The tests, first introduced by the Institute of Industrial Psychology in 1923, were continually being refined and developed by Rowntree’s industrial psychologists, and since Madge’s interview they had added new sections to test interviewees’ reactions and agility. In the reaction test, they recorded how quickly Florence responded to a red light as it flickered on and off. She did that well enough, but the agility test was a larger version of the child’s game where you have to move a metal hoop along a wire. If you allowed the hoop to touch the wire, it completed an electrical circuit and sounded a buzzer. Just as in the piping test, Florence’s hand was shaking so much from nerves that her attempts to move the hoop along the wire were accompanied by a relentless succession of buzzing noises, each of which only served to make her nerves worse and her hand shake even more.
‘There were quite a few other things I had to do,’ she says, ‘and after they had tried you out with all these different things, they then decided what sort of job to offer you. When I finished, they must have decided that I was all thumbs and much too clumsy for the production line, because I saw them write on my paper in block capitals “NO MACHINE WORK” – no piping or setting chocolates, or any of the other jobs in the Machine Room.’
3
Madge was almost too excited to sleep the night before her first full day at the Rowntree’s factory, and although she knew that she had dropped off for a while during the fleeting hours of summer darkness, she was wide awake as the morning sunshine grew brighter on the edge of the curtains, listening to her two sisters breathing steadily on either side of her. Being the youngest and smallest girl, Madge had to sleep in the middle of the bed between her sisters and there were many times that she cursed her misfortune at having to do so, but not that morning. She felt cosy and safe and warm, lying next to her sisters as she thought ahead to what the day might hold. She smiled to herself when she heard the knocker-up rattling their bedroom window with her long pole, as she pictured the familiar figure of Mrs Ettenfield standing in the street below. Ample-bosomed and no more than four feet ten inches tall, she was almost as tall as she was wide, and Madge’s dad always joked, ‘She needs a pole to reach the parlour window, never mind the bedrooms upstairs.’
Mrs Ettenfield was the last of a dying breed, one of only a handful of knocker-ups left in the whole of the North of England by the early 1930s, and very few of them were women. Before that time, not many families in the street owned an alarm clock, because even the cheapest ones were quite expensive and unreliable, and with stiff financial penalties for being late for work, a lot of families relied instead on the traditional knocker-up to rouse them. Knocker-ups were often the older residents of a neighbourhood, doing one of the few jobs still open to them, earning a few extra coppers by banging on doors and windows to wake people up in time for work; or the lamplighters who came round the streets lighting the gas lamps in the evenings and extinguishing them again at dawn; or even the local policemen, supplementing their wages on their early-morning beats. Now clocks were becoming cheaper, and within a few years the knocker-ups, like parlourmaids and rag and bone men, would fade into history.
Madge got out of bed, provoking a sleepy mumble of complaint from Rose as she clambered over her. By the time she went downstairs, her mum was already busy, riddling out the ashes and coaxing the fire back to life to boil the smoke-blackened kettle she had filled. Madge washed her face and hands at the sink, shivering at the chill of the water. She dressed in her new overall and spent ages tying and retying her turban in front of the mirror in the hall, but each time it looked a mess. ‘I just can’t seem to get it right,’ she said, as her sister came clattering down the stairs.
‘Here, I’ll do it for you,’ Rose said, ‘but you’ll soon get the hang of it.’ She retied it, gave a nod of satisfaction and then hurried through to the kitchen. Madge submitted patiently to her mum’s inspection, then walked up to the factory with Rose, both of them eating a slice of bread as their breakfast on the way. Madge’s gums were still sore and she tore the crusts off her bread and gave them to her sister.
Haxby Road was packed with people, all moving in the same direction. Most of the men were on bicycles, with the women on foot, a tide of white-overalled and turbaned workers flooding through the gates. They slowed to a jostling queue as they passed through the double doors into the main building. Rowntree’s rules on timekeeping were strict. Everyone had to record their exact starting and finishing times by putting their time card into one of the four clocking-in machines by the timekeeper’s office inside the main entrance, or in the time clocks in the individual departments. The process of clocking-in was known to the girls as ‘blicking-in’, because the Rowntree’s time clocks were made by a company called Blick Time Recorders Ltd, and the word ‘BLICK’ was prominently displayed in block capitals on the face of the clocks. To encourage good timekeeping, Rowntree’s gave a ‘Blue Riband’ award to those with 100 per cent attendance over the course of a year.
There was a ‘ping’ sound as each employee’s card was time-stamped by the machines, and the whole entrance lobby echoed with the tinny noise. Madge gave her name to the timekeeper, who riffled through a handful of new blicking-in cards and handed her one with her name and department typed neatly at the top. Rose could have showed Madge the way to the Card Box Mill, but the company rules about introducing new employees to their workplace were as precise and unbreakable as every other aspect of Rowntree’s operations, so Rose went on ahead while Madge was greeted by her designated guide and led through the factory towards the Card Box Mill.
It was a long walk, because the Card Box Mill was at the northeastern corner of the factory site. The corridor that led to Madge’s workplace was windowless, flanked by offices all the way down the right-hand side, and by a vast, concrete-floored storage area on the other side. At the far end they took a staircase up to the first floor, the main card box production area, where the beautiful fancy boxes for the chocolate assortments were made. As Madge reached the top of the stairs and looked around the vast room, she was met by a wall of sound. The noise of the clattering machines on every side was deafening, and the women working there were shouting above the din just to make themselves heard.
Built ten years before, the Card Box Mill housed about 500 workers, the vast majority of them women. They worked in a huge, wood-floored open space, interrupted only by the steel pillars supporting the roof, with electric lights hanging from the steel girders that spanned the full width of the enormous room. The overhead lighting was harsh and it was always bright in there, and often extremely hot. Along with the eye-watering smell of the glue they used to stick the boxes together, there was also a rather fusty odour, suggesting a lack of care in cleaning and dusting that would never have been tolerated in the food production areas. The same applied to the pigeons that often found their way into the Card Box Mill and became trapped there. As fast as one lot were caught or killed and removed, others found their way in through broken windows or gaps around the roof edges, or by flying in through the main doors that were always left open in hot weather to provide much-needed ventilation, for it was one of the least comfortable places in the entire factory to work.
The roof – a series of steep-pitched ridges and troughs – was entirely glazed, and as a result the mill was freezing in winter, while in summer the heat was almost unbearable. Every door and window was left open to try to create a draught, and the women workers wore nothing but underwear or even swimsuits beneath their overalls, but it had little effect and sweat dripped steadily from their foreheads as they worked. Even when the glass roof was eventually whitewashed to reflect the sun’s rays a little, the Card Box Mill remained ferociously hot.
Madge’s