59. Wall's Ice Cream: My 1958-1960 Gap Years (3)

 

[This is the third blog about my two years between school and university - see also blogs 55 and 58.]

My next gap years' job was on the night shift of Walls Ice Cream factory “The Friary” in Acton, West London. My Dad was instrumental in setting this up since he was interested in the industrial chaplaincy movement and presumably had some contact with someone in the personnel department at Tommy Walls. In the summer season there were plenty of job opportunities when the night shifts opened up to take account of the extra demand for ice cream.

The main attraction for me was the night work wage of eleven guineas a week. This effectively doubled my weekly income and gave me an opportunity to save money for my goal of hitch-hiking to Italy before I went to university. I had not pursued the earlier idea of learning Spanish as fascist Spain was not a place I had any desire to visit.

My main job was as an operative on the packaging line for small ice cream blocks. There were teams of four for each machine and we rotated jobs by the hour to stave off the boredom. Only one of the jobs required a little dexterity, the rest merely needed paying attention, clearing away faulty blocks from trays and moving finished packs to the trolleys for taking to the storage fridges. Occasionally there were flourishes of panic when a machine played up (or a worker fell asleep) and ice cream piled up everywhere in a big mush.

I was kept away from the packaging departments for a spell early in my employment as I awaited medical clearance after a mass x-ray. During that time I spent a number of shifts on the factory roof washing and loading empty ice cream containers into shutes to travel down into the plant. I found it quite satisfying to be awake to watch the sunrise and feel I had stolen a march on the rest of the population by having my day's work already near complete.

In my 1959 diary I found this little ditty:

Cans

Eternal

Here they come

Streaming relentlessly upwards

Cans

Dirty

Cansinfew

Cansinplenty

Cans full Cans empty

Cans for washing, shifting, sorting

This

is the

 Epitome

of the

Modern Tin Age

Cans of everything Cans sans end.

At the other end of the process I would keep a watch on the full tins running through to the loading bay for trucking out. Since the tins came through in batches, this job did not need constant activity and I was able to read while doing it, including, if memory serves me right, a book about Thomas Aquinas. Pretentious as this sounds this was not a matter for mockery among my work colleagues. There was a united nations of unskilled operatives in the plant, mostly from West Africa or the West Indies but also from Cuba and South America. Many were students working nights to help pay for their day time studies. I think some of the conversations I had during work breaks at the Friary were much more interesting than many of those I later had in university staff cafeteria and common rooms.

Six pages of my 1959 diary are given over to speculations about life and the meaning of life prompted by discussions at the factory. Here are a couple of extracts:

What is life? Danner told me he believed an educated man was one who accepted the reality of life. Yet he could not tell me what this reality of life was. Realism has become a common cry; how often we hear people say - that's life. Where do I look for life's reality? In the factory amongst the workers? But they are all trying to escape from their work; they work for the weekend... I wish to live yet cannot find life. I am like a pregnant mind borne by the wind with no body. A bodyless mind... Where is the breath of life? It is drowned by man's kicking, pushing, shouting and grovelling and I don't know where it stirs.

Hypolite said that man is nine tenths animal; an animal whose instincts are conditioned by his environment and the circumstance in which he lives. He has evolved through the animal world gradually becoming more of a mind and less animal... It is a long process with little noticeable change over the last three thousand years... The result in countless generations will be the triumph of mind over matter... As Tolstoy says, we have our herd life - like bees or ants - and we also have our own free mental life. The more diverse our interests outside our swarm life the freer and the happier we are.

The continuity of summer seasonal work, however, was never guaranteed. Ice cream sales went up and down with the weather and management had complete discretion to lay folk off without notice. So a worker could arrive at work on a Monday evening at 10pm, be given his cards (only male staff were employed in the factory at night) and sent home until further notice. It didn’t happen to me but did to many men whose families were dependent on that income. Up until that time I hadn’t taken much interest in the economics of the labour market or in the role of unions and management in negotiating conditions of employment. Walls Ice Cream opened my eyes to the nature of the relative power of capital and labour and the inequities and imbalances in workplace relationships. This later changed my whole focus of university studies.

At the end of the summer season, when the majority of the night shift were laid off, the management posted a very short notice on the board thanking the staff for what had been a record season. The reaction to this lack of tangible recognition for the factory operatives was greeted with a mixture of anger and assorted ribaldry. I, good little worker that I was, was offered a transfer to Walls Meat factory to work on the day shift, an offer I didn’t take up.

I never ate Walls Ice Cream again after working at The Friary. Early in my job there I saw a delivery truck go from the factory to complete its deliveries next door at the Elizabeth Arden cosmetics plant. It seems the vegetable oil that was the basis of face creams was the same as the ‘cream’ that went into Walls Ice Cream. Some years later I seem to remember, controversy arose over whether Walls Ice Cream could legitimately be labelled ice 'cream' at all.

It was during my time at Walls that I went for an interview with Voluntary Service Overseas (see blog 55). I remember I went in my work clothes - red jumper, black trousers - after being up all night. I was interviewed by a panel of men, most of whom seemed to be bishops. At that time VSO was in its very early days and was only sending volunteers to four countries. I knew quite a lot about the African countries but needless to say the question I was asked was what did I know about Sarawak to which I replied "Nothing." I don't think I made a good impression and was turned down.

Once I had finished factory night shifts I enrolled in Italian evening classes at one of the local schools near Kilburn High Road. My plan was to hitch hike to Italy and back in the spring of 1960. In the meantime I took up a job with Harrods of Knightsbridge.