Biscuit Girls Page 10

  In Carlisle, during and just after the war, thousands of people worked at 14 MU. Ivy’s father worked there, and most Carlisle people knew someone at 14 MU. It was considered a cushy number, a holiday camp, partly because outsiders never really knew exactly what work was carried out there. MU stood for ‘maintenance unit’, supplying parts for the RAF – which could be anything from half a plane to a sheet of notepaper – hence it needed hangars and warehouses, offices and storerooms, plus an army of labourers, storemen and clerks. Carlisle’s 14 MU even had thirteen miles of its own railway. It sounds a bit now like an early version of an Amazon warehouse.

  There were seven MUs scattered around the UK, all classified as secret, each carrying a full range of stock just in case any of them got hit by an air raid. In 1945, the Carlisle one employed 4,300 people, 784 of them uniformed, the rest civilians, half of whom were women workers.

  Jean had hardly settled into Carlisle and into her job at 14 MU when Jack was called up. He was still officially a Reservist and the REME wanted him back because of the Suez crisis. On 26 July 1956, General Nasser, the president of Egypt, had nationalised the Suez canal, much to the fury of Britain, France and Israel, who mobilised their forces and started bombing Cairo.

  Jean was getting over the shock of finding Jack was going abroad, possibly to fight in a war, when she discovered she was pregnant.

  ‘I never thought of having an abortion. There were back-street abortionists you could go into those days, but I didn’t fancy it. I’m not religious, but I feel aborting is killing a human being.’

  They decided they had better quickly get married, which they did on 8 September 1956, at Carlisle register office. They also managed to get a council house.

  Then things began to look up. Jack was not sent to Suez after all. Instead he was stationed for several months at Cark, in the south of Cumbria. He was back home in Carlisle by Christmas, the Suez crisis now over. He then got work in Carlisle as a driver.

  In April 1957 Jean went into Fusehill maternity hospital for what she thought was her normal check up, not realising how near term she was.

  ‘The doctor examined me and said I had to stay in. I said I can’t. I have to go home and make my husband’s dinner. He said OK, but come straight back.’

  On her return, she went into the labour ward where she gave birth to a fine bouncing boy. He was later followed by two other boys and a daughter.

  It was in 1971 when her youngest was aged five and at primary school that Jean decided she wanted to go back to some sort of work. Jack was still working as a driver, but they had little money and Jack wanted a car of his own.

  She applied to Carr’s – even though the wages seemed to her pretty miserable, compared with her last job in Liverpool. Carr’s were offering £3 a week whereas back at Vernons she had been on up to £15 a week. This had included a Christmas bonus and also a bonus for being able to set a record by sorting a thousand pools coupons in twenty-five minutes.

  ‘But I heard Carr’s was considered a good job. All the Carlisle women who worked there seemed to like it.’

  Alas, she was turned down. She was interviewed by a personnel manager who looked at her CV, saw she had worked at the offices of the Liverpool Echo and at Vernons Pools.

  ‘She told me I would not like factory work and could not offer me the job. That was a bit of a disappointment. We did need the extra money.’

  However, she went back after a few months and pleaded for a job, asking at least for a two-week trial, to see how she got on.

  And so it was agreed. In April 1971, Jean started work at Carr’s. She was a Liverpool woman, not a local, now aged thirty-five with three young children, who had had no experience of work in Carlisle, or any idea of what it might be like to be a factory worker.

  Chapter 8

  Ivy

  Ivy was still working at Carr’s when Jean joined, and she was one of the old hands who helped the new girl to settle in.

  For her first ten years at Carr’s, Ivy had had no thought or desire for promotion. She was content to do her basic packing job.

  ‘I used to tell the new girls, all these young slips of things, that I had been there since the factory had been built in 1837. In fact, I had walked all the way from Kendal to Carlisle with John Dodgson Carr to open his first shop in Castle Street. They believed me, of course, knowing nothing about the history of the firm.’

  She was no longer as giddy and daft as when she had started, jumping and dancing around, but she had survived one mishap. It affected her job at Carr’s, but in fact it was not caused at work but at the hairdresser’s.

