Читать книгу The Sweethearts: Tales of love, laughter and hardship from the Yorkshire Rowntree's girls - Lynn Russell - Страница 7

On a warm Monday morning in July 1932, Madge Fisher stood fidgeting in the hallway of her terraced house while her mother, Margaret, pinned up her hair and then inspected her from top to toe. ‘Hands,’ her mother said, and Madge presented them meekly for inspection, glad that she’d remembered to wash them at the kitchen sink. She was a petite blonde girl with a quick wit and a ready smile, but her mum was a force of nature, a big, powerful woman, warm and loving, but leaving no one in any doubt that she was the boss of her own household. At seventeen stone, she dwarfed her diminutive daughter, and one look from her was enough to let Madge know when she’d done something wrong.

The front door, opening straight onto Rose Street, stood ajar, and the sun streaming through it cast a long rectangle of light onto the threadbare strip of carpet in the hall and the scuffed toes of the hand-me-down shoes Madge had inherited from one of her sisters. She fidgeted even more as her mum straightened the collar of her dress and repinned her hair for the third time. ‘I’m going to be late if I don’t go now, Mam,’ Madge said, so with a last critical glance at her daughter, Margaret hugged her and then stood on the doorstep to wave her off.

There was the sound of horse’s hooves and a brief, warm smell of stables as a horse and cart plodded slowly past, the rag and bone man’s cry of ‘Rag and Bo-o-o-o-ne’ echoing from the walls. He sat with the reins held loosely in his lap, the open cart behind him already littered with a few bundles of rags and a heap of thick beef bones left over from Sunday joints. Nothing was wasted in those days. Madge’s mum collected used brown-paper bags, carefully smoothing and folding them and putting them in the kitchen drawer for later use. They shared the drawer with bits of string, coiled and tied like small bowties, and rubber bands and paperclips that were stored in neatly labelled old tobacco tins. Food was never thrown away but used and reused, so that Sunday’s roast meat would be served cold on Monday (washday), reheated in a stew on Tuesday, then minced and cooked as a shepherd’s pie on Wednesday, and the last of it served up as rissoles on Thursday. Friday, of course, was always a fish day.

The rags collected by the rag and bone man would go to the ‘shoddy merchants’ in the Heavy Woollen district around Batley and Dewsbury, to be spun back into blankets or cheap yarn, while the bones went to the glue factories, the eye-watering stink revealing their presence long before the factories came into sight. The rag and bone man exchanged this near worthless waste, not for money, but for little muslin bags of ‘dolly blue’, used to whiten the sheets and shirts on washday, or donkey stones like the ones Madge’s mum and her neighbours used to scour a neat white strip onto the edge of their front steps. Some even did the edges of the kerb stones at the side of the street. It was not just a sign that the owners were houseproud; on winter evenings and early mornings the white edges shone faintly and helped them to avoid stumbling over the kerbs or the steps in the darkness.

As Madge reached the corner of the street she glanced back. Her mum was still standing on the step, and although she was already deep in conversation with their next-door neighbour as usual, she gave an answering wave to her daughter before she disappeared from sight. Fourteen years old and just two days after she had left the Haxby Road School that stood at the end of the street, Madge was about to enter the world of work for the first time. The flood of workers who had been walking and cycling up the Haxby Road only minutes before had now dwindled to a trickle. The last few, half a dozen women in turbans and white overalls, hurried past Madge, two of them smoking a last cigarette before they reached the factory gates.

The walk to Rowntree’s should have held few terrors for Madge, for Rose Street was so close to the factory that the smell of chocolate was always in the air, a constant thread in her childhood memories. Her family and Rowntree’s were as closely linked as the lettering in a stick of rock, and in fact confectionery was arguably as much a family business for the Fishers as it was for the Rowntrees. Madge’s father worked as a fireman in the Rowntree’s Fire Brigade, and every single one of Madge’s nine brothers and sisters was already at Rowntree’s as well. There had never been any question that Madge would also be going to the factory or, like most girls in York, that she would leave school at the legal minimum age. Very few parents could afford the luxury of continuing to subsidize children who wanted to further their education. It was a straightforward economic necessity: as soon as you were old enough to earn your keep, that is what you had to do. When each of her brothers and sisters had left school, at the end of the spring or summer term, depending on when their fourteenth birthday fell during the year, straight to the factory they all went. Now she was treading the same path.

Yet despite her brothers and sisters already being at Rowntree’s, as Madge walked up the Haxby Road, she found her footsteps slowing at the daunting thought of what lay ahead. Even more than York Minster, Rowntree’s dominated the city. The factory’s countless buildings sprawled over a site that spanned the whole area between Haxby Road and Wigginton Road, extending well over a mile from north to south. It was so vast that there was even room for allotments on the Wigginton Road side, while to the north of the factory buildings there were acres of sports grounds and open fields. Rowntree’s even had its own network of railway sidings inside the factory grounds, a small station, Rowntree’s Halt, on the main line, and its own wharf on the Foss Lock – the navigable part of the River Foss. Barges with gleaming brass, varnished woodwork and buckets and watering cans painted in the traditional ‘canal’ style shuttled between York and the deep-water port of Hull on the Humber, bringing cocoa beans from Ghana and Nigeria, gum arabic – the sap of the acacia tree – from Sudan, hazelnuts from Turkey, Ethiopian coffee, vanilla from Tahiti, Jamaican honey and a score of other exotic ingredients. They were discharged into the factory’s huge bonded warehouses on the waterfront in Hungate, and the barges would then depart laden with chocolates and confectionery for export.

