Last week hundreds of people piled into a gallery in Bermondsey for tea and biscuits.
The gallery, the Coleman Project Space on Webber Street, was once a hair dressers that stood just outside Peek Freans biscuit factory and served up broken biscuits to its customers.
Now 17 years after the factory closed, the gallery was stocked with photographs and films of ‘biscuit town’ and old employees of the plant turned out with their children and grand children to talk about their days in the biscuit business.

Some of these memories are now written on the walls, others have been recorded on camera. Some are quite light hearted. Francesca Polass, whose great grand mother worked in Peek Freans, writes: “My great uncle, (who lived in Fowley Street, which used to be behind the Peckham Town Hall) claimed to have invented the cheese sandwich biscuit, but apparently many people made this claim around that time.”

Others are more poignant. John Arthur Taylor was working as an engineer at the factory at the beginning of the Second World War. He says he had eleven brothers and sisters in his family, but when he returned home after a night shift his entire family had moved to Cornwall to escape the bombings, and not left a forwarding address. With no where to go, he joined the RAF, and had a successful wartime career in the air. Superior officers wondered why he never wrote to his family, but he had no idea where they were.
He returned to Peek Freans after the war but was only there 18 months. He called the memoir “Footprints in the snow”, because he hadn’t lasted very long.

The war interrupted a lot of people’s memories of the factory. Ruth Jenkinson, now 82, was 14 when she started work at Peek Freans. “I have been on every floor,” she says, “but mostly custard and bourbon. I had a turn down the bakehouse when I was about 16. You had to have a medical to see if you were fit enough.”
When the war broke out the area around the factory was bombed. “A few people got killed on Drummond Road. In 1942 there was no barrage balloons in place, and the planes came down the road machine gunning. I had to hide under a table.”

In 1944 Ruth was in the wrong place again on New Cross Road. “I heard the doodle bug stop. I thought, hello, that’s coming down. It fell across the street from me and sort of lifted me up. I had my hand over my eyes and a piece of glass hit my hand. I lost a lot of my hair in the shock and my face was all blown up in the blast. I couldn’t clench my fist afterwards. I wasn’t sure if I would be able to go back to work.”She did: and became an old hand on the custard creams. “The bottom bit went in one shoot, the top in the other and they got creamed. If you had a bit of broken it could jam the machine, one of the engineers would come and you had to stop the whole thing, so I used to pick up the broken ones and just sling them in. That’s how you got broken custard creams.”

One of the engineers Ruth might have called on was Ron Lascelles, now 77. Ron was an engineer on the custard and bourbon machines. Originally from Doncaster, love had brought Ron to Bermondsey after the war.
“I had a pen friend in Bermondsey while I was in the Navy. I’d never met her, but we’d been writing for two years. I met her at Waterloo Station. She was with her mother because in them days you had to be. And we got married, three years later, in 1952. I stayed in Bermondsey.”

Ron spent his life engineering the production of tasty snacks. He went to work in Shuttleworth’s chocolate factory, but was offered more money by Sainsbury to go on the pies and pasties. In 1972 he arrived in Peek Freans.
“I had ten years here,” he said. “It was hard work. Massive machines. If they broke down it put seventy women out of work, so you had to be on your toes. It was nearly all local people who worked here apart from the night shift, who were all Polish. They used to come down in droves. It was as if they were going to a football match.”

Biscuits were hard work. Rose Elkins, now 73, started working at the factory on the evening shift in 1956. Rose was used to hard work: she had just had four children. “I started on the top floor with the creams. The cream was very soft and you had to be careful as you picked them up in case you squashed them. Every tray you packed you got so much money for. If you found a hair in a biscuit you got half a crown. If you found a bit of metal you got a bit more. You might do twenty trays in a shift – it depended if the machine was a good machine.”
After tea and biscuits in the gallery, these former Peek Freans workers, with relatives and friends, took a walk around the old factory. “This is the first time I have been back in 22 years,” says Ruth. They walk the grounds and peer into the company offices that have taken over the area, occasionally interrogating the odd employee. “Can that computer tell me what the weather will be like tomorrow?” asks Ruth.

Ron remembers a cardboard cake that stood in the reception area. It was a replica of the Queen’s wedding cake that was made at Peek Freans. “It was a marvellous cake,” says Ron.
When the factory closed in 1987 The Photographers and Blackfriars’ Photography Project produced a book of photographs, a few of which are reproduced here. Arne Sjogren designed the book, and included short passages from employees about leaving Peek Freans.
Some are from workers who had just joined the factory. “When this place closes I will be glad to return to normal life but sorry to see it go,” writes one. “With my shift you’ve got no social life and boy friends are an occasional treat.”

Another writes: “A lump some of money and now our career is down the drain, but what can we do to stop it? Nothing. So we’ll take the money making sure we put a bit of it away for a rainy day to go for a lovely holiday in the sunshine and then find ourselves another beat, God willing.”
As a postscript, this week the News received a letter from Mr Denis E Frean, the only surviving grandson of George Hender Frean, one of the founding partners in 1857. He happened to be in the neighbourhood of the factory in the 1980’s, with his son Patrick, and the pair dropped in. “No Frean has been on these premises for very many years," said a surprised receptionist. The two saw a portrait of the original Mr Frean in the boardroom.
When the factory closed the portrait of the man who started the whole biscuit enterprise was returned to them. It now hangs in his son’s house.