Biscuit Girls

by Hunter Davies

  ‘It was boring and monotonous, but physically it was not too tiring, but then, I was a young fit woman at the time.’

  After a while, she was moved on to small Table Water Biscuits, where it was hotter as they were nearer the ovens.

  ‘You had to straighten them by hand, which only took a second, but you still got blisters from the heat if you were not careful. If you complained, the charge hand would say, “You shouldn’t hold them long enough to get blisters.”

  ‘Gloves were available but most girls didn’t wear them. You were more dexterous with bare fingers. Now of course you have to wear gloves, all the time. You are not supposed to touch anything with bare hands.’

  After her thirteen weeks trial period was up, she and her husband David had bought their G Plan sideboard. She was offered a permanent contract, so decided to stay.

  ‘I had got used with the money. As one of the lasses told me in that first week, if you survive to take your first pay packet home, you’re hooked.

  ‘I was on water biscuits with Ann McVitie as my charge hand. No, no connection with the biscuit firm. We were told she was married to George McVitie, the Carlisle United footballer, but she never talked about it.

  ‘The lasses on the team were either like me, young mothers with young children, or older married women with their children almost grown up. The older ones always looked after the younger, as I was looked after when I joined.

  ‘I discovered I had to hold my tongue at certain times, not make personal remarks about people. You might be bad-mouthing someone and then discover it was their aunty or cousin. Carr’s was full of families who had worked there for decades. It was one reason you didn’t have strikes. They knew if the factory closed, all of their family would be out of work.

  ‘There was great loyalty for each other and the firm, you would do anything to help someone else, but it was really based round the factory. You didn’t socialise much after work, but we did have some great Christmas party nights out. Everyone had their own family and children to worry about, but when there was a funeral, even of someone who had not worked there for years, hundreds would turn out. If someone was ill, we’d take turns to go and visit. There was a family culture. You had your ups and downs, but we all pulled together.’

  In 1979, Barbara had a second child, Sharon. She says she had timed it to get the maximum tax advantage, as she had done with her first child. ‘If you have them towards the end of the year, you got a good tax rebate, so I had one in November and one in December. I know it sounds awful, but I had planned it that way.’

  She had gone on the Pill just before she got married, and carried on with it till she was twenty-five. ‘When I was trying for Sharon, I always said if I didn’t have a second by the time I was aged twenty-five, that would be it, no more.

  ‘Three years after the birth of Sharon, I got sterilised, by which time I was twenty-eight. I could have asked David to have a vasectomy but something told me that was not for him. Anyway, I have always preferred to be in control. At least of myself.’

  She got no maternity leave or wages while away from work giving birth to her first child but did get maternity leave and pay with her second child. Even so she returned to work just three months afterwards, having set her sights on moving up the property ladder.

  In 1978 they had sold their small flat for £8,500 – having bought it for £5,950, therefore making a profit of almost 50 per cent in just four years. They then bought a Link house for £11,600, taking on a further mortgage. ‘Link was just a posh name for a new terrace house, but it was a whole house, with three bedrooms, so we felt we had achieved something. But in my mind, the next stage was to have our own semi. So we were still saving just as hard and still needing the two wages.’

  Her husband, since the day they had married, had handed over his entire wage packet to Barbara – as her own father had done. ‘I just copied their system. My dad would hand it over and my mum would put it all in a tin with little divisions. She would say that’s for rent, that’s for gas, that’s for food – and here’s your pocket money. It seemed to work. I have done the same pretty much all our working lives.’

  Barbara has always been the financial brains in their family, having been an ace at maths while at school, unlike David, who had no interest in money or knowledge of mortgages and interest rates, not even having a chequebook. He left it all to Barbara. Fortunately she turned out to be excellent at it. David’s interest was in cars and with Barbara’s wages coming in, he was soon able to indulge himself a little, eventually buying himself a Jaguar XJ.

  Barbara worked for the next four years on the factory floor, packing biscuits, and enjoyed the company of the other lasses.

  ‘The winters were OK but the summers can get very hot. Sticky knicker weather we called it. On really humid days you would come into work with your clothes already sticking to you, so it was terrible if you had to work on anything too near the ovens. You just sweated all day long.

  ‘When I first started working at Carr’s I used to get the bus to work and back every night. Sometimes my husband would give me a lift there and I would just get the bus home. In December 1981 I passed my driving test and was then able to use the family car to get to and from work. This was much more convenient. When the shift finished the only thing on everyone’s mind was to get to the clocking-out area and punch your time card and head to the locker area and get home as quickly as possible.

  ‘Working with women was quite good, really, as there was a good mix across the generations. The older lasses often looked out for the younger ones. Having said that, a lot of the older more experienced workers often thought they knew everything, that they could do the job better that the young ones, which wasn’t always true. The younger girls also looked out for the older lasses, especially the ones nearing retirement and were maybe struggling slightly to keep up. Basically, underneath any surface bickering or bitching that might go on, when it came right down to it we all really did look after each other.’