The Rowntree’s factory was a town within the town: ‘You could almost have lived your life there and never left,’ one former worker said. ‘There was everything you could ever need right there,’ including a shop, a post office, a library, a cinema, a gymnasium, tennis courts, sports fields, a swimming pool and a dining hall. Built in 1913, and used as a military hospital during the First World War, the Dining Block spread over three floors and could seat well over 2,000 people at a time, yet that was just a fraction of the thousands employed at the factory. There were around 8,000 at the time that Madge began work, and by the end of the decade that had grown to over 12,000 – 30 per cent of York’s entire working population. Rowntree’s employed so many people that at 5.30 every evening the Haxby Road was swamped by an avalanche of men and white-clad women pouring out of the factory on foot and on bicycles, while the queue of buses waiting to take home those who lived further afield extended for half a mile along the road. So narrow was the bridge over the railway that two buses could pass each other with only inches to spare, increasing the congestion still more and endangering the crowds of pedestrians spilling out from the pavement into the roadway.

As Madge crossed the bridge over the railway line, passing the little shop where another latecomer had paused to buy a newspaper and a packet of five cigarettes, a billowing cloud of steam and smoke from an engine waiting at the signals below swirled around her and a few black smuts drifted down to the pavement around her feet. The train that brought hundreds of workers from Selby every morning was discharging the last of its passengers at Rowntree’s Halt, and in the sidings she could see lines of goods wagons waiting for a shunting engine to haul them into the factory.

Her walk led her alongside the dark-blue-painted iron railings that surrounded the factory, and as she passed the first set of gates she quickened her pace when she saw the time on the large clock set into a tall, white-painted concrete pillar just inside the gates. There were similar clocks at all the entrances to the factory, perhaps as a warning to late-arriving employees of how much pay they were about to lose, for if you were even two minutes late for work at Rowntree’s, you would find the doors shut and locked until lunchtime and your wages would be docked a full morning’s pay. It was now five minutes before her interview and she did not want to be late; she had heard of girls who had been turned away and refused a job without even being given an interview if they failed to arrive on time.

Just beyond the first gates, facing the road but still within the confines of the factory site, she passed the Joseph Rowntree Memorial Library, a quaint-looking, red-brick Arts and Crafts building dedicated to the man who had ruled the company for over half a century until his death in 1925. With its arched leaded windows and stone pillars framing the entrance, it looked rather like a small church, perhaps an apt reflection of the reverence that its founder had felt for education and self-improvement through learning.

Smoothing an imaginary crease from her dress, she turned in through the main gates on the north side of the library and passed along an avenue of trees next to the Rose Lawn, an area of grass and flowerbeds that contained another memorial to Joseph Rowntree. Three small oak lampposts and a row of oak benches stood around the lawns, all carved by Robert Thompson, ‘The Mouseman of Kilburn’, with his signature, a small carved mouse, on each of them, as on every piece of oak furniture he ever made. Every summer, men from the Rowntree’s Joiners department would carefully sand down the benches and then revarnish them to preserve them in perfect condition through the coming winter.

Madge had no time to admire them, let alone sit on them, and she hurried on towards the doors of the building. As she entered the lobby she was greeted by the smell of polish and the scent of the cut flowers that stood in two large vases at either side of the entrance. Just inside the doors there was also a life-size statuette of ‘Plain Mr York’, a smiling, bespectacled figure, wearing a top hat and tails and holding a tray of souvenir postcards that visitors to the factory were encouraged to take.

The timekeeping office stood just beyond the lobby on the left-hand side of the entrance corridor, flanked by some of the time clocks on which every employee had to clock in and out at the start and finish of the working day. The timekeeper, a florid-faced man with a thick, grey moustache, kept a watchful eye on the comings and goings of the staff from a hatchway set into the wall. Madge hung on her heel for a moment as he dealt with someone else, but then he looked up and winked at her. ‘You’re new,’ he said. ‘Here for the interview?’ He turned his head to glance at the clock. ‘Cutting it fine, aren’t you? And I’m afraid you’re in the wrong place, love. The interviews are in the Dining Block across the road.’ He pointed back the way she had just come. ‘You can take the tun–’ But terrified that she would now be late, Madge had already turned and run back out of the doors.

She sprinted across the road, dodging a bus and a bicycle on the way, and burst in through the doors of the Dining Block just as the minute hand of the clock on the end wall clicked round to 7.30. A woman with a self-important air and a sheaf of papers in her hand glanced from the clock to Madge, pink-faced from exertion and still breathing hard from the run across the road, and pursed her lips in disapproval. But she only asked ‘Interview?’ and then pointed to the bench on the other side of the corridor, next to a small staircase, where another young girl was already seated. ‘Wait there a moment and someone will come down for you.’

Madge did as she was told, exchanging a nervous smile with the other girl. They sat in silence for a couple of minutes, with Madge glad of the chance to get her breath back, and then there was the clatter of heels on the stone stairs and a girl appeared. She looked scarcely older than them, but already had the bored and slightly condescending air of a hard-bitten veteran. ‘You waiting for Mrs Sullivan?’ she said.

