Biscuit Girls Read online

  Carr’s workers in their best frocks eating sandwiches on their annual outing in the 1930s

  Later Carr’s works outings went to the seaside, such as Silloth, the local seaside resort on the Solway, loved by generations of Carlisle people, and also to Blackpool. There were even occasions in the 1920s and 1930s when the Carr’s works outings reached Paris and Brussels – all paid for by the company.

  Alas for Ivy and her post-war co-workers, still struggling under rationing and other restrictions, the big outing, for the whole works, with the factory closed for the day and entertainment and refreshments laid on, seems to have died out by 1948.

  ‘The only outing I can remember was one organised by the bakehouse. A group of us went on the train to Blackpool. I remember two girls saying they didn’t want to sit next to so and so – who was a charge hand. I think we organised the outing ourselves, not the factory. And I think we paid for it.’

  For well over a hundred years, Blackpool had been the number one attraction for all northern families, including Scottish families, who came in their tens of thousands during their Fair Week or holiday week, jamming the streets of Carlisle as they headed for Blackpool in their coaches. The main route south was through the town centre, until the M6 motorway was completed in the 1970s and Carlisle could breathe more freely.

  Blackpool was seen as glamorous, exciting, with so much to do and see, such as the tower (built 1894), the pleasure beach, all the big shows at the big theatres, and the annual illuminations. They began on a small scale in 1879 when eight so-called ‘electric sunshine’ arc lights were hung on the promenade, but became world famous from 1912 onwards when Princess Louise turned on 10,000 lights and the illuminations proper began. By the 1950s, when Ivy visited, there were one million light bulbs and seventeen million annual visitors. Numbers fell by the sixties, when cheap foreign travel arrived, but it is still the UK’s number one seaside tourist

  Carlisle families, who could afford it, took their annual holidays in Blackpool in the immediate post-war years, or went on day trips by coach on so called mystery tours which usually turned out to be a tour round the Lakes or joining the millions on the front at Blackpool. The men would have dragged several wooden crates of State Management beer on to the coach before departure, which they would open up on the way back, swigging the beer and singing songs, till soon the whole coach joined in, and they rolled back into Carlisle in the early hours.

  Carlisle, however, also had its own well-loved little local seaside town – Silloth situated on the Solway, about ten miles from Carlisle. It has also had a long history as a seaside resort, if on a more modest scale, starting from the 1860s onwards, once the railway had opened. Silloth was not seen as glamorous and exciting like Blackpool, with all its facilities – the main adjective describing Silloth usually is ‘bracing’ – but it provided lots of harmless, healthy fun for generations of Carlisle families.

  Everyone went there at some time in the summer, whole streets emptying as neighbourhoods went en masse, the overexcited children rushing up and down the platform at the Citadel station, then jamming into overcrowded carriages, dying for their first glimpse of the sea.

  Silloth’s handsome main street was filled with hotels, boarding houses, cafes and shops, overlooking an enormous green, beautifully kept and cut. Beyond it was the promenade and the sea, with great views across the Solway to Criffel and the Scottish hills. Most people walked up and down the promenade and paddled in the sea, though there wasn’t much sand in Silloth itself. You had to go down the coast a bit, to West Silloth, for that, where there was a golf course and a residential home.

  Entertainment in the pre-war and immediate post-war years included a Pierrot show, fun fair, donkey rides and an amusement arcade. There was also a dock and little harbour to poke around at Silloth, with cargo boats coming in from Glasgow and Liverpool, some of them bringing wheat for Carr’s flour mill by the dock side. There was also a little fishing fleet, bringing in Solway shrimps, which you could buy fresh in the town. The basic population of 3,000 would swell to 10,000 in the summer season during the fifties. When the railway station closed in 1964, Silloth’s great days were over, but it is still enormously loved and lingers on in the minds and affections of all Carlisle people.

  All the Carr’s biscuit workers, Ivy included were taken there as children and as young adults went off there with their pals for their Saturday afternoons or Sundays off work to have a bit of a blow, parade up and down, before going back to the grind on Monday.

