With their high heels and bouffant hair, the women of the Sunbeam plant, in Cork, caught the public imagination. Now a group of them have turned their stories into a play, writes Mary Leland
Maureen Lehane can still picture the little table in the corner of the workroom at the Sunbeam Wolsey textile factory, in Cork. It's pay day in 1947, and a small queue of girls are waiting for the chance to rub out the figures pencilled on their envelopes of cash. "A seven might be reduced to a five, or a three, in shillings, so that when they gave up their wages at home they would be able at least to keep back a little for themselves," she says. "Otherwise they'd only get what their mother allowed them, and that might not be much."
It is something of this almost matriarchal ethos that Marion Wyatt wants to reproduce for her play Sunbeam Girls, which opens at Cork Opera House on Wednesday. "It seems to me," she says, "that they were strong-willed women, independent, yet they handed over their wages to their mothers every week, possibly to pay for those behind them in the family who might be given the chance to stay on at school."
That's one of the threats that Wyatt, who is director of Stage Centre theatre company, remembers from her own childhood, in the northern suburbs of Cork city: the possibility that if she didn't behave she might be sent to work at Sunbeam and so be denied the chance to go to secondary school. Girls as young as 13 were taken on at the factory; if they didn't marry they might stay there for the rest of their working lives.
Yet, as a group, the girls, in a kind of working-class coalition, were a social element in themselves. Going to piano lessons on Spangle Hill as a child, Wyatt would pass the Sunbeam gates and see the workers ending their shift, still wearing their overalls. "It was like watching a river of blue, almost intimidating. But at the same time the women had the high heels and the bouffant hairstyles like images of what we were beginning to see on television or in magazines. And there would always be a few of them hanging around the gates, smoking."
There were men, too, of course, in grey trousers and long buff aprons, but in a workforce that once topped 2,000 people it was the women who captured the public imagination. Wyatt's attempt, in fact, is to reproduce not just a matriarchy society but an entire one, or at least a category of Cork life, now vanished, that once seemed integral to the city's northside communities.
Lehane, who started at Sunbeam on a wage of 12 shillings and sixpence, is not part of the writing team, which initially styled itself 7.3.1. (seven women, three generations and one secret), but she is typical of the world the company wants to celebrate. She is typical, certainly, in that she left the factory when she got married, in 1954, and, to a lesser degree, in that she went back 12 years later, conditions and rules having shifted in the meantime. "It just started to happen," she says. "Married women were allowed to keep working, along with some other changes. There wasn't the same kind of religious atmosphere, although the statues were still up on all the landings. And the women were coming into work wearing slacks."
They were also coming in pregnant, which was unheard of in her younger days. Then a girl "in trouble" simply left. Usually she married the father of her child, as the community expected, but she did not continue working, and neither was her absence discussed on the factory floor. "The worst thing that could be said of a girl then was that she 'had to get married'," says Lehane.
In at least one of its versions, the song The Boys of Fair Hill asserts that "Sunbeam girls are very rude/ They go swimming in the nude". Lehane says that, in fact, the Sunbeam girls did not have a reputation for being particularly fun-loving or daring, never mind notorious.
The truth may have been distorted by the convivial parties thrown by Billy Dwyer, Sunbeam's founder, in his swimming-pool-equipped garden at the factory. What Lehane remembers most vividly are the rosaries said aloud, with designated workers giving out the decades, or the stoppages to recite the angelus at noon, or the penny collections to buy candles for St Martha's shrine, or the extra half-hour allowed for Mass on holy days of obligation - "and there used to be quite a few of those".
There were two staff trips to Rome, with the company covering half the cost and the workers paying the balance from their wages. And, of course, there was the contribution from the employees for the building in Blackpool of the Church of the Annunciation. Commissioned by Dwyer, then a TD, in memory of his daughter Maeve, it was designed, inside and out, architecture and artefacts, by Seamus Murphy. If the Sunbeam girls lacked notoriety, the same could not be said of Dwyer - the church quickly became known as "Billy's fire escape".
At rehearsals at Lough Community Centre, on the other side of the city, Wyatt's cast includes some of the people who contributed to the script, largely through reminiscences, mementoes or recollections of stories told by mothers, grandmothers and aunts. Her group, now given the joint pseudonym of Aisling Cara, got together as women linked first through working with Wyatt and then through a wish to develop their shared interests into something more tangible.
Eventually, Stage Centre became a unifying agency, where little monologues and souvenirs and photographs moved on to a storyboard; additional research encouraged an awareness that an oral history by itself would not be dramatic enough for the stories coming through. It would have to be dramatised, and it would have to be fiction - although the script, by providing a back story relating the older women to the younger, takes in many factual locations, including the Pantry in Blackpool, where milk, cakes and biscuits were served until late at night. That once-hallowed meeting place is now a bank, just as the Sunbeam factory, closed in 1993 and destroyed by fire 10 years later, is now the site of a business and industrial estate.
Like many others, Lehane had predicted the demise of Sunbeam, as it was heralded by a series of takeovers and section closures. Although she was by then managing the staff shop, she remembers the procedures of the factory floor and the hard, wearying and uncomfortable work done by the women turning the toes of socks, by the linkers picking up every single stitch, by the menders who had to produce undetectable repairs.
She remembers, too, a small sisterhood victory in the very hot summer of 1947. "You were not allowed in unless you wore stockings; we all decided, as a protest, to roll down our stockings to the ankles, and it worked: we were given leave to go without stockings during summertime."
It is the only case she remembers of the Sunbeam girls cutting up rough.
• The Sunbeam Girls opens at Cork Opera House on Wednesday