Biscuit Girls Read online

  It has meant for two centuries at least that ‘country folk’ from a large and scattered catchment area have been traipsing into Carlisle each day for work, for shopping, for entertainment or for secondary schooling.

  Naturally some of the city slickers of Carlisle have always felt superior to their country cousins, considering them slow and old-fashioned, with straw sticking out of their ears. A gross libel, of course.

  One of the remarkable features of Cumbria’s home-grown multi-millionaires who became nationally well known has been their rural origins. They include John Laing the builder (originally from Sebergham); Eddie Stobart of the lorry firm (Hesket Newmarket); the Denning family who run the Westmorland service station on the M6 and Reghed (Shap) and the Rayner family who began Lakeland, the kitchenware firm (Windermere). And of course John Dodgson Carr from Kendal.

  Dorothy’s family were rural but not quite of such a business bent. Her father Joe, who was living on a rented smallholding when Dorothy was born, did later acquire a small farm of around fifty acres bought by his father, but instead of using this chance to expand, he gave it up and his father took it back.

  Joe then reverted to being a hired hand, an agricultural labourer, who moved around the Sebergham, Dalston and Hesket Newmarket area when Dorothy and her older sister Margaret were growing up, living in a sequence of farm cottages that came with his job.

  ‘He didn’t like managing things. He liked being out in the open all the time. And I think he was a bit like me, taking things easy and not wanting too much stress, but he was a lovely man.’

  Dorothy’s earliest memory dates back to when she was three, in the summer of 1942 when they were living near Hesket. A Lancaster bomber had come down, trying to limp home after being shot at over Germany, and had crashed into the side of a high fell.

  ‘We all set off to go and find it, my mam and dad and my sister. We’d never seen a plane before, so we were very excited. It seemed to take ages, and we must have been walking for two hours. I ended up on my dad’s shoulders. We could see the plane clearly on the fellside, but it was hard to get at.

  ‘The crew had survived, somehow, and been taken to hospital by the time we arrived, but there was some RAF and police guarding it.

  ‘My dad lifted me up and put me on the wing. I was so scared! I think I cried. I thought the plane was going to take off.’

  Dorothy had bright red hair – unlike her mother and father. ‘“Where has she come from?” People used to say. I did have an aunt with red hair and when my father grew a moustache, it always came out ginger. I liked having red hair. Didn’t bother me. The usual remark when I was at school was, “Left out in the rain, were you, and gone all rusty?”’

  The war had little effect on their family rural life. They had plenty to eat as her father grew potatoes, turnips, apples, corn, wheat, barley and kept a few cows while their mother had hens.

  ‘But every little inch had to be cultivated for the war effort, even bits that had never been used, which was why me dad had to grow some wheat, which he had never done. They came round inspecting you. One year the inspector refused my dad’s wheat, said it wasn’t up to standard. My mother maintained they were just saying it – they had too much already. There was nothing wrong with his wheat, so she said.

  ‘I suppose we were lucky, living on a farm in wartime, as we had things like eggs all the time, from our own hens, unlike people living in town only being allowed one a week, or whatever it was. When we had any spare, Mam sold them to the Egg Marketing Board. It gave her a bit of money.

  ‘My father also kept a few pigs, so we usually had plenty of bacon and ham, but there were wartime restrictions about pig keeping. Depending on how many ration books you had in the house, and we had four, that decided how many pigs you could kill a year. We were allowed two.

  ‘We didn’t kill the pigs ourselves, that was not allowed, it had to be a registered butcher. He would come to the farm twice a year and kill one of our pigs. When I was little I was quite fascinated by it, but when I was a young girl, I hated the sound of the pig squealing. I used to run away and hide in the fields when I heard the pig squealing. Everyone thought it was very funny.

  ‘We got groceries once a fortnight from a van, the Co-op van, which came to the lane end or we might go to the village shop, but that was a bit of a trail. Mainly we had very plain food.