  ‘When I was younger, going to Silloth seemed to be going a million miles away. I went on the train with my parents and grandmother and my brother. I could never sleep the night before if I knew we were going. I was just so excited.

  ‘But going to Blackpool on that works trip was a really big adventure. I had never been as far on the train. We just seemed to laugh all the time. I have a photo somewhere of us all at the railway station, lining up before we set off. I think it must have been around 1953. Now I look at it, there are far more than I remember – looks about a hundred. Yet it was just the bakehouse workers.’

  Ivy never drank, never went to pubs, even as a young working woman. ‘My father liked a pint and would go to the Horse and Farrier in Raffles on a Saturday evening, but he never drank in the house. No one drank at home, in their own house. Now it’s what everyone does.’

  She went on a mystery tour once, not long after she had started at Carr’s, with another girl from her production line. The mystery tour destination turned out to be the Lakes, so not much of a mystery. When they landed in Keswick they were told there was a one-hour stop for shopping or walking around, or going down to the lake.

  ‘Me and my friend decided to go to a pub. I had never been to one before. I went in – and oh no, sitting there was one of our neighbours. I was so embarrassed. I worried all the way home to Carlisle, knowing my mother would be bound to find out. So when I got home, I told her. I thought it was better coming from me than from a neighbour. Young women never went to pubs. It just wasn’t done.’

  Now and again, being nosy, when there were no charge hands glaring over her, young Ivy wandered round the factory. It was a bit of a rabbit warren, with much of it still as it was when J.D. had first built it. One day down an alleyway she came across two women tearing up paper – teasing it out to make packing material for the boxes of biscuits.

  ‘They had built up a huge mountain of torn paper, as big as a haystack. I decided to climb up and started jumping on this mountain of paper, imagining I was on a farm in a hayloft. From down below I heard one of the girls shouting up to me, “Here’s Polly!” This was Polly Parker, the supervisor. We were all really scared of her. I jumped down from the pile of paper and hid behind some tins, saying to myself, “Please God, don’t let her look up here.” But she just walked through our room, and never noticed I was missing.

  ‘It was just devilment, really, being young and daft. I wasn’t really naughty or wicked or anything. I was just enjoying myself. I always loved working there, from day one.’

  Ivy got a tea break each morning of ten minutes. Depending on what sort of job they were on, the girls would go singly or together. If it was a rush order, they would take it in turns, agreeing with the charge hand who would go and when. If times were slack, they would all take their break together in the canteen.

  At lunch, when Ivy began in 1948, they were allowed one hour, but a few years later this was reduced to forty-five minutes. ‘They even tried once to give us only thirty minutes for lunch, but we all protested. No strikes, we just moaned, and they stuck to the forty-five minutes.’

  During the first week she was there, she went to the canteen for lunch, but didn’t like it. ‘I didn’t know where to sit, so I just stood there, looking stupid, as all the girls seemed to be in groups. Someone said sit over there, with that woman. I did, but she turned out to have a funny eye. It upset me, which I know it shouldn’t have done, so I never went back.’

  Instead, I
vy decided she would go home for lunch each day as Dalton Avenue was only a mile or so away. She went on the bus at first, but it became expensive and was all a bit of rush, so she bought herself a bike. Her first one was a Hercules, bought from T.P. Bell in Abbey Street where generations of Carlisle teenagers got their bikes. She bought it on the never-never, paying five shillings a week.

  ‘I loved my bike and was never off it. You felt so free, whizzing along on your bike, independent like. I used to cycle so hard there and back every lunch time that when I got off my bike my little legs were shaking.’

  She received her wages every week on a Thursday, lining up to retrieve it from a little black metal box with her personal number on. ‘It was a very small box – cos our wages were so small!’

  She handed over all her thirty-four shillings wages to her mother each week, who then gave her five shillings back as her pocket money, and another five shillings went on payments on her bike.

