Biscuit Girls Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 Ivy

  Chapter 2 Ivy

  Chapter 3 Ivy

  Chapter 4 Dulcie

  Chapter 5 Dulcie

  Chapter 6 Dorothy

  Chapter 7 Jean

  Chapter 8 Ivy

  Chapter 9 Jean

  Chapter 10 Dulcie

  Chapter 11 Dorothy

  Chapter 12 Barbara

  Chapter 13 Ann

  Chapter 14 Barbara

  Chapter 15 Ann

  Chapter 16 Ivy

  Chapter 17 Dulcie

  Chapter 18 Dorothy

  Chapter 19 Jean

  Chapter 20 Barbara

  Chapter 21 Ann

  Chapter 22 Ivy

  Afterword: Carr’s Today

  Acknowledgements

  Appendix 1: Carr’s Biscuits 1860s

  Appendix 2: Carr’s Biscuits 2014

  Copyright

  About the Book

  ‘I wore my overalls all evening, I wanted everyone in the street to see me, show them I was in work. I arrived early for my first day and stood looking through the windows at all the girls working away. It all seemed so big and daunting. I was very nervous, but I always loved working there, from day one.’ – Ivy

  Ivy, Dulcie, Barbara, Ann, Dorothy and Jean all had different reasons for applying for work at Carr’s of Carlisle, but once they had put on their overalls and walked through the factory gates they discovered a community where they worked hard, gossiped, got into scrapes and made lifelong friends.

  Beginning in the 1940s, this is the true story of the ‘Home of Biscuits’, based on the vivid recollections of six of the women who helped send Carr’s biscuits around the world.

  About the Author

  Hunter Davies was brought up in Carlisle, educated at Durham University, and now lives half the year in London and half in the Lake District.

  As a journalist he worked on the Sunday Times, where he was chief features writer, and later editor of the magazine. He wrote regular columns for Punch and currently writes for the New Statesman, The Sunday Times, the Mail on Sunday and Cumbrian Life. For three years he presented Bookshelf on BBC Radio 4.

  He is the author of over forty books, including biographies, novels, children’s novels (Flossie Teacake) and several books about the Lakes. He is the author of the only official biography of the Beatles.

  Introduction

  In the 1950s, when my twin sisters Marion and Annabelle were at the Margaret Sewell School in Carlisle and my wife Margaret was at the Carlisle and County High School for Girls, teachers would warn all the girls that if they didn’t stick at their lessons they would end up as ‘cracker packers’.

  Everybody in Carlisle knew what that meant – and still do, for the phrase and the activity continues to this day. It referred to the women workers on the production line at Carr’s biscuit factory, standing there all day, packing crackers. Who on earth would want to do that sort of menial, tedious, repetitive job? That was the fairly unsubtle message, not to say dreaded warning to get a grip, get your head down, pass those exams, get some proper qualifications and then you will be off, free and independent, not condemned to a life of factory work.

  But of course for many unskilled, unschooled workers, Carr’s was looked upon as a good job, attracting women from all over the surrounding area. Ethel Bragg, the mother of Melvyn Bragg (the writer and broadcaster, now Lord Bragg of Wigton), worked at Carr’s from 1930 to 1931, coming in each day on the bus. She died in 2012, aged ninety-five.

  ‘My mother was a cracker packer for about a year,’ so Melvyn told me, ‘until her name came up for a job in her home town at Redmaynes, the clothing factory, where she made buttonholes until she married in 1938 when, as was the custom, she was fired for the offence of matrimony. She was very happy working at Carr’s. It was one of the very few jobs available for girls who left school at fourteen and what used to be delightfully called “without any qualifications”. She used to get the bus from Wigton into Carlisle and get off at Trinity Church – now gone – which was the bus stop opposite the biscuits works. At home, we always bought Carr’s water biscuits.’

  Factory workers have always had a bad press. In all towns, in all industrial nations, at all times, since it all began, there has always been one factory, one sort of job which has become a term of contempt or of pity, about which local people either sneer or feel sorry. Charles Dickens scared the souls off all right-thinking Victorians by his memories of sticking labels on bottles of shoe polish in Warren’s boot blacking factory. Today we have dreadful tales of sweat shops in China and south-east Asian clothes factories.

  When Margaret went on to Oxford on an Open Scholarship, and got her name on the Honours Board in the school hall, she used to come home to Carlisle and say she would have learned more about real life had she gone to work at the Carr’s factory.

  Obviously, aged nineteen, she knew little about real life, at Carr’s or elsewhere, and it was a bit of bravado. And yet she knew there was something about these women whom she had met, had listened to when growing up on the Raffles council estate, whose lives and opinions and experiences were just as valid as anyone with a fancy education or more privileged background.

  In the 1950s, women had already been packing crackers at Carr’s for well over a hundred years, in a factory producing biscuits that dates back to 1837, which boasted that it was the home of biscuits. Many of them had served there for the whole of their working lives, loyal and proud to have worked for Carr’s, a benevolent family firm, some of them receiving long-service awards after clocking up forty-five years. The workers must have known that they were engaging in a meaningful if modest task, their minds probably miles away while they were silently, automatically packing crackers that would be dispatched around the world. For were not Carr’s Table Water Biscuits known and enjoyed in all the corners of the globe? So they were being told in the company magazine, the Topper Off.

