first day at work, to have tea with them in the café annexe and talk through their first experience of paid work. History does not relate whether this was to reassure the mothers that their daughters were being well trained and looked after, or to stiffen the backbones of daughters who had found their first taste of the workplace unpleasant and were looking for a way out.

      The parents of boys starting apprenticeships were also invited to the factory. A huge range of skilled tradesmen were employed by Rowntree’s, and every craftsman, joiner, engineer, bricklayer, plasterer, electrician, plumber, painter and decorator had an apprentice. Their mothers and fathers would look round the factory and then go over to the dining hall and have tea with their boy’s overlooker, just to get to know the man who was to be in charge of their son for the five- to seven-year term of his apprenticeship.

      Florence’s mum came in one afternoon soon after she had started work, but Florence was so scared of the overlookers and so fearful of doing something wrong that she did not even look up when her mum walked past her workbench, but kept her eyes down, fixed on her work. When she started, she was too frightened to do anything but get on with her work, but ‘it was a learning experience there,’ Florence says, ‘and I soon got a bit braver and a bit bolder, and I came out of there knowing a lot more than when I went in – and not just about work!’

      It was all piecework – the quicker you worked, the more you could earn – and there was very СКАЧАТЬ