The Sweethearts

by Lynn Russell

  When Florence came back to York, Rowntree’s still did not have any work for her, so instead she went to work for the engineering firm of Cook, Troughton & Simms. Despite the opportunity to practise her new skills, she didn’t enjoy it much, finding the work boring and the wages and conditions nowhere near as good as those at Rowntree’s, so when trade began to pick up again and Rowntree’s called her back, she didn’t have to think twice. This time she went into Cream Packing. ‘Thinking back to my interview before the war, I decided that they’d obviously lost the bit of paper that said “No Machine Work”,’ she says with a smile. She was packing the butterscotch chocolates and, being very fond of them, took the opportunity to help herself to one from time to time when the overlookers were not looking, but she ate so many that, she says, ‘I got fed up of them after a while and stopped eating them – and I’ve never eaten them since!’

  7

  Eileen

  Like so many other York girls, Eileen Morgan went straight to Rowntree’s after leaving school when she was sixteen years old, in 1951. ‘If you were growing up in York,’ she says, ‘when you left school, there were only two places you wanted to work. You either went to Rowntree’s or you went to Terry’s. A lot of people and a lot of families worked for one or the other, so if your granddad and your dad worked there, you went there too.’

  Four young women of an earlier era had been so eager to work at Rowntree’s that, either not wanting or not being able to afford rented accommodation, they got themselves a tent, pitched it in a friendly farmer’s field at Pocklington, and then either walked or cycled the twenty-six-mile round trip into York every day to go to work. The tent proved a mixed blessing. The young women were so scared of earwigs – there was an old wives’ tale that, as their name suggests, earwigs would crawl into your ears if you slept on the ground – that in an attempt to keep them at bay, they stuffed cotton wool in their ears before they lay down to sleep. The girls were also terrified of the wasps that plagued them on warm summer evenings, and at night they were frightened out of their wits by cows looming up out of the darkness and stumbling on their guy ropes or bumping into their tent. Despite all that, they lived in the tent through winter and summer, and kept up their marathon commute to work for twelve months in all, before finding more comfortable and conventional, if also more expensive, accommodation in a house in the city.

  Eileen had no need of a tent, as she lived in a terraced house just off Burton Stone Lane, but her family background was very unusual. She was born in 1935 in her grandmother’s house, where her father, Arthur, and mother, Doris, were living at the time. Her parents had known each other all their lives, having grown up in the same area, and they married young. Like so many couples in that era, they simply could not afford a place of their own at first, but when Eileen was still very small, her parents managed to save enough money to move to a house on Monk Stray on Malton Road. Eileen’s dad worked at the Rowntree’s factory loading cocoa beans into the grinding mills; it was hard physical work, but he was a tall and powerful figure and very fit. In addition to the heavy lifting he did at work, he had played rugby league for York in his younger days, and was a keen race-walker in his spare time.

  Eileen’s dad was a handsome man and, admits his daughter, ‘He was cocky and even arrogant. I think he was “a word and a blow” sort of man; in fact I know he was,’ she says, laughing, and he’d had a string of previous girlfriends before he met and settled down with Doris. ‘He was quite a character,’ Eileen says, ‘and he used to say all sorts, though a lot of it wasn’t fit for the ears of a little girl!’ He enlisted in the Army as soon as war was declared, and his strength and fitness as well as his personal qualities saw him selected for the elite Commandos when they were formed in the wake of Dunkirk in June 1940. Eileen was only five when war broke out and her dad went away, and she has only the vaguest memories of him before the war, but she can clearly recall seeing him in his uniform boarding the train to go back to his unit after spending some wartime leave with them at home.