  Many years later, in 1997, Margaret published a book about the history of Carr’s, Rich Desserts and Captain’s Thin.fn1 The title is a bit of a mouthful – they were two of Carr’s famous early biscuits.

  In her book, she was dealing with the early years, from 1831 to 1931, and it was mainly about the Carr family, following them down the generations. It won a prize and sold well and naturally I am greatly indebted to it for background information. At the time, though, I remember her moaning about the lack of letters from the main participants, about the problem of finding any colour or personal details or about real life on the factory floor. But it was meant to be a serious, quasi-academic study, of a pre-war family business dynasty. It did not concern itself with the workers, or the post-war decades. Which is what I have now decided to attempt.

  What was life really like for the ordinary women factory workers, the ones who packed the biscuits? How did they stand it? Were they just doing it for the money? How hard was it? Were they happy, accepting or merely resigned? Or was it their home and personal life, outside their factory life, that really mattered to them?

  There is some decent oral history of what it was like be a Carr’s factory worker, tape-recorded interviews that cover the period back to the First World War. They were made in the 1950s and again in the 1980s, part of that sudden interest in capturing working-class, local history, which sprang up after the last war and is today available in most local library and records offices.

  It is noticeable, in the Carlisle archives, that members of the Carr family, so important in the city and the county for many decades, were not interviewed. It was the ordinary workers that archivists wanted to capture in those
post-war years.

  I have listened to and read many of these oral accounts, and found them all fascinating – but I have not used them here, except for a couple of examples. For, while they are rich on the inter-war or immediate post-war years, they are stories of women now dead, and the task I set myself was to capture the stories of women still alive today, who started in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, and some of whom were still working at the factory up until the last couple of years. For life at Carr’s, and at similar factories all over the country, all over the world, still goes on, though the number of factory workers in the UK is roughly half of what it was in the immediate post-war years.

  One problem with oral history, fascinating though it can be, is that it is not proactive. The oral historian’s tape recorder records, content to receive what it is being told. Oral historians are essentially archivists, not seeing it as their job to cross-examine, counter or comment.

  The problem with the opposite, journalistic approach is that while the interviewer might properly engage, stir up and drag out, he or she often has an agenda, even if it just their own personal interests and concerns, which can slant or distort the end result, highlighting certain aspects, minimising others.

  I like to think I have let the six women who tell their story here talk naturally, as they wanted to, allowing their own memories to flow freely, but also making them try hard to remember feelings and events, fashions and entertainments, local and national, that they all have lived through. I am roughly the same age as them, and my childhood home was Carlisle, so this helped me to focus them, and jog their memories of times and places, without, I hope, trying to make them fit any of my preconceptions or prejudices.

  However, the book is not just about the lives of six women. It is equally a slice of recent social history, about events and changes in Carlisle, most of which were going on in Britain and the Western world at large. As we progress through their lives, at work and at home, I have tried to put their personal experiences in a broader context, for those who might have forgotten or never knew when exactly it was that the Pill came in, beehives were fashionable, when the horrors of the Eleven Plus happened, or when sales of the first council houses became possible. Carlisle might be a fairly remote town, where things have usually arrived late, but since the war, all of us still alive and of a certain age have lived through and experienced much the same changes in conditions, fashions and attitudes. Even if we didn’t realise it at the time.

  Along with the general social history, as reflected in the lives of our six women, there is also a more specialist history – the history of biscuits, and of Carr’s in particular. Biscuits have had a role, a bit part, in all our personal lives these last 150 years, in wars and in famines, peace times and at work. Few there are who have not longed, in good or bad times, for a Nice Cup of Tea and a Biscuit. Yet, strangely enough, there is no book about the history of biscuits. There are individual histories of the leading firms, such as Carr’s or Huntley & Palmers, but I have failed so far to find a general history that covers the whole story of biscuits, right back to the beginning.

  I found the six women whose stories are told here through a Carr’s pensioners club for women who had retired from the factory. I talked to a group, explained the project, made it clear I wanted to know about their personal lives, not just their work at the factory, and asked for volunteers. I thought they shouldn’t be all of exactly the same age, but a broad range of ages so they would have a span of experience to share.

  I had to resist the temptation to draw parallels or proclaim trends, but I think they are a fairly typical sample of post-war working women: ending up spinsters or married, some fit and healthy, others suffering failing health having faced the same sort of problems of most modern families, from divorce to drug-related deaths. As we shall see, some preferred to stick to working on the line, whereas others discovered they had different ambitions. The six in the book are aged between sixty and eighty. Four of the six were born pre-war, so have vivid wartime memories. Two were born post-war, growing up in the sixties, reacting to all the new social changes, reflecting the modern notions of female entitlement and ambition. I did have a seventh, but she dropped out, having originally agreed. During my first proper meeting with her at her own home, discussing again the point of the book and what I would be asking, she changed her mind. She had been involved in a messy divorce. The details were not secret, known to her family and friends, but it had all been so awful that she didn’t want to relive the experience through talking about it.