They looked at each other, uncertain of who they were waiting for.

‘You are here for an interview, aren’t you?’ the bored-looking girl said, not even bothering to conceal her irritation. ‘Well come on then.’ She jerked her head to signal them to follow her and then went back upstairs without waiting to see if they were behind her.

They hurried after her and at the top of the stairs found themselves in an open area lined with glass cases displaying some of the beautiful commemorative chocolate boxes the workers in the Card Box department had made for special occasions such as Valentine’s Day, Easter and Christmas, or for members of the Royal Family; Queen Mary had a standing order for a dozen elaborate boxes of Rowntree’s chocolates as Christmas gifts.

The girl handed Madge and the other interviewee over to Mrs Sullivan, a middle-aged woman with wire-rimmed glasses and grey hair tied back in an immaculate bun. She gave them a brief welcoming smile and then led them into a small office furnished with hard wooden chairs and plain wood desks, just like the ones at Madge’s school, right down to the steel-nibbed pens, the inkwells and the sheets of well-used, dark-green blotting paper. Mrs Sullivan told them to sit down and then handed them each a form on which they entered their name, address, age, the school they’d attended, their hobbies and their other personal details. The tip of her tongue protruding from the corner of her mouth, Madge completed her form with painstaking care, desperate not to smudge it or drop ink blots on it.

Mrs Sullivan looked up as the sound of scratching pen nibs ceased. ‘Now,’ she said, as she collected the completed forms from them, ‘we have a series of tests for you to complete, but don’t worry.’ Again there was the flicker of a smile. ‘They’re not like exams that you pass or fail, these are simply to give us a good idea of what you can and can’t do, and what you’re best at, so that we can decide – everything else being satisfactory, of course – which department to allocate you to. You’ll also have a medical and our dentist will check your teeth.’ She gave another thin smile at the look of panic that crossed Madge’s face.

‘I’ve never been to a dentist before,’ Madge said.

‘Then it’s high time you went,’ the woman said. ‘But don’t be alarmed. It’s perfectly routine and quite pain-free.’

The two girls were separated and Madge was led into another, larger room, where three people, two men and one woman, were waiting. All wore white lab coats, giving them the air of doctors or scientists, and each carried a stopwatch and a clipboard. They were industrial psychologists, whose role was to study working methods and identify the most suitable new recruits for any given task. Industrial psychology was a still-novel quasi-science much admired by Seebohm Rowntree, who had succeeded his father as chairman of the company, and its stated aims were not just to use scientific methods to increase efficiency, but to produce a ‘correspondingly higher standard of comfort and welfare for the workers’ and eliminate ‘all the unhappiness caused by what is popularly called putting the round peg in the square hole’. Laudable though those aims may have been in theory, their practical application via ‘time and motion’ studies almost invariably led to employees being required to do more work, more quickly, for little or no more reward, and the individuals with their stopwatches and clipboards soon became hated figures.

To help them assess potential employees, the industrial psychologists devised home-spun tests and pieces of ‘home-made’ apparatus, including colour-recognition tests and a formboard like the child’s toy in which different shapes have to be matched to the right holes on a wooden board, enabling them to ‘weed out those girls who are unlikely to become efficient packers’. It was to remain the yardstick by which Rowntree’s graded potential production line employees for thirty years.

Madge was to be the latest new recruit to be graded by these methods. The leader of the group, a man with dark hair flecked with grey and a small goatee beard, explained each test to Madge and then one of his assistants placed the equipment in front of her. ‘These tests are to assess your aptitude for the different kinds of work you might be doing here,’ he said. ‘Please complete them accurately and as quickly as you can. The first test is to place these wooden shapes into the correct spaces in the formboard. Some of the shapes are incorrect, either because they are the wrong size or because they are damaged, and those you should place on one side. Now if you are ready? But please do not begin until I tell you to.’

His assistants then placed a wooden board with different-shaped indentations in front of her and a tray containing the wooden shapes to her right, and a moment later the man with the goatee said ‘Go’ and clicked his stopwatch. As Madge began sorting the shapes and fitting them into the recesses on the board, she could see from the corner of her eye that they were watching her intently and making occasional notes on their clipboards, but she did her best to ignore that and carried on sorting the shapes. She tried one in a couple of different places before consigning it to the reject pile, but eventually she filled the last recess and heard the faint metallic click as they stopped their watches in unison. She glanced at their faces, but their expressions remained impassive as they compared their notes and figures, making it impossible for her to read how well or badly she had done.

The next test involved sorting items by colour, which she did by posting different coloured cards into the correct matching boxes, and then she had to fit shaped pieces of wood into a square frame. There were a series of other tests, including a paper with puzzles to solve and a set of mathematical problems that again made Madge feel as if she had been transported back to the school classroom. They also took her temperature and measured how warm her hands were, something she might have found alarming had one of her sisters not told her that they did this because you could not go into chocolate piping – hand-piping designs onto the top of individual chocolates using an icing bag – if your hands were too warm, because it made the chocolate go white as it cooled.

