Lumps and stumps, heels and wheels.
Love the chillin' babes in the Cooling Room
Good stuff.
I'm fascinated with these kind of things, there's so many aspects to it all, so many different approaches one may take to survey the field, and the sociocultural lens provides a richness of personal histories --- it goes beyond a simple product/consumer relationship, it's about the people who made something well and the people who appreciated that well-made thing, something to celebrate and carry a healthy enthusiasm for --- often in my searches I come across harsh critical assessments of the academic sort which seem to invariably make the whole tobacco affair look like some sinister conspiracy or something, it's quite tiresome trying to read that sort of mambojambo, dumb stuff like looking at old advertising and feeding the misread imagery through a Marxist perspective "
...with the increasing habit for brands to be advertised with transferable symbolic values, this figure was offered to the working-class and lower-middle-class white male consumer as an image with which he could identify with and which could offer him what appeared to be a degree of glamour and adventurism..." etc etc
Much more fun is finding and reading old employees talking about their experiences, like this,
"
The Stemming Room was where stems were removed from tobacco leaves. Audrey and her colleagues would throw 'Joeys' (piles of leftover leaves) at each other for fun, 'until the forewoman caught you!"
http://mshed.org/explore-contribute/themes/in-our-workplaces/everyday-experiences-work-relationships/working-at-wills-tobacco-factory/
Or this, talking about the old Gallaher factory,
"My Ma was a "stripper" in Gallaher's in the 1940's, up until her marriage in 1953. Her sisters also worked there, and so did her mother in the First World War. Granny's job was putting the cigarette cards into the packets. She and the other young girls used to include a piece of paper with their names and addresses, and soldiers used to write to them. Mum said the stink of the tobacco never left them them no matter how much they washed. She'd go to dances, and the first thing a bloke would say was "I KNOW WHERE YOU WORK!"."
"... the cakes were large squares approx; 2'x2' these were feed through a cutting machine one on top of the other and sliced very thin then feed into flat wooden trays. The tray was weighed, a clerk kept the record of who got which tray. The slices of condor was weighed to 1ounce, wrapped in silver paper by hand (some girls looked as if they were doing a magic trick they wrapped so fast) then boxed and then sent off to be packed. A quality control person came around every hour and checked a sample for weight if it was wrong you got money deducted from your wage. We moved to machines end of 69 early 70 i think. we just weighed the tobacco and the machine wrapped and boxed it this broke down at least 5 times a day. The more trays you got through the more bonus you made."
http://www.belfastforum.co.uk/index.php/topic,37355.0.html?PHPSESSID=867932c23f4b689bba73a83ab3ac7d75
It was common to call them Gallaher girls...
Or this former worker at Dobie's in Scotland, she says "
I didn't smoke then, not till later but you still smuggled tins out in your bra." !!!
= )
p12
http://www.accordhospice.org.uk/content/files/According%20to%20Us%20-%20March%202012.pdf
...and then there's this video documentary, about Player's Nottingham, which is actually pretty amazing in a way, it makes me glad that the historical importance has been realized and an effort of archiving has been made, and actually bringing in the former employees for it all is icing on the cake...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-A1CuaSqgPg