  Factory work of the sort they experienced is changing, and will change as more automated machinery comes in, so in one sense they are period pieces, the end of the line. But there will always be some sort of industry somewhere in the world taking advantage of the sweat of women who see little alternative.

  At the time of writing, the six women were all alive, each living in their own homes, enjoying their retirement after what has been by normal standards an exceedingly hard life. Their names are real, as real as the lives they have lived, and nothing has been changed. I can’t thank each of them enough for their time and their memories, their thoughts and feelings.

  Hunter Davies

  Loweswater, Cumbria, 2014

  * * *

  fn1 Margaret Foster, Rich Desserts and Captain’s Thin (Chatto & Windus, London: 1997)

  Carr’s advertisement from 1950s

  Chapter 1

  Ivy

  Ivy aged fourteen in the school netball team

  ‘Ivy, go and see if anyone is in the lavatory, will you, pet?’ said Ivy’s grandmother.

  So four-year-old Ivy toddled off down the little lane behind her grandmother’s house in Brook Street, an old Victorian terrace which had communal wash houses behind and a single outside lavatory, shared by all. Ivy was a stumpy, broad-shouldered little girl, always cheerful, always smiling, always wanting to please.

  The year was 1937. Ivy and her parents and her big brother Tommy had recently moved into a new council house not far away in Dalton Avenue. Her grandmother’s house had one room downstairs, which was the living room, plus a pantry, and two bedrooms upstairs. They had gas mantles for lighting and open coal fire for heat, on which they made toast and boiled a kettle for tea.

  Ivy loved going to visit her grandmother, helping in any way she could, even though the house was poky and cramped with very few amenities, compared with her family’s new council house. The dustman could drive right into the backyard at her grandmother’s, where the wash house and lavatory were, and if they were in a good mood, and not in a hurry, they would give little Ivy a lift round to the front of her grandmother’s house. Brook Street has long since been knocked down, considered one of the city’s poorer areas, not far from the old industrial slums of Caldewgate.

  On this particular day, the lavatory was empty, so when Ivy rushed back with the good news, her grandmother grabbed the big iron key on a long piece of string and made a dash for it. And got there in time, before anyone else had spotted the vacancy.

  Ivy was born in her grandmother’s house, hence her affection for it, on 2 August 1933, and was named Ivy Emma. Emma was chosen by her grandmother. Growing up, Ivy always hated the name Emma and tried to keep it secret. Now, eighty years later, it has become fashionable again.

  ‘My mother went home to her own house to have me, which was normal at the time. My brother Tommy, seven years older, was born there as well. Of course we had hospitals in Carlisle in the 1930s, but I suppose you felt safe in your own house, back with your mam.

  ‘My grandmother’s house might have been fairly primitive, but the wash house was excellent. They had this wood-fired boiler that heated the water so hot you couldn’t touch it. In fact, my mam used to take all our washing there. She could never get the boiler hot enough in our own house.’

  Her grandmother had been a factory worker in her youth, at Buck’s, a clothing factory, known for its shirts. Her husband Isaac, twelve years older, was a labourer in the Hudson
Scott factory, famous for its tins, especially biscuit tins. Ivy’s father was a labourer and worked at 14 MU, an RAF maintenance unit, across the other side of Carlisle.

  Ivy’s house was on the Raffles estate, and had an indoor lavatory and a bathroom. The Raffles estate had been created as a model council estate, with nothing too good for the workers. The movement for better housing had started after the First World War. ‘The only adequate solution to the housing question,’ said the King’s Speech in 1919, ‘is to build houses specifically for the poor.’

  The government made grants and Carlisle City Council was proud that it was one of the first local authorities to snap up the subsidies. Their first council houses opened in 1922. The earliest of many new council estates on the edge of the city was at Longsowerby and the council lashed out on good building materials and provided a variety of styles, some with bay windows and parlours, proper bathrooms and indoor lavatories. They were so desirable that it was found that many white-collar workers, who in theory could have managed a mortgage to buy their own house, were rushing to get on the council-renting list. In 1926 the council purchased ninety-eight acres at Raffles, a mile to the west of the city centre, and the city architect Percy Dalton was told to fit in as many houses as he could, and also provide a new park, shops, a church and other amenities. The Raffles estate did not have the variety enjoyed at Longsowerby, and most of the houses were more basic, without bay windows and front parlours, but they were still well built and modern and nearer the middle of the town, handy for workers in Caldewgate, where the Carr’s factory was situated. This time the council managed to restrict the tenants to industrial, blue-collar workers, many of them rehoused from the slums in Caldewgate. When they were nearing completion, young families would walk round Raffles on Sunday afternoon to admire the new houses and all the greenery and new shops. The average weekly rent in 1930 was six shillings, out of an average industrial wage of two pounds, three shillings and tuppence.