Carol Morris, Voices from the Factory Floor
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Carol was born on 25th December, 1949 in Caernarfon. She was one of five children and had two sisters and two brothers. Her brothers were in the army while her sisters stayed in Caernarfon. The family lived in a two-up-two-down house with an outside toilet, although they moved to a larger house later on. She got married in the 1960s. Her father was Scottish and moved to Caernarfon with the army at the end of the war where he met her mother. They married and moved to Aberdeen but Carol’s mother didn’t like it and they moved back to Caernarfon.
Her father worked in Ferodo after leaving the army in the 1960s, in the Nuclear Power Station on Anglesey and in other factories in the area. Her mother worked in shops in Caernarfon and in a factory outside town checking bombs. Her mother remembers refugees coming to Caernarfon from Liverpool during the war, and her mother welcomed them into the house even though it was only a two-up-two-down. Her mother kept in contact with them after the war and felt as if she had lost a sister when one of them died a year later. It was a very close knit community at the time. Carol went to Ysgol Maesincla in the 1950s and then on to Ysgol Segontium. She left school when she was fifteen years old, which was possible then if you had work to go to.
‘I had my birthday at Christmas time. There were no holidays as such at that time, you had ... Christmas Eve and Christmas Day ... not New Year’s Day or anything like that. And I remember going back to school, I’d just been for an interview and I was starting work straight away, and I was wearing jeans and I had a row because I wasn’t in uniform and I said, “I’m not coming back, I’ve got a job.”’
She got a job making bras in a factory on the quay (the corset factory).
"I was shocked at the size of the cups. To a young girl, they seemed huge. You had these steels going up the side and some went down, and the body went in, and I’d never seen anything like them before. We had a lot of fun there."
8.00 Carol earned nine pounds a week in the corset factory and thought she was rich. She would give her mother four or five pounds and keep the rest herself. She’d been there for a year and a half when Ferodo came to Caernarfon. "It was a brand new factory and they were taking children on. When it first opened they took on people of all ages ... and then they started taking on children ... well we were still sixteen, and I went to work there and I got twenty pounds a week.' This was circa 1963/4. She was earning good money and could earn a bonus with over-time. "So mam was still getting the five pounds and now I was getting fifteen. But best of all, I could buy a packet of fags at last, ha, ha." She bought clothes and tried to save some money.
She went to Ferodo because she’d heard the money was better. It was easy going from one job to the other. The corset factory wasn’t the type of place you’d like to stay forever. In Ferodo they made brake linings for cars and stair treads and encouraged the youngsters to learn to do everything in order to find out what they liked doing the best.
She worked in the Ferodo office but didn’t like it. Workers were paid according to their age. For youngsters this was 16-18 years old and 18 -21 years old. The wage went up when they were 21 years old. She was given an interview and was shocked at how large the factory was compared to the corset factory.
13.00 Most people travelled to Ferodo by bus when she started working there but after a year or two people starting buying cars and motor bikes and the car park got bigger and bigger.
She was given a few weeks training and could earn a bonus on top of her wage. Her work was stencilling the number and Ferodo name on the stair treads and brake linings. She used to do this with a pot of paint and stencil, but later on they used a stamping machine.
A man timed them at their work in order to work out the bonus rate, and they would deliberately do the job slower when he was doing this.
She quarrelled with the managers in Ferodo after she had been there for four years and went to Ferranti circa 1967. She was there for a few years and she got married and had children.
Ferodo was a lovely factory but when Carol’s parents separated things went to bad from worse with between her and her father who was working at the factory. Carol thought it best for her to leave. (She tells the story of why she left later on.)
The Ferodo factory was huge and had many different sections. The workers weren’t permitted to enter some parts unless they were wearing the appropriate clothing due to the machinery there. The toilet facilities there were spacious, unlike the old-fashioned Edwardian toilets in the corset factory. They had their own lockers and there were showers there. The women would bring clean clothes in with them on a Friday, wash their hair, and go straight out to the pub. There were first aiders in the office block, which was on two levels. The canteen was outside the factory and they had two sittings. There was a family atmosphere there.