  ‘I was always a homebody, and I loved coming home for my dinner. In fact, I never wanted to leave home, ever. I felt safe there.’

  In her early working years, while still a teenager, she went with her mother and father each week to the cinema, as she had done while at school. During the war and the post-war years, every cinema in Carlisle, as in every town in the country, had massive queues, often winding round the block and stretching for several streets. These queues were despite the fact that in these post-war years Carlisle had as many as eight cinemas in operation. The Lonsdale, the smartest and biggest, had opened in 1931, but there were also several much older ones: the Palace (1906), the Public Hall (1907), the City (1915) as well as the Botchergate, Stanley, Rex, Regal, all of them going full steam, with queues for every film, whatever it was.

  There was also a theatre, Her Majesty’s, with live shows, which first opened in 1880. Charlie Chaplin and Buffalo Bill had appeared there in 1904. Many well-known music hall stars still performed there when Ivy was growing up, if not all of them perhaps quite at their peak. Seasons of plays were also performed at Her Majesty’s by visiting companies, plus amateur shows by local theatricals, along with Gilbert and Sullivan. Going out, ‘up street’, as they say in Carlisle, there was quite a choice of entertainment in the post-war years.

  TV was very rare. There were only 14,500 TV sets in the whole of the country in 1948, mostly around London. Even if TV had reached Carlisle, it would have been hard to switch on – one quarter of houses still did not have electricity.

  Radio was popular, with those who had electricity often connecting leads to their overhead light sockets – which meant you sat in the dark to listen, hoping there would not be an explosion. There were no pop music programmes or channels on the BBC – only on Radio Luxemburg, which arrived in 1948 and launched the first hit parade. No wonder cinema-going was at its peak in 1948 with such little competition. A third of the population went to the films at least once a week.

  ‘My father loved the cinema but he had this thing about queuing, he hated doing it, so he would rush home from work and then all of us would run to the City cinema to catch the early house. My mother would have two pies ready for him, the minute he got inside the front door, and he would eat them as we rushed off to the City.

  ‘They had this strange woman in the box office, who had long dark ringlets and wore a long red velvet old-fashioned dress. Nobody else in Carlisle dressed like her. Everyone was fascinated by her.

  ‘We always went in the cheap seats, which meant you entered in a side door that took you right to the front rows. Often the show had started, so we crept in, blinking in the dark, like three blind mice. The Three Stooges, that was one I loved, and of course Charlie Chaplin.’

  Ivy enjoyed dancing – and another near reprimand at work happened when she was almost caught by a supervisor. She was dancing by herself, behind a row of large biscuit tins, when a supervisor was seen to be approaching, but Ivy managed to get to her packing position on the line, just in time.

  Now and again, when she got a bit older, she would go with girlfriends into the dance halls in the middle of town. She would dress up to the nines, putting on her nylons. ‘I wore them with a panty girdle, or was it a suspender belt? Something like that. You had to, to keep them up.’

  She went dancing at the Cameo and Queens, though never the Crown and Mitre, Carlisle’s grand hotel, which had its own ballroom with proper musicians in evening dress, the sort of hotel which ordinary factory workers did not patronise.

  Mostly, in her early teenage years, Ivy went to the community hall weekly hops at Raffles, and most of the girls and the boys there would be ones she had grown up with.

  ‘I wasn’t really all that good at dancing, but I did enjoy the quickstep.

  ‘When I first started going, my mother used to say, “Now mind yourself, Ivy, I want you home by nine o’clock.” And of course I did what I was told, being a good obedient little girl, even though I was by then a working woman.

  ‘Girls of that age today are like cats. They only go out in the dark. Instead of coming home at nine, as I did, that is the time they start thinking about going out.’

  Several boys did ask to take her home, and now and again she agreed, usually in the company of another girl, just in case.

  But she did progress now and again to allowing a boy to take her home, on her own. ‘That usually ended in some struggles.’

