The Sweethearts: Tales of love, laughter and hardship from the Yorkshire Rowntree's girls. Lynn Russell

baby out for some fresh air. If it was a wet day and the box started to disintegrate, they just went and found another one.

      Madge’s dad – his name was John, but everyone called him Jack – was a jolly-looking, apparently extrovert character with a bushy moustache and stocky build, but appearances could be deceptive, because he was quiet, shy and softly spoken and, like the rest of the family, he was never in any doubt as to who was the boss of the household. Madge’s mum was a real hard worker. She more than had her hands full with a family of twelve to look after, but she used to take in washing as well, trying to earn a bit of extra money to help make ends meet. She did not have a washing machine or anything like that; it was all hand-washing, done with a boiler, a dolly tub and a washboard, and her big, powerful hands were always reddened from the work, the constant immersion in water and the cheap, rough soap she had to use.

      Madge’s mum could be formidable, but she was warm and loving to her children and she had a kind heart, as well as a soft streak for those down on their luck. There were plenty of ‘gentlemen of the road’ – tramps – on the streets in those days, many of them veterans of the Great War, too rootless, too injured or too traumatized to settle easily back into normal civilian life – and they all knew Madge’s mum. Madge remembers them coming down the street, heralding their approach by singing at the tops of their voices. They would walk round into the back lane at the side of the house and wait there, and after a couple of minutes Madge’s mum would always come out and give them a mug of tea and a big lump of home-made custard tart or apple pie; they all knew where to go for a hot drink and a bite to eat.

      It had probably never occurred to Madge or her mum to wonder why York had become such a ‘chocolate city’, but throughout the twentieth century, the city’s three big confectionery firms – Rowntree’s, Terry’s and Craven’s – employed about three times as many people as York’s other great industry, the railway. The reason was partly an accident of history and partly of geography. Sited on a principal junction of the east coast mainline and straddling one of the main tributaries of the River Humber, the railways and the barges plying the waterways between York and the port of Hull gave the confectionery manufacturers cheap transport for raw materials like cocoa beans and sugar, and easy access for their finished products to the great industrial populations of Yorkshire, the Northeast and the Northwest. York also happened to be the site of a long-established Quaker community, and Quaker and non-conformist industrialists in York and elsewhere dominated the confectionery trade.

      One of the most famous names in that trade began life in very humble circumstances, when Joseph Rowntree Senior established a small grocer’s shop at 28 Pavement, York, in 1822. A devout Quaker, he was given an immediate reminder of the evils of the demon drink when he attended the auction of the shop premises at a nearby pub and found the auctioneer so drunk that Joseph had to sober him up by repeatedly plunging his head into a bucket of cold water before the sale could even begin. Despite – or perhaps because of – that treatment, the auctioneer then sold the property to him.

      In time, his two eldest boys joined him in the business, but it was not large enough to support the third son, Henry, as well. Instead, he began working for Tuke and Company in Castlegate, another Quaker-owned business, importing and manufacturing tea, coffee and cocoa, until, in 1862, he bought and renamed the Tukes’ business. A lively, gregarious personality, Henry had great ambition and charm, but rather less business sense. Despite total sales of no more than £3,000, he promptly splashed out on ‘a wonderful new machine for grinding cocoa’ and a collection of ramshackle buildings on the bank of the River Ouse to house a new factory. It was always a dark, dingy and damp place, and often worse than damp; whenever the river was high, it flooded the cellars. Within seven years, Henry’s elder brother, also called Joseph – who was cautious and prudent where Henry was impulsive and spendthrift – had to take over the running of the company to save his brother from the shame of bankruptcy, and succeeded in turning the business around.

      During the latter half of the nineteenth century, the falling price of cocoa as Britain and the other imperial powers forced down the price of raw materials from their colonies, coupled with the rising wages paid to industrial workers, paved the way for a boom in the consumption of cocoa and chocolate. Once barely affordable luxuries for the working classes, both were now within the reach of almost everyone.

      Employing just a handful of workers in 1869, Rowntree’s labour force swelled so rapidly that by 1890 it had far outgrown the original factory at Tanners Moat, and construction began on a new factory, a steadily expanding sprawl of fortress-like red-brick buildings on a site that eventually covered a square mile between Haxby Road and Wigginton Road in the north of the city. By 1909, 4,000 people were employed there.

      Even while the firm was still struggling, Joseph Junior’s brand of Quaker philanthropy had led him to seek a means of improving the social condition of his workforce and, in 1901, his son Seebohm, who shared his father’s concerns, produced a report revealing the scale of the deprivation in the slums that had developed in York and other cities during the previous century. It had a powerful impact on the young Winston Churchill: ‘I have been reading a book which has fairly made my hair stand on end,’ he said, ‘written by a Mr Rowntree who deals with poverty in the town of York … I see little glory in an Empire which can rule the waves and is unable to flush its sewers.’

      Spurred on by his son’s report, Joseph acquired 150 acres of land in open country between the Rowntree’s factory and what is now the York outer ring road for a new ‘garden village’ – New Earswick – echoing existing developments at Bournville, Port Sunlight and Saltaire for Cadbury’s, Lever Brothers and Salts Mill workers respectively. Joseph insisted that the houses were to be spacious, ‘sanitary and thoroughly well built’, with large gardens. Rents were low and New Earswick was a genuine mixed community, with housing for both workers and managers. There were allotments, a local community centre – the Folk Hall – sports facilities, a library, a doctor’s surgery, shops and a post office. The village was open to anyone, not just Rowntree’s employees, but the majority of residents earned their living at the factory, and it proved enormously popular.

      In line with Joseph’s progressive ideas, all employees at Rowntree’s also had access to sports, social clubs and other facilities, free education, a company doctor – the first one was appointed to the staff in 1904 – and a team of nurses. There was a dentist, an optician and a chiropodist, and Rowntree’s even had its own social workers, ambulance and a fire brigade with its own fire engines; with 14,000 employees at its peak and some highly inflammable products stored at the factory, Rowntree’s was a greater fire risk than the city itself.

      Joseph also introduced a Works Council in an effort to replace the ‘us and them’ industrial relations that blighted so many other industries. In 1906 he established one of the first ever occupational pension schemes in the world, holidays with pay were introduced in 1918, and the following year the working week was reduced to forty-four hours, with no Saturday working, long before the vast majority of other British factories followed suit. Soon afterwards, Rowntree’s brought in a profit-sharing scheme for employees, again one of the first in the country.

      Like the other great Quaker industrialists of his era, Joseph Rowntree is now often accused of paternalism and excessive meddling in the lives of his employees, but he undoubtedly felt an acute sense of responsibility for their welfare and, whatever his motives, the results were not in doubt: his employees were better paid, better housed, better fed and clothed, and had better medical and social care than almost any others in the country. He remained chairman of Rowntree’s until 1923 and died two years later at the age of eighty-eight. He was buried in the Quaker burial ground at The Retreat in York, and despite his fame and fortune, in accordance with Quaker traditions, his gravestone is identical to all the others in that cemetery; if not always so in life, all were equal in death.

      Joseph’s son and successor, Seebohm, also combined a strong social conscience with a hard head for business, but the effects of the Great Depression in the late 1920s and early 1930s pushed Rowntree’s to the brink of bankruptcy. In 1931 large numbers of workers in the Card Box Mill were laid off and the company cut the wages of its remaining workforce, replaced many of the male workers with lower-paid women and for a while worked a three-day week.

      Rowntree’s