  Most of the other biscuit girls, and most factory workers, are content to stay at the same level, receive their wages and not have to take home any thoughts or stresses connected with work. That’s why they are doing it – simply for the money. Barbara was doing it for the money, but she was ambitious for more. Which meant she soon began to think of promotion.

  After four years packing, she applied and was accepted to be a quality controller. QC, so it was called, for which she got to wear a red collar on her overall. It was not looked upon as a greatly desirable job, so not many applied.

  ‘It wasn’t much more money, just a pound or two a week, but was more interesting and varied. You went round weighing the biscuits, picking them at random to check if they were lightweight or not. You also checked the date codes and other things. If they were light, you put up a “Hold” notice, a yellow A4 card which said “Hold For Audit”. You might be holding up fifty to sixty boxes that had already been packed, if you had found one packet light, so you weren’t very popular. Piecework had stopped by the time I started, but it still ruined their targets if you held things up.’

  The other thing Barbara had to look out for was any foreign bodies, such as a bit of metal or plastic which had got into the biscuits. By now, metal detectors had come in and all packets and boxes had to go through them automatically. If the machine started pinging, the QC had to stop the work, find the foreign body, and then work out at what stage and when it might have happened, checking when the line was last declared safe.

  ‘It was usually to do with something happening in the oven. There was a wire mesh conveyor band in most ovens. The mixing area was another critical control point. Bits could come off one of the belts. It rarely ever happened, but now with health and safety coming in, you had to check everything and get to the bottom of it.’

  The major health and safety changes in the UK started with the Health and Safety at Work Act of 1974. It was long overdue in industrial plants generally as lax methods and supervi
sion had grown up. Lack of proper rules, for example, had led to many North Sea divers being killed or injured. There were dramatic stories in the newspapers and then long-drawn-out investigations. In the mining industry as well, still going strong, corners had been cut and lives endangered. Then there was the problem of working with asbestos, which no one seemed to have realised was a potential killer. The effects of radioactivity in the nuclear industry had also not been fully understood.

  By the 1980s, health and safety procedures were being laid down in all industries and all workplaces, leading to a small army of health and safety enforcers, lots of work for lawyers and an avalanche of posters and warnings in the workplaces as the bosses covered themselves, just in case. In a biscuit factory, the worry was not just injury to any of the workers, which of course did happen, but of greater concern was possible injury or damage to customers caused by eating something dodgy in a Carr’s product, leading to legal problems and a dramatic fall in sales.

  So as a QC, Barbara’s job was vital. She was allowed to walk into any of the individual plants – as the various departments were called – and do a random test and call a halt if necessary. Not the sort of job that many ordinary working women want to do, especially if they’re only in it for the pocket money, or extra cash for Christmas.

  ‘I always got the same reply every time I opened the big doors and walked into Icing Plant. “You can fuck off right away.” That’s what the charge hand would say as soon as I entered. It didn’t upset me. It was just banter.

  ‘I didn’t swear, not till I started at Carr’s, but I heard a lot of it. Not from all the women, just a minority who seemed to swear all the time. Nothing personal. They were not swearing at you, just when telling you something. “I went to fucking Tesco and got some fucking cigarettes and then met my fucking husband…” They didn’t know they were swearing, half the time.’

  Barbara was a QC for five years. Then in 1987 she put in for another promotion, this time to that of charge hand/supervisor.

  There was a bit more money, but she was still in touch with the workers on the lines, not stuck in some office.

  ‘One of the ways to say thank you to a team who had worked well was to let them go for an extra smoke or a cup of tea for ten minutes. It would reward them with an extra break, but of course the work still had to go on, the conveyor belt was still rolling. So I would stand in the line in her place, doing her job. So even as a charge hand, you were still doing physical work.’

  As a charge hand, one of the things she had to do was sort out any rows or arguments between the girls. There was occasional shouting and swearing, though rarely did it lead to hair-pulling or punching, though that was not unknown.

  ‘You had to act quickly, when you saw it flaring up. “Right, you stand over there, I’ll talk to you later.” Then you would investigate what had happened.

  ‘For fighting you could be immediately suspended, but usually a row just resulted in a warning. After three warnings, then you could be subject to some form of more serious discipline.’

  One of the more serious breaches of conduct was ignoring SOP – Standard Operating Procedure – not doing something that should have been done, even if it did not result in an accident, though often it did.

  ‘Some of the girls didn’t care. You would say, “Right, you are now suspended, go home.” They would say, “Not bothered, it’s a sunny day, better at home than this effing place…”

  ‘They would stay at home for three days on full pay while the case was investigated, for of course until that was done it wasn’t known if they were guilty or not.

  ‘Another serious breach of conduct was hitting a charge hand, a manager or another team member, or coming into work drunk. For that you could get sacked immediately. That was considered gross misconduct.

  ‘On the whole, I can’t remember many serious incidents that I had to deal with personally. In the main it was just relatively minor squabbles.’

  Chapter 15

  Ann

  Ann, the single mother, had only planned to work at Carr’s as a Christmas extra for three months maximum, doing the evening shift, from six to ten, going straight there from her full-time job at the hair salon. Her son Adrian, now sixteen, was happy enough to go to his grandmother’s for his tea.

