by Lynn Russell
Dorothy was skilful and experienced enough to adapt to working on the enrober again without any problems, but it could be a daunting experience for some of the younger girls, largely because, as Sue Mizzi recalls, ‘There were four right well-known women who worked there. Everyone was frightened of them, though no one knew why, or if they did, they weren’t telling.’ When Sue and her friend were sent to work there, no one, least of all the intimidating foursome, told them what they were supposed to be doing, so her friend just pointed towards them and said to Sue, ‘Let’s just copy them.’ They did exactly that and, perhaps as a result, they got on like a house on fire with the fearsome foursome, though at the end of the shift they were still little wiser about what their job was supposed to be, nor whether they had been doing it right or wrong.
When Dorothy had been working in Enrobing for a while, she was transferred to packing After Eight mints. Rowntree’s still did not have a machine that could feed the chocolates into the small brown envelopes, so all the packing was done by hand. The After Eights used to come down the conveyor and the packers had to pick the mints up, slip them into the envelopes and then put them into the cartons, exactly twenty-six in each one. ‘It got a bit monotonous now and again,’ Dorothy says, ‘but you moved around the conveyor so you did different jobs on the machine, which made it a bit more interesting.’
However, Dorothy had not been working there long when she had to hand in her notice yet again after discovering to her considerable surprise that she was once more pregnant, with her third boy, Julian. ‘When I left,’ she says, ‘they were all teasing me and saying, “Don’t worry, come straight back and bring him in with you, we can wash all his nappies in the big sink in the corner there!” where we used to clean the pans that had chocolate in them.’ Not long after the birth she did go back again, though not with Julian in tow. She worked in Enrobing again at first, and then went into the Smarties department, and, she says, ‘It was an education, the way they were made.’ Tubes of Smarties had previously been filled by hand, work which was so repetitive and mechanical that even the most conscientious worker was sometimes tempted to improvise a little just to alleviate the boredom. Sarah James, whose mother worked in the Gum department on the Smarties production line, was ‘amazed to hear my mother talking of deliberately putting all the same coloured Smarties together in one tube rather than mixing them all up. My mum! Hardly a rebel!’
Now the company was mechanizing the process and bringing in new machines to produce giant-sized tubes of Smarties as well as the standard tubes, and a whole new team of women was brought together to work on the product. None of them had ever done any of the work before. ‘These tubes came through on the conveyor belt,’ Dorothy recalls, ‘and you had to take them off three at a time, put them in a rack and pass them to the next person to Sellotape the end of the tube and then pass them on again to the packers. Well, I’m not kidding you, you only needed the Sellotape to go a bit wrong and you would start falling behind, but the tubes were still coming down the belt and they started to pile up. We’d be covered in bits of Sellotape with tubes still coming down the belt and falling off onto the floor. We didn’t know what to do and we couldn’t stop laughing about it, so the overlooker really got cross with us. Eventually we did get the hang of it, but while we were learning it was hilarious.’
Another girl sent to work in Packing and Despatch found Sellotape to be just as much of a health hazard there. She was armed with a Sellotape ‘gun’ and told that her job was to seal boxes ready for despatch. Unfortunately she had never seen a Sellotape gun before and didn’t know how to work it. When the first box came down the line she started the tape all right and stuck one end of it to the box, but she didn’t know how to stop it and the tape ‘just kept going on and on and on. Before long it was not only stuck to the box, it was also stuck to me, and in fact it was stuck to just about everything else as well.’ By now she was blushing crimson and every eye in the room was on her. Finally one of the other women came down and said, ‘Don’t you know what to do?’ She shook her head, saying, ‘Nobody showed me.’ The woman showed her how to do it in two seconds flat, and having disentangled herself from the Sellotape, she managed to do the rest of her boxes without further mishap.
It was a measure of the contentment that Dorothy had found in her family life with Rod that she could take in her stride things that would have had her in tears when she was younger. She loved her work and the company of the women she worked alongside, but the best moments of the day were always those that she spent in the company of her family.
