On a warm Monday morning in July 1932, Madge Fisher stood fidgeting in the hallway of her terraced house while her mother, Margaret, pinned up her hair and then inspected her from top to toe. ‘Hands,’ her mother said, and Madge presented them meekly for inspection, glad that she’d remembered to wash them at the kitchen sink. She was a petite blonde girl with a quick wit and a ready smile, but her mum was a force of nature, a big, powerful woman, warm and loving, but leaving no one in any doubt that she was the boss of her own household. At seventeen stone, she dwarfed her diminutive daughter, and one look from her was enough to let Madge know when she’d done something wrong.
The front door, opening straight onto Rose Street, stood ajar, and the sun streaming through it cast a long rectangle of light onto the threadbare strip of carpet in the hall and the scuffed toes of the hand-me-down shoes Madge had inherited from one of her sisters. She fidgeted even more as her mum straightened the collar of her dress and repinned her hair for the third time. ‘I’m going to be late if I don’t go now, Mam,’ Madge said, so with a last critical glance at her daughter, Margaret hugged her and then stood on the doorstep to wave her off.
There was the sound of horse’s hooves and a brief, warm smell of stables as a horse and cart plodded slowly past, the rag and bone man’s cry of ‘Rag and Bo-o-o-o-ne’ echoing from the walls. He sat with the reins held loosely in his lap, the open cart behind him already littered with a few bundles of rags and a heap of thick beef bones left over from Sunday joints. Nothing was wasted in those days. Madge’s mum collected used brown-paper bags, carefully smoothing and folding them and putting them in the kitchen drawer for later use. They shared the drawer with bits of string, coiled and tied like small bowties, and rubber bands and paperclips that were stored in neatly labelled old tobacco tins. Food was never thrown away but used and reused, so that Sunday’s roast meat would be served cold on Monday (washday), reheated in a stew on Tuesday, then minced and cooked as a shepherd’s pie on Wednesday, and the last of it served up as rissoles on Thursday. Friday, of course, was always a fish day.
The rags collected by the rag and bone man would go to the ‘shoddy merchants’ in the Heavy Woollen district around Batley and Dewsbury, to be spun back into blankets or cheap yarn, while the bones went to the glue factories, the eye-watering stink revealing their presence long before the factories came into sight. The rag and bone man exchanged this near worthless waste, not for money, but for little muslin bags of ‘dolly blue’, used to whiten the sheets and shirts on washday, or donkey stones like the ones Madge’s mum and her neighbours used to scour a neat white strip onto the edge of their front steps. Some even did the edges of the kerb stones at the side of the street. It was not just a sign that the owners were houseproud; on winter evenings and early mornings the white edges shone faintly and helped them to avoid stumbling over the kerbs or the steps in the darkness.
As Madge reached the corner of the street she glanced back. Her mum was still standing on the step, and although she was already deep in conversation with their next-door neighbour as usual, she gave an answering wave to her daughter before she disappeared from sight. Fourteen years old and just two days after she had left the Haxby Road School that stood at the end of the street, Madge was about to enter the world of work for the first time. The flood of workers who had been walking and cycling up the Haxby Road only minutes before had now dwindled to a trickle. The last few, half a dozen women in turbans and white overalls, hurried past Madge, two of them smoking a last cigarette before they reached the factory gates.
The walk to Rowntree’s should have held few terrors for Madge, for Rose Street was so close to the factory that the smell of chocolate was always in the air, a constant thread in her childhood memories. Her family and Rowntree’s were as closely linked as the lettering in a stick of rock, and in fact confectionery was arguably as much a family business for the Fishers as it was for the Rowntrees. Madge’s father worked as a fireman in the Rowntree’s Fire Brigade, and every single one of Madge’s nine brothers and sisters was already at Rowntree’s as well. There had never been any question that Madge would also be going to the factory or, like most girls in York, that she would leave school at the legal minimum age. Very few parents could afford the luxury of continuing to subsidize children who wanted to further their education. It was a straightforward economic necessity: as soon as you were old enough to earn your keep, that is what you had to do. When each of her brothers and sisters had left school, at the end of the spring or summer term, depending on when their fourteenth birthday fell during the year, straight to the factory they all went. Now she was treading the same path.
Yet despite her brothers and sisters already being at Rowntree’s, as Madge walked up the Haxby Road, she found her footsteps slowing at the daunting thought of what lay ahead. Even more than York Minster, Rowntree’s dominated the city. The factory’s countless buildings sprawled over a site that spanned the whole area between Haxby Road and Wigginton Road, extending well over a mile from north to south. It was so vast that there was even room for allotments on the Wigginton Road side, while to the north of the factory buildings there were acres of sports grounds and open fields. Rowntree’s even had its own network of railway sidings inside the factory grounds, a small station, Rowntree’s Halt, on the main line, and its own wharf on the Foss Lock – the navigable part of the River Foss. Barges with gleaming brass, varnished woodwork and buckets and watering cans painted in the traditional ‘canal’ style shuttled between York and the deep-water port of Hull on the Humber, bringing cocoa beans from Ghana and Nigeria, gum arabic – the sap of the acacia tree – from Sudan, hazelnuts from Turkey, Ethiopian coffee, vanilla from Tahiti, Jamaican honey and a score of other exotic ingredients. They were discharged into the factory’s huge bonded warehouses on the waterfront in Hungate, and the barges would then depart laden with chocolates and confectionery for export.
The Rowntree’s factory was a town within the town: ‘You could almost have lived your life there and never left,’ one former worker said. ‘There was everything you could ever need right there,’ including a shop, a post office, a library, a cinema, a gymnasium, tennis courts, sports fields, a swimming pool and a dining hall. Built in 1913, and used as a military hospital during the First World War, the Dining Block spread over three floors and could seat well over 2,000 people at a time, yet that was just a fraction of the thousands employed at the factory. There were around 8,000 at the time that Madge began work, and by the end of the decade that had grown to over 12,000 – 30 per cent of York’s entire working population. Rowntree’s employed so many people that at 5.30 every evening the Haxby Road was swamped by an avalanche of men and white-clad women pouring out of the factory on foot and on bicycles, while the queue of buses waiting to take home those who lived further afield extended for half a mile along the road. So narrow was the bridge over the railway that two buses could pass each other with only inches to spare, increasing the congestion still more and endangering the crowds of pedestrians spilling out from the pavement into the roadway.
As Madge crossed the bridge over the railway line, passing the little shop where another latecomer had paused to buy a newspaper and a packet of five cigarettes, a billowing cloud of steam and smoke from an engine waiting at the signals below swirled around her and a few black smuts drifted down to the pavement around her feet. The train that brought hundreds of workers from Selby every morning was discharging the last of its passengers at Rowntree’s Halt, and in the sidings she could see lines of goods wagons waiting for a shunting engine to haul them into the factory.
Her walk led her alongside the dark-blue-painted iron railings that surrounded the factory, and as she passed the first set of gates she quickened her pace when she saw the time on the large clock set into a tall, white-painted concrete pillar just inside the gates. There were similar clocks at all the entrances to the factory, perhaps as a warning to late-arriving employees of how much pay they were about to lose, for if you were even two minutes late for work at Rowntree’s, you would find the doors shut and locked until lunchtime and your wages would be docked a full morning’s pay. It was now five minutes before her interview and she did not want to be late; she had heard of girls who had been turned away and refused a job without even being given an interview if they failed to arrive on time.
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