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

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СКАЧАТЬ the back lane. They wouldn’t come back until one of the grown-ups had rounded it up and shooed it back into its pen.

      A cobbled lane ran along the rear of the house, flanked by Parson’s Wall, a high stone wall surrounding the garden of the vicarage, which contained an orchard full of apple trees. In late summer, Madge and her sisters and brothers would climb over the wall and help themselves to the apples, even though the parson seemed an intimidating, almost sinister figure when they were young. He was very tall and dressed all in black, with a long black frock coat and broad-brimmed black hat; he looked more like an undertaker than a priest to them. However, their fear did not stop Madge and her friends from playing tricks on him sometimes. They would sneak through his garden, tiptoe up to his front door and knock loudly on it. Then they would wait, peering through the letterbox, until they saw him appear from his study at the far end of the hall, and then they would turn and run like mad, sprinting away through the orchard and over the wall, arriving back home more out of breath from laughter than from running.

      They also had a rusting black bicycle – one of the old-fashioned, heavy iron ‘sit up and beg’ types – that they named ‘Black Bess’ after Dick Turpin’s steed, and they used to take turns to go round and round the block on it, pedalling down the street and round the back lane, while the others counted loudly the minutes and seconds it took. That simple pastime could occupy them for hours until the gang gradually lost interest and drifted away in search of the next game or amusement.

      Being the youngest of the ten children, Madge was, she says, ‘really spoilt’, and her sisters Marian and Ginny even used some of their wages from the factory to pay by weekly instalments for a top-of-the-range Silver Cross dolls’ pram for her, together with two beautiful dolls. One of her other sisters, Mabel, used to do a lot of knitting and she chipped in by knitting all the dolls’ clothes. Madge hardly ever used to play with that pram or those dolls, but she was not being a spoilt brat, for she had a friend across the road whose family were even poorer than Madge’s and couldn’t buy her any sort of dolls’ pram to play with. Consciously or subconsciously, Madge decided that she did not want to be playing with her expensive toys in front of a friend who did not have any, and instead the two friends played with a little rag doll. They got a cardboard shoebox and made cushions and blankets out of scraps of fabric to put inside it, then poked a hole through the end of the box and tied a piece of string through it. While the Silver Cross pram and the expensive dolls remained almost untouched, Madge and her friend would play for hours pulling the shoebox along the street behind them as if it were a pram and they were taking their baby out for some fresh air. If it was a wet day and the box started to disintegrate, they just went and found another one.

      Madge’s dad – his name was John, but everyone called him Jack – was a jolly-looking, apparently extrovert character with a bushy moustache and stocky build, but appearances could be deceptive, because he was quiet, shy and softly spoken and, like the rest of the family, he was never in any doubt as to who was the boss of the household. Madge’s mum was a real hard worker. She more than had her hands full with a family of twelve to look after, but she used to take in washing as well, trying to earn a bit of extra money to help make ends meet. She did not have a washing machine or anything like that; it was all hand-washing, done with a boiler, a dolly tub and a washboard, and her big, powerful hands were always reddened from the work, the constant immersion in water and the cheap, rough soap she had to use.

      Madge’s mum could be formidable, but she was warm and loving to her children and she had a kind heart, as well as a soft streak for those down on their luck. There were plenty of ‘gentlemen of the road’ – tramps – on the streets in those days, many of them veterans of the Great War, too rootless, too injured or too traumatized to settle easily back into normal civilian life – and they all knew Madge’s mum. Madge remembers them coming down the street, heralding their approach by singing at the tops of their voices. They would walk round into the back lane at the side of the house and wait there, and after a couple of minutes Madge’s mum would always come out and give them a mug of tea and a big lump of home-made custard tart or apple pie; they all knew where to go for a hot drink and a bite to eat.

      It had probably never occurred to Madge or her mum to wonder why York had become such a ‘chocolate city’, but throughout the twentieth century, the city’s three big confectionery firms – Rowntree’s, Terry’s and Craven’s – employed about three times as many people as York’s other great industry, the railway. The reason was partly an accident of history and partly of geography. Sited on a principal junction of the east coast mainline and straddling one of the main tributaries of the River Humber, the railways and the barges plying the waterways between York and the port of Hull gave the confectionery manufacturers cheap transport for raw materials like cocoa beans and sugar, and easy access for their finished products to the great industrial populations of Yorkshire, the Northeast and the Northwest. York also happened to be the site of a long-established Quaker community, and Quaker and non-conformist industrialists in York and elsewhere dominated the confectionery trade.

      One of the most famous names in that trade began life in very humble circumstances, when Joseph Rowntree Senior established a small grocer’s shop at 28 Pavement, York, in 1822. A devout Quaker, he was given an immediate reminder of the evils of the demon drink when he attended the auction of the shop premises at a nearby pub and found the auctioneer so drunk that Joseph had to sober him up by repeatedly plunging his head into a bucket of cold water before the sale could even begin. Despite – or perhaps because of – that treatment, the auctioneer then sold the property to him.

      In time, his two eldest boys joined him in the business, but it was not large enough to support the third son, Henry, as well. Instead, he began working for Tuke and Company in Castlegate, another Quaker-owned business, importing and manufacturing tea, coffee and cocoa, until, in 1862, he bought and renamed the Tukes’ business. A lively, gregarious personality, Henry had great ambition and charm, but rather less business sense. Despite total sales of no more than £3,000, he promptly splashed out on ‘a wonderful new machine for grinding cocoa’ and a collection of ramshackle buildings on the bank of the River Ouse to house a new factory. It was always a dark, dingy and damp place, and often worse than damp; whenever the river was high, it flooded the cellars. Within seven years, Henry’s elder brother, also called Joseph – who was cautious and prudent where Henry was impulsive and spendthrift – had to take over the running of the company to save his brother from the shame of bankruptcy, and succeeded in turning the business around.

      During the latter half of the nineteenth century, the falling price of cocoa as Britain and the other imperial powers forced down the price of raw materials from their colonies, coupled with the rising wages paid to industrial workers, paved the way for a boom in the consumption of cocoa and chocolate. Once barely affordable luxuries for the working classes, both were now within the reach of almost everyone.

      Employing just a handful of workers in 1869, Rowntree’s labour force swelled so rapidly that by 1890 it had far outgrown the original factory at Tanners Moat, and construction began on a new factory, a steadily expanding sprawl of fortress-like red-brick buildings on a site that eventually covered a square mile between Haxby Road and Wigginton Road in the north of the city. By 1909, 4,000 people were employed there.

      Even while the firm was still struggling, Joseph Junior’s brand of Quaker philanthropy had led him to seek a means of improving the social condition of his workforce and, in 1901, his son Seebohm, who shared his father’s concerns, produced a report revealing the scale of the deprivation in the slums that had developed in York and other cities during the previous century. It had a powerful impact on the young Winston Churchill: ‘I have been reading a book which has fairly made my hair stand on end,’ he said, ‘written by a Mr Rowntree who deals with poverty in the town of York … I see little glory in an Empire which can rule the waves and is unable to flush its sewers.’

      Spurred on by his son’s report, Joseph acquired 150 acres of land in open country between the Rowntree’s factory and what is now the York outer ring road for a new ‘garden village’ СКАЧАТЬ