Life changing

The importance of cold hands

Hurrah it’s Easter! Hurrah an excuse to eat (yet more) chocolate! But have you ever stopped to think about how that perfectly-shaped, glossy, smooth chocolate egg came to be?

As we await the arrival of one certain bunny, we hear from Mrs Dales, who assembled Easter eggs and filled Dairy Box and Black Magic boxes at Rowntree’s for seven years from 1950.

One of the first tests a prospective Rowntree’s employee had to undertake involved their hands: “They felt your hands – if your hands were cold, you went in the cream packing (department), you see, so you wouldn’t melt the chocolates,” Mrs Dales explains.

Mrs Dales was just 15, and only weeks out of school, when she began work at the Rowntree factory in January 1950. And almost immediately she was thrust into Easter egg production, which always began before Christmas.

The process involved taking two separate egg halves, packing one side with some cardboard bedding, filing the other side with sweets, then putting the halves together, wrapping in foil, and tying a ribbon around it.

Making ‘quarter pounders’

Due to the regimented process of one girl weighing the sweets before another girl assembled the egg, Mrs Dale referred to the finished products as “quarter pounders”.

And the weight of the sweets inside the Easter eggs wasn’t the only thing regimented at Rowntree’s back then.

Single women worked on production line number one, then “when you got married you got moved off number one onto number three, to work with the other married women”. And the only jewellery workers were allowed to wear - aside from simple sleeper earrings – was a wedding ring. “If you got engaged, you couldn't wear your engagement ring,” she recalls.

Workers took classes one day a week from 9am until 4pm. Mrs Dales took her classes on Wednesdays.

Gym classes meant bath time

“We used to meet other girls there, from other parts of the factory that we didn’t know; girls that worked in the gum room, or the room where they made jellies,” she reminisces. The classes included woodwork, music, cookery, as well as gym, which “is when we had a bath”.

“(At home) we had a tin bath in front of the fire, but we used to go to the gym to have a proper bath… It’s funny to think about it now, but that’s what we did.”

Rowntree’s, in York, has employed thousands of locals at its confectionery manufacturing plant, housed them in its model village, and provided leisure in the public park laid out by the Quaker family that founded the business in the 1860s.

Thanks to National Lottery players, we’re uncovering the heritage behind Rowntree’s meaning that future generations can learn about the factory and find out what Rowntree’s meant to the people who worked there.

Listen to the recording of Mrs Dales’ memories of Rowntree’s

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