Finally she was asked to pack some dummy chocolates into a box while once more they timed her with stopwatches. ‘The chocolates are actually made of plaster of Paris, so I advise you not to taste them,’ the leader of the group said, permitting himself a small smile, though the expressions on his companions’ faces showed it was a joke that had grown whiskers from constant repetition. ‘Pack them in exactly the same order as the box on your left, and once more, please do not begin until I tell you to.’ His assistants then placed a full chocolate box on her left, an empty one in front of her and set down a wooden tray containing the plaster ‘chocolates’ on her right. Madge sat studying the layout of the full box, her hands poised over the dummy chocolates until she heard the word ‘Go’ and the faint click from their stopwatches, then scrambled to pack the chocolates into the individual frilled paper cups inside the box as quickly as she could.

When she had completed all the tests, the three of them conferred briefly, their impassive faces still giving Madge no hint of how well or badly she had done. The woman added something to the notes she had been making on Madge’s form and then ushered her back into the corridor. Mrs Sullivan was waiting for her, and having studied the form – Madge herself was not permitted to see it – she gave a brief smile and said, ‘Congratulations. Subject to a satisfactory medical, you have been passed as suitable for employment at Rowntree’s.’

Madge felt no elation or excitement at that, only relief that she would not have to go home and tell her parents that, uniquely among the members of her very large family, she would not be working at the factory. Whether because Madge’s hands were too warm, or because she hadn’t shown enough dexterity and speed when posting shapes on the formboard, or simply because it was the only place where they were currently short-staffed, Mrs Sullivan told her that, providing her medical examination did not reveal any unexpected problems, she would be assigned to work in the Card Box Mill, where they made the boxes for the Rowntree’s chocolate assortments and made and printed the packaging for all the company’s brands.

She then led Madge along the corridor to a suite of rooms with a sign reading ‘Occupational Health Department’, and left her in the care of a nurse. The rooms were light and airy, with a strong background smell of carbolic disinfectant. Madge was first seen by an optician, a man in his thirties wearing horn-rimmed spectacles and a spotted bowtie, who shone a light into her eyes and then had her read a series of letters of diminishing size from a chart on the wall. She rattled them off right down to the end of the bottom line, and would have told him the manufacturer’s name in tiny print at the bottom had he not held up a hand and said, ‘Thank you, Miss Fisher, your eyesight is marvellous.’

She returned to the nurse, who scrutinized Madge with the air of a horse dealer assessing a filly, and then rattled off a series of questions. ‘Ever had any serious medical complaints? Ever been in hospital? Ever suffered fits, blackouts or seizures? Any of your family suffer from TB? Any family history of mental illness? Do you suffer from ringworm or any other skin complaint?’ As Madge replied ‘No’ to each question, the nurse made a note on the pad in front of her. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘take off your dress so I can examine you. If you’ve got any skin complaints, then we’ll have to treat them before you can begin work.’

Madge hesitated, embarrassed, but then took off her outer clothes and stood there in her underwear, acutely aware of how old, patched and mended it was. ‘Hold out your hands,’ the nurse said. ‘And now turn them over so I can see the other side.’ She also checked Madge’s back, neck and legs for signs of any skin conditions, felt the glands in her neck and parted the hair on her scalp. ‘Just checking for nits,’ she said. ‘All right, no problems there. Now I just need to measure your height and weigh you.’

Madge stood in front of the wooden measure fixed to the wall while the nurse checked her height. When Madge stood on the scales, she saw the nurse frown as she adjusted the weights until the scale was in balance, and then read the figure. ‘Seven stone four,’ she said. ‘A bit light for your height. You need to put a bit of weight on.’

‘Why’s that?’ Madge asked.

‘Because if you’re too thin, you’re more likely to be ill. That means you’re more likely to be off work and that costs Rowntree’s money.’

‘Not me,’ Madge said. ‘I’m never ill.’

‘Just the same,’ the nurse said. ‘Tell your mam that I said you need a bit more weight on your bones. Now, get dressed, and then you just need to see the dentist and you’re done. It’s the next room down the corridor from this one. Just knock and walk in.’

The dentist had a fully equipped surgery and Madge looked around with interest, tinged with more than a little fear. She might never have been to the dentist herself, but she’d heard enough scare stories from people who had to be very nervous about it. The dentist bustled in, all brisk efficiency. ‘Now, let’s have a look at those teeth of yours, shall we, Miss Fisher?’ he said, steering her into the leather chair and then pressing a foot pedal to recline it. ‘All right, open wide.’

She felt herself go rigid as he leaned over her with a dental mirror in one hand and a thin steel probe in the other. ‘Just relax,’ he said. ‘I promise you, I’ve done this before and I’m not going to hurt you.’ She was grateful for his attempt to put her at ease, though it did little to soothe her nerves. He fell silent as he began to probe her teeth. Madge had just begun to relax a little when she felt a stab of pain as he tested one of her back teeth. A few moments later, she yelped at another twinge from the opposite side of her mouth.

The dentist checked the last few teeth, then brought the chair upright again. ‘I’m afraid those two teeth are going to have to come out,’ he said.

Madge felt the blood drain from her face at the thought. ‘But it’s the first time I’ve ever had teeth out,’ she said, with a tremor in her voice. ‘In fact it’s the first time I’ve ever been to a dentist.’

‘From the state of your teeth, I rather thought it was,’ he said. ‘But don’t worry. We’ll give you an anaesthetic – some gas – and you won’t feel a thing.’ He gave her a brief professional smile that did little to reassure her. He then asked her when she’d last eaten, and luckily – if that was really the word, Madge thought, as she peered over his shoulder at the frightening-looking steel implements in the sterile cabinets behind him – she’d been too nervous to eat breakfast before she left the house that morning. The dentist studied her pale, frightened face for a moment. ‘Do any of your family work here?’

