Break a Leg by Jenny Landreth

Author:Jenny Landreth [Landreth, Jenny]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473563575
Publisher: Random House

He wasn’t leaving, you’ll note, he was just moving department, but his colleagues thought it was worth a party, and Port Sunlight News thought it worth reporting on. Every time a woman ‘left to get married’ or went to live abroad (which was not uncommon), it was noted and often accompanied by posed photos of people who clearly didn’t face the camera often. Here is Miss Millie Crompton, for instance, ‘who for the past eleven years was engaged in the Fancy Cardbox Department’ (the what?) and was off to Cairo to get married. Millie stares out from the shiny page, with a slight smile and an almost-raised eyebrow, in a simple embroidered shirt and with messy hair. Here is Miss Martha Griffiths on her retirement; she warranted a page-long article, which in itself was a history lesson about working lives and women and the early days of soap manufacture. ‘Martha has taken leave of her beloved Printing Department with which she has been associated since 1889.’ She’d joined the company ‘over thirty-four years ago, before the first boiling of soap in No. 1’. There was the Number 1 Soapery, the Number 3 Soapery, the Number 1 Stamping Room, the Number 2 Stamping Room. Each a small glimpse.

The News also reported all the things that went on outside work, which makes for a glorious record of the sheer quantity of opportunities employees had. Education, the arts, sport, social activities, charity, horticulture – you name it. There were reports on the bowling seasons and whist drives, the billiards trophies and the dances that are run by every department – the Traffic Department Dance, the Time and Wages Department Dance, the Service Department Dance – and about all the holiday camps, Old Boys’ Associations and Girls’ Social Clubs. There were ambulance classes and the Women’s Helpful League, gala days and presentations. These people were busy. So was the News writing style, which ranges from florid to fever pitch. In December 1922, a royal visit gave one journalist a meltdown. ‘One of the greatest days in the history of Port Sunlight was Saturday December 16th,’ he hyperventilated, ‘and it was also the greatest of the many great days in the life of Viscount Leverhulme.’ There are even pages listing every new book put on the shelves of the Lever Library.

There are articles, too, on how to live your life as the perfect Port Sunlight resident. They could read about the importance of temperance, or life insurance, or gardening. One article, ‘Teeth as Arbiters of Health’, reminded me that my father’s last place of employment in the late seventies was the dental surgery of Hardy Spicers, a Birmingham car factory which felt very far from the charms of Port Sunlight. There are articles on how to pronounce ‘margarine’ (with a hard ‘g’, surprisingly. I’ve been doing it wrong all my life) and lectures on whaling, including graphic detail on how to kill a whale. Impossible to believe that would be useful to many people, but there it was.

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