Dorothy continued working at Rowntree’s until 1976, when she was forty, and she then left the company for the last time. ‘I had to finish then,’ she says, ‘because my youngest, Julian, had started going to school and I wanted to be there to see him off to school in the morning and be there again when he finished in the afternoon – you couldn’t afford to pay people to look after your children then, and there were no family members to do it for me, like my grandmother had done for my father – so I needed to work hours that fitted in with that. There were no shifts like that at Rowntree’s so I left the factory for the last time and found other work.’
The ‘Swinging Sixties’ were long over and in their off-duty hours, in place of miniskirts and bouffant, heavily lacquered beehive hairstyles, the younger Rowntree’s girls were now beginning to appear for work in punk-style clothing and with spiky, heavily gelled and highly coloured hairstyles. One girl in the department did not want to waste her money on hair colouring, and so bleached the ends of her hair blonde by dipping it into a bucket of Domestos.
Alongside the superficial changes, Dorothy had also noticed a difference in the atmosphere inside the factory. Although there was far less tension between management and unions at Rowntree’s than in many other British industries, the factory was not immune to the disputes and industrial strife that was scarring the 1970s, and the sense of being part of a community of workers that had always marked out Rowntree’s in the past was now fast fading.
‘It was a shame that I had to leave in one way,’ Dorothy says, ‘because I was never happier than I was at Rowntree’s, and it had been such a lovely atmosphere, but that did change a lot after Mackintosh came in.’ In 1969, Rowntree’s merged with the Halifax toffee maker Mackintosh. Coachloads of Rowntree’s employees went to the House of Commons to petition against the merger, and they arrived back in York really late at night, but still had to go into work as usual early the next morning. As soon as they got there, they were greeted by workmates saying, ‘You did a lot of good, didn’t you?’ It turned out that the merger had gone through the previous evening, while they were still on their way back from London. One woman spoke for many when she lamented the change, remembering how at one time, ‘I couldn’t get to work quick enough to get to chat with my friends and enjoy all the jokes. It changed after the Rowntree-Mackintosh merger, though. It wasn’t the friendly, family firm it was before.’
Dorothy agrees:
There just didn’t seem to be the same friendliness after that. It wasn’t just that the Rowntree’s company was beginning to change by then, because some of the people who worked there were also very different from the ones I’d worked with when I was young. I was working on Smarties by then and some of the women on the machines were lunatics. It was all piecework and they wanted to earn the money, so if they got someone who was a bit slow with them, they used to play hell. That’s what finished me in the end, because they got greedy. For the sake of two or three pence, these girls were getting nasty with someone who was doing their best but was still learning, and they’d be saying, ‘Oh, don’t have her on here, we don’t want her.’
I feel sorry for eighteen-year-olds now though, because things are much worse now; there just aren’t the jobs any more. When I was young we could just walk out of school and go straight into a job. There were three confectionery companies in York: Rowntree’s, Terry’s and Craven’s; there were the railways, the carriage work
s, the glass works, the button factory, Armstrong’s and a lot of other smaller factories you could work in, but now, even with a good education, what is there at the end of it? It’s soul-destroying to see it – what have we done to the place?
15
Maureen
A few months after Shirley had joined her in York, when Maureen was still seventeen, their mum and dad borrowed £100 as a deposit on a Victorian house on East Parade in the Heworth district of the city, and moved there with the girls’ brothers and youngest sister. The family was then reunited, with Maureen and Shirley able to move out of their digs and live with their parents again. On the day they moved, 15 April 1961, they were full of excited chatter and laughter as they packed their suitcases, but no matter how carefully they folded them, they now had far more clothes than they could squeeze into their cases. ‘We’ll have to make two trips,’ Maureen said, but now that they were on the brink of leaving their hated digs, neither of them could bear the thought of having to return once more. Instead, in fits of laughter, they began dressing themselves in layer after layer of their most bulky clothing.