  In 1944, Arthur’s commando unit was involved in the fighting at Anzio. As special forces, they were operating behind enemy lines before the beachhead assault, and continued to take part in the fighting as the battle raged. It proved to be one of the bloodiest and most prolonged battles of the entire war. The twelve men in his unit posed for a group photograph before going into action – Eileen still has a copy – and the rest of them are standing there ramrod straight, legs together, as if they’re on parade, whereas Eileen’s dad is standing with one leg bent and his head tilted, looking straight into the camera with a quizzical smile on his face, taking it all in his stride. ‘To me, that shows the arrogance he had,’ she says, ‘but the fact that he was so arrogant was probably what got him through it all.’

  Eileen’s father was one of only two men from that group who were still alive when the fighting was over, but he paid a terrible price for his survival. The battle was still raging when he was hit in the neck by a bullet fired by a German sniper, and because of the angle of entry, the bullet penetrated down through his neck and deep into his body. Badly wounded, he was picked up by the stretcher bearers and laid down next to some other casualties to await transport to a casualty clearing station. As he lay on the stretcher, helpless, thinking about his wife and daughter and wondering if he would ever see them again, he saw a German soldier rise from cover; he had probably been waiting until the casualties had all been gathered together before launching his attack. Arthur tried to shout a warning but it was lost in the noise of battle. He had time to study the German’s features – he was blond-haired and looked to be no more than a boy – as, still unseen by anyone else, he drew back his arm and hurled a stick grenade. The last thing that Eileen’s dad remembered seeing was that German’s youthful face and blond hair, and the stick grenade turning end over end as it fell towards him.

  It landed no more than a couple of yards from Arthur and exploded at once. A piece of shrapnel smashed into his kneecap, badly wounding him, and other fragments of the grenade ripped into his face. He passed out, and when he came round it was to a world of pain and utter darkness, for the explosion and the shrapnel had blinded him. His right eye had been completely torn out by a shard of flying metal and his right eardrum was perforated. His left eye had also been badly damaged, his knee had been shattered and he had several other wounds including the bullet hole in his neck. His wounds were so bad that after he had been taken to hospital in Naples, he was given just twenty-four hours to live, but he was a strong man, with an even stronger will to live, and he pulled through. The doctor who examined him told him that he should try to get himself to the United States, because it was the only place where surgeons had the skills, the equipment and the facilities to have a chance of saving the sight in his remaining eye, but the wound then turned gangrenous and in the end the left eye had to be removed as well.

  When he was well enough, Eileen’s dad was taken back to England – his ship was bombed on the way, but although damaged, it did not sink – and he was then treated at the American Red Cross hospital at Fishponds in Bristol. Eileen’s mother took her to visit him there. Eileen was just nine years old then and barely remembered her father, and it was a terribly traumatic visit because, she says, ‘He looked simply horrendous. His wounded leg was still in plaster, his hair had grown long, there were scars all over his face and scalp, and to allow his wounds to continue to heal and to keep his eye sockets open until he could be fitted with glass eyes, he had two pieces of blank pink plastic in the sockets, which made him look even more alien and alarming to me.’

  They kept him at Fishponds for nine months, mainly, according to Arthur, ‘to cheer the Yanks up’ who were also being treated there. He was well positioned to cheer them up because with his leg still in plaster from groin to ankle, his wheelchair had been fitted with a solid wooden platform jutting out parallel to the ground, on which his leg rested while he was wheeling himself around. This gave him the perfect opportunity
to provide a much-appreciated service to his British and American friends. Alcohol was of course banned from the ward, but just outside the hospital gates there was a pub with a ‘beer off’ – an off-licence. Had any of the hospital doctors had time to consider the matter, they might have paused to wonder why Arthur’s wheelchair always seemed so much harder to manoeuvre after his regular excursions for ‘a breath of fresh air’. Even more curious, his leg, while still encased in plaster and draped with a hospital blanket, seemed to have swollen to two or three times its previous size. Had they pursued him to the ward, the mystery would have been solved at once, because accompanied by much muffled laughter and clinking of glass, the blanket was peeled back to reveal a line of beer bottles, nose to tail the length of the wooden platform on either side of his leg. The contents were consumed every evening, adding greatly to the morale and well-being of the assembled company, and the next day Arthur would set off for another of his wheelchair constitutionals, with the empties neatly arranged down the sides of his leg beneath the blanket, ready to be swapped for full ones.

