Biscuit Girls

by Hunter Davies

  In 1902 the old coaching inn was totally rebuilt, with no expense spared, four stories high in sandstone and red bricks and little towers at the top. The president of the USA, Woodrow Wilson stayed there on a state visit to the UK in 1918, insisting on stopping off in Carlisle as that had been the hometown of his mother, calling it a ‘pilgrimage of the heart’.

  By the 1950s, the hotel still had its Edwardian grandeur, with sweeping staircases and oak-panelled bars and dining rooms, head waiters in coat-tails, liveried doormen and the Crown and Mitre insignia picked out everywhere in gold, almost as if it were a royal residence. The ballroom was large and splendid and attracted the quality from the city and county who turned up for balls in their best and most formal evening wear. Not the sort of place that Ivy or any of her friends from the factory would ever frequent – though naturally very popular with Carr’s directors. But it was known and admired, if just from the outside, a grand and dominating building right in the heart of the old city.

  All day long, during the post-war years when Ivy was growing up, factory hooters constantly signalled the end of another shift. If you made the mistake of trying to get across the town at the wrong time, you would be swept along by thousands of workers released from their factories, flooding on to the street. There was work for all, now that the factories were tooling up, hoping for a post-war boom, going back to peacetime production, back to the products they had always made. During the war, many had gone over to war work, making uniforms or rations for the troops.

  In 1948, aged fifteen, Ivy, along with two other friends from school, decided to apply to Carr’s, to join the girls she had shouted at from the playground. It was looked upon as a good job for girls of Ivy’s class and education. She never saw ‘cracker packer’ as a term of contempt, unlike some of the more aspirational and middle-class Carlisle families. She saw smart girls, in smart overalls, who seemed to be cheerful and happy. Just like herself.

  Everyone in Carlisle knew about Carr’s. Its factory had dominated the skyline and the history of the city for so long – though most of its residents had probably forgotten its origins, or indeed how remarkable it was that a small city like Carlisle should have been the birthplace of biscuits as we know them today.

  The story of Carr’s began in 1831 when young Jonathan Dodgson Carr, the son of a grocer, opened his first bread shop in Castle Street in the middle of Carlisle, having walked there all the way from Kendal, about fifty miles south of the city. Kendal was in Westmorland at the time, and Carlisle was in Cumberland – both since 1974 neatly if not quite happily joined together in the new county of Cumbria.

  However, ‘walking all the way’ is a bit of a Carr family legend. It is more than likely he got a lift most of the way from a family friend who was in the tea business, but it is true that, as a second son, he did set off alone, with a pack on his back, to seek his fortune in Carlisle, which, although with a population of just 30,000, was a bigger town than Kendal with more opportunities, where industry appeared to be booming and the railways rumoured to be coming soon.

  Jonathan Dodgson Carr (1806–1884), the founding father of Carr’s of Carlisle, opened a bread shop in 1831 and then a biscuit factory in 1837, the world’s first to manufacture biscuits.

  When Jonathan Dodgson Carr opened his little bread shop, biscuits were not as we know them today. The word biscuit was in use, but it generally referred to ship’s biscuits. In Dr Johnson’s famous dictionary in 1775, he gave two definitions for biscuits. Firstly he said they were, ‘a kind of hard dry biscuit, made to be carried at sea’. Ship’s biscuits were made from hard-baked unleavened dough, which lasted much better on long voyages than bread. A seaman would tap the biscuit on a hard surface before eating it in order to dislodge the weevils. Ship’s biscuits were usually made in ports, all by hand, in a bakery near the docks, then transferred to the boats when they set off on a long voyage. When Captain Cook did his epic voyages across the globe in the 1770s, he managed to make some of his hard tack biscuits last for up to three years.

  There were also sweet biscuits, commonly known as ‘fancies’. Dr Johnson defined them as ‘compositions of fine flour, almonds, sugar, made by confectioners’.

