During Madge’s early days in the Card Box Mill, an overlooker came marching along the production line one day, brandishing a couple of hairs that had found their way into a completed chocolate box. Madge’s sister Rose had beautiful, lustrous long hair, and when not at work had it arranged in ringlets down her back – ‘She used to win prizes for it at the Rialto,’ Madge says. Rose was now singled out and told to report to the manager’s office.
She returned to the house that lunchtime in floods of tears. Their mum looked up from her cooking and said, ‘Now then, our Rose, what’s wrong with you?’
‘I’ve been told off about my hair,’ Rose said. ‘They found a hair in one of the boxes and they think it’s one of mine.’
Madge’s mum gave her a look that was somewhat lacking in sympathy and then said, ‘Come here a moment, then.’ Rose gave her a puzzled look, but did as she was told, and Madge’s mum immediately took out her kitchen scissors and cropped off all of Rose’s long ringlets, saying, ‘There you are. Problem solved!’ However, when she’d finished snipping away with the scissors, and saw all those beautiful ringlets lying on the floor, Madge’s mum joined in with Rose’s tears and sobbed even louder than her daughter.
Juniors like Madge were paid lower rates when they were young, and they didn’t go on to the full adult wage until they were twenty-one. Like many other manufacturers, at times when there was no shortage of labour Rowntree’s used to save money by getting rid of workers when they were old enough to qualify for a full adult wage and taking on another fourteen-year-old instead. Men received higher pay than women, even when performing exactly the same task, but they were just as vulnerable to being sacked as soon as they qualified for the full adult wage. Madge’s three brothers were all fired by Rowntree’s when they reached their twenty-first birthdays. One of them, Ted, the second eldest, couldn’t find other work around York and in the end emigrated to Australia. That was in the days of the ‘Ten Pound Poms’, when it cost you ten pounds to emigrate there on voyages that were heavily subsidized by the Australian government. Neither Ted nor his parents had that kind of money, but their neighbours heard about it, held a collection in the street and raised seven pounds for him. Madge’s dad then told Ted, ‘I’ll give you the other three pounds.’ So Ted and another boy from the street went out to Australia together on a steamer packed with Ten Pound Poms. It was a ten- to twelve-week journey, and once out there the emigrants had to remain there for at least two years or repay the full cost of their passage – the huge sum of £120. As a result, most emigrants did not return to Britain for many years, even for a brief visit, and some never came back at all.
Madge was nine years old when Ted left. It was to be forty-seven years before she or any other member of the family saw him again, and it was several years before they had news of him at all. Madge’s mum wrote regular letters to the last address she had for him, but they all came back unopened, because neither his family nor the Australian authorities had any idea where he was. Like thousands of others in those bitter years of the 1930s, he was unemployed for a long time, wandering the outback trying to eke out a living and find some work somewhere, even if it was just an hour or two’s labour in return for food or a roof over his head for the night. Without work, Ted was reduced to eating out of bins, or anything he could find. He did not write to his family, partly because he didn’t even have money for a stamp, but also because he didn’t want to write with a tale of failure, preferring to leave them in ignorance of the dire straits he was in.
However, Ted came to an outback farm one day and asked the farmer’s wife for work or something to eat. She pointed to a pile of logs and told him that if he split those for her, she’d give him some food. He chopped the logs for her and did a few more odd jobs around the farm over the next few days, and eventually he was taken on as a permanent worker. The farmer’s wife had a daughter, Maud, and she and Ted started courting and in time they got married.
Madge was a married woman with children of her own long before Ted returned to Britain, but finally, forty-seven years after emigrating as a Ten Pound Pom, he came home on a visit, bringing Maud to meet his mum, who by then was in her late eighties. Madge’s mum had always said, ‘Whatever else, I’ll live to see our Ted come back,’ and she was as good as her word, and in fact lived for many years after that, dying at the ripe old age of ninety-five. However, her husband had died of a stroke some years before Ted came home, and was never to see his son again. A few years after that visit, Madge and her sister Ginny went out to Australia together and stayed with Ted and Maud on the farm, which by then they’d inherited.
When Madge started at Rowntree’s in 1932, Ginny was working as a tour guide, showing visitors around the factory. There were seventy women working in the Guides department, a reflection of the huge popularity of the Rowntree’s factory tours. School parties, clubs and all sorts of other organizations – 70,000 people a year in total – took the free tours, coming from all over the North of England and far beyond, by train, charabanc and later, as affluence increased, by car. People coming by train arrived at Rowntree’s Halt and the guides, dressed in cream overalls edged with brown piping and wearing navy-blue court shoes, would walk through the factory to meet them there. Other arrivals were dropped off by bus outside the guides’ office in part of the Dining Block.
Ginny was a lively character and very popular with the visitors. Their dad used to say, ‘There’s always one devilish one in a family,’ and in the Fishers it was Ginny, though Madge herself was not far behind. Ginny was, Madge says, ‘a real devil, always cracking jokes, playing tricks and bending the rules whenever she could’. Rowntree’s tour guides were strictly forbidden to accept tips, but many visitors, especially the Americans, were accustomed to tipping everywhere they went and Ginny was certainly not going to look such a gift horse in the mouth. As she was showing the visitors around the factory, she would glance behind her to make sure there were no supervisors or managers within earshot and then say, ‘We’re not supposed to accept tips, you know, but in case you’re interested, that’s my pocket right there!’
As a tour guide, Ginny often had to work very long hours. The tours didn’t start until 8.30 a.m. but the guides still had to turn up for work at 7.30, and spent the first hour of their day working on the production lines. They then assembled in a long line and were given one of the five routes: A, B, C, D or E. Each guide would take a small group, usually about eight people, and lead them on a three-mile walk around the factory that took two hours to complete. One tour started at the Card Box Mill, another in the Gum department, another at the Cream Block, another at the offices, and the last one at the Melangeur Block. The name Melangeur (the workers pronounced it ‘mullanja’) had been adopted from a term used by the French and Swiss confectioners who had perfected the art of chocolate-making. Mélangeur meant ‘mixer’ in French and the Melangeur Block was where all the chocolate for the factory was made.
As well as the general public, Rowntree’s also used factory tours to strengthen the company’s links with wholesalers and retailers. Once a year a train would set off from London and ‘stop at just about every station’ to pick up local shopkeepers and bring them to York for a factory tour. The guides would go down to Rowntree’s Halt to meet them and show them around the factory, and then serve them tea. There were evening tours too, and dinners, and Ginny would sometimes work till midnight, having been there since 7.30 a.m., though if they worked that late, Rowntree’s did at least pay for taxis to make sure that all the guides got home safely.
While Ginny led factory tours, Madge and her sister Rose were hand-making fancy boxes, but their other sister in the Card Box Mill, Laura, was at the machine end of the room, doing much less interesting work, making plain boxes and the ‘outers’ – the large cartons in which the completed boxes were shipped. She would have loved to have been working in the same section as Madge and her other sisters, making boxes of all shapes and sizes, as it was interesting work and very skilled. There were heart-shaped boxes for Valentine’s Day, and special ones for Christmas and Easter, as well as for one-off presentations. When Madge was eighteen she was chosen to make four beautiful boxes to be presented to Queen Mary and her three ladies in waiting during a visit to the factory, all in ruched satin with drawers with silk tassels, and each