Maureen’s story
This is Maureen’s story, one of five stories extracted from THE SWEETHEARTS.Whether in wartime or peace, tales of love, laughter and hardship from the girls in the Rowntrees factory in Yorkshire.“Maureen started work at Rowntree’s on her fifteenth birthday in April 1959, and remembers being the only one in the entire workforce who was wearing ankle socks. But she soon settled in and on Saturday afternoons Maureen and the rest of the girls would go into town – 'I really liked the fashions then and used to love getting dressed up in those days. We wore stockings and suspenders, stilettos, and we always wore gloves, usually white ones, and shoes and handbag to match. We all wore skirts under our overalls and hooped petticoats. My digs were just over the bridge from Rowntree’s and the boys used to love watching me run down the bridge in the morning! I was never late for work, but I usually cut it pretty fine and often had to run the last couple of hundred yards. The hoops would ride up while I was running so there’d be a lot of wolf whistles from the boys…’”From the 1930s through to the 1980s, as Britain endured war, depression, hardship and strikes, the women at the Rowntree’s factory in York kept the chocolates coming. This is the true story of The Sweethearts, the women who roasted the cocoa beans, piped the icing and packed the boxes that became gifts for lovers, snacks for workers and treats for children across the country. More often than not, their working days provided welcome relief from bad husbands and bad housing, a community where they could find new confidence, friendship and when the supervisor wasn’t looking, the occasional chocolate.
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Some places announce themselves by a distinctive smell in the air, long before the town or city itself is reached: the hoppy aroma of brewing from Burton, the lingering smell of the old fish docks in Grimsby, the sulphurous fire and brimstone of the forges that used to announce Sheffield, or the acrid stink of the Billingham chemical works. York greets its visitors with an altogether sweeter and more enticing smell: the rich, mouth-watering aroma of chocolate drifting on the breeze from the Rowntree’s factory just to the north of the city centre. The company, by some distance the city’s largest employer, was taken over by Nestlé in 1988, but to the citizens of York it will always be known as ‘Rowntree’s’.
This is the story of some of the Rowntree’s Sweethearts – the women workers from the company’s Golden Age, which spanned the half-century from the 1930s to the 1980s. That era began at a time when a woman’s right to vote had at last been established, but her right to choose her career path, manage her own money, live her own life and follow her own destiny was far from certain. In the 1930s and the decades that followed, many of the women employed at Rowntree’s found a degree of financial independence, self-confidence and self-reliance through the money they earned at the factory, the skills they acquired and, of no lesser importance, the bonds they formed with other women workers. For some unhappy women, whose lives were blighted by poverty, illness, bad housing and even bad husbands, their working days at the factory also offered a much-needed refuge and respite from their domestic turmoil – a place where they could be happy, respected and valued by their workmates.
The women to whom we spoke in the course of our research were all unstintingly generous with their time and their memories, but it’s a sobering thought that, had this book not been published, their extraordinary, moving and inspirational stories might well have gone untold and unrecorded. They loved their time at Rowntree’s and still regard the factory and the company with great affection. It was, they said, ‘a great place to work and a real community’. They had the Yorkshire virtues: warmth, compassion, honesty, truthfulness, thrift and the capacity for hard graft. They did a fair day’s work in return for a fair day’s pay, shared laughter and tears, hardship and good times, and in the process they helped to make Rowntree’s – and York – what it is today.
Lynn Russell and Neil Hanson, April 2013
Rowntree’s confectioners hand-decorating Easter eggs, c.1930s. ©Société des Produits Nestlé S.A.
Hand-piping the decorations on the tops of chocolates (possibly Dairy Box), late 1940s. ©Société des Produits Nestlé S.A.
Ladies packing Smarties into ‘cinema cartons’, early 1950s. ©Société des Produits Nestlé S.A.
A new recruit undergoes psychological assessment in the Rowntree’s psychology department, c.1950s. ©Société des Produits Nestlé S.A.
Married women work in the seasonal section, wrapping Easter eggs in foil and tying them up with ribbons, 1954. ©Société des Produits Nestlé S.A.
Ladies of the Cake department pack six penny bars of Milk Motoring Chocolate into ‘outers’ ready to be sent out to retailers. ©Société des Produits Nestlé S.A.
Cyclists on Haxby Road, a quarter of a mile from the Rowntree’s factory, c.1920s. ©Stephen Barrett
Maureen is a feisty, fiercely independent woman, who grew up in a sleepy rural community, but more than made up for lost time after moving to York to work at Rowntree’s when she was fifteen. She lived the life and enjoyed some of the freedoms and opportunities that were opening up to women in the 1960s.
Rowntree’s had always been a pioneering employer, and though the Rowntree family’s involvement in the company had all but ceased by the time Maureen joined in 1959, it still retained many of the old traditions initiated by Joseph Rowntree and upheld by his son Seebohm, based on their liberal and Quaker principles of social reform and philanthropy, including the provision of healthcare, excellent leisure facilities and many other benefits. Young workers were even given paid time off to further their education in classes organized and paid for by the company, known as Day Continuation classes.
Mercurial, impulsive and prone to leap first and look afterwards, Maureen has had many jobs and many relationships over the years, not all of them successful, but whatever regrets she may have about some of the wrong turns she made, they pale beside the happiness she’s derived from her life and still continues to enjoy today. With a no-nonsense attitude and a great sense of humour, even in retirement, aged 67, Maureen has lost none of her zest and appetite for life.
Maureen Graham started work at Rowntree’s on her fifteenth birthday in April 1959, and it was, she says, ‘the longest day of my life. It was awful. I was a skinny little thing, the overall was far too big for me, the turban practically covered my eyes so I couldn’t see what I was doing, and even worse, I was wearing a pair of white ankle socks.’ As she joined the jostling crowds of women making their way into work that morning, she realized that there were about 6,000 women at the factory and 5,999 of them, from the youngest girls to the women approaching retirement, were all wearing stockings. The only one in the entire workforce who was wearing ankle socks was Maureen. She was a shy girl, who had grown up in a small farming village fifteen miles outside York, and the ways of the ‘big city’ were new to her. ‘I was a country lass and didn’t know any different,’ she says. She never wore ankle socks again, going bare legged until she could afford to buy a pair of stockings herself. They were expensive and easily laddered, but there were several shops then where you could get damaged stockings mended invisibly.