With a final look around the room, they stumbled down the stairs, bumping their bulging suitcases from step to step, then dropped the key on the hall table and slammed the door behind them for the last time. Their elation soon began to fade. They could not afford to take a taxi and now faced a two-mile walk from their digs to the house at Heworth wearing several layers of clothes and carrying their leaden suitcases. Even worse, it was unusually hot for so early in the year, with the sun burning down out of a cloudless sky. They plodded slowly up the road, pausing frequently to rest their aching arms and wipe the sweat from their brows. Every time they heard a vehicle approaching, they gazed behind them, desperately hoping that some knight in shining armour, though more likely in a Ford Popular, would take pity on them and give them a lift, but each time the car swept past and disappeared into the distance in a cloud of dust and exhaust fumes. The girls trudged onwards, their footsteps slowing with almost every yard and the rest breaks becoming more and more frequent, and longer and longer. It took them two hours to cover the two miles, and by the time they got to the new house, both of them were drenched in sweat and almost collapsing from exhaustion.
Having moved back in with their parents, they paid their mum one pound a week for their board and lodging. Most of the girls who worked at Rowntree’s had to pay a lot more than that to their mothers, but Maureen and Shirley’s mum refused to take any more from them, leaving them with what seemed to them then to be a lot of spending money. Until he moved to York, their dad had been working at Northern Dairies at Holme on Spalding Moor, and he used to cycle all the way there from Hayton, nearly ten miles away, in all weathers. Life became a lot easier for him after they moved into the city, because he took a job at Rowntree’s as well, working in the Smarties department like his eldest daughter, so she would often see him during the day. It was a relief to both girls to be back home with their parents, not least because there was now something a lot more substantial than Cheese Whiz or potted meat on the table for their tea every night.
It was a nice area and a lovely house, though even in the early 1960s it was still by no means unusual to find houses with only the most minimal facilities. The house in East Parade had a bathroom with a bath in it, but there was no hot water supply other than a back boiler on the kitchen fire, so if there was no fire lit, the only way to get water for a bath was to heat it in saucepans on the stove or in the washing machine and then carry it up to the bathroom one pan at a time. ‘I was usually the one who had to do it,’ Maureen remembers, ‘because, though she probably wouldn’t admit it, Shirley was a bit lazy and it was hard work carrying all that water upstairs. So almost every time, she was happy to share my bathwater. I’d go first, which was only fair having done all the work, but then she’d say, “Oh, leave the water in,” and no matter how dirty it was, she would be straight in after me.’ They used to use the washing machine when they were washing their hair as well, bending over the sink and rinsing their hair with water from the outlet pipe of the washer.
There was an outside toilet in the yard, but almost invariably the light was not working because every time a light bulb went anywhere in the house, someone would pinch the bulb from the toilet to replace it. The girls hated going to the outside loo, especially after dark, but Shirley hated it the most because she was frightened of spiders and the loo was full of them. There was rarely any proper loo paper, and Maureen or one of the other children would have the job of tearing up squares of newspaper and spiking them on a nail sticking out of the back of the toilet door. Even when there was the luxury of a toilet roll, it was always an Izal one, with hard, shiny paper that was, if anything, even less pleasant to use than old newspaper.
Maureen and Peter had been going out together for over two years and had even got engaged, but they eventually split up, mainly because someone else had caught Maureen’s eye. She told Peter she was finishing with him and started going out with a boy who had a scooter instead of a motorbike. ‘So I went from a rocker to a mod,’ she says now with a laugh. Even though mods looked smarter, tending to wear sharp suits rather than the leather jackets and jeans that bikers wore, it’s doubtful whether Maureen’s parents would have been much more approving of their daughter’s choice of a mod boyfriend than they were of a rocker. A series of bank holiday riots at seaside resorts in the early 1960s, with running battles between groups of mods and rockers, and the resulting lurid media coverage, had led to calls from MPs and police for tougher penalties on hooliganism, and much soul-searching about the decline of the ‘moral fibre of the nation’. In that feverish climate, the mere sight of a group of rockers on their bikes or mods on their scooters was enough to provoke something approaching horror in the hearts of the older generation. Maureen’s church-going, strongly moral and conservative parents certainly fitted that description, but in the event she managed to persuade them that her new boyfriend was a steady, respectable lad, and not some feral hooligan.
