When Florence was seven, the entire street was demolished under the slum clearance programme and the family was moved to a brand-new council house in Pottery Lane. Florence was delighted when they went to see it and she discovered that it had the luxury of a handbasin with taps. Even then they still had to use an outside toilet – it wasn’t until they eventually moved to a four-bedroom house in Foss Way years later that they had a bathroom as well: ‘We thought we’d died and gone to heaven when we got there!’ Florence says.
Florence had started school at St George’s, but then went to St Wilfrid’s when they moved house, and stayed there until she left school at fourteen. There was little doubt about where she would work when she grew up. Her dad was one of only two members of the family not employed by Rowntree’s – he worked at the electricity station on Foss Islands Road – but all her brothers and two of her sisters worked there; even her mum had worked there as well before she got married. She was one of the first ‘pipers’, using an icing bag full of liquid chocolate to pipe swirls onto the chocolate assortments, in the original Rowntree’s factory at Tanners Moat by the river.
Florence finished school on a Friday in July 1937 and started work at Rowntree’s the following Monday. ‘There was only Rowntree’s, Terry’s and the railways in York really,’ she says. ‘If you didn’t go to one of them, you’d have struggled to find work at all. Mind, you couldn’t walk straight into Rowntree’s like you could at Terry’s; you had to pass the tests that they gave you, but you knew if you passed the medical and the tests, that’s where you’d be going. It was seen as the best place to work; they were good to you, Rowntree’s, with medical care and everything.’
Even those girls who did not at first follow the well-trodden route straight from school through the factory gates at Rowntree’s often turned up there within a couple of years. One of Florence’s workmates, Dot Edwards, started at Terry’s instead when she was fourteen, and spent two and a half years there. ‘I Cellophaned a lovely big fancy box for the Queen while I was there,’ she says. ‘It was on display in Terry’s window for a while, but then they went on short-time working, where you did two weeks on, but then you were off for two weeks. There was no unemployment money then so I only had half the money I’d had before – and at age fourteen it was only nine shillings and eightpence a week, even when I was working full time – so I decided to leave and went to Rowntree’s instead. I had a brother and a sister already working there and that was how you got on to work at Rowntree’s in those days; if you had relatives working there, you had preference over everyone else.’
Girls without family connections often found themselves drawn to Rowntree’s by peer pressure or the gravitational pull of the city’s biggest employer. The mother of another of Florence’s contemporaries, Madge Tillett, had planned a career for her daughter in hairdressing and had even secured her an apprenticeship. ‘My mum used to go to a hairdressers in Clarence Street,’ she says, ‘and she got me a place there, and in those days you had to pay a premium to learn. But when they asked us at school, “Where do you want to go?” all my friends said “Rowntree’s”, and when they got to me I said “Rowntree’s” as well, because if all my schoolfriends were going to be there, I wanted to be there, too. I thought, “Whatever am I going to say to my mum?” and she was really furious with me, but luckily my dad stuck up for me and said, “Let her go where she wants to.” So, like almost all of my friends, I went to work at Rowntree’s.’
Another girl, Marjorie Cockerill, was planning to join the Co-op and work in the kitchens, but when she told her father, he said, ‘You’re not going into the kitchens – you’re that clumsy, you’ll cut your hands off. Get yourself to Rowntree’s and get a job there.’ Muriel Jones, who had lost both of her parents within ten months of each other when she was young, and had been taken in by her aunt and uncle, saw a similar lack of sympathy from her guardian. ‘When I left school,’ she says, ‘and had “had a rest”, as my uncle called it, over the weekend, he said, “Right, now get yourself over to Rowntree’s and see if you can get a job.”’
Rowntree’s also gave employment to people from other areas of the country. One of them, eighteen-year-old Gwen Barrass, left her home in Cramlington, Northumberland, to work at Rowntree’s in 1938 without knowing a single soul in York. At the railway station she had to find the girls who were to be lodging at the same address as her – one girl from Washington, County Durham, and two from Newcastle – none of whom she had ever met before. They shared a room in a boarding house and were each charged one pound a week for full board at their lodgings, but it was very poor quality and the food they were given was almost inedible. Her wage as an adult was one pound eighteen shillings a week and she tried to send a few shillings home to her mother every week, so she did not have much left to spend on herself.
For other girls, a move to York was rooted in a family tragedy. Sheila Hawksby’s great-grandparents came from Derbyshire, where they had worked as domestic servants in a country house, but both caught cholera and died, leaving Sheila’s grandmother and four other children as orphans. The three oldest, including her grandmother, were old enough to work and so moved to Yorkshire in search of jobs, but the two youngest, aged just five and seven, were taken in by Barnardo’s and then sent to Canada. Once there, the two children were separated and sent to homes thousands of miles from each other. Sheila’s grandmother never saw either of them again.
Before she moved to York and found work at Rowntree’s, Sheila’s early life had been spent among the coalfields of South Yorkshire. After years in the grimy colliery districts, with the smoke-belching chimneys, the clanking winding-wheels at every pit head, the black dust that coated every surface no matter how many times the house was swept and cleaned, and the pall of smoke that seemed to hang permanently over the pit villages, York was a revelation to her. ‘I thought it was a beautiful place,’ she says. ‘Going down Coney Street with all the lovely shops, I’d never experienced anything like that before. I thought York was a wonderful city, and I still do.’
Even though Florence had lived in York all her life and nearly all of her family already worked at Rowntree’s, she still found it ‘quite a scary experience’ when she went into the factory for the first time for her interview. Blonde-haired and so petite that she looked even younger than her fourteen years, she drew a little comfort from the fact that a large number of other young girls were also being interviewed at the same time. Boys tended to be taken on sporadically at the factory, on an ad hoc basis, but Rowntree’s need for female workers had steadily increased to cope with the rising demand for their new Black Magic assortments and Aero and Kit Kat bars, and they tended to recruit them at mass interviews and hirings, usually coinciding with the end of the Easter and summer terms, when the fourteen-year-olds were leaving school.
Most of them would have been as intimidated as Florence by the sheer scale of the Rowntree’s factory and the vast numbers of people already employed there. ‘There were so many people pouring in through the gates,’ Florence recalls, ‘and the whole place was so huge – even the rooms were enormous – that I couldn’t imagine how I was ever going to find my way around the place.’
Like the other girls applying for jobs, Florence went through an interview, a ‘very stiff’ medical examination and also underwent a psychological evaluation. Her medical history and general state of health were assessed, and the nurse examining her searched her scalp for nits, checked her teeth and eyes, and examined her skin, taking a very close look at her hands and arms. ‘They wanted to make sure that you were good and healthy before they took you on!’ Florence says. She was also weighed to make sure she was not too thin for her height. Another girl, Lillian, remembers them ‘playing steam’ with her for being underweight – she was only six stone ten at the time.
The industrial psychologists then took over, with a series of tests designed to evaluate Florence’s memory and her basic mathematical abilities – packers had to be able to count the number of chocolates going into certain products and also weigh items to ensure they were not below the minimum weight printed