Smoothing an imaginary crease from her dress, she turned in through the main gates on the north side of the library and passed along an avenue of trees next to the Rose Lawn, an area of grass and flowerbeds that contained another memorial to Joseph Rowntree. Three small oak lampposts and a row of oak benches stood around the lawns, all carved by Robert Thompson, ‘The Mouseman of Kilburn’, with his signature, a small carved mouse, on each of them, as on every piece of oak furniture he ever made. Every summer, men from the Rowntree’s Joiners department would carefully sand down the benches and then revarnish them to preserve them in perfect condition through the coming winter.
Madge had no time to admire them, let alone sit on them, and she hurried on towards the doors of the building. As she entered the lobby she was greeted by the smell of polish and the scent of the cut flowers that stood in two large vases at either side of the entrance. Just inside the doors there was also a life-size statuette of ‘Plain Mr York’, a smiling, bespectacled figure, wearing a top hat and tails and holding a tray of souvenir postcards that visitors to the factory were encouraged to take.
The timekeeping office stood just beyond the lobby on the left-hand side of the entrance corridor, flanked by some of the time clocks on which every employee had to clock in and out at the start and finish of the working day. The timekeeper, a florid-faced man with a thick, grey moustache, kept a watchful eye on the comings and goings of the staff from a hatchway set into the wall. Madge hung on her heel for a moment as he dealt with someone else, but then he looked up and winked at her. ‘You’re new,’ he said. ‘Here for the interview?’ He turned his head to glance at the clock. ‘Cutting it fine, aren’t you? And I’m afraid you’re in the wrong place, love. The interviews are in the Dining Block across the road.’ He pointed back the way she had just come. ‘You can take the tun–’ But terrified that she would now be late, Madge had already turned and run back out of the doors.
She sprinted across the road, dodging a bus and a bicycle on the way, and burst in through the doors of the Dining Block just as the minute hand of the clock on the end wall clicked round to 7.30. A woman with a self-important air and a sheaf of papers in her hand glanced from the clock to Madge, pink-faced from exertion and still breathing hard from the run across the road, and pursed her lips in disapproval. But she only asked ‘Interview?’ and then pointed to the bench on the other side of the corridor, next to a small staircase, where another young girl was already seated. ‘Wait there a moment and someone will come down for you.’
Madge did as she was told, exchanging a nervous smile with the other girl. They sat in silence for a couple of minutes, with Madge glad of the chance to get her breath back, and then there was the clatter of heels on the stone stairs and a girl appeared. She looked scarcely older than them, but already had the bored and slightly condescending air of a hard-bitten veteran. ‘You waiting for Mrs Sullivan?’ she said.
They looked at each other, uncertain of who they were waiting for.
‘You are here for an interview, aren’t you?’ the bored-looking girl said, not even bothering to conceal her irritation. ‘Well come on then.’ She jerked her head to signal them to follow her and then went back upstairs without waiting to see if they were behind her.
They hurried after her and at the top of the stairs found themselves in an open area lined with glass cases displaying some of the beautiful commemorative chocolate boxes the workers in the Card Box department had made for special occasions such as Valentine’s Day, Easter and Christmas, or for members of the Royal Family; Queen Mary had a standing order for a dozen elaborate boxes of Rowntree’s chocolates as Christmas gifts.
The girl handed Madge and the other interviewee over to Mrs Sullivan, a middle-aged woman with wire-rimmed glasses and grey hair tied back in an immaculate bun. She gave them a brief welcoming smile and then led them into a small office furnished with hard wooden chairs and plain wood desks, just like the ones at Madge’s school, right down to the steel-nibbed pens, the inkwells and the sheets of well-used, dark-green blotting paper. Mrs Sullivan told them to sit down and then handed them each a form on which they entered their name, address, age, the school they’d attended, their hobbies and their other personal details. The tip of her tongue protruding from the corner of her mouth, Madge completed her form with painstaking care, desperate not to smudge it or drop ink blots on it.
Mrs Sullivan looked up as the sound of scratching pen nibs ceased. ‘Now,’ she said, as she collected the completed forms from them, ‘we have a series of tests for you to complete, but don’t worry.’ Again there was the flicker of a smile. ‘They’re not like exams that you pass or fail, these are simply to give us a good idea of what you can and can’t do, and what you’re best at, so that we can decide – everything else being satisfactory, of course – which department to allocate you to. You’ll also have a medical and our dentist will check your teeth.’ She gave another thin smile at the look of panic that crossed Madge’s face.
‘I’ve never been to a dentist before,’ Madge said.
‘Then it’s high time you went,’ the woman said. ‘But don’t be alarmed. It’s perfectly routine and quite pain-free.’
The two girls were separated and Madge was led into another, larger room, where three people, two men and one woman, were waiting. All wore white lab coats, giving them the air of doctors or scientists, and each carried a stopwatch and a clipboard. They were industrial psychologists, whose role was to study working methods and identify the most suitable new recruits for any given task. Industrial psychology was a still-novel quasi-science much admired by Seebohm Rowntree, who had succeeded his father as chairman of the company, and its stated aims were not just to use scientific methods to increase efficiency, but to produce a ‘correspondingly higher standard of comfort and welfare for the workers’ and eliminate ‘all the unhappiness caused by what is popularly called putting the round peg in the square hole’. Laudable though those aims may have been in theory, their practical application via ‘time and motion’ studies almost invariably led to employees being required to do more work, more quickly, for little or no more reward, and the individuals with their stopwatches and clipboards soon became hated figures.
To help them assess potential employees, the industrial psychologists devised home-spun tests and pieces of ‘home-made’ apparatus, including colour-recognition tests and a formboard like the child’s toy in which different shapes have to be matched to the right holes on a wooden board, enabling them to ‘weed out those girls who are unlikely to become efficient packers’. It was to remain the yardstick by which Rowntree’s graded potential production line employees for thirty years.
Madge was to be the latest new recruit to be graded by these methods. The leader of the group, a man with dark hair flecked with grey and a small goatee beard, explained each test to Madge and then one of his assistants placed the equipment in front of her. ‘These tests are to assess your aptitude for the different kinds of work you might be doing here,’ he said. ‘Please complete them accurately and as quickly as you can. The first test is to place these wooden shapes into the correct spaces in the formboard. Some of the shapes are incorrect, either because they are the wrong size or because they are damaged, and those you should place on one side. Now if you are ready? But please do not begin until I tell you to.’
His assistants then placed a wooden board with different-shaped indentations in front of her and a tray containing the wooden shapes to her right, and a moment later the man with the goatee said ‘Go’ and clicked his stopwatch. As Madge began sorting the shapes and fitting them into the recesses on the board, she could see from the corner of her eye that they were watching her intently and making occasional notes on their clipboards, but she did her best to ignore that and carried on sorting the shapes. She tried one in a couple of different places before consigning it to the reject pile, but eventually she filled the last recess and heard the faint metallic click as they stopped their watches in unison. She glanced at their faces, but their expressions