Gateway Object – Teapot and Cups on Tray

A few of the ladies at Newman Brothers, led by Dolly Dunsby, went on strike after a disagreement with the directors about tea-break duration. Joyce Green, company secretary at the time, argued that the ladies’ 10-minute tea breaks had turned into half-hour breaks, and informed the directors about how much this was costing the company. She advised that in order to save money, the tea break had to be a strict ten minutes, as it was costing the company precious production time. This may not be the full story, but it wasn’t well received. Dolly Dunsby, Alice Overton and few other ladies walked out on strike.

In the early 1960s,

The company was left with no warehouse staff, which stopped production. The ladies were eventually convinced to come back to work by directors, Mr Kellett and Mr Floyd, a few days later. When recounting the incident, Joyce Green remarked that:

“we’d no warehouse staff. My fault. However, went home one day, I don’t really know how many days it was and John Kellett said, ‘Oh dear we’ve got to solve this, haven’t we? We shall have to go and see them. We shall have to go and see Mrs Overton’.” Who then lived at the bottom of the road here. Anyway, eventually they did come back. Oh dear, so…”

360° View of the Tea Set and Cups

The original 1960s’ tea station still exists, intact in the Shroud Room, and was preserved right up until the last working day at Newman Brothers in 1998. If cups could talk!

There was clearly a clash between management and workers, and we of course only have half of the story. The warehouse team were small and without them present to manage the packing and distribution, the running of the business suffered. The ladies who walked out also took so much knowledge with them, which inevitably slowed down production at Newman Brothers. After all, Dolly ran the Warehouse and distributed the ‘jobs’ every morning and had a solid system in place. Without this, the company suffered.