  ‘I went to have a perm and the girl put these hot curlers on me. I had to sit for ages with them on, but somehow they slipped down and burned me ears! After a few days, my ears went funny, a sort of nasty rash down the side of my face. I went to the surgery at work to tell them, as everyone could see it by now.

  ‘We did have a nurse at work who came round, but she wasn’t much good. Whether you had a cut finger or your head had come off and you were carrying it under your arms, she would still give you an Anadin. I never knew her name, I just used to call her Nurse Anadin.

  ‘This time I realised I had something nasty, which is why I went to the surgery. They said I had dermatitis. I was immediately taken off packing and told to go home. I went home, crying, worried about losing my job and losing my wages. I felt dirty. Anyway I was given penicillin and after a few weeks it cleared up and I came back to work.’

  It was after ten years at Carr’s that Ivy first found herself being asked to help with training some of the new girls, though not receiving any official promotion, or extra pay.

  ‘I wasn’t bothered about getting extra money. I just enjoyed helping the new girls. I had about eight I was to look after, mostly young girls straight from school. They were all lovely, all hard-working, and would never abuse things, like taking too long a break. If they get trained right, they wouldn’t do that.

  ‘But some of them would be in tears in the first few weeks, not being able to cope – especially when they had to do night shifts. Night shifts did not bother me. I would often swap with someone, as a favour, if they couldn’t manage it, because of their boyfriend or husband or children. I was single, so it didn’t make much difference to me.’

  Then one day, Ivy got a real promotion.

  ‘It was a Friday evening, end of the week, and I was just about leave when John Robinson, the manager of the bakehouse, shouted across to me. “Ivy! Pink overalls on Monday, all right?”’

  That was all he said. But Ivy knew what it meant. She had become a charge hand. By now it was the early 1960s and she had been working at Carr’s for almost fifteen years before the call had come.

  She was still unmarried, living at home, with her mother. Ivy’s father had died some time ago, in 1951 aged sixty. Her brother Tommy had got married, with Ivy as a bridesmaid, and had his own family to look after.

  When her mother’s health began to fail, Ivy found herself increasingly looking after her, which naturally curtailed her own social life and the chances of having a boyfriend or going away on holidays. Such has so often been the position of an unmarried daughter when a widowed mother falls ill.

  ‘The doctors began to talk about putting her in a home, but I wasn’t having any of that. No one was putting my mother away.’

  So Ivy gave up work and for nine months stayed at home, looking after her mother. She died aged sixty-four in her own home, as she had always wanted. This was in the Raffles council house in Dalton Avenue where she had lived since Ivy was born. Ivy took over the rental, living there on her own.

  After nine months at home, Ivy decided to go back to work at Carr’s, back on the assembly line, back to being a charge hand on Rich Desserts.

  However, there were some clouds hovering on the horizon which began to worry all the Carr’s workers, especially with so many of them coming from the same families and therefore so dependent on employment from the same firm.
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br />   When Ivy had joined in 1948, the post-war boom was just beginning and by 1954 Carr’s workforce was soon up to 2,500, almost as high as in the 1920s and ’30s when it had been 3,000.

  The firm was still very successful, a bright star in the biscuit firmament, but the field had become very crowded and competitive since J.D. had first opened his factory in 1837.

  Throughout the nineteenth century all the biscuit makers had taken advantage of the social and economic changes, with commuter trains creating suburbs and people on trains or standing at stations enjoying a biscuit to keep themselves going. In the twentieth century, teashops spread out all over the country, where secretaries and working girls could go to for a quick snack on their own.

  The rival biscuit firms competed to think of new lines, new tastes, new shapes, sending out hundreds of salesmen to get orders, spending fortunes on newspaper advertisements and promotions.

  The biscuit firm that claimed to be Britain’s oldest was Crawford, who could trace their origins back to a bakery shop in Edinburgh in 1813 – J.D. Carr’s Carlisle shop did not open till 1831. But it wasn’t till the 1860s when Crawford opened a factory in Liverpool that they really expanded.

