Recorded Memories

Carole Bramley Interview. October 2001

Carole Bramley early working life in Pex and Corah’s:
‘You tended to think that factory fodder was from the secondary modern schools’

‘Find something at least equal to men…we weren’t being paid the same as [the] men were on that countering and I thought that was wrong’

Carole left school before her 15th birthday, her birthday being on 1 January.On Fridays they had singsongs and sang over the sound of the machinery.In the room that Carole worked the linkers were in rows, there were also the hand examiners at the back and the work was stacked at the front. Carole’s aunt was the forelady but there was no favouritism – if she got work that she liked she could earn good money.She also had another aunt working at the factory.

When she first started at Pex she was trained to do the job as a linker and paid a set wage until she became fast enough to be put on ‘your own time’. As well as a manicurist the girls were also provided with spectacles. Carole also remembers they had well known entertainers of the time come to entertain them and these shows took place in the canteen, they were also broadcast on the radio and similar to many other factories they had a shop. They did a 44 hour week – Carole found it a very long day and was ready to go home at 4 o’clock with the part timers.She took breaks to pass the time – wash her hands, ‘Have a smoke’.She smoked just to be grown up.She was out most evenings – dancing, went to a jazz club, also a youth club in Enderby.When she was at Corah’s she joined the judo club. She’d get the bus home from work to Narborough but would be catching a bus back into Leicester later in the evening.Carole commenting that there had always been a good bus service into Leicester.

Carole’s father was from Stoney Stanton and she thinks that he started his working life at Howe’s hosiery factory which was a factory in Stoney Stanton. He didn’t want to work in one of the local quarries.Her mother was from Sapcote and thinks she may also have started her working life at Howe’s.

While working at Corah’s Carole was given the option of learning the countering. Countering had always been a man’s job – there was opposition from the men but she thought of it as possibly giving a ‘bit more skill, more prestige’.She felt she was pushed into factory work and tried to ‘make the best of it’ and got out if it ‘as soon as I could’. She wanted to find something equal to men’s salary. When working on the countering the women weren’t paid as much as the men which Carole thought of as being wrong. With nursing she felt she was able to earn the same amount as men – ‘you get recognition for it, you get pension, something like a fair wage. …you had this thing about working in a factory, you get so much low self-esteem from being in that situation’. She remarked, ‘You already feel second class because you didn’t pass your scholarship and then you are told you are going to be factory fodder – that’s almost second class isn’t it’. Working in a factory ‘You are just thinking about the next pay cheque’.

Linking had been phased out, a cheaper way was found to stitch the stockings but according to Carole the new method used wasn’t as successful because with linking there were ‘no lumps and bumps’. She acknowledges that linking was a skilled job but Carole didn’t find it satisfying – ‘It hurt my eyes, very monotonous…sat in same position all day, very frustrating.‘Every single stitch had to be in place – if you see some very fine stockings,15 denier, imagine how tiny the stitches are on that and you had to put one stitch on one of these little linking frames – you couldn’t get one stitch out because you would drop a ladder’