Maureen left school at 15 (1955) and began working at Swiss Embroidery. Sack if spoke and only stayed a week. Moved to Welsh Hills Works Corona Pop Factory. Clogs because of the broken glass - their sound marked out Corona workers..Describes process and how some bottles exploded. Made syrup from sugar- pushing wheelbarrows. Hard work. Also made squash They had ‘unbelievable’ cuts. Singing. Taking pop bottle back for money. Finished there in 1959. Trough to wash bottles. Different flavours. Very cold in winter- cold bottles. Also delivering Smiths Crisps. Social life: YMCA; pictures and dancing. Clothes shops in Porth. Washing hands in caustic soda before factory dance in Bindles, Barry. Left because she couldn’t get leave for her sister’s wedding. Her sister got her a job at the Bellito stocking factory in St Alban’s. Returned to work in Creeds (c.1960-1963), Treforest estate, making capstans; terrible smell. She was in assembly. Rush for buses after work. Her husband worked there too. Very hot.
Patricia left Swansea Technical School at 15 (1961) to work in the Addis factory, making hand brushes. She was on inspection. She stayed there 2 years. Then on to Windsmoor sewing factory, making army clothes (again 2 years). Then she had a son and went back to Addis – now producing mascara brushes. Next she went to Smith’s Crisps. The crisps would come down a funnel and she would put the salt in, in little blue bags. Stayed 6 months and moved to Corona –for 26 years (1966-92) . She started on the line watching bottles of pop going back and fore. She also worked in the cellar room making pop and cider, then on the fork-lift, moving pallets. When the factory closed (1992) she went to Walkers crisps, again working on the fork-lift and night shift too. The factory floor was a bit manic. Buying seconds in the factories. Walkers - if there was no work – night off and no pay. Accidents – Acid burns in Corona and in hospital. Certificates for driving the forklift. Walkers’ and Corona cold – the pop froze. Hardly saw husband because of shifts. Corona was like a family – best factory. She worked in factories 1961-98. Later she worked in the university.
Dilys worked in the Corset Factory from the age of 15, straight from school. She worked on various lines, on different parts of the corsets. She enjoyed it there but on the whole found factory work repetative and boring. The factory was very basic: “It was a concrete floor and there was dust there, lime from the corsets. We had an X-ray every year. A man brought water in, in a watering can, he went around the place like that, watering the floor. There were windows like those on a greenhouse upstairs, and in the summer, it was boiling, you were being cooked alive.” She also worked later in other factories, such as the cockle factory in Caernarfon and Ferranti in Bangor.
Myfi worked in the Corset Factory from the age of 15, immediately after leaving school. Her mother wanted her to go to college but Myfi liked sewing and was eager to get to work, so she and a friend went down to the factory to ask for work behind her mother's back. They both got the job but the managers had to separate them because they talked too much! Myfi began in the factory making ends, ie, finishing the corsets and then moved on to the stitching, where she excelled because she was very quick. She felt important as she earned one pound 10 shillings a week and could help support the family and pay the rent. There were 144 working there when she started in 1956 and this went down to under 50 aftewards, because fewer women wore corsets, and she was lucky to keep her job. The factory changed then to making bra slips. She married in 1959 and left to have her first child in 1960, returning to sewing work in Laura Ashley, Caernarfon, in the 1970s or 1980s.
VN014 Margaret Willams, Corset factory, Caernarfon
Margaret began in the Corset Factory at 15. She had no choice as her mother had told that once she was 15, she had to look for work. So she went down to the corset factory with her friend and they got a job. She earned £1.60 and if they worked overtime she got a shilling extra. Margaret gave her wages to her mother and she had two brothers who worked also. She was trained how to sew straight doing hems and bindings, and this training went on until a worker was able to handle a machine. She was very good at her job and worked as a supervisor at age 17 during the illness of the regular supervisor, Nansi Fawr. She did different jobs there and her sister Jeanette, who was blind, also worked there for five years. She liked working there even though it was very noisy with the machines. She said she'd go back now if it was with the same crew. Dinner time they used to get chips from a shop nearby and as Margaret worked near the door, the girls used to give her their orders and she'd go and fetch them. She was in the corset factory 6 years first time round, and went back for about six months four years after she married. After this she stayed at home to raise her children and when they went to school she did other jobs - cleaning and home help and finally working with the disabled.