  Classic Victorian advertisement for Carr’s biscuits

  McFarlane Lang, another leading Scottish firm, originated in Glasgow in the 1840s, while the McVitie family, later McVitie’s and Price, originated in Dumfries. They started up properly in business in Edinburgh in the 1830s – making their name with the patenting of digestives in 1890, so called because they contained bicarbonate of soda, which in theory helped digestion. In 1925, McVitie’s went one better, creating one of the all-time favourite biscuits – chocolate digestives.

  It’s noticeable how many of our best-known biscuit firms, their names still recognisable today, began in Scotland. Is it because the Scots have always had a sweet tooth, or is it because the tradition of baking scones, shortbread and oatcakes had been passed on through the generations, long before factories began?

  By the end of the nineteenth century, the world’s biggest biscuit makers had become Huntley & Palmers, whose origins date back to 1822. Like the Carr’s, they were Quakers and like J.D. Carr, Joseph Huntley had begun as a baker. His bakery shop was just one of thirty in Reading at the time, but it happened to be located on the main London road, opposite the main posting inn for the stage coaches to London, Bristol, Bath and the West Country. He found passengers were buying cakes and biscuits from him to eat on the journey, as the refreshment prices in the posting inn itself were so expensive. He started sending his delivery boy with a basket of biscuits to sell to passengers as they waited in the inn yard while the horses were changed. By supplying the carriage trade, his biscuits therefore had a wider sale and popularity than would normally have been the case.

  Joseph then fell ill, but he was joined by a cousin, also a Quaker, George Palmer, and the firm became Huntley & Palmers. They built their Reading factory in 1846, by which time they were putting their biscuits into tins, making them last longer on the coach journey. By 1900 they were employing 5,000 people and claimed to be the world’s biggest biscuit factory. Reading became known as the biscuit town and their football team, Reading FC, were known for many years as the Biscuitmen. (Today, they tend to be known as the Royals, after the Royal County of Berkshire.)

  By the 1930s, Meredith & Drew in London – founded by another baker, William Meredith, in the 1830s – had begun to claim the top spot, boasting they were now Britain’s biggest biscuit makers. In their advertising, they said they used only the finest eggs – from their own hens in Jersey – and only used Irish or French butter. They got their Royal Warrant in 1902 and, like Carr’s and all the other leading manufacturers, they were quick to help out in national emergencies, knowing it would reflect well on them. One of Meredith & Drew’s prize possessions was a handwritten letter from Lord Kitchener, thanking them for a gift of biscuits to the troops.

  Most of our leading biscuit firms always seemed to think up something from their past or present that they could boast about in their advertising. All part of the war between them and the battle for our custom.

  In 1921 the first of some major reorganising took place when Huntley & Palmers and Peek Frean in London combined to call themselves Associated Biscuit Manufacturers. Peek Frean was the firm that owed a lot of its success to John Carr, the much younger brother of J.D.

  In 1948 came another important joining together when the two big Scottish firms, McVitie’s and Crawford’s, combined to form United Biscuits.

  Carr’s meanwhile, still being run by the descendants of J.D. Carr, remained an independent company. They had, of course, their own proud boast, which their rivals agreed was pretty well true: THE BIRTHPLACE OF THE BISCUIT INDUSTRY. The slogan appeared on the main walls of the front of the Carlisle factory and also on their advertising, no doubt bringing a small glow of pride to Ivy and all the other faithful workers.

  When Ivy and Dulcie first joined – in 1948 and in 1954 – the Carr family were still firmly in control, and still took a personal interest as their forefathers had done, cheering on the workers, appealing to their loyalty. One of the bonding elements in the Carr’s factory family of workers, which helped to keep them all together and be inspired by the firm’s heritage and its present-day successes, was the Carr’s staff magazine, the Topper Off.

  It began in 1928, the idea of the formidable Miss Nora Wynn, who was appointed Lady Superintendent by Theodore Carr in 1920. She was in effect the personnel manager, looking after the welfare of all the women, both their physical and mental well-being. The title, the Topper Off, referred to the girl who finally inspected the contents of a tin before the lid went on.

