Our brand-new community production His Last Report has been created with the support of 250 local volunteers. Many of our volunteers have personal connections and memories attached to this York story. Below is a guest blog from one of our volunteers Carol Warren, who has found herself playing a character whose story closely resembles that of her mother Mabel.
In the play His Last Report, I have found myself playing my mother, this is her story:
Mabel Jackson, née England (me mam) was born in York workhouse in 1915, the illegitimate daughter of Agnes from Leeds. Agnes was the only grandparent I ever knew until she died when I was thirteen years old. My mother was fostered by a good family living in the Leeman Road area who already had children of their own, “but took me in as one of them and I’m very grateful”. For a few years she was the subject of a distressing tug of war, with Agnes taking her back to Leeds and trying to get her to settle, “once she gave me so many sweets to make me stay, I ended up in hospital”. When Agnes finally gave up the struggle, “I remember skipping down the path back home”. How sad for my grandmother; I liked her, she looked after us well when my brother and I were packed off to her house in the summer holidays, but my mother’s only comment about her was “I don’t much care for her”.
Back in Balfour Street, they were a happy family, if poor. The house regularly flooded, leaving a terrible stench, and there were cockroaches everywhere. They did have shoes, unlike many other children in the street, but no one ever saw a doctor, they couldn’t afford it. My mother did well at school and declared she must have got her brains from her unknown father. Agnes never revealed who that was, maybe somebody from the household where she had worked as a maid, who knows.
Mabel passed her 11+ but as they couldn’t pay for the grammar school uniform, she went to secondary modern instead and was made to leave age 14 to work as a maid herself… and this is where her association with the Rowntrees began. She was employed as a scullery maid by the Naishes who lived in a grand house in Clifton, which is still there, mentioned in the Rowntree Historic Walks brochure. Duncan Naish had married Winifred, sister of Seebohm, who died very young, so I think my mother’s employer must have been his second wife. They were good to her, but she hated the long hours and heavy work heaving coal buckets upstairs. Many of the Rowntree family used to come over for dinner and gatherings, including Seebohm. “I remember once at a garden party, Mrs Naish asked me to take a cake to one of her guests, so I picked one up in my hand and gave it to her. She was so embarrassed but wasn’t horrible to me, just realised I didn’t know any better”.
After a few years there, learning manners and the meaning of hard work, Mabel took up employment at Rowntree and Co as a packer on the conveyor belt and she loved it – the freedom, the camaraderie, the singing, the humour, the gossip: “we weren’t two-faced, we were three-faced!”. She felt so looked after there with all the facilities and activities on offer. She joined a dance troupe, she became a champion bowler, she became best friends with Winnie Trimble, an overlooker, whose name I will love to my dying day.
She met and married my dad George, another factory worker up the road at instrument makers, Cooke, Troughton and Simms. She took a break to have two children, my older brother David and me. Even though she enjoyed working at Rowntrees, her constant message to us both was “don’t end up in a factory like me and your dad, get an education, it’s your way out”. And she was right, David ending up as a bank manager and me as a graphic designer, then a therapist.
Age two, I was bundled off to nursery so my mam could go back to work. “I don’t know if it was the right thing to do but I wanted you to have things”. I guess her own early years informed that decision. So, a ‘packing again she did go but at some point, her brightness was recognised. She was good at maths and spelling and was offered a job as a stock writer. She could not have been happier. She swapped her white overall for a green one, had her own little office, travelled round the whole factory, could nip out for a crafty fag on the fire escape with Brian Sollett, her partner in crime. He was the man who invented After Eight Mints and a cake decorator par excellence. For her eightieth birthday I commissioned him to decorate her cake with a packet of cigarettes on top.
Mabel retired in 1975 and died in 2003. She would be so proud to see me playing Maggie, a singing packer with a wicked sense of humour just like her. Likewise, I’m so proud of and grateful to my feisty, loving mother who supported me in everything I did. Oh, and thanks to Rowntree for a childhood of chocolates, a mug of Smarties for Christmas, orange creams, a mouthful of fillings. Worth it!
Don’t miss His Last Report at York Theatre Royal from 19 July – 03 August.
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