She nodded. ‘My father, three brothers and six sisters.’

He smiled. ‘Then I’m sure we can spare one of them from their work for half an hour. I’ll send word for one of your sisters to come and sit with you.’

The dental nurse took her back out to the waiting room and sent for Madge’s sister Rose, the next in age to her, to come from the Card Box Mill. Rose arrived ten minutes later, glad of any interruption to the monotonous routine of the working day, and sat with Madge, making nervous small talk until it was time for her to go back into the surgery.

The nurse helped Madge into a white gown and settled her back in the chair. She felt like a very small child as two men loomed over her, the dentist behind her and a red-faced anaesthetist with the ruptured veins of a heavy drinker in front of her. He wheeled a metal stand with two tall gas bottles over to the chair and checked the gauges and settings. ‘Is that laughing gas?’ Madge asked, half frightened and half intrigued.

‘No,’ he said. ‘This one puts you completely to sleep.’ He unhooked the mask with a flexible hose attached to it and placed it over her nose and mouth, then told her, ‘Now, just close your eyes and breathe deeply.’ The mask was cold and hard and smelled of rubber, and it also had a slightly acrid tang, like the cupboard under the kitchen sink at home where Madge’s mum kept the bleach and lye soap. She heard a faint hissing sound and took a tentative breath and then another, her palms prickling with a nervous sweat. The gas felt cold in her nose and mouth and a feeling of dizziness and nausea crept over her. She couldn’t remember anything after that.

Rose had stayed in the waiting room, but she could see the blurred movements of the dentist through the frosted glass, and heard the murmured conversation of the two men and then the gruesome, grinding sounds as the steel forceps gripped and twisted Madge’s teeth and pulled them out one by one. Madge herself saw and heard none of that, and remembered nothing else until she came round a few minutes later. As she regained consciousness, still half drugged by the gas, she began shouting for her sister and saying, ‘I remember, Rose. I remember.’

At the sound of her sister’s voice, Rose jumped up, knocked on the door and without waiting for an answer, pushed it open and ran in. ‘What do you remember, Madge?’ she said, squeezing her sister’s hand.

In her gas-fuelled dreams, Madge had been seeing herself as a piece of confectionery on the Rowntree’s production line. ‘I was coming down this chute,’ she said. ‘And I saw you at the end of the chute waiting for me.’ She tried to sit up but was still very groggy. Her mouth tasted foul and as she probed with her tongue, she felt the soft fleshy cavities in her gums where the two teeth had been removed. The dental nurse had meanwhile steered Rose back to the waiting room while the dentist made a final check of Madge’s mouth.

‘Everything’s fine,’ he said. ‘They’ll heal up perfectly well, but don’t eat or drink anything until teatime and, tempting though it is, don’t keep testing the cavities with your tongue, because if you do, they’ll start bleeding again. And Miss Fisher? If you don’t want to be coming back to see me again, you need to take better care of those teeth. Brush them twice a day, morning and night, and don’t eat so many toffees.’

‘I don’t eat toffees,’ Madge protested.

‘Well, chocolates then, or gums, or whatever sweets you do eat.’ He paused, studying her face. ‘All right now? Then let’s see if we can get you back on your feet and into the waiting room. You may be a little unsteady at first, but the nurse will help you.’

Later, Madge would look back on her first taste of dentistry with relief that the experience had not been worse, because the stories circulating around the factory about the company dentist cast serious doubts over his competence. One of her fellow workers, Muriel, recalls that ‘After a visit to have a tooth removed, it put me off going to any dentist for life, as he broke it so many times and even then left a bit of tooth stuck in my gum,’ necessitating several visits to a different dentist to repair the damage. Others suffered even more at his hands. One girl, Marjorie Chapman, had to have five teeth out before she could start work at Rowntree’s. As she went under the anaesthetic, the last thing she remembers seeing was ‘a tram going by with all the faces looking at me’. The extraction was a prolonged, messy and very bloody affair, and Marjorie ended up having to be taken to hospital to have her gums stitched. ‘It was rough,’ she says. ‘My mouth was dreadful and I was only fourteen. It was about eight weeks before I could start work and the dentist got in terrible trouble over it.’

With Rose walking alongside them, the nurse steered Madge back to the waiting room and then, after she’d had a few more minutes to recover, took her out to the main office area, where Mrs Sullivan was still sitting at her desk. She peered at Madge over her glasses, then turned to Rose. ‘Your sister seems fine now,’ she said. ‘So you’d better be getting back to work, hadn’t you?’

Rose gave a reluctant nod, squeezed Madge’s hand and walked off down the corridor as Mrs Sullivan turned her attention to Madge’s form. She made another note on it, then nodded to herself and added her signature at the bottom.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘You’ll start in the Card Box Mill tomorrow morning at 7.30 a.m. prompt. Your pay will be eleven shillings a week for a forty-four hour week.’ She took a printed booklet from her desk drawer and handed it to Madge. ‘This is a copy of the Works Rules and Regulations. We expect you to read it, know the rules and abide by them at all times. Any breach of them will be treated as a matter for disciplinary action.’