  ‘It was very daunting going to a work in a factory as I had never worked in one before. Even though my mother had worked there for so long, I had never actually been to it. All the different departments were still separate, like the chocolate room, or the Bourbon room, not under one roof as they later became. Going down that long corridor, it was like Spaghetti Junction – with rooms and doors and little corridors and yards suddenly leading this way and that. There seemed to be so many different areas. I got lost numerous times. It was also very noisy.

  ‘I got the bus to work each day. They were always full at finishing times with everybody rushing out of the factory to catch their bus.

  ‘Lots of women working together could cause problems on occasions as sometimes personalities clashed, but most of the time it was OK.’

  At Carr’s, her charge hand for a while was Barbara, beginning to zoom up the career ladder as well as the property ladder. Unlike our women who were born pre-war, both Ann and Barbara – born 1949 and 1953 – seemed keen from the beginning to better themselves, at work and at home.

  Ann’s three months extended to two years – over which time she still did two jobs. It meant that during the working week she hardly saw Adrian. She would go straight from the hair salon to the Carr’s factory, there being no time in between to go home. She left her house at 8.30 each morning and did not return till 10.30 at night. But it did mean she was earning good money, which of course she needed as a single mum.

  After two years at Carr’s, Ann managed to save enough for a deposit to make an offer for her council house. The Right to Buy legislation had come in under the Housing Act of 1980 and is considered to have been one of Mrs Thatcher’s major achievements. It had first been proposed in the Labour manifesto of 1959 but Labour had lost, so it was forgotten for a while. Under Mrs Thatcher’s legislation, you could get a discount depending on how long you had been a tenant in the house to compensate for all the rent you had paid.

  In 1980, Mrs Thatcher managed a much publicised photo opportunity when she handed over the keys to the very first council tenant purchaser, the Patterson family from Romford in Essex. They had lived in the house for eighteen years, which qualified them for a 40 per cent discount and they were able to buy their house for £8,315. Since 1980, it is estimated that two million council tenants in the UK have bought their own houses – many of them subsequently being sold on at a good profit. It was in 1993 that Ann acquired her council house, at a price of £18,760 on a twenty-five-year mortgage. She then decided to give up hairdressing and work at Carr’s full-time. When Adrian left school he eventually started working at Carr’s as well.

  For her first two years at Carr’s, Ann was on Bourbons. Ann found it quite hot working on Bourbons, as they were near the ovens, though it was nowhere near as hot as on the water biscuits. The difference being that the Bourbons and custard creams, unlike the water biscuits, went through a cooling process straight out of the oven, before being conveyed along to the packers. Having cream put inside them, they needed to be cooled and solidified before being handled and packaged.

  Ann worked with three other girls, picking up the Bourbons and feeding them into a wrapping machine. The biscuits came at them in a constant stream on divided tracks, like miniature railway lines. You had to keep on top of your particular track, emptying it as quickly as possible, then feeding the wrapping machine. Sometimes a machine would stop, break down, or one of the little tracks get blocked, so they had to hope one of the other girls would help you out to clear the blockage and avoid any biscuits being wasted. When that happened, the biscuits began running off the end of the line for all to see.

  ‘It paid to be good friends with all of the girls. You relied o
n them to help because if you had a problem everything would pile up.

  ‘I never knew why they didn’t have automatic packing machines – some machinery to pick up the biscuits and put them in the wrapping machine. I am sure they had been invented by now, after all these decades. But they would have been expensive, so I suppose that was the reason. Girls were cheaper.’

  One day, her uncle, who was a shop steward, asked Ann if she would like to be a shop steward too. She said no, definitely not.

  ‘During all those years in hairdressing, I had nothing to do with unions. They didn’t exist, in salons, and we all seemed to survive OK.

  ‘But my uncle came back a few months later, saying they were desperate to have a woman shop steward. Could I not just give it a try?’

  So she agreed and became one of ten shop stewards at the Carr’s factory, representing the GMB.

  The union is a result of various mergers over the years, starting in 1924 when the National Union of General Workers merged with the Municipal Employees Association to form a new union, the National Union of General and Municipal Workers. In 1982, following a merger with the Boilermakers and others, it became the General, Municipal Boilermakers and Allied Trade Unions – being known more snappily since then by its initials, the GMB. Today it has over 600,000 members, many of them manual workers, council workers and care workers.

  Carr’s at the time when Ann joined in 1991 was not a closed shop – which it had been when Barbara joined in 1977 – but when new people joined the firm, a union rep was allowed to talk to each one and explain the benefits of the union.

  Ann still worked full-time on the Bourbon line, but was allowed roughly half an hour a week for union duties, as long as she notified her charge hand well in advance. She had to attend meetings with the other shop stewards and then report back to her section any excitements, such as pay negotiations or better hours, or to distribute leaflets. Being a shop steward was not very arduous, and attracted no more pay. She did the same packing work, remained on the same wages, paid by Carr’s, but she felt it was worthwhile.