Freelance journalist and author Kate Thompson has written a series of novels set in wartime East London. Her latest, Secrets of the Lavender Girls, meant having to learn about the history of Stratford and the Yardley factory where the book is set. As part of her research she met former Yardley employees Ann Roper, 86, and Eileen McKay, 90.

What is your book about?

The book is set in Yardley’s cosmetic factory in Stratford during the Second World War, or Stinky Stratford as it was affectionately known back then. It’s a big old slice of social history based around the girls who worked their way through the war and were known locally as, ‘The Lavender Girls’. Through my characters eyes I try to show that for some women, war acted as springboard out of drudgery, giving them freedom, autonomy and agency.

Why did you set it in the Yardley Cosmetics Factory in Stratford?

Yardley’s is part of the industrial heritage of Stratford and after hearing about the Lavender Girls I became intrigued and wanted to find out more.

By the time this book was set in, the 1940s, the House of Yardley was already an established brand, famous for its lavender water, soaps, talcum powders and complexion creams, sold in Bond Street and all the best department stores. The factory was somewhat less glamorous.

Situated downwind of the West End, in an East London backwater known as ‘Stink Bomb Alley’, it was a huge employer of local women, who were known locally as the Lavender Girls. Their fragrant name masked the unsavory reality of work in the canal-side factory, sandwiched between a paint firm, a fishmeals factory (crawling with maggots in the gutter outside) and an abattoir. There were seven different types of air down Carpenter’s Road, depending on whether the factory was distilling lavender, or boiling up animal bones for the soap.

The rivalry between surrounding firms was as potent as the atmosphere. Within a half mile of each other in Stinky Stratford there was the Oxo factory, Clarnicos sweet factory, Spratt’s the dog food firm, Berk Spencer Acids and on the other side of the bridge in Bow, the Bryant & May match girls. When the clocking off hooter blasted over the canal, or as it’s known to many, ‘the Cut’, the doors to all the factories flung open and out came a stream of apron and turban clad factory girls.

Yardley had the best staff welfare around, perhaps only rivalled by East End sugar manufacturer Tate & Lyle in neighbouring Silvertown, offering great wages, bonuses and perks-a-plenty. As well as a monthly sale in the canteen, where the girls could get their favourite Yardley lipstick or perfume at cost price, they had an annual black tie dinner dance at Stratford Town Hall, a beano to Margate in the obligatory ‘Kiss me Quick’ hat and the Yardley Social and Sports club, which allowed girls to compete in netball, hockey, whist drives and swimming. Or for those not sports inclined, you could try out for the Yardley Follies dance troupe where the girls performed at the legendary Theatre Royal in Stratford.

The family firm took a paternalist approach to staff welfare, encouraging the girls to save by helping to set them up with saving accounts. If you had the sniffles or the ‘curse’, you were ushered in to see the Welfare Officer for a gargle or a lie down with a hot water bottle. For more serious afflictions, Yardley’s sent their girls to a convalescent home in Bexhill by the Sussex coast for a fortnight’s paid leave. Yardley’s even paid for all workers to have an annual chest x-ray, with a machine that was wheeled into the factory.

As an extra incentive, girls in the various different departments got the chance to win the shield for best housekeeping and most productive/tidy belt. The lucky winners would be sent to the deliciously named, Bond Street Beauty School for a makeover.

Glamour was the watchword of those times and never was it more resonant than in the East End. East End girls have always been able to put on the glamour. It was a badge of honour and mark of respect to be well turned out.

It also came from being raised in the heartland of the schmutter (rag) trade. East End women are gifted with a needle and thread and could buy a length of material on their dinner break and have run it into a nice blouse by teatime.

Care over their appearance took on extra potency during WW2, when Churchill declared that ‘Beauty is your Duty’. There was a genuine fear that if women lost their femininity and God forbid were seen looking a little scruffy it would lead to a collapse in morale which would be detrimental to society.

Britain’s oldest cosmetics firm, Yardley, rose to the challenge, telling their customers that ‘good looks and morale go hand in hand’ and Vogue told its readers that ‘a woman past caring is a woman past repairing.’

These powerful messages were underpinned with a sophisticated pseudo military marketing campaign of cosmetics, which saw the weaponisation of lipstick. There were shades called ‘Auxiliary Red’ ‘Victory Red’ and ‘Home Front Ammunition.’ There was even a shade created called Burnt Sugar, said to go perfectly with khaki. The message to women was clear. Lipstick is your weapon and you are a soldier on the Homefront.

There is so much intriguing history bound up in this factory and I guess you could say it called to me.

What made you want to organise a reunion?

I didn’t do it consciously. It was a long shot, but when I found two ex-Yardley workers from Stratford to interview as research for this book, I thought I’d take a punt and interview them together.

You see, research is so much more fun when you can actually meet with people who inhabited the world you’re writing about. Archives are all well and good, but what about speaking to the women who lived through the war and listening to their first-hand memories? What of the colour, the vibrancy and the voices that bring a place to life?

I’m passionate about documenting the lives of working-class women born into brutal poverty, but also steeped in rich and vibrant communities, women whose social histories we can learn so much from. Women such as these leave no paper trail, so it’s important to shine a light on the richness and complexity of their lives. Women like Ann Roper, 86 and Eileen McKay, 90, who both worked at the Yardley factory, along with over one thousand other young women.

Outside Yardley in 1948 Ann Roper (top left) and Eileen McKay (bottom left).

‘I don’t mind,’ Ann told me, as she parked her shopping trolley next to the table in the café in Morrison’s in Stratford. ‘I’m an East Ender, I’ll chat with anyone.’

