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

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СКАЧАТЬ nervousness and her desperation not to make mistakes made her even more fallible, and there was precious little sympathy for her from some of her more experienced workmates. She recalls:

      It took a while to learn everything, but if they thought you were going too slow and costing them money, some of the women you were working with could be pretty impatient with you … and some a bit more than impatient. My job was to keep a woman supplied with cardboard to make the boxes and at first I couldn’t keep her going fast enough with them. She thought I was being too slow, so she threw a box at me and one of the corners hit me in the eye. I had a real shiner of a black eye and a scratch on the eyeball itself and she panicked a bit then, and said, ‘I’ll never do that again.’ I think she was worried stiff that I’d report it, but I was far too frightened of her to do that. Anyway, my eye was all right, and I soon got up to speed with the work; it was amazing how quickly you learned. It was funny, when we started, the experienced women didn’t want us juniors anywhere near them, because they thought we’d be costing them money, but by the time we got moved to other departments, we’d got that good at it that they didn’t want us to go.

      Nearly all the production line workers in the factory were paid at piecework rates, and there were sometimes astonishing differences in the speed at which some of the more dexterous women could perform their tasks. One woman was legendary for the speed with which she could chop cherries for the Cherry Cup chocolates (known as Liquid Cherry in the 1930s) for the Black Magic assortments. Normal workers picked up a cherry from the pile on their left, placed it on the chopping board in front of them, cut it in half with their knife and then picked up the two halves and dropped them into the container on their right. However, this particular woman had evolved a system where she flicked cherries across from her left, trapping them against the blade of her knife, cut them in half with a blow of the knife and then flicked the halves into the container on her right with the knife blade. She worked so fast that she reached her targets and achieved the maximum piece-rate income well before the end of the working week, and after that she would surreptitiously shift some of her surplus cherries to the containers of her workmates so that they too could earn more.

      As elsewhere in the factory, in addition to their lunch break, Florence and the other girls had a ten-minute break in the morning, though none at all in the afternoon. The break was taken at or near their workbenches and conveyors, since there was insufficient time to go anywhere else. A woman from the kitchens came round with the trolley of hot and cold drinks – tea, coffee, cocoa, milk, lemonade or lime juice – though they weren’t provided free; the girls had to pay for them. Although there was a choice of drinks, the trolley did not contain any food. In some of the food production areas, employees were not allowed to bring in anything to eat in case crumbs or other debris contaminated the confectionery or attracted vermin; in others they were merely forbidden to eat at their work tables, but could eat sitting on the floor or in the changing room downstairs, or there was a ‘corridor kitchen’ where they could buy sandwiches or scones that had been made in the Dining Block. Less strict rules applied in areas of the factory where no food was produced, like the Card Box Mill and the Saw Mill, which may help to explain the Card Box Mill’s near-permanent population of pigeons.

      At first Florence and her fellow juniors used to sit under the bench during their break and try to turn out some more boxes while they were there, to keep up to the rate that had been set, but even during their breaks the overlookers used to watch them, and would shout at them, ‘This is a break. You’re supposed to sit and rest and not do any work,’ and the girls had to stop. Like many others, Florence used to go home for her lunch because she lived so close to the factory, so she did not use the Dining Block regularly until much later on when she was put on night shifts, but occasionally, if her mother was away for the day visiting a relative, Florence would have her lunch at work.

      The Dining Block was on the other side of Haxby Road from the factory, and at dinnertime – lunchtime to those born outside of the North – although some made the dash across the road, most of the thousands of workers opted to reach the block by means of the tunnel that ran right under the Haxby Road. On the night shift, when the factory was largely deserted and the gates locked, there was no option but to use the tunnel. The entrance was near the Rose Lawns, and the first time she used it Florence thought that from the outside it looked like an overgrown bike shed, but inside, to her amazement, she found that there was a grand double staircase leading down into a broad tunnel. At the far end Florence followed the crowd of chattering workers up another double staircase into the three-storeyed dining hall.

      The Dining Block was on the same giant scale as the rest of the factory. The offices and the Health department that had occupied part of the building when Madge was interviewed had now been moved to the newly built Cream Block on the other side of the road, and almost all of the Dining Block was now given over to feeding the army of Rowntree’s workers. There was a café and servery, and a 500-capacity men’s dining hall on the ground floor, a women’s dining hall seating 2,000 on the first floor, and an executive dining room with waitress service on the top floor, where the firm’s managers and directors could eat. Florence and her workmates would join the queue, and as they approached the servery, wooden railings at hip height funnelled them into single file. Having ordered their food, they then sat at long, thin wooden benches to eat their lunch, usually soup, meat and two veg and a steamed pudding, though on Fridays the main course was always fish. Whether served at midday or in the middle of the night, it cost less than a shilling, with meat and two veg for sevenpence halfpenny and fish and chips fourpence or sixpence.

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