  ‘It was always a roast on Sunday, beef mainly. Next day we had cold meat, then it was made into a shepherd’s pie or hot pot. The roast could be made to last up to half the week. We usually had a pudding, either rice pudding or stewed fruit, just what was in season.

  ‘My father didn’t cook, but he said he could. And my mother said he could. But I don’t actually remember him ever doing any. He thought it was woman’s work, so if there were any around, he let them do it. Anyway, he was out all day in the fields, not like people on shift work in factories who would come home at a regular set time. So Mam did all the cooking. And I would help her – because I liked it. We always sat down together, at the table, and ate together, even if we had to wait for my dad to come in from the fields.

  ‘I had no likes and dislikes. I liked everything. Well, it was plain, natural food, so you couldn’t dislike it, could you. Fried tomatoes, that was the only thing I wasn’t so keen on. I like tomatoes, but plain and uncooked.

  ‘My parents never drank in the house, not that I ever saw. My father might go out to the pub for a drink now and again, but not often. He didn’t have the money. But there was usually a bottle of rum and a bottle of whisky in the house. I don’t remember anyone ever drinking it though. The rum was used for cooking – for making rum butter or rum sauce for the Christmas pudding.

  ‘We also had a lot of soups and broths, anything like that to warm us up. Oh, it was so cold in them days, the winters were terrible. We had no central heating of course, or any sort of heating, apart from the one fire. We had no gas and no electricity, with living out in the country, not till we moved into Dalston. For most of my childhood the cooking was done on an open fire, with a range, using coal or logs. For light we had paraffin lamps. The radio ran on batteries, which were so expensive and huge.

  ‘It was so cold we used to sit with blankets over us, even in front of the open fire. That’s what we did most evening in the winter, huddle round the fire in the lamplight.

  ‘When you went to bed, you put on as many layers and as many blankets as you could, as of course there was no heat in the bedrooms either. Rubber hot-water bottles were hard to get during the war. I think rubber was going to the war effort. So you used a stone hot-water bottle. We also had an aluminium one at one time. It was a like a Thermos flask. You filled it with hot water. If you touched it with your bare hands or feet you would scream. I used to put it inside one of my dad’s old socks and take it to bed. You would literally burn your feet if the sock wasn’t there.

  In the morning, it was agony. You tried not to stand on the lino floor with your bare feet. Otherwise you would freeze to death, or be stuck to the lino till springtime. And of course the windows were frozen on the inside when you woke up.

  ‘So yes, that was one of the bad things about living out in the country in the war, with no gas and electricity.’

  Around Carlisle, and in many other rural areas, there were prisoner-of-war camps, which provided cheap labour on the local farms. Dorothy remembers some Czech farm labourers working with her father, but assumes they were refugees from war-torn Europe, not POWs.

  Her father served in the Home Guard from its inception in 1940 till 1944. Anthony Eden, Secretary of State for War, had announced its creation in May 1940, saying that any males between the ages of seventeen and sixty-five who were not eligible so far for military service should join up and help to defend the nation from possible invasion. Within a week, 250,000 had joined. By July, the total was 1.5 million. The vast majority were middle-aged, hence the title Dad’s Army. There is a myth that no Home Guard soldier ever fired a shot in anger, but in fact in
the big towns, such as London during the Battle of Britain, they helped to man anti-aircraft guns. The first casualty inflicted by anyone in the Home Guard was on Tyneside in 1943 when a Home Guard gunner brought down a German plane.

  Dorothy’s father served for the whole of the war and she remembers that he wore a uniform, carried a rifle and rose to the rank of corporal. In rural Cumbria of course there was little call to man anti-aircraft batteries.

  ‘But he did get a certificate for map reading – which my mother always laughed at. She couldn’t understand it as she said he never had any sense of direction.’

  Dorothy has kept all her father’s Home Guard mementos, his certificates, badges, bits of his uniform, and also a very nicely printed message of thanks from the Lieutenant Colonel of the 3rd Cumberland Battalion, HG of the Border Regiment, presented in 1945, when the war was over.