Beginning at Courtaulds in 1960, Sandra worked first on the perning, doing 'dolls hair' before being moved on to the 'cakes'. They were on piece work but she was never fast enough. The factory had a glass roof which was painted green to keep the sun out but they were still 'cooking', said Sandra, but it could also be very cold in winter. She lived four miles away and went to work on the bus. She also went on day release. She left after six years, when she about 21, because she was fed up. “I gave my notice in; it was time to leave, time to move on. I was thinking, no, I’m not going in today and I drove right past and went to Rhyl.” A little later she got a job with De Havilands driving a crane on the Hawker Sidley 125 production line (small planes): " My dad always talked about slingers, I knew what a slinger was and things like this. I knew the language, so that was it, I was a crane driver." She left this job after a year to have a baby, and returned to work in John Summers (Shotton Steel works), and doing various driving and sales jobs, from 1971 until she retired in 1998.
Gaynor worked at Courtaulds for 4 years, the whole time on the coning. She did have an interview but she can't remember it and neither can she remember her first day, though the factory was much bigger than the paper mill where she'd been working previously, straight from school. At Courtaulds, there were three factories - Deeside, Castle and Aber; Aber was the nicest one and she was in that one. Gaynor hadn't done that sort of work before so she had a couple of days training when she started. She picked it up very quickly and loved it there, because it was something she'd achieved, keeping her 'ends' up and the cones going. They had a machine each and she worked in a team with two others who were older than she was and had started before her. Gaynor started on 'normal' coning machines and because she was fast they put her on the wool. She left at 20 and got married soon after. She returned to factory work later on, for a few years, but not to Courtaulds. In 1970, her photograph was used in the office Courtaulds magazine.
Vera worked at Courtaulds straight from school,starting in 1941. "I went by myself for a job, and they interviewed you. You just went there for a job. There was nothing else I wanted to do. I probably didn’t think I’d got the capabilities to do anything else. Then you go to see the nurse and she would look in your hair for nits. And then a chat and they would tell you to start. And then when I started, my mother used to take me to the bus in the mornings because it was dark and I was only a little fourteen year old. So she would take me to the bus for a while, until I got in with some other people and then I could go to the bus with them. And we had to wear black clothing. Our dresses which we made for our selves or somebody made for us, out of blackout curtains. We had to wear black, so that it would show all the threads and that on us." Vera went from the 'cakewrapping' into the office, when the factory asked her to do the book keeping. But, as the girls on the factory floor got more money than she did by earning a bonus, she went back into the production part, where she did the 'coning'. She was there until she got married in 1950 and left Courtaulds afterwards to have a baby. She returned to work afterwards and went into local government, doing rent collecting and debt recovery, where she stayed until she retired at the age of 66.
Like a lot of factories, Courtaulds had a women's football team. This photo is from around 1969 and was donated by Eddi Parry, whose wife Sharon worked in the factory, though she isn't in the photo.
VN028 Vicky Perfect, Courtaulds, Flint
Vicky worked in Courtaulds from the age of 15, for 11 years. She would have liked to have stayed on at school and gone to college but her mother expected her to go out and work. She'd already been working in a cafe in Rhyl from the age of 13. She began factory work in Mayfair, which made duffle coats and was located on the top floor of Courtaulds but independent of it. It closed and was taken over by Courtaulds and the small workforce came too. Vicky was initally on the 'coning' and was later a union rep. She moved onto the staff at the age of 20, to the work study department. She can't remember what she earned when she was on the factory floor but in the work study department her wages were £23, in cash, and she gave the packet unopened to her mother, who would keep the £20 and give her £3, out of which she had to buy all her own clothes from her mother's catalogue. She still worked in the café at the weekends and bank holidays and the two week factory shutdown and she had to give this wage to her mother too, unopened. She liked working on the staff and did this job until she left to have her children in 1976.