  ‘The next time that lid is removed,’ said an editorial in the first edition, explaining the title, ‘it is by the customer, who will judge Carr’s of Carlisle by what meets his eye. So in our magazine. The things that go into the life of a factory such as ours are infinite; they go to make up the life and character of a community.’

  The magazine was a moral lifter, hurrah for us and our happy, cheerful staff, which gave reports on all the clubs and staff events and listed the international prizes for biscuits that the company had won in Paris, Berlin and Amsterdam. The message was clear: the workers should be proud of their firm, still family run, which cared for the welfare of all its staff and even in hard times, it was still doing well.

  The early issues, in 1928–29, included some unusual features, such as an article about the women workers at a rubber goods factory in China and an article on Kenya by Allen Carr. There were reports on the football and hockey clubs, both with their own pitches at Carr’s own sports field on Newtown Road. The 1928 staff dinner, presumably for the office staff, not the humble production-line workers, was held at the Crown and Mitre, Carlisle’s top hotel.

  There were also some jokes. One of them was about a man who had just married the daughter of a wealthy biscuit maker. A friend meets him in the street and congratulates him. ‘You’ve taken not just the cake but the biscuit,’ says his friend. ‘Yes,’ the man replies. ‘And the dough with it.’

  The use here of dough meaning money, a nineteenth-century American phrase, is interesting. It is often thought to have become popular only during the Second World War, brought over by the American troops, but clearly it had reached Carlisle by the 1920s.

  The first nine issues of Topper Off, twenty-four pages each, featured on the cover a Lake District or rural scene, and no sign of any ugly factory buildings. For its tenth issue, Christmas 1929, the front cover is devoted to a handwritten letter from Theodore Carr, grandson of J.D., and now chairman. He sends festive wishes and signs off ‘Heartiest greetings, your friend and chairman’. How many chairmen these days look upon themselves as a friend of the workers?

  In 1948, when Ivy joined, the magazine was up to forty pages. There were a lot more contributions from ordinary workers and also a column by someone calling themselves ‘Airtight’ who thanks the girls for
all their Valentines and gives them advice about going on their holidays. ‘Beware of strange young men with large moustachios and one glass eye. Never accept a cigar from them.’ Girls – whether packers or office staff – were going no further than Silloth or Blackpool in 1948, if they were lucky, and were pretty unlikely to smoke cigars, so the warning seems rather redundant.

  A women’s column advises always to use curlers at night. To look neat and tidy you could not beat ‘our old friends TIME and THOUGHT’. There were hints on how to make the most of your coupons – particularly your clothing coupons – for rationing continued in the UK till well into the 1950s.

  A most informative article explained the history of the matzos, and their religious significance. During the recent war, a matzo warehouse in London had been bombed but Carr’s had increased production to help the Jewish population, of which it said there were currently 400,000 in the UK.

  There were lots of retirements, with several women having achieved forty-five years of service, which doubtless fifteen-year-old Ivy scoffed at when she read about them in the Topper Off, wondering how anyone could possibly stay that long.

  There was a list of recent weddings in the autumn issue 1948, giving the names of twenty-two Carr’s female workers and the men they had married. Did Ivy wonder if one day she would be one of them?

  Sixteen years later, in February 1964, by which time Ivy was a charge hand, the Topper Off had become a bumper production of sixty-four pages, glossy with lots of pictures and a colour cover. It listed all the recent achievements, such as providing Carr’s Water Biscuits for a packed luncheon of 5,000 directors at the Albert Hall and being displayed on a stall at the Confectionery Exposition in Paris. There were several pages of overseas news, featuring Carr’s sales forces and agents all round the world, including Turkey, the Canary Islands, Denmark, Sweden and Paris.

  At home, the success of Carr’s Golf Club against Hudson Scott Tin Box Factory is highlighted – the team includes members of the Carr family. The bowls club had been to play in Sunderland at the Pyrex sports stadium. The gardening club was thriving and there was a works library, available to all, which contained 350 books.