  There are many officers and men I hope to see again. Some may however move to other places and our ways will part. To these I say ‘Thank you, goodbye and good luck. To those who remain in Cumberland, thank you and au revoir.’

  The commanding officer who signed this touching card was Lt. Col. RN Carr, MC – Ronald Carr (1894– 1967), another one of J.D.’s grandsons.

  He is rather overshadowed in the Carr family saga by another, slightly older grandson, Theodore Carr, who after Jonathan Dodgson himself is always reckoned to be the most innovative and energetic of the subsequent Carr dynasty.

  It was Theodore Carr (1866–1931) who is credited with establishing what became known as Carr’s Table Water Biscuits. Some Americans claim they had invented a similar dried cracker earlier, but of course the origins of such biscuits go back to the hard tack used by sailors.

  Carr’s had from almost the beginning been successfully producing a dry biscuit version called Captain’s Thin, but it was in 1890 that Theodore managed to create what he called a Table Water Biscuit. It was one third as thin as normal dried biscuits but delicate and lighter in colour as it had not been baked in the ovens for as long. It was a complicated process to get it right, and not end up with a pile of crumbs. The name ‘crackers’, as originated in the USA, had come from the fact that in the baking process, it did tend to crack and pop. Table Water Biscuits are made simply from flour and water, hence the name, with no fats or sugars added, and the reference to table suggested it should be displayed on the dining table, ready to be scoffed when the cheese course arrived.

  In 1901 Theodore launched the Café Noir biscuit, aimed at more sophisticated tastes, which proved extremely popular. In 1906 he helped invent what became known as the Baker-Carr machine, which iced biscuits in one tenth of the time it had previously taken by hand.

  Theodore was also an MP and a car fanatic, building Carlisle’s first ever steam-driven motorcar in 1896, creating clouds of steam as he tore around the country lanes scattering terrified locals and ignoring all rules and regulations.

  Ronald Carr, his younger cousin, aged just thirty-seven when his older cousin Theodore died, had never been expected to do much, in life or in the family firm. He had been a sensitive, delicate young man, educated at Repton and Cambridge.

  By now the Carrs had not just ceased to be Quakers, but were keen to send their children to the best public schools, universities and regiments, which traditionally Quakers had shunned, being against hierarchies or any sorts of oaths of allegiance. One reason Jonathan Dodgson never sent his own sons to boarding school was that he heard that in the sixth form they were allowed what was known as ‘small beers’. He was, of course, strictly teetotal all his life. Young Ronald Carr had disliked being dragged round the factory as a child, and was determined not to go into biscuits. But when the First World War began, he joined up and served with distinction, as did several of the Carrs – a sure sign that their Quaker pacifist origins had been long forgotten.

  Aged only twenty-two, Ronald Carr was awarded the Military Cross for bravery. On the same day, Stanley Carr, son of Theodore, was killed. After the war, Ronald felt it was his duty to serve the family firm. He was an active director for many years, eventually becoming chairman. He was considered pretty tough, keen to drive the firm forward and make it as profitable as possible.

  During both world wars, Carr’s factory kept going, but of course production was limited and controlled. A lot of the wartime work in the nation’s factories was secret, especially anything to do with munitions, but Ronald Carr in his 1946 Christmas message to the workers revealed exactly what they had been doing during the recent war years.

  ‘Our fortunate geographical positions enabled us to do much what other firms were unable to tackle. We packed curry powder and organised production of camouflage nets, both very sneezy jobs. We made special packs of biscuits for the Pacific war and tons of vitamin chocolate. It tasted awful, but doubtless it served its purpose. I think it might be said that the firm met all the demands made upon it and rendered good service.’

  Dorothy today still treasures the signed card from Ronald Carr, which was given to her father at the end of the war when she was aged six and still at primary school.

  She was at Sebergham village school when she sat the Eleven Plus, but like Ivy, it was a bit of non-event and she doesn’t remember much about it.