  There were men at work when Ivy joined Carr’s, but they were in the minority – around 20 per cent of the 2,500 workers. In the very beginning, when the factory first opened back in 1837, there were only a hundred or so workers in the first few years, most of whom would appear to have been men, though no exact records have survived.

  Jonathan Dodgson Carr had been a baker, which was a male occupation, so he employed men in his new factory when he first opened, usually taking them on as apprentices. But once the production lines started rolling, and J.D. Carr had introduced all the latest steam-powered machinery, cared for by men, he found that women could do the job of packing and filling the tins more dexterously and quickly, and more cheaply than the men.

  This was the case all over the UK in the new factories of the Industrial Revolution, in which Britain was the world leader, especially in areas like textiles, food, sweets and chocolate. Until these factories of mass production came along, women on the whole did not go out to work, because there were no jobs for them – apart, of course, from domestic service, the main source of income for millions of women over the centuries.

  Up until the last war, women workers had to leave once they were married, and always earned less than men, which was still the case when Ivy started at Carr’s, though in just a few years, it was possible for married women to be employed.

  One of the young boys Ivy remembers working with was Eric Wallace, born in Carlisle in 1938, who joined Carr’s in 1953, by which time Ivy was now aged twenty.

  Eric was unusual for a Carr’s worker, male or female, that he had gone to what was then a small, modest fee-paying Catholic school, Austin Friars.

  ‘I let my parents down badly by deciding to leave at the age of fifteen.’ So Eric said later in a 2001 interview for Carlisle’s oral archives. ‘I didn’t fancy any sort of academic career and decided I wanted to work in a factory, so I applied to Carr’s. My father worked there fifty years in the end – and got a gold watch when he retired.

  ‘I started as a glorified labourer – and loved it. For the first few weeks I went to bed at nine at night, absolutely shattered, but then I got used to it and really settled in.

  ‘Then I became a barrow boy. It was like a great adventure playground, the most wonderful place for a young teenager to be. There were lots of new buildings but also lots of old buildings, going back to when Carr’s began in the 1830s, full of mysterious passages. I used to love it in winter in the darkness, arriving at 7.30 in the morning, pitch black, dark streets, with cellars, attics and secret corridors – places where you could go to smoke a Woodbine.

  ‘Becaus
e I was a barrow boy, one of Ronnie Atkins boys, a team of maybe a dozen teenagers, we could go everywhere in the factory with our barrows, picking up full tins of biscuits or carrying ingredients and materials, and wheel them round about the factory all day long.

  ‘We were all teenage boys and there were lots of teenage girls, many more than us, so we were always falling in love. We would flirt, fall in and out of love and – er, hmm – there were many liaisons. We had the most wonderful time.

  ‘We would meet in certain parts of the factory and then, after work, we would go to the Rex in Denton Holme or the Regal cinema across from the Carr’s factory. You could get double seats, like sofas. And it was always very dark. Yes, it was tremendously exciting.’

  Eric was then moved from the barrows to be a general labourer, and ordered to demolish some local houses surrounding the factory. These had been put up by J.D. Carr to house the workers but had now become slums.

  ‘We had to knock down Poets’ Corner – which was what we called these fairly squalid streets. They had been named Wordsworth Street, Shakespeare Street, Byron Street and I think a Coleridge Street. There were still one or two people living there. We had to go in with no training, no hard hats, no protective clothing, just a team of twenty or so of us told to get in there and knock down everything. We immediately had these great fires going, tied ropes round walls and chimneys to pull them down. It was brilliant. I couldn’t wait to get into work every morning.’

  Ivy never went out with Eric – he was a few years younger – but she remembers all the flirting that used to go on. And the occasional secret affairs.

  One woman, a married woman, told her husband she only got one week’s holiday a year, which was a lie, as she got two. During her other week off, her husband continued to drive her to work, dropped her off at the front gate, then went off to his own work. She would then go through the factory, out of a back door – and off to spend the day with her boyfriend. Her husband picked her up as usual at the front gates after work, never knowing what she had really been doing all day long.