  No doubt to the disappointment of the wounded soldiers he left behind who would have to find another way to get their beer, Eileen’s dad was eventually transferred to Stoke Mandeville. Although his leg was healing, he remained seriously ill and his doctors still hadn’t found the sniper’s bullet that was lodged somewhere inside him and that was making him so ill. One day, his nurse told him that a General was coming to make an inspection of the ward and that he had to tidy his bedside locker. As he reached over to start doing so, he froze in agony, locked into that position and unable to move. When doctors examined him, they found the cause was the sniper’s bullet, which had passed right down through his neck and his torso, before becoming lodged in his ribs. As he stretched out, the bullet must have shifted position slightly and trapped a nerve.

  With the bullet at last removed, Arthur continued his slow recovery and when his doctors judged that he was strong enough, he was sent to complete his demobilization from the Army and then came home to York. Eileen says:

  I can remember really well the day he came home. I was ten years old then and Mum and I went to York station together to meet his train. I can even remember exactly where we were sitting as we waited for Dad’s train to arrive. In those days as you went into the station, on the platform where there are now tables and chairs for a café, back then there was a circular, wrap-around seat with a wrought-iron pillar in the middle. We sat there waiting for him to come through the barrier, as you had to in those days – it wasn’t open as it is now. All the fears I’d had when I first saw him in hospital had now disappeared. I knew who he was now. I’d visited him many times since then at Fishponds and at Stoke Mandeville, and I’d got used to him and the way he was. I was just looking forward to seeing him.

  Joe Corrigan, whose family ran Corrigan’s Funfair at Scarborough, had also been blinded in the war, and had been in hospital at Stoke Mandeville with Eileen’s dad and demobilized with him. When Eileen went to see her dad at Stoke Mandeville, she saw Joe Corrigan’s family coming in and bringing him all sorts of different kinds of fruit that were virtually unobtainable in Britain in wartime – either they had been raiding the Rowntree’s hot house for exotic fruits or they had some strong connections in the black market. As Arthur and Joe were both York men, the two of them had been sent home together. Eileen spotted them a fair way off, with her dad towering over Joe, who was only a little fellow.

  As they came through the barrier Eileen saw her mum’s expression change. A moment before they had both been happy and excited, chattering about what it would be like to see him and what they would do that evening to celebrate, but as soon as she saw him, she was absolutely furious – not with Arthur, but with the Army. Both Arthur and Joe had just been demobbed, and when they’d handed in their uniforms and army kit, and signed the last of the endless army forms, they were supposed to have been issued with civilian clothes: their ‘demob suit’, as it was known. Both of them had indeed been sent home wearing double-breasted suits, but instead of a white or striped shirt, dark tie and black shoes, like everyone else who was being demobbed, they had been kitted out with khaki shirts to which white collars had been attached, they were still wearing the red ties from the hospital and they had scuffed army boots instead of shoes. They looked more like tramps than returning war heroes and, Eileen says, ‘Mum was blazing with anger about it because she felt, rightly, that it demeaned them. You just weren’t demobbed like that, and the clear implication was that because these two men were blind, the army clerks had decided that because they couldn’t see what they were wearing, it didn’t matter what strange combination of clothes they were given.’ It blighted what should have been a joyful homecoming.

  After a brief spell at home, Eileen’s dad then went to St Dunstan’s in Brighton, a charity that helped blind ex-servicemen to come to terms with their disability and learn new skills to aid them in coping with civilian life. After being evaluated there, Arthur was sent to the St Dunstan’s training school at Church Stretton in Wales to start learning Braille. ‘He never did the standard Braille because his hands and fingers were too chunky,’ Eileen says, ‘so he did what was called “Moon Braille” – circles and lines instead of little dots.’ He also learned to type so he could try to earn his living as a typist but, she says, ‘Dad simply couldn’t stand it. He was an active man and hated sitting at a typewriter, and the money he could earn from it was also really poor. There was no pension or other benefits and the pay was only one pound, two shillings and sixpence a week.’ Of that modest sum, Eileen’s dad sent the pound home to his wife and kept only half a crown as spending money for himself.