She paused and gave Madge a questioning look, making sure the message had been received. ‘Now, you’ll need two white turbans and two overalls with no pockets in them. We don’t supply them, you have to provide your own, but if you’ve no money and can’t afford them, we have an arrangement with the stores in town. You can get them there and we’ll deduct the money from your wages, a shilling a week, until you’ve paid for them. You’ll need to wear stockings and flat shoes, no high heels, no sandals and no jewellery other than wedding rings.’ She paused again. ‘Though you’ll not have one of those just yet, will you? No make-up and no perfume allowed, no pins or small objects of any kind, and no food to be brought into the working areas. You’ll need money for a drink at break time, and a little “sailor bag” to hang around your neck to keep your money in. There’s a ten-minute morning break and you get an hour at dinnertime. If you’re not going home for your dinner, you can buy a meal in the Dining Block – the food is good and it’s cheap, too. Any questions? No? Then we’ll see you tomorrow at 7.30 a.m. sharp. Don’t be late or you’ll be locked out and lose your morning’s pay. Report to the timekeeper’s office just inside the main doors and someone will meet you there and take you over to the Card Box Mill.’

As Madge turned into Rose Street on her way home, with the metallic taste of blood in her mouth, she saw her mother on the step, still chatting to her neighbour. ‘Well?’ she said, as Madge walked up to her.

‘I’ve had two teeth out,’ Madge said, opening her mouth to show her mother her sore and bleeding gums.

‘Never mind that,’ her mum said. ‘Did they take you on?’

‘Yes, in the Card Box Mill.’

Her mum nodded to herself as if she’d known it all along. ‘Good. Well, you’ll not lack for company, will you? You’ve got two sisters already working there.’

Madge felt a little crestfallen that her mother was treating her success at gaining a job so matter of factly – paid work of any kind wasn’t exactly thick on the ground in 1932 – and her disappointment must have shown in her face, because a moment later her mum’s expression softened and she gave Madge a hug. ‘I’m proud of you,’ she said. ‘Now get yourself changed and go and enjoy your afternoon off. It’s the last one you’ll be having on a weekday for quite a while.’ She winked at their neighbour. ‘About fifty years, if all goes to plan.’ Madge could hear them still laughing at the joke as she hurried upstairs to get changed.

Madge was even excused helping with the tea that night, though she and Rose were quite adept at dodging those duties anyway. The next sister, Laura, always did more than her share, and as she was making the tea she would often say plaintively to her sisters, ‘Come on, you two, I’ve been at work the same as you, give me a hand,’ but Rose and Madge would usually find ways to sneak off and not reappear until tea was actually on the table, and most of the time they would get away with nothing worse than a reproachful look from Laura.

Madge was born in the house in Rose Street on 29 May 1918 – Royal Oak Day. The First World War was still raging and her father was away fighting on the Western Front. He didn’t set eyes on his new daughter until eight months later, when he was demobbed after the end of the war. Madge was the youngest of ten children – seven girls and three boys. Her dad had ginger hair and her mum was fair, he was right-handed and she was left-handed, and their ten children were split along similar lines: five of them had ginger hair and five of them – including Madge – had fair hair; five of them, again including Madge, were left-handed and five of them were right-handed.

Rose Street was about 200 yards long, running the full distance between Haxby Road and Wigginton Road. There were fifty identical terraced houses on either side of the street, with a narrow back lane behind them. There was virtually no traffic in the street at all – only one of all the occupants of the houses in the street had a car, and even that was used only at weekends – so the local kids could play in the street all day long. Madge and her friends had a skipping rope, fixed to a hook in the wall and stretching from one side of the street to the other, and she can still remember the skipping rhyme she and her friends used to sing on her birthday.

Twenty-ninth of May,

Royal Oak Day,

If you don’t give us a holiday,

We’ll all run away.

Where shall we run to?

Down the lane,

To see the teacher with the cane.

The girls would play rounders in the street as well, while the boys played cricket in summer with an old tennis ball and a wooden crate for stumps, and in winter they kicked an old, scuffed leather football around, and when that was lost they used a bundle of rags, tightly bound together with string, as a substitute.

There was a corner shop at the end of Rose Street. When Madge was small it was a sweet shop, and her parents or one of her older sisters would sometimes give her and Rose a penny to go and buy some sweets. ‘I used to think I could buy the whole shop for a penny,’ Madge says. ‘Rose and I would stand there for ages trying to decide what to buy.’

The rooms in the two-up, two-down houses were very small, so much so that a tall man could stand with his arms outstretched in any of the rooms and almost touch the opposite walls simultaneously. Downstairs there was a kitchen at the back with a floor of bricks, and a coal fire with an oven alongside it where Madge’s mum used to do her baking. As a child, one of Madge’s jobs was to polish the oven once a week with black lead. There were twelve mouths to feed, and every other day her mum would make up big bowls of bread dough, leave it to rise and then bake it in the fire oven, filling the house with the delicious aroma of fresh-baked bread. The big wooden table where she made the bread was also used to scrub the clothes on washday – Monday – the day of the week the girls used to dread. All of them were roped in to help with the task of washing and airing the sheets and clothes from the week, and with their mum too busy washing to cook, the Monday evening meal was usually an unappetizing cold spread of the leftovers from Sunday.