There were three shifts – six until two, two until ten, and ten until six. The canteen opened early to make breakfast for the men coming on and off shift. They could have a hot dinner there or bring their own sandwiches in. They held Christmas parties and the workers’ children would be there and be given a present by Santa Claus.
22.00 Ferodo was a good employer. There was a strike there years later after it had been taken over by American employers because they tried to cut wages. It lasted for three to four years The women worked from eight until five and didn’t work shifts. They did jobs like painting, checking, office work, or canteen work but didn’t do the heavy, dirty work on the machines.
Everybody’s clothes stank, even the people who weren’t on the machines. They wore old-fashioned overalls supplied by the company. The men made brake linings on the large machines in one part of the factory, and they were cut to size in another part. There were large drills there to put the screws into them. Carol would put the grey and cream colours onto them.
She loved sewing and went to Laura Ashley’s in Caernarfon years later. Carol didn’t work in a dusty atmosphere. She doesn’t remember many accidents taking place there. There was a union. She said, "Well, before Margaret Thatcher came in 99% of the factory was union led." She paid her unions subs directly to the representative who came round every Friday, collected the money and asked them if they had any complaints.
30.50 Carol had a complaint when she was sixteen or seventeen. "I’m not sure if I took it the wrong way, or if I was too shy, but you could call it sexual harassment. I was a well-built girl, and I had a comment from a man. And it upset me and one of the girls heard and she didn’t like it ... it wasn’t fair on girls working in a place where there were men working because years ago in the corset factory, it was just girls working there... and he had to go in front of the management and got a slapped wrist, because he hadn’t done anything, but had said something, but he hadn’t done anything and he got a warning and he wasn’t to speak to girls like that, especially young girls.
The older women were used to working with men in factories, but not the young girls. They had to learn while they were growing up. At that time it was quite common for men to make comments or wolf-whistle as they do when a woman walks past a building site. When Carol worked in Laura
Ashley twenty years ago the women would do the same thing if a lad walked through the factory. "We were worse than the men in Ferodo to say the truth. I remember many young boys blushing from ear to ear, walking through that factory."
There weren’t many young girls working in Ferodo at the time. Carol knew one or two when she went to work there. People travelled from everywhere by bus or by car with colleagues. Carol paid 50p a week to somebody for a lift instead of getting the bus. Carol and a group of workers had to walk to work once when it had been snowing heavily and they wouldn’t have got paid if they hadn’t gone to work. This wasn’t possible for the workers who lived in the country.
39.00 They had holidays in the summer, at Christmas and Easter. (They had to work Christmas Eve morning.) During the summer holiday she went round town or out to the countryside on a motor bike. If somebody was off ill from work she thinks they were paid by the government rather than the company. She doesn’t remember ever being off ill from work.
They used asbestos in the brake linings but nobody knew it was harmful at the time, but it caused a nasty smell in the factory. Some men have tried to claim money for its effects recently. They wore masks but would take them off at times, for example when they were walking off. It didn’t affect the women because they didn’t work directly with it and Carol never felt ill as a result of working at Ferodo.
Carol enjoyed the company of the women in the factory and never thought about working somewhere better. She didn’t pass anything at school so like many girls like her the plan was to get work, get married and have children. She met her husband in Ferodo and they married in 1968. Her first child arrived in 1969 and because her mother lived at home and could look after her child Carol could earn a little money as a waitress.
There wasn’t much opportunity to chat with anyone in the factory unless you were working next to them or if you saw them in the canteen. She didn’t know everybody by name, but she knew everybody’s face.
As well as the Christmas party there were other social activities such as Ferodo Choir (which became Caernarfon choir), and the football team. Carol wasn’t a member as she couldn’t sing. The factory was big enough to hold parties but they started going out to hotels as the workforce grew. The workers had lunch in half hour shifts when there were lots of people working there.
48.00 It was a shock for her going from a small factory like the corset factory to a ‘massive’ factory like Ferodo. There were more men than women working there.
