Like Madge, Florence was sent to work in the Card Box Mill, where they made the fancy cardboard boxes for the chocolate assortments, and the plainer ones for Black Magic and Dairy Box. Her heart sank when she saw her workplace for the first time that summer day in 1937, because there were so many machines and the noise they made was deafening. As if that wasn’t daunting enough for a shy girl like Florence, the overlookers were also very strict. ‘They used to sit in the middle of the room at right high desks,’ she says, ‘so that they could see everybody and everything that was going on, and when you were just starting and very young like me, I daren’t do anything wrong, because I was really frightened of them.’
Two of the overlookers, Miss Price and Miss Sanderson, were ‘both tartars really’, according to Joan Martin, one of Florence’s workmates, who also worked under their hawk-like gaze:
Everything had to be done just right or you were in trouble. Miss Sanderson was very tall and very straight-laced. She was in charge of inspecting your work and if you got one thin mint too many in a box, or whatever it was, you were in trouble. And if Miss Sanderson came round the corner and caught you putting a chocolate in your mouth, you’d really be in for it. Miss Price was shorter and tubbier, but pretty strict too, though the foreman, Mr Walker, was even worse. He was a holy terror and a lot of the girls were frightened of him. Miss Price and Miss Sanderson could be a bit too demanding, but they were nice enough away from the factory. They shared a house in Fountain Street, just off Haxby Road near the factory. They were living together, but in those days nobody thought anything much about that; if they thought about it at all, they probably just assumed they were friends.
When Florence and the other new girls started work, Rowntree’s invited their mothers to come in during their first week, to look round the factory and see what their daughters were doing. In fact, although Florence had been interviewed on her own, throughout most of the 1930s the girls’ mothers or sometimes a friend of the family would sit alongside them during their interviews. The system was changed in 1938, so that girls were interviewed without their mothers being present, though they were still invited into the factory on the afternoon of their daughters’ first day at work, to have tea with them in the café annexe and talk through their first experience of paid work. History does not relate whether this was to reassure the mothers that their daughters were being well trained and looked after, or to stiffen the backbones of daughters who had found their first taste of the workplace unpleasant and were looking for a way out.
The parents of boys starting apprenticeships were also invited to the factory. A huge range of skilled tradesmen were employed by Rowntree’s, and every craftsman, joiner, engineer, bricklayer, plasterer, electrician, plumber, painter and decorator had an apprentice. Their mothers and fathers would look round the factory and then go over to the dining hall and have tea with their boy’s overlooker, just to get to know the man who was to be in charge of their son for the five- to seven-year term of his apprenticeship.
Florence’s mum came in one afternoon soon after she had started work, but Florence was so scared of the overlookers and so fearful of doing something wrong that she did not even look up when her mum walked past her workbench, but kept her eyes down, fixed on her work. When she started, she was too frightened to do anything but get on with her work, but ‘it was a learning experience there,’ Florence says, ‘and I soon got a bit braver and a bit bolder, and I came out of there knowing a lot more than when I went in – and not just about work!’
It was all piecework – the quicker you worked, the more you could earn – and there was very little training. New girls like Florence were not set to work with an experienced woman who could have shown them the ropes and helped them get up to speed; they were shown once what they were supposed to be doing and that was it, they were thrown in at the deep end and left to sink or swim. Rather than making her less error prone, Florence’s nervousness and her desperation not to make mistakes made her even more fallible, and there was precious little sympathy for her from some of her more experienced workmates. She recalls:
It took a while to learn everything, but if they thought you were going too slow and costing them money, some of the women you were working with could be pretty impatient with you … and some a bit more than impatient. My job was to keep a woman supplied with cardboard to make the boxes and at first I couldn’t keep her going fast enough with them. She thought I was being too slow, so she threw a box at me and one of the corners hit me in the eye. I had a real shiner of a black eye and a scratch on the eyeball itself and she panicked a bit then, and said, ‘I’ll never do that again.’ I think she was worried stiff that I’d report it, but I was far too frightened of her to do that. Anyway, my eye was all right, and I soon got up to speed with the work; it was amazing how quickly you learned. It was funny, when we started, the experienced women didn’t want us juniors anywhere near them, because they thought we’d be costing them money, but by the time we got moved to other departments, we’d got that good at it that they didn’t want us to go.
Nearly all the production line workers in the factory were paid at piecework rates, and there were sometimes astonishing differences in the speed at which some of the more dexterous women could perform their tasks. One woman was legendary for the speed with which she could chop cherries for the Cherry Cup chocolates (known as Liquid Cherry in the 1930s) for the Black Magic assortments. Normal workers picked up a cherry from the pile on their left, placed it on the chopping board in front of them, cut it in half with their knife and then picked up the two halves and dropped them into the container on their right. However, this particular woman had evolved a system where she flicked cherries across from her left, trapping them against the blade of her knife, cut them in half with a blow of the knife and then flicked the halves into the container on her right with the knife blade. She worked so fast that she reached her targets and achieved the maximum piece-rate income well before the end of the working week, and after that she would surreptitiously shift some of her surplus cherries to the containers of her workmates so that they too could earn more.
As elsewhere in the factory, in addition to their lunch break, Florence and the other girls had a ten-minute break in the morning, though none at all in the afternoon. The break was taken at or near their workbenches and conveyors, since there was insufficient time to go anywhere else. A woman from the kitchens came round with the trolley of hot and cold drinks – tea, coffee, cocoa, milk, lemonade or lime juice – though they weren’t provided free; the girls had to pay for them. Although there was a choice of drinks, the trolley did not contain any food. In some of the food production areas, employees were not allowed to bring in anything to eat in case crumbs or other debris contaminated the confectionery or attracted vermin; in others they were merely forbidden to eat at their work tables, but could eat sitting on the floor or in the changing room downstairs, or there was a ‘corridor kitchen’ where they could buy sandwiches or scones that had been made in the Dining Block. Less strict rules applied in areas of the factory where no food was produced, like the Card Box Mill and the Saw Mill, which may help to explain the Card Box Mill’s near-permanent population of pigeons.
At first Florence and her fellow juniors used to sit under the bench during their break and try to turn out some more boxes while they were there, to keep up to the rate that had been set, but even during their breaks the overlookers used to watch them, and would shout at them, ‘This is a break. You’re supposed to sit and rest and not do any work,’ and the girls had to stop. Like many others, Florence used to go home for her lunch because she lived so close to the factory, so she did not use the Dining Block regularly until much later on when she was put on night shifts, but occasionally, if her mother was away for the day visiting a relative, Florence would have her lunch at work.
The Dining Block was on the other side of Haxby Road from the factory, and at dinnertime – lunchtime to those born outside of the North – although some made the dash across the road, most of the thousands of workers opted to reach the block by means of the tunnel that ran right under the Haxby Road. On the night shift, when the factory was largely deserted and the gates locked, there was no option but to use the tunnel. The entrance was near the Rose Lawns, and the first time she used it Florence thought that from the outside it looked like an overgrown bike shed, but inside, to her amazement, she found