There was a wonderfully, gorgeously posh girl. For the sake of this recording, we’ll call her Linda. And then there was my colleague, John. Linda dressed immaculately. She had beautiful little mini skirts, gorgeous legs, high heels. Her hair was coiffured, and she had a big tin box on her desk which was full of makeup, and a mirror. And any time she knew that somebody was coming to the office, this tin box would get opened and a mirror was there, and off she was, plastering her face doing all this. It was hysterical. John and myself used to just kill ourselves laughing. But my boss, and possibly a lot of the men there, thought she was the most divine woman ever. Now, at that time… well, I still am a bit out there… I used to wear the craziest clothes ever. It was New Romantics, it was the ‘80s. My boss used to say, ‘Why can’t you be more like Linda? She’s beautiful. Look at those gorgeous legs. Look at you, wearing your wild and weird clothes, in your orange boiler suits.’ And I used to say ‘Because I don’t want to be like that! I want to wear shoes that feel comfortable, and I like what I wear.’ ‘Well, you don’t look feminine.’ And when I asked for a wage rise once he said, ‘This to you should be pin money. You should be married with children.’ I said ‘Well, I don’t want to get married and have children. I just want to be myself. I’m only in my early 20s.’ ‘No, you should learn to be more ladylike.’ Oh, it is… Misogyny was just absolutely horrendous. And it got worse, and the more he hit at me, the more that I got really, really angry with him.

I remember the overlooker, because I wouldn’t take maternity leave. Maternity was different then as well. And so, every now and then he used to throw a ball of wool into the machine as he was walking past. And I used to run like hell to turn that machine button off. The emergency stop off. If I couldn’t have done it…
LMI: It would turn the machine off.
CD: Yeah, because it would get caught round the mandarins, which would then slacken, and they can break the next one on. Now of course, it did used to catch, but I used to get to the stop button before he did. And what it was is, if I couldn’t have done that, I would have been made to go on maternity. And that’s what he did it for. He was testing my reflexes. And it was quite funny because when we were going… We broke up for the Wakes Week fortnight and us overlooker turned round and he says, ‘Oh’ he says, ‘I’ll see you when you’ve had the baby.’ I said, ‘No you won’t. You’ll see me after holiday.’ Lo and behold, the weekend after the holiday, I was missing, because he were born eight weeks early. And then weekend afterwards, I went back in in my normal jeans. And I’m back on the machine with my sister-in-law. And he walks through, stopped, walked back again, looked at me. Baby’s in special care and I’m back to work. He was probably about two weeks old. So I was the breadwinner, you know, I had a mortgage to pay. So I went back to work straight away.

I was very young, so they [the women] sort of bullied you. They’d send you off on fool’s errands and mess you around. They used to ask me to make the wool a bit heavier and say, you know, that they’d doffed 400 bobbins, not 380, because it was more money for them. And I used to sort of… when I had my pen, because they all wore little pinnies, short sleeve pinnies and stuff, and I’d be stood at the side of them, and maybe I’d have my pen to write their weights down, and when they said, ‘Oh put me down for more.’ Which I couldn’t, I couldn’t do that, it was re-weighed by someone else. I used to write on, you know, just do that on their arm with the pen, just, you know. Anyway, one lunchtime, I remember, I’m sat at the side of a machine, all the machines were off at lunchtime, but no one went home for lunch, they just sat there eating their sandwiches. And suddenly these four women came up, got me in a corner, stripped me naked, absolutely naked, Alan, I kid you not. And they… I won’t say where the pens went, but I was well written on, absolutely well written on. I was locked in a skip. They put the lid down on these big basket skips. And I was in there for an hour. Naked. Written on…you know, whatever they’d written – silly things – naughts and crosses…where the naughts went it’s not mentionable! They were a force to be reckoned with.
AD: You must’ve been terrified!
LM: I was terrified! Absolutely. I was scared of the women. I never used to walk down the sides of the machines when they called me.

The rooms where the machines were, were gigantic. It was like being in an airport, you couldn’t see from one end to the other. The problem was that the floors of the mills in… 60 years ago when I worked there, were flags. They weren’t wood. And unfortunately the machines used to be oiled. And that oil got onto the flags. And it was quite dangerous because you slipped.

Yes, I got injured working at the mill. There were these big bins, as large as this room, if not larger. And they used to fill them with wool. But at the back of those bins was [a] corridor with a stop button and a start button at each end. So there was literally two walls at the side of you. It was a steel frame and then the wood frame on top. And that used to carry the bales from one yard into another. So they’d drop down a chute so they could be stored down there. And what happened, some workmen had been in and taken some wooden lats off. On some occasions, the bales would get twisted. So we’d have to jump on there and run up the corridor and straighten the bales with hand hooks. And what happens when you straighten a bale with a hand hook, it literally pushes you back. And my leg went in between the wood that was moving, and the frame. So I was trapped halfway through, in this mill. And no way to get out. And I was being pulled into the machine. So just out of sheer fear, I think, I pulled my leg out and it broke all the bones in the bottom of my leg and twisted my ankle bones round. And I was carried out and taken to hospital on a chair. And had a plate put in my leg.