Carol left Ferodo before getting married because she quarrelled with a manager. One day Carol was suffering from period pains and went to the office and asked if she could go home. Her parents were experiencing marital difficulties at the time. She overheard the personnel manager making a comment about them in Welsh because he thought she couldn’t understand. She says she went ballistic and swore at him and he told her to leave. He told her not to bother clocking out but she insisted because she wanted to get paid. Her mother sent her back the next day to apologise but this time he turned on her mother. Carol told him that nobody spoke that way to her mother and they left and she got a job straight away in Ferranti.
After her parents split up Carol’s mother got a job in Ferranti. Carol was glad she’d walked out of Ferodo. She also received her wages. She was angry that the manager had made disparaging comments about her parents in Welsh because he thought she didn’t understand. She called him a red headed Welsh nationalist. She’d sworn when things kicked off again when she went there to apologise with her mother, and her mother gave her a slap outside the factory.
In Ferranti she thinks she made parts for telephones. Her mother had two small children when she started working in Ferranti. Carol wasn’t there for long as she had her first child in 1969, and the second in 1971. After waitressing she got a job as a lollipop lady in her children’s school. Her husband was still working at Ferodo. He was made redundant at the time of the big strike (Camni
Friction Dynamix in 2000) but they had separated and divorced ten years after getting married. After this Carol decided that she didn’t want to live off the government and got a job in a factory in Llanberis that made clothes for the forces. At the time of the Falklands War she was struck by the image she’d seen on the television of the men of the Sir Galahad jumping into the sea wearing the orange ‘babygrow' suits they’d made in the factory. The women in the factory had been working hard doing overtime to get these suits ready for the war, and had earned extra money but she got upset when she saw the men of the Sir Galahad. There were boys from Caernarfon on board, one of whom died. They didn’t make the suits in the factory but sewed the material and made waterproof joints. The work was more interesting after seeing the men wearing the suits. The factory was called Glyn Protective Clothing and closed a few years later so she received redundancy.
1.03 The company had told them the factory was closing so that the workers had time to look for other jobs. Carol heard that Laura Ashley was opening in Caernarfon and she got a job there. She was in her thirties at the time and there were younger women at the interview and she told the manager, 'Well, I've come here for an interview but I can see you've got a lot of young girls.' 'Well, you've had your children. I've just looked at her hand, she's engaged, she'll be getting married.' They had to have a go on the machines. In Glyn Protective the machines were old but in Laura Ashley they were brand new and Carol was panicking that she wouldn’t be able to use them. She did okay and got the job. She was faking that she could do the job. She needed it because she had two daughters. She was at Laura Ashley for 13 years, from the early 1980s until the early 1990s and is still in contact with her colleagues on Facebook.
She received redundancy from this factory as well, when Laura Ashley sold to a company making clothes for Marks and Spencer. The new company had promised the workers that they would keep their jobs but they cut the workforce down from over two hundred to ninety. Carol had thought she would be fine but the factory was closed in the same year that Laura Ashley closed (2004?). She was a union rep at the time and the BBC asked her if she would make a programme about factories that were taking their work out of the country. They looked at the clothes being sold in shops – they had been made abroad and were of poor quality. She had a reunion with some of the women from Laura Ashley two years ago in the football club in
Caernarfon. She is not in contact as much with the people from Ferodo. Looking back, she thinks the factory wasn’t a nice place to work but there was good company there and she made good friends. She had fond memories of Laura Ashley – the factory grew to employ over two hundred people. Her daughter worked there too and they went down with the company to play football in Carno. They had good parties, such as fancy dress parties. She remembers one
Christmas in the canteen and they had to have two sittings because the company was so big. Santa turned up but he was actually a Kissogram hired for her as she was celebrating her fortieth birthday and he told her to ‘unwrap him’.
Carol talks of Laura Ashley factory in Caernarfon in the 1990s. Whenever anyone got married they had to walk around the factory in clothes that the workers had made for them. When she was getting married she knew that this was going to happen to her and she had to sit at her machine all day in a really horrible Laura Ashley dress. When clocking out time came she’d intended changing back to her own clothes but when she went out the door everybody was waiting for her on the other side and they threw eggs, tomato sauce, vinegar and all types of things at her. She stank as she walked home.
Duration: 1 hour 20 minutes