  The specialist confectioners who produced sweet biscuits tended to cater for the quality, for the nobility and affluent middle classes, and were usually centred in the wealthy areas, such as Mayfair in London.

  In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, these sweet biscuits were not taken with tea or coffee, as today, but were considered by the upper classes as an important part of the dessert course. You dipped your biscuits in sweet wine to round off your meal. The most popular were sponge biscuits, often long and thin, made specially to fit into the narrow wine glasses of the time. (Sponge fingers today are often long and thin, reflecting their history.)

  Sweet biscuits often came in fancy shapes, decorated with elaborate motifs, such as the Prince of Wales feather, or with some other royal connection. In most big towns, high-class confectioners made their own biscuits and supplied them to the wealthy. Some of the more successful published their own recipe books, with instructions on making your own biscuits at home. Sweet biscuits were also made by housewives in their homes, who might sell some of their spares from trays on the streets.

  All these early biscuits, either hard tack or fancy sweet biscuits, were handmade, local productions by local bakers. No powered machinery was used. The sweet biscuits could not be transported more than a few miles, and even then it would need a fast stagecoach or they would very quickly go off. They certainly could not be sent off across the ocean to the far corners of the world.

  All this changed, thanks to Jonathan Dodgson Carr. Having made a success of his bakery in Castle Street, he decided in 1837 to open his own biscuit-making factory.

  This was the same factory that young Ivy, aged fifteen, applied to for a job in the autumn of 1948, 111 years later.

  * * *

  fn1 The term radar was in use, having been coined in 1940 by the US navy, an acronym for radio detection and ranging.

  Chapter 2

  Ivy

  Ivy had to have a medical when she applied to Carr’s, as did all new factory workers all over the country. She was frightened by the thought of possibly having to strip and be examined by a doctor, but in the event all they seemed concerned about was her nails.

  ‘You were not allowed nail varnish and you hadn’t to have bitten your nails. One of the girls I applied with was turned because of the state of her nails, but I got accepted. I was then told to go and pick up my overalls.

  ‘I went home and wore them all evening, in fact, I never had them off for that first week. I wanted everyone in the street to see me, show them I was in work.

  ‘Anyway, the next day, wearing my overalls, I arrived early for my first day, as I was so eager to start work. I stood looking through the windows. I could see all the girls working away. I remember thinking – I can’t imagine what it will be like, what will I do? I just had no expectations. And of course I never thought for one moment that I would end up working there for so many years.’

  At the end of that first day, Ivy and another girl decided to go home along the canal.

  ‘As we were walking along, just the two of us, this man suddenly flashed himself. What a fright we got. We ran like hell and caught up with a group of other Carr’s workers, walking from the factory. We felt safer then.

  ‘At the time, I was really scared, as it had never happened before, and I had never seen such a thing. I suppose what I should have done, which I might have done today, was go up to him and start singing “Oh what a beauty”.

  ‘Don’t you know that song? Could be an old music hall song. I learned it when I was young. No, not from my mother, she would never have sung a song like that. It might have been on the Billy Cotton Band show, just after the war.

  Oh what a beauty,

  Never seen one like that before

  Oh what a beauty

  It must b
e two feet long or more

  It’s such a lovely colour

  Nice and round and fat

  I never thought a marrow

  Could grow as big as that

  ‘That would have fettled him! I would have laughed in his face right enough. But I was only fifteen at the time, and too scared. So I ran home.’

  Jonathan Dodgson Carr would have been appalled by such behaviour, as well as by the rude song that Ivy so enjoyed singing. He was a Quaker and when he opened his new biscuit works in 1837, he was determined that all his workers should be of good moral character and behaviour.

  He had chosen for his new factory a site in Caldewgate, just outside the old walled city. It was a poor area, with many slums, situated beside the river and a canal, down which ships sailed for the open sea.

