Even though Madge and the other girls had stools at their workbenches, they usually used them to hold their work because, with boxes stacked while they waited for the glue to dry, there wasn’t enough space on their benches for everything. They preferred to stand anyway – it wasn’t possible to do the work while sitting down – but they were more than ready for a rest and a sit down by the end of the day. They had a ten-minute break in the morning – there was no afternoon break – but they did not have time to go to the dining hall during break time, so they would all buy a mug of tea or cocoa, or a glass of milk or squash from the trolley brought round to each department by one of the servers from the Dining Block. Rather than sit on their high stools in full view of the overlookers, Madge and the other girls used to lay their stools on their sides, flat on the floor next to the machines, and then perch on the legs and chat until they finished their drinks. Sometimes they would even crawl underneath the benches where they worked, out of sight of the overlookers, but they had to crawl back out as soon as the bell went to signal the end of the break, and get cracking again straight away.
As they were doing hand-work, Madge and her workmates could go for a short toilet break whenever they needed one, whereas Madge’s sister Laura at the other end of the room had to wait for break time. Like those at many other factories, she and her workmates could only leave their work stations during official rest periods, because if anyone left at other times they had to stop the machines. ‘You all had to go to the toilet together,’ one of them recalls. ‘We worked from half past seven to half past five, and you kept working until the conveyor stopped.’
Another woman, Kath, who worked in Cream Packing, putting the chocolate assortments into the boxes that Madge and her workmates made, recalls that:
We used to get a ten-minute toilet break when they’d stop the machines and we all had to go to the toilet together, because when the conveyor was running you had to be working. One charge-hand was a real stickler. She would look at the clock and say, ‘Right, ten minutes, no longer,’ and then turn the machine off. Precisely ten minutes later, whether or not everyone was back from the toilet, she’d turn the machine back on again. Down would come all the chocolates, and the last few girls would be scrambling to get back to their places in time. With the time it took to get there and back, you’d only have six minutes’ break time, but it was amazing what you could get up to in those six minutes, especially my friend Joyce. She used to draw black lines on bits of white paper, stick them on her eyelids, like giant false eyelashes, and walk down the aisle between the machines, fluttering her eyelids at the men she passed going down the room.
The girls were not allowed food on their workbenches, so if they wanted something to eat at break time, they either had to eat it sitting on the floor or go downstairs to the room where they kept their coats. Again, as soon as they had finished eating, they had to rush to the toilets and then be back at the machines ready to start work as soon as they started running. ‘If you weren’t there,’ says one of them, ‘that was your lookout and you’d be struggling to catch up.’
Some of Madge’s workmates in the hand-work section took advantage of their relative freedom compared to the machine box-makers stuck at their workplaces on the conveyor belt, and they often used a toilet break as an excuse to go for a crafty smoke outside, since smoking was forbidden anywhere within the factory buildings. Madge did not smoke, but her friend Alice would often pretend to have period pains in order to take a break; if the overlookers had been more alert, they might have noticed that she appeared to be having two or three periods a month.
There was a rest room as well, where women could go if they weren’t feeling well. They could have an hour’s sleep and then, if they still didn’t feel any better, they could go home. This was also open to a certain amount of abuse, and sometimes Madge or one of the other girls would either elude the overlookers and sneak off to the rest room or pretend an illness they didn’t really feel, and then go and have a quick forty winks.
Until the age of eighteen, like all the other juniors at Rowntree’s, Madge spent a few hours a week at what were known as ‘Day Continuation’ classes, another of Joseph Rowntree’s liberal innovations, aimed at extending the education of his workforce for a few years beyond their schooldays. Employees had to attend classes one day a week for boys and one afternoon a week for girls. For the most part, the classes were not aimed at improving their working skills, but rather as an end in themselves, giving them a taste of music and drama, for example, that they might otherwise never have experienced.
Miss Birkenshaw took the drama group, and while most of the girls and women at Rowntree’s wore plain-coloured, utilitarian clothes in more or less drab shades of green, brown, grey or black, she was an altogether more exotic specimen. Her hair was immaculately coiffed and she wore thick make-up with heavily rouged cheeks that made her look a little like a Japanese geisha, and she always dressed in heavily frilled blouses and suits in vivid shades of pink, red and orange. Her reading style was equally dramatic and her choice of mainstream, middle-brow books such as Jamaica Inn proved very popular with Madge and the other girls.
Miss Johnson, the music teacher, was a much less flamboyant character but no less well liked by her pupils. She was a Scot, with a soft Highlands accent, and taught the girls everything from traditional Scottish ballads to light opera and classical music. She wore her long, dark hair in a bun, but as she waved her hands about conducting an imaginary orchestra while the music played, her hairpins would often fall out and her hair would tumble around her shoulders while the class collapsed in fits of giggles.
The girls were also expected to improve their physical condition through PT (physical training) sessions, and Miss Birkenshaw often took those classes as well. In winter or in poor weather, the sessions were held in the factory gymnasiums – one for each sex – in the long glass veranda along one side of the Dining Block, but in summer the classes were held out of doors, often on the Rose Lawn near the main gates of the factory. Madge and the other girls, shivering and self-conscious, had to go outside and over the road, wearing their shorts that looked like navy-blue knickers, and they had to do their exercises on the lawn with everyone peering out of the windows at them, as one of them later recalled: ‘I always hated PT because of that.’ Those who were keener on exercise could also do fitness and athletics classes after working hours, some of them run by Audrey Kilner-Brown, who worked in the Personnel department but was well qualified to coach athletics, having won a silver medal in the 100 metres at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
The Day Continuation classes took place in the Dining Block, where the junior employees were also taught skills for life. In the case of girls, such skills were often, though not always, linked to their supposed future roles as wives and mothers. In autumn 1938, the company’s house journal Cocoa Works Magazine noted ‘a strong demand for courses of instruction in the domestic field, helpful to brides to be’, and ten years later the magazine was still proudly claiming that they helped ‘the natural ambition of the normal girl for marriage and motherhood’.
However, the girls’ classes were not confined to the domestic duties that wives and mothers were expected to carry out; they were also taught a variety of subjects that appeared to vary from year to year according to the skills, interests and sometimes the hobbies of those appointed to teach them. Many girls seem to have been taught English and natural sciences but, perhaps surprisingly in the context of the times, many also learned woodwork, making wooden trays, stools or other small items for their homes.
Madge and her classmates were also taken to see the glazed hot house near the Dining Block, where the gardeners grew tropical fruits like bananas, as well as vanilla pods and cocoa beans, though the latter were for demonstration purposes, not for production. During the war years, when imports of fruit from the Caribbean virtually ceased, that hot house was one of the few places in Britain where you could actually find a banana. There were also grass tennis courts between the hot house and the Haxby Road, one of several leisure facilities that women employees on short-time working were encouraged to use, and behind the tennis courts there were flowerbeds where the gardeners grew the cut flowers for the vases spread throughout the factory.