  ‘I wasn’t very brainy, as well as being lazy. My mam used to say I didn’t know anything. I couldn’t concentrate at school. I wanted to be out in the fields, watching my father ploughing with his horses. He didn’t have any tractors during the war, and nobody had a car. I used to like sitting on his turnip drill behind the horses. I knew exactly where each cow should go in the byre, but my sister didn’t. She wasn’t interested in the farm.’

  Only one girl in Dorothy’s year passed the Eleven Plus, but the year before her younger sister Margaret had rather surprised the family when she passed the Merit for the high school.

  Dorothy went for a while to the little primary school in Hesket Newmarket, where in her class was Eddie Stobart, senior – father of Edward, the one who went on to build up Eddie’s little local agricultural firm into a massive transport organisation.

  In 1952, Dorothy aged thirteen, a solemn but open-faced, open-hearted girl, moved to Wigton Secondary Modern in the small town of Wigton, the home of Melvyn Bragg, another Cumbrian who did good, but he was at Nelson Tomlinson, Wigton’s grammar school.

  Wigton Secondary Modern was in a brand-new building that could double up as a hospital. They had a uniform, but Dorothy was excused having to wear one as she had arrived late and was just going to be there for two years. ‘It seemed enormous, after the one-class village schools I had been at. I didn’t know anyone. They were all strangers. But anyway, you just get on with it, don’t you, as best you can, sort of style.’

  She left school in the summer of 1954, just a month before turning fifteen. She looked for work, knowing the chances were that if she was lucky, it would be in Carlisle. There were few jobs at the time for young women in country areas – and even fewer today.

  She wasn’t fazed by the thought of the big city, having been to it regularly over the years with her family.

  ‘Me and my mam and sister used to come in on a Saturday for shopping, leaving really early and coming back quite late. It was a big outing for us and we usually ended up having some tea at the country café. Dad had no car, so we came on the bus.

  ‘I used to think Carlisle people were better off than us. Not just more money but they had better things. We always thought the best stuff in the covered market or the shops had gone by the time we got there. Things like new clothes, new fashions, they had disappeared by the time we had even heard of them.

  ‘The accents were a bit different. They seemed a bit more intelligent, or advanced, let’s say. I noticed that the children were allowed to go and run messages to the shops or go on the bus from about the age of eight. Me and my sister were not allowed to go on the bus alone till we were ten or eleven. And then only if we were together.

  ‘When we got a bit older, we all used to go
into Carlisle as a family once a week in the evenings, to go to the cinema. I loved cowboy films and thrillers. We had chips afterwards on the way home. It seemed so exciting, going into Carlisle.’

  Dorothy’s first job was in a small confectionery shop, Richardson’s in Longsowerby, on another of Carlisle’s council estates. Mrs Richardson ran the bakery side with Dorothy and another girl, while Mr Richardson and his son ran the shop part. They didn’t bake bread, that was bought in, but made a wide range of tea cakes, scones, shortbreads and cakes, baked in their own bakery.

  Dorothy came in every day to work on the early bus, seven o’clock, from Dalston, near where her father was now working, along with the other early workers. ‘I loved the bus ride, going down Dalston road as we got into Carlisle, and seeing all the big houses.’

  Her starting wage was £2 7s 3d. She loved the job, staying there thirteen years, till the Richardsons retired. She then spent eight years as a machinist in a textile factory, Morton Sundour, machining curtains and bath mats, till that factory closed and it moved to Bolton.

  In 1976, she was out of work for three months, worried that she wouldn’t get another job. She was still living with her family who had by now moved into Carlisle. Her father – with his father’s help – had managed to buy a small house in Wood Street. Her sister Margaret had got married and moved to Gloucester.

  Through the Job Centre, Dorothy was told there might be a vacancy at Carr’s. She went for the interview, where naturally they gave her nails a good inspection.

  ‘The man who saw me, Tommy Walker, was mostly interested in whether I had any of my family working here. I got the impression that was what got you in, or at least gave you a better chance. I had nobody, coming from a line of farming people. But anyway, they took me on. I was thrilled, after being out of work.