  He had done his research and experimenting and his new factory turned out to be revolutionary – the first in the world to make biscuits on an industrial scale, using steam-powered machinery and production lines. He created a machine for cutting biscuits, which until then had been cut by hand, taking the idea from a printing machine that he had seen in use at the tin factory of his friend Hudson Scott. He also adapted the system of cutting out letters, as done in the printing works, when it came to the shapes of his biscuits. One of Carr’s first lines of biscuits were alphabet biscuits, greatly loved by generations of Victorian children. It was later considered to be one of the important tools in helping the Victorians to read.

  Hudson Scott, like Jonathan Dodgson Carr, was a Quaker. It is often said that those early nineteenth-century Quaker families, who did so much to create and finance the industrial revolution, were part of a Quaker mafia. It is remarkable how many there were at the same time creating remarkable institutions – the Cadburys, Rowntrees and Frys in chocolates and sweets, the Lloyds and Barclays in banking, Clarks in shoes, Wedgwood in pottery. Behind the scenes were other Quakers, like the Pease family who helped finance the first railway lines. And yet at the time the Quakers were only a small minority of the British population, rarely more than 100,000. (Today they are greatly reduced, numbering only 14,000 adult members.)

  They did tend to know each other, which helped with contacts, but they did not do discounts or favours for each other. They usually ended up being deadly rivals, which is eventually what happened in the biscuit trade.

  But the big thing about them was that they were trusted, their word was their bond, no need for contracts or legal agreements, which their fellow Quakers knew as well as the general public. They might be dour, sombrely dressed, refusing to take oaths or accept any hierarchies, thus cutting themselves off from so many professions, such as the law, the army, academia, but they were incredibly hard-working, honest, inventive and entrepreneurial.

  They had at one time been victimised for their non-conformist beliefs, and disliked by many ordinary folks for their moralising, sanctimonious ways and rules, such as their insistence that all their workers should be abstemious – in every way.

  An indenture dated 1849, signed by a new apprentice baker at the Carr’s factory, John Sanderson of Ashley Street, Carlisle – site of Ivy’s school – shows that he had to agree ‘not to commit fornication nor contract matrimony, nor play at Cards or Dice tables. He shall neither buy nor sell. He shall not haunt Taverns or Playhouses nor absent himself from his Master’s service day or night unlawfully.’ And he had to keep this up for the whole five years of his apprenticeship.

  On the other hand, Carr’s paid good wages, provided reading rooms, a large wash bath big enough to swim in, medical and educational help, none of which his workers had at home. Jonathan Dodgson Carr created model terrace houses for his workers – naming the first street Kendal Street, after the town where he had been born.

  A report in Chambers Edinburgh Journal of 9 September 1848 praises the running of the Carr’s factory and the good health of the workers, comparing it favourably with London bakers, who had been investigated in a previous edition of the Journal and found to be over-worked, undernourished and badly treated. In contrast, Carr’s workers were well dressed and of a ‘healthy appearance’. But then, they were allowed very few unhealthy habits.

  Jonathan Dodgson Carr had chosen the Caldewgate site partly because it was on the canal – the one along which Ivy had walked on her first day. It had been built in 1823, just eleven miles to the sea, but it gave him shipping access down to Liverpool and to the wider world, for importing raw materials and for dispatching his biscuits, which until then, like all biscuits, had enjoyed only local circulation. By the 1840s he was already sending his biscuits to London.

  And at the time he was building his new factory he also knew that the railways were coming. For some time canals had been established all over the country with great success, but the Carlisle to Port Carlisle canal arrived late – and alas was killed off by the noisy newcomer before it had properly flourished. It was later filled in and converted into a railway line.

  The world’s first railway was George Stephenson’s Stockton to Darlington in 1825 – backed by the local Quakers – followed by the first passenger line, the Liverpool–Manchester in 1830. There were then plans for a cross-country line, from Newcastle to Carlisle, which eventually arrived in 1836, just before the Carr’s factory opened. Carr’s then created their own branch line, with a terminus inside their factory boundary.