Madge’s mum and dad didn’t go out often – aside from anything else they couldn’t afford it – but once in a while they would get dressed up in their Sunday best clothes and go to the Grand picture house to see a film. Madge and Rose would sit on the edge of their mum’s bed, watching her putting on her make-up, and they’d say to each other, ‘We’ll do that when we’re older.’ Once their parents had gone out, despite all their promises of good behaviour, the children would go wild around the house, with Madge’s brother Jimmy and sister Laura getting up on the wooden table in the kitchen and dancing like mad.

The front room was kept for best and only used on Sundays. One Sunday, Madge’s sister Ginny was coming through from the kitchen with a shovelful of coals to light the little fire when Madge came running out of the room, straight onto the edge of the red-hot shovel. It could have blinded her, but it missed her eyeball by millimetres and she escaped with a bad burn on her eyelid. There was a piano in the front room and Madge was sent to a music teacher for piano lessons, but she was so desperate to get out and play with her friends in the street that she barely ever practised at home. She used to sit in the front room and bang away on the piano, while her mum, who had a tin ear for music, would call out from the kitchen, ‘That’s good, our Madge.’ The truth was, the family had wasted their money, because Madge could only just about play ‘Chopsticks’ and nothing else.

Upstairs there were two and a half bedrooms: two bedrooms and a tiny boxroom where her brother Dick slept. He made a hole in the door and used to spy on his sisters and tease them, usually leading to a noisy chase down the stairs. Madge’s mum and dad had one room, though they shared it with their youngest children when they were small, and the rest of the kids slept three and four to a bed, topped and tailed, with two at the top of the bed and two at the bottom. Madge slept that way every night for five years. Only when the eldest boy, John, and their eldest sister, Edna, had both left home and got married did the congestion ease a little. Somehow there was also room in the tiny house for a large collie dog as well.

There was no bathroom in the house, just a tin bath hanging on a hook on the outside wall next to the back door; the toilet was also outside, next to the coal shed at the end of the long, narrow yard. It was what was called a ‘duckett’ toilet, like a bucket with a wooden seat over it. When they were younger, Madge and her sister Rose used to go out there with a candle after dark and drop candle wax on the backs of their hands, then go in and say, ‘Look at all the spots we’ve got!’ in the hope of persuading their mother that they had gone down with measles or some other infectious disease that would have got them a few days off school. Madge’s mum was not born yesterday, however, and was not so easily fooled. ‘I’ll give you spots,’ she’d say, and chase them out of the room.

Madge was a little scared of the dark out in the yard, with the wind blowing, rustling the dead leaves and making the door creak, and if she wanted to go to the toilet at night, she always waited for Rose and went with her. When Rose had finished with the toilet and it was Madge’s turn, Rose used to say, ‘Right, I’m going now,’ and pretend she was going to go back into the house, while Madge was crying and saying, ‘I’m going to tell my mam if you don’t stop it.’

There was a little raised flowerbed in one corner of the yard where her mum grew flowers such as geraniums and pansies, and a home-made pigeon loft where one of Madge’s brothers used to keep a few fan-tailed doves. Madge’s mum would block up the grate in the middle of the yard and fill it with water so that the pigeons could have a drink and a bathe. They also kept an old drake that lived in a pen at the end of the yard. It had a vicious streak, and if it got out it used to chase Madge and the other small children out of the yard and down the back lane. They wouldn’t come back until one of the grown-ups had rounded it up and shooed it back into its pen.

A cobbled lane ran along the rear of the house, flanked by Parson’s Wall, a high stone wall surrounding the garden of the vicarage, which contained an orchard full of apple trees. In late summer, Madge and her sisters and brothers would climb over the wall and help themselves to the apples, even though the parson seemed an intimidating, almost sinister figure when they were young. He was very tall and dressed all in black, with a long black frock coat and broad-brimmed black hat; he looked more like an undertaker than a priest to them. However, their fear did not stop Madge and her friends from playing tricks on him sometimes. They would sneak through his garden, tiptoe up to his front door and knock loudly on it. Then they would wait, peering through the letterbox, until they saw him appear from his study at the far end of the hall, and then they would turn and run like mad, sprinting away through the orchard and over the wall, arriving back home more out of breath from laughter than from running.

They also had a rusting black bicycle – one of the old-fashioned, heavy iron ‘sit up and beg’ types – that they named ‘Black Bess’ after Dick Turpin’s steed, and they used to take turns to go round and round the block on it, pedalling down the street and round the back lane, while the others counted loudly the minutes and seconds it took. That simple pastime could occupy them for hours until the gang gradually lost interest and drifted away in search of the next game or amusement.

Being the youngest of the ten children, Madge was, she says, ‘really spoilt’, and her sisters Marian and Ginny even used some of their wages from the factory to pay by weekly instalments for a top-of-the-range Silver Cross dolls’ pram for her, together with two beautiful dolls. One of her other sisters, Mabel, used to do a lot of knitting and she chipped in by knitting all the dolls’ clothes. Madge hardly ever used to play with that pram or those dolls, but she was not being a spoilt brat, for she had a friend across the road whose family were even poorer than Madge’s and couldn’t buy her any sort of dolls’ pram to play with. Consciously or subconsciously, Madge decided that she did not want to be playing with her expensive toys in front of a friend who did not have any, and instead the two friends played with a little rag doll. They got a cardboard shoebox and made cushions and blankets out of scraps of fabric to put inside it, then poked a hole through the end of the box and tied a piece of string through it. While the Silver Cross pram and the expensive dolls remained almost untouched, Madge and her friend would play for hours pulling the shoebox along the street behind them as if it were a pram and they were taking their baby out for some fresh air. If it was a wet day and the box started to disintegrate, they just went and found another one.