In walks ebullient Eileen – 91 years old but with sparkling brown eyes and soft skin that make her look a good decade younger.

‘It’s you isn’t it!’ gasped Ann. ‘Oh my days,’ exclaimed Eileen, instinctively reaching across the Formica tabletop and clutching Ann’s outstretched hands.

Turns out, not only did they work together, they were close pals who both worked on the same conveyor belt packing Yardley’s famous creams. They lost touch after Ann left the factory to get married in 1950 and hadn’t seen each other for 68 years.

Stranger still, Ann even pulled out a photograph she’d brought with her by sheer coincidence of the two of them aged 15 and 18, two ravishingly beautiful, spirited young girls, enjoying a moment of fun on a tea break, larking about with Eileen’s arm slung round Ann’s neck.

We had a Davina McCall, Long Lost moment as tears of nostalgia filled their eyes and the years melted away. The two women stayed in touch, right up until Ann’s tragic death from COVID in January. I miss Lavender Girl Ann. She was a typical East Ender – loyal, sharp, hard-working and kind.

Was it difficult finding the former employees?

Not really, thanks to social media (as you can see from my appeal) it’s so much easier to connect with the past. I also put appeals in the local paper, and spent time looking through the archives at Eastside Community Heritage, who hold some powerful oral histories which they collected for their project – Only a Yard to Yardley’s. It was listening to these vivid stories, (held at the University of East London) that really helped me to understand the place this factory held in the social fabric of Stratford.
https://www.hidden-histories.org

What was their reaction when you told them about the book you were writing?

Relief, I think that finally their hidden histories were being told. For so many of these women there is frustration that working class factory women and housewives are always overlooked and marginalised in the story of the Second World War. I think in part lies in the fact that they weren’t in an official uniform, unless you count an apron and turban, and they haven’t left a paper trail, until now. They might not have instigated history, but they were forced to react to it, so history when seen through their eyes takes the true temperature of the times. The job of working in factories and raising kids was dangerous and hard, and these women approached it with imagination, courage and humour.

They also complained about paling into invisibility as they age. ‘What you have to understand, Kate,’ says Eileen despairingly, ‘when you’re 80 you’re invisible, when you’re 90 you might as well be dead. I might have snow on the roof, but I’m not old. I’ve got stories to tell.’

Today, Yardley, Stink Bomb Alley and Angel Lane market are sadly long gone, buried beneath the sprawling Olympic Park and a landslide of gentrification. What times. What joy. What women! We shall never see their like again. I only hope my fictional characters do justice to the real-life Yardley girls.

They must have told you some interesting stories, what was your favourite?

These are some of my favourite little gems, which I listened to at Eastside Community Heritage.

‘Oh we used to talk about boys all the time,’ chuckled Barbara who worked in the powder room from 1962-1968. ‘There was a fella who used to come in to service the machines, he had an unfortunate tic and used to blow raspberries. Being young we thought this was hilarious and used to fall about.

Another lad used to wheel in barrels of goods and we’d call out “nice bum” We were shameless.’

Carol in box making, who also worked there in the 1960s, confesses to a couple of cheeky gins on a Friday dinnertime. ‘We’d all leg it back terrified of being late. We had some larks. Used to get some of the blokes who worked there in the empty barrels and roll ’em around the firm.’

‘We talked about sex mainly,’ states Joan who worked on a belt gluing boxes in the 1960s. ‘I was the youngest so I got well educated. I’ll never forget one morning tea break on Christmas Eve. We’re sitting round drinking our tea and wondering why it tasted so funny.

‘Someone had put a load of whisky in the tea-urn. We were slaughtered and it was only 10am. There was no more work to be done after that!’

Molly who worked in the soap room as a 14-year-old, trimming lavender soap by hand with a knife, insists she only went to Yardley because she liked nice smells.

‘I used to take my letters in there; they smelt gorgeous so when I sent a letter it was all perfumed. I worked there with me mum and my sister. Used to thumb a lift home on the lorries as the buses were full of factory girls. You can imagine the laughs we had.’

Through Ann and Eileen I learnt about the powerful camaraderie and community that the girls enjoyed. ‘‘They really did look after us like family. I used to earn five bob, given to me every Friday in a brown paper packet. It would go straight to my mum who’d give me back two,’ Ann told me before her death.

Eileen agreed. ‘We felt proud to work there and be a Lavender Girl. Such smashing looking girls worked there too, we all used to walk down Carpenter’s Road at clocking off time and all the boys from the surrounding firms would shout “Aye aye, Up the Yardley Girls,” trying to carry our bags and wolf-whistling.

‘We were a tight-knit community at Yardley’s, all the girls were friendly and looked after one another, supported one another through life’s trials. Say if someone’s mum died, we would all rally round.
‘We shared everything, because we were all same boat you see. We were all poor.’

Did you include any of them in Secrets of the Lavender Girls?

All of them and plenty more bedside!

This is the second book in your Homefront series; do you have plans to write anymore?

Not at the moment. I’m just finishing the first draft of my next novel, The Little Wartime Library, based on the true story of Bethnal Green Underground Tube Shelter library, which during the war operated over the boarded-up tracks of the westbound Central line, offering shelterers escape and solace through stories. Wartime civilians read voraciously, much as we are now, during the COVID pandemic.

I think the Homefront series has the potential to be made into a TV drama; just like Call the Midwife, is this something that you would consider doing?

Yes! It’s every writer’s dream to see one of their books adapted into a tv drama. I think The Stepney Doorstep Society would lend itself particularly well to a TV series as it chronicles some remarkable women and their hidden histories and the powerful contribution they made to the social, economic and political history of wartime East London.

www.katethompsonmedia.co.uk

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