In addition to changing boyfriends, Maureen was also ready for a change in her working life and she left Rowntree’s before she was eighteen years old. ‘Silly girl,’ she says now, shaking her head at the memory. Had she stayed there until her eighteenth birthday, she would have been on the full adult rate of pay, much more than she could earn anywhere else in York. She was a fast worker and a real hard grafter and Rowntree’s were so eager to keep her that they offered her the chance to work anywhere she wanted in the factory, from the production line to the offices, but ‘nearly eighteen, nearly ready to go onto the big money, I was stupid and I turned them down’, she says.
Maureen was bored with the work she was doing at Rowntree’s and had made up her mind that it was time for a change, so she left the factory to go and work as a waitress at Shepherds Café in The Shambles in the centre of York. It was one of the most atmospheric streets in Britain, where each storey of the medieval buildings jutted out beyond the one below so far that they cast the pavements into shadow, and it was said that you could reach out of the window on one side and shake hands with your neighbour across the street. Such sights, as well as the glories of the Minster, were beginning to draw tourists to the city, and the number of cafés and restaurants to serve them was growing, but wages in catering were very low and Britons had not really embraced the concept of tipping at the time – some still haven’t! – so Maureen’s earnings were a lot lower than they would have been had she stayed at Rowntree’s.
After Maureen left, Shirley didn’t stay at the factory very long either, going off to work at Terry’s instead. Although Rowntree’s and Terry’s were direct competitors, the companies’ rivalry never really involved their employees. ‘There wasn’t really any rivalry,’ Maureen says, ‘because you could get a job anywhere in those days. You could walk out of one job and into another one the next day, so no one really thought about rivalry or anything. We’d meet women from Terry’s when we were out and they were
friendly enough. You just worked where the money was best or where it suited you best.’ However, Shirley did not stay very long at Terry’s either, and walked out on them after a dispute with an overlooker. ‘She’s a bit fiery, is Shirley,’ Maureen says. ‘She’s not so bad now, but she used to be really fiery; I think it’s the red hair that does it.’
Soon after starting work at the café, Maureen parted company with her mod boyfriend and, through an introduction from one of the other waitresses, she then met and began going out with a boy called Brian, who was serving in the Air Force and based near York at Church Fenton. They had a whirlwind romance and were married when she was eighteen, by which time she was already carrying her first child, a son they named Brian after his father. They split up just two years later when she was twenty, even though there was a second son, Peter, on the way by then – ‘life in the fast lane’, she says now with a wry smile. Her husband had been given a short-term posting to Huntingdon and Maureen’s mum persuaded – in fact ordered – her not to go with him, insisting that with one baby and another on the way, she needed to be at home so her mother could help to look after them. Maureen’s husband was probably already having an affair while he was in Huntingdon because, as she says, ‘He always used to buy me presents when he was doing something naughty, and every other day he used to send me a couple of little bottles of Tia Maria through the post that he must have bought in the NAAFI at his base, so I was already thinking that something was up.’
He left the Air Force soon afterwards and returned to York where he started working as a bus driver, but it didn’t stop him from ‘playing away’, and when Maureen discovered that he was having an affair with a bus conductress, she threw him out and started divorce proceedings. What made it even worse in Maureen’s eyes was that the bus conductress was ‘an old woman, or that’s how it seemed to me at the time, because I was only twenty and she was thirty-two, so she seemed old to me, and yet there was my husband having an affair with her.’