Madge’s dad – his name was John, but everyone called him Jack – was a jolly-looking, apparently extrovert character with a bushy moustache and stocky build, but appearances could be deceptive, because he was quiet, shy and softly spoken and, like the rest of the family, he was never in any doubt as to who was the boss of the household. Madge’s mum was a real hard worker. She more than had her hands full with a family of twelve to look after, but she used to take in washing as well, trying to earn a bit of extra money to help make ends meet. She did not have a washing machine or anything like that; it was all hand-washing, done with a boiler, a dolly tub and a washboard, and her big, powerful hands were always reddened from the work, the constant immersion in water and the cheap, rough soap she had to use.

Madge’s mum could be formidable, but she was warm and loving to her children and she had a kind heart, as well as a soft streak for those down on their luck. There were plenty of ‘gentlemen of the road’ – tramps – on the streets in those days, many of them veterans of the Great War, too rootless, too injured or too traumatized to settle easily back into normal civilian life – and they all knew Madge’s mum. Madge remembers them coming down the street, heralding their approach by singing at the tops of their voices. They would walk round into the back lane at the side of the house and wait there, and after a couple of minutes Madge’s mum would always come out and give them a mug of tea and a big lump of home-made custard tart or apple pie; they all knew where to go for a hot drink and a bite to eat.

It had probably never occurred to Madge or her mum to wonder why York had become such a ‘chocolate city’, but throughout the twentieth century, the city’s three big confectionery firms – Rowntree’s, Terry’s and Craven’s – employed about three times as many people as York’s other great industry, the railway. The reason was partly an accident of history and partly of geography. Sited on a principal junction of the east coast mainline and straddling one of the main tributaries of the River Humber, the railways and the barges plying the waterways between York and the port of Hull gave the confectionery manufacturers cheap transport for raw materials like cocoa beans and sugar, and easy access for their finished products to the great industrial populations of Yorkshire, the Northeast and the Northwest. York also happened to be the site of a long-established Quaker community, and Quaker and non-conformist industrialists in York and elsewhere dominated the confectionery trade.

One of the most famous names in that trade began life in very humble circumstances, when Joseph Rowntree Senior established a small grocer’s shop at 28 Pavement, York, in 1822. A devout Quaker, he was given an immediate reminder of the evils of the demon drink when he attended the auction of the shop premises at a nearby pub and found the auctioneer so drunk that Joseph had to sober him up by repeatedly plunging his head into a bucket of cold water before the sale could even begin. Despite – or perhaps because of – that treatment, the auctioneer then sold the property to him.

In time, his two eldest boys joined him in the business, but it was not large enough to support the third son, Henry, as well. Instead, he began working for Tuke and Company in Castlegate, another Quaker-owned business, importing and manufacturing tea, coffee and cocoa, until, in 1862, he bought and renamed the Tukes’ business. A lively, gregarious personality, Henry had great ambition and charm, but rather less business sense. Despite total sales of no more than £3,000, he promptly splashed out on ‘a wonderful new machine for grinding cocoa’ and a collection of ramshackle buildings on the bank of the River Ouse to house a new factory. It was always a dark, dingy and damp place, and often worse than damp; whenever the river was high, it flooded the cellars. Within seven years, Henry’s elder brother, also called Joseph – who was cautious and prudent where Henry was impulsive and spendthrift – had to take over the running of the company to save his brother from the shame of bankruptcy, and succeeded in turning the business around.

During the latter half of the nineteenth century, the falling price of cocoa as Britain and the other imperial powers forced down the price of raw materials from their colonies, coupled with the rising wages paid to industrial workers, paved the way for a boom in the consumption of cocoa and chocolate. Once barely affordable luxuries for the working classes, both were now within the reach of almost everyone.

Employing just a handful of workers in 1869, Rowntree’s labour force swelled so rapidly that by 1890 it had far outgrown the original factory at Tanners Moat, and construction began on a new factory, a steadily expanding sprawl of fortress-like red-brick buildings on a site that eventually covered a square mile between Haxby Road and Wigginton Road in the north of the city. By 1909, 4,000 people were employed there.

Even while the firm was still struggling, Joseph Junior’s brand of Quaker philanthropy had led him to seek a means of improving the social condition of his workforce and, in 1901, his son Seebohm, who shared his father’s concerns, produced a report revealing the scale of the deprivation in the slums that had developed in York and other cities during the previous century. It had a powerful impact on the young Winston Churchill: ‘I have been reading a book which has fairly made my hair stand on end,’ he said, ‘written by a Mr Rowntree who deals with poverty in the town of York … I see little glory in an Empire which can rule the waves and is unable to flush its sewers.’

Spurred on by his son’s report, Joseph acquired 150 acres of land in open country between the Rowntree’s factory and what is now the York outer ring road for a new ‘garden village’ – New Earswick – echoing existing developments at Bournville, Port Sunlight and Saltaire for Cadbury’s, Lever Brothers 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.