  In the very early years of the factory, there seems to have been only two sorts of biscuits produced – the alphabet biscuits and a form of dry water biscuits. By the end of the 1840s, the factory was producing up to twenty different types. A diary kept by a foreman, John Irving, for the year 1849 records him being made foreman of ‘the Sugar Biscuit and Ginger Cake Department’. He describes new machines coming in to make Excursion biscuits – which would appear to have been made specially for the annual works outing – and another machine to make Pic-Nic biscuits, named after the fashionable pasttime of having picnics in parks.

  His diary entry for 4 February 1851 reads ‘Got a blowing up from John Carr about the ginger nuts being too hard baked’, and on 12 June he writes ‘Got little finger of the right hand broken with the Dessert Machine’.

  The name Rich Dessert biscuits harked back to those aristocratic diners dunking their sweet biscuits in their glass of sweet wine. There was also Captain’s Thin, a dry biscuit, a reference to the sort of better quality hard tack which the captain of the ship might have treated himself to.

  Following up on the success of the Alphabet biscuits, there were a couple of other fun lines, which did very well with families. Doggie biscuits were not for dogs but carried illustrations of the best-known and best-loved dogs and were officially known as the Kennel Range. They featured Labradors, terriers and greyhounds. Children and dog lovers enjoyed collecting and eating them, but the problem was that their prominent features, such as their nose or ears or tails, tended to get broken off. Customers complained, hoping to get a new biscuit in return, till eventually the line was withdrawn.

  Another popular line caused far less trouble as the image was flat, with no sticky-out bits. They carried the engravings of well-known and distinguished people of the time, such as Queen Victoria, the Duke of Wellington and the Prince of Wales, plus all-time greats like Shakespeare. The images were not all that clear, which was part of the fun, trying to work out who on earth they were.

  By the 1840, Carr’s biscuits had been reaching London, and in a good condition, thanks not only to the rail and sea transport, but also to the good packaging, which was due to the dexterity of the biscuit packers. No such form of labour had been needed when all biscuits were handmade and went straight from the baker’s back oven on to the counter at the front of the shop. A new breed of working life had been created.

  In 1841, Jonathan Dodgson Carr suddenly achieved some national acclaim. In some senses it was a minor award as it did not come with any prize money, but it was remarkable in that it gave recognition to a biscuit factory that had been going only a few years, situa
ted in a town a long way from anywhere, created by a family with no connections to the good and the great of the time, and in a field that had quickly become crowded, with biscuit factories beginning to spring up all over the country, from Edinburgh to Reading, once J.D. had shown the way. Carr’s was honoured with a Royal Warrant for biscuits – the first biscuit manufacturer to receive this royal seal of approval.

  No one seems to know how it happened, whether some lobbying had gone on, friends in high places had been tapped up, or a generous supply of free samples had been slipped into the royal kitchens – not, of course, that Quakers would stoop to such tricks.

  It does seem to have come out of the blue. What seems likely is that the royal household must genuinely have sampled and enjoyed some of Carr’s biscuits – which particular ones were never revealed – but once it happened, Jonathan Dodgson made the most of it. He referred to the Royal Warrant in their promotion and advertising, knowing how much it would make his rivals jealous and furious, but of course it was done discreetly, without too much shouting.

  One of the company’s earlier advertisements appeared in The Friend, the journal of the Quakers, in 1845. ‘The Queen’s biscuits manufactured by J.D. Carr, Carlisle, are in general use at the Royal Household and much approved by numerous respectable families.’

  Naturally, the packaging of the biscuits was soon emblazoned with the royal coats of arms and the proud wording: ‘By Appointment to the Her Majesty, Queen Victoria, Biscuit Manufacturers, Carr and Co, Carlisle, Established AD 1831’.

  Those words and the impressive logo were still being used by the time Ivy joined the firm in 1948, though now His Majesty had to be thanked, as there was a king on the throne, George VI.

  As a factory-line worker, Ivy found herself handling packets all emblazoned with the Royal Warrant, just as her predecessors on the line had done for over the previous hundred years.