  Eileen still wonders why he even attempted typing:

  He could have trained to run a corner shop instead, like a small newsagent or a tobacconist, or he could have trained as a physiotherapist, or done plenty of other things – St Dunstan’s offered all kinds of training and support to help blind people back into work, and he was still only thirty-one years old – but all he wanted to do was go back to Rowntree’s. I suppose it was what he knew and he felt safe in that environment. So in the end he just came home; I don’t even know whether he came on his own or whether someone brought him, but he just turned up on the doorstep one day and said he couldn’t stand it any more. Mum and I were shocked to see him standing there. He did bring his typewriter with him and kept it at home, and I can remember the sound of him tapping away on the keyboard occasionally, but he rarely used it and of course when I got to sixteen years old and started working in the offices at Rowntree’s, I was the one who had to do the typing if any was needed and he just did the dictating!

  Rowntree’s had been helping Doris and Eileen financially while Arthur was in hospital and at St Dunstan’s, and Philip Rowntree now came to see him and told him that if he returned to Rowntree’s and completed retraining, Philip would personally guarantee that Arthur would be given a suitable job. ‘They would have given him an easy job to do, I think,’ Eileen says, ‘but no, although it was a heavy job, he wanted to do the job he’d been doing before the war, back among the men that he knew, splitting sacks and pouring cocoa beans down the chute into the grinding mills. So that is what he did. He took up his old job again and kept doing it for the next twenty-five years.’

  The cocoa beans he handled were grown in Ghana and Nigeria and brought by huge cargo ships to Hull docks. Transferred to barges, they were then carried up the Humber, the Ouse and into the Foss Lock, from where they were discharged into the Rowntree’s bonded warehouses lining the waterfront. It was a popular run for the bargees because they were often given bags of chocolate misshapes as a perk of the job. The cocoa beans were stored in the warehouses by the river until they were needed, then taken to the factory and raised on the hoist that ran from the ground floor to the top floor of the Elect Block in the northeast corner of the factory site. It was known as ‘The Gables’, although, confusingly, the same name was given to the top floor o
f almost every one of the score of different buildings on the factory site. The hoist was for products only, and off-limits to all employees unless they could produce a note from the company doctor to say they were too badly injured or infirm to use the stairs.

  Eileen’s father did not have to climb flights of stairs every morning, because he worked on the fourth floor and there was a long wooden ramp leading up to it, so he only had to climb a relatively short flight of stairs and could then use the ramp to reach his workplace. He did his day’s work on a raised platform near the hoist. A man called Taff Limbert used to take the ten-stone (sixty-four-kilo) sacks of cocoa beans from the hoist, one at a time, wheel them over to Arthur and rest them against his leg so that he knew exactly where they were. Arthur would take hold of them, slit them open with his knife, lift and twist the sack in one movement, then pour the beans down the chute into the mills where they were ground, and he performed the arduous task with such dexterity that he was the equal of any of his sighted comrades. ‘He was a remarkable man and became quite famous around the factory,’ Eileen says. ‘The tour guides showing visitors around the site always used to make a point of taking them to see my dad at work.’

  The cocoa beans that Arthur poured down the chute into the grinding mills underwent a series of processes as they passed down through the floors of the building. The crushed beans were first hand-sorted to remove foreign material such as dirt and stones, then roasted and winnowed – passed through drums where giant fans blew the husks away. The beans were then ground down again, first into cocoa ‘nibs’ and then into the creamy paste known as ‘cocoa liquor’. Cocoa powder and cocoa butter were produced as by-products of this complex process.