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

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СКАЧАТЬ and Salts Mill workers respectively. Joseph insisted that the houses were to be spacious, ‘sanitary and thoroughly well built’, with large gardens. Rents were low and New Earswick was a genuine mixed community, with housing for both workers and managers. There were allotments, a local community centre – the Folk Hall – sports facilities, a library, a doctor’s surgery, shops and a post office. The village was open to anyone, not just Rowntree’s employees, but the majority of residents earned their living at the factory, and it proved enormously popular.

      In line with Joseph’s progressive ideas, all employees at Rowntree’s also had access to sports, social clubs and other facilities, free education, a company doctor – the first one was appointed to the staff in 1904 – and a team of nurses. There was a dentist, an optician and a chiropodist, and Rowntree’s even had its own social workers, ambulance and a fire brigade with its own fire engines; with 14,000 employees at its peak and some highly inflammable products stored at the factory, Rowntree’s was a greater fire risk than the city itself.

      Joseph also introduced a Works Council in an effort to replace the ‘us and them’ industrial relations that blighted so many other industries. In 1906 he established one of the first ever occupational pension schemes in the world, holidays with pay were introduced in 1918, and the following year the working week was reduced to forty-four hours, with no Saturday working, long before the vast majority of other British factories followed suit. Soon afterwards, Rowntree’s brought in a profit-sharing scheme for employees, again one of the first in the country.

      Like the other great Quaker industrialists of his era, Joseph Rowntree is now often accused of paternalism and excessive meddling in the lives of his employees, but he undoubtedly felt an acute sense of responsibility for their welfare and, whatever his motives, the results were not in doubt: his employees were better paid, better housed, better fed and clothed, and had better medical and social care than almost any others in the country. He remained chairman of Rowntree’s until 1923 and died two years later at the age of eighty-eight. He was buried in the Quaker burial ground at The Retreat in York, and despite his fame and fortune, in accordance with Quaker traditions, his gravestone is identical to all the others in that cemetery; if not always so in life, all were equal in death.

      Joseph’s son and successor, Seebohm, also combined a strong social conscience with a hard head for business, but the effects of the Great Depression in the late 1920s and early 1930s pushed Rowntree’s to the brink of bankruptcy. In 1931 large numbers of workers in the Card Box Mill were laid off and the company cut the wages of its remaining workforce, replaced many of the male workers with lower-paid women and for a while worked a three-day week.

      Rowntree’s remained in serious financial trouble throughout 1932, but within twelve months, from bleak-looking prospects and shedding its workers in droves, Rowntree’s was transformed into a fast-expanding and hugely profitable business. This was the company that Madge had now joined.

      2

       Florence

      Madge was already nineteen and beginning to feel like a seasoned veteran at Rowntree’s when, in 1937, another nervous fourteen-year-old followed in her footsteps through the main gates of the factory. Florence Clark was born in 1923 and grew up in Layerthorpe, just to the east of the city centre, in a two-up, two-down terraced house with a front door that opened straight onto Bilton Street. There were ten of them all together: Florence’s mum, Barbara, and dad, Harry, and her four brothers and three sisters, with Florence the youngest of them all by five years. The house was tiny and, like Madge’s family, the children slept three and even four to a bed, with two at the top and two at the bottom. ‘You were lucky to get a blanket,’ she says, ‘and we had to use overcoats for blankets on cold winter nights, though if it was really cold, my mum would give us the shelf out of the fireside oven, wrapped in a piece of cloth, as a hot-water bottle. She’d put it right in the middle of the bed where all four of us could get our feet on it.’

      There was no bathroom and no hot water in the house, just a tap for cold water that was shared with the neighbouring houses. There was an outside toilet – a wooden seat perched on top of a bucket – but it was more than a little precarious and Florence was always a bit frightened to sit on it when she was young in case it overbalanced. She was lucky she didn’t have to use the outside toilet at night, because there was a ‘gazunder’ – a chamber pot, so-called because it goes under the bed – in the bedroom she shared. They did not have luxuries like toilet paper, just bits of newspaper, and as the youngest, one of Florence’s jobs when her dad and mum had finished reading the paper was to tear it into squares, make a hole in the corner of them, slot a string through, and then hang them up in the outside toilet.

      They had a wash house in the yard as well, a lean-to built onto the back wall of the house containing a concrete and steel boiler with a fireplace underneath and a galvanized pipe poking out through the roof to serve as a chimney. Once a week, on Fridays after school, they used to light the fire under the boiler to heat up the water for their weekly bath – the tin tub they used as a bath hung on the back wall in the yard because there wasn’t room for it in the house. They would all share the same water, so by the time the last of them got in – and as the youngest and smallest, Florence was in no position to argue about the pecking order – the water was tepid at best, and so grey and with so much soap scum on the surface that it was questionable whether they were any cleaner when they got out than when they got in.

      Inside the house were hard floors of bricks laid on edge directly onto the earth beneath them, with oilcloth like a thin linoleum placed on top of them, and a scrubbed pine table and a few mismatched hard chairs in the kitchen. They used sheets of newspaper instead of tablecloths – it did at least give them something to read while they ate – and there were not enough seats for all the family to sit down together; since they all ate at the same time, the younger children had to eat standing up. With so many mouths to feed, there was never any food to spare. ‘I always remember,’ Florence says with a rueful smile, ‘that my dad had two boiled eggs for his breakfast and all I ever used to get were the tops of the eggs when he’d cut them off.’

      Florence and the other local children all played in the street; they had to do so because there was nowhere else to play except for a bit of rough ground called Ropery Walk a few streets away. The girls played skipping with a long rope tied at one end to a lamppost or a house wall, hopscotch or a curious game called ‘peggy stick’ that was a bit like the old Yorkshire game of ‘knurl and spell’. It was played with a big stick and a wooden peg, shaped at both ends. You had to hit one end of the peg with the stick to flick it up into the air, and then before it dropped to the ground you had to swing back the stick and hit the peg again, knocking it as far as you could. In a narrow street lined on both sides with houses opening directly onto the pavement, misdirected hits of the peg sometimes led to the ominous sound of breaking glass. The girls also had ‘whipping tops’ that spun with the flick of a bit of string or cord, and Florence and her friends would spend ages decorating them with paints or drawing pins pushed into the top and polishing them until they shone, so that they would catch the light and sparkle like gold. In summer the boys would run down to the river at the end of the next street and go splashing and swimming in it, but Florence and the other girls never went down there.

      Although there weren’t any cars in the street – no one could afford to run one, let alone buy one, in that impoverished district – over the course of the day there was a steady trickle of horses and carts with people buying and selling goods. Some only came once or twice a year, like the swarthy knife grinder with a thick moustache and eyes so dark they looked black even in bright daylight, who always wore a red-spotted handkerchief like a scarf around his neck, fastened with a gold clasp. He had an enclosed cart like a small showman’s wagon and a Heath Robinson contraption on the back: a rickety-looking metal frame, like a bicycle, with a grindstone precariously balanced where the handlebars should have been. Having drawn up his СКАЧАТЬ