Interview about family, McCorquodales 'envelope' room, automation, and characters.
Bill Rowlegde talks about McCorquodales print works, ‘built first of all to provide jobs for the daughters of the railway men’ and therefore, Wolverton’s largest employer of girls and young women. The girls, who would start when they left school, if they didn’t marry, would often stay until they were sixty. There was no canteen in McC.’s and they would take their own food and eat it in what they called the ‘mess hall’. Some wives placed dinner baskets on the old steam tram from Stratford, he remembers it broke down on occasion and recalls the accident where a young man lost both legs. He describes the women known as ‘squatters’, who sat on piles of envelopes to press them down and comments on the terrific heat and the smell of burning paper in the envelope room because of the ‘drying off of the gum’.
He recalls the introduction of ‘automatic machinery… the Stokes Press’, and the ‘Harris Press an American, sheet fed rotary printer’. The result was an increase in output over a hand fed machine, from eight hundred to a thousand sheets an hour, to four thousand an hour. They also installed very versatile rotary presses that would number, perforate, fold and punch.
He remembers how he couldn’t afford a holiday because there was no holiday pay. If he wanted to go away he had to save up so he could take time off. He talks of the National Deposit Society into which you payed sixpence a week, then if you were sick you took your doctor’s certificate to the secretary and they paid you, so much a week.
He recalls characters from the workplace including Mr. Meacham, who worked his way up from sweeper-up to manager. Mr Keyborough, foreman of the envelope room ‘that was amusing in them days the envelope room; he used to have a high office set up above, that much from the floor and then the office on top of it so he could look all round the envelope room. Don’t matter where you looked he was glaring there, they were really foremen them days’.
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