Bomb Girls--Britain's Secret Army Read online

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword

  Introduction

  The Poems

  1. Building the Secret War Machine

  2. Working in a Bomb Factory

  3. Betty’s Story: The Yellow Ladies

  4. Margaret’s Story: The Process Worker in ‘A’ Section

  5. Ivy’s Story: The Girl with the Lathe

  6. Laura’s Story: An Angel and a Rose

  7. Margaret’s Story: The Teasing Girl

  8. Maisie’s Story: Maisie From Essex With the Facepack

  9. Alice’s Story: Fancypants

  10. Dorothy’s Story: The Government Inspector

  11. Iris’s Story: The Girl on the Bicycle

  12. The Factories

  Plates

  Copyright

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My most sincere thanks to everyone involved in the All Party Parliamentary Group for Greater Recognition for Munitions Workers, namely Rob Flello, Russell Brown, Huw Irranca-Davies and Phil Wilson, who were so generous with their time in the initial stages of my research.

  A special thank you must also go to Clare Tillyer at John Blake Publishing, whose infectious enthusiasm for the idea kickstarted the book into life. Also to Lloyd Brown, Chief of Staff in Rob Flello’s office and Kellie Haste, Huw-Irranca Davies’s caseworker at Ogmore, for all their help and efforts on behalf of the women.

  Mike Clubb, author of The Welsh Arsenal (essential reading for anyone interested in the history of munitions work in the Bridgend factory) gave me invaluable assistance in guiding me towards the surviving munitions workers, as well as important insights into the record keeping of accidents and fatalities at Bridgend.

  Thanks too must go to Vera Barber in Bishop Auckland for keeping the flame alive for the memory of the ‘Aycliffe Angels’ over many years and maintaining a mini-archive of material from those times.

  The enthusiastic contribution of the families of the Bomb Girls I interviewed also made it so much easier to organise and conduct my interviews. David and Eunice Jagger, Matt Green, Don Curtis and Jo Street were extremely helpful every step of the way, particularly when it came to the details of their family history. Thanks too to Juliet Young at Stanway Primary, Colchester, for assistance in tracking down Margaret and Don Curtis.

  And finally, and most importantly, my thanks to the memorable, brave women whose stories are told in these pages: Betty, the two Margarets, Ivy, Dorothy, Maisie, Alice, Iris and Laura. All gratitude for the time we spent together looking back at your lives – and your amazing and invaluable contribution to the history of this country.

  FOREWORD

  This book tells a story of heroes, ordinary women who responded to the call to serve their nation in extraordinary and dangerous times. But this is no work of fiction. Their often gruelling experiences should already be well-known and a source of national pride. Yet for nearly 70 years, these women’s stories have largely gone untold.

  Over the last few years we have seen recognition for a number of groups of veterans of the Second World War, most notably on the Home Front. The Bevin Boys and Women’s Timber Corps in 2007, the Women’s Land Army in 2009 and the participants in the Arctic Convoys in early 2013 have all received long-deserved recognition of their service.

  Yet, perhaps surprisingly, there remains a group of veterans, numbering well over a million people, who remain without any form of recognition. The munitions workers of the Second World War, the majority of whom were women, were carrying out highly skilled, dirty, and extremely dangerous work, with the threat of accident or enemy action a constant threat. It goes without saying that the consequences of an explosion in a munitions factory could be horrific.

  An enormous explosion at the RAF Fauld underground munitions storage depot in Staffordshire of 1944 killed 81 people, and the 1940 bombing of the Vickers aircraft factory at Brooklands, near Weybridge in Surrey resulted in the deaths of 86 workers, with 630 people injured. At Royal Ordnance Factory (ROF) sites across the country, workers toiled day and night amidst risks such as these to provide the munitions Britain needed to maintain the war effort.

  But perhaps because the highly secretive nature of the work during the war bred in them the habit of not talking about their wartime experiences, or maybe because the attitude of so many meant that they didn’t feel the need to draw attention to themselves, this ever-dwindling number of people in their late eighties and nineties now find themselves the true unsung heroes of the Second World War.

  This book explains in vivid detail the trials and tribulations facing women in munitions factories, be it the ever-present risk of explosion, the effect that the chemicals they worked with would have on their bodies, or simply the day-to-day difficulties of living in a strange place and dealing with the restrictions of wartime. Theirs is an incredible story and one which has taken far too long to tell.

  Even I, as a member of the campaign for recognition, was not aware that my partner’s grandmother had worked in a munitions factory until recently. A member of my staff mentioned the campaign to a friend, who also told him that a relative of his had worked in munitions.

  I know of other members of the campaign who have only recently discovered that their relatives were former workers, thanks to their involvement with the campaign. It is likely that taking into account the sheer numbers of workers in the munitions factories, most people in Britain will be related to, or will know someone who worked in the factories during the war years. Many are perhaps just not aware of it, or do not fully appreciate its significance.

  At the outbreak of the First World War, Britain found herself woefully underprepared and in no position to provide anywhere near the number of shells required by the British Army. This ‘Shell Crisis’ was a major contributory factor to the fall of the Liberal Government in 1915, which in turn led to the formation of a coalition Government and the appointment of David Lloyd George, future Prime Minister, as Minister of Munitions. The Government came to realise that the only way to win the war would be to move the economy onto a war footing and prioritise the manufacture of munitions.

  Women had previously worked in munitions factories but the changes made by the Munitions of War Act in 1915 not only made it a penal offence for a munitions worker to leave their employment in a munitions factory, but also led to an increase in the number of female workers from 212,000 in 1914 to nearly 1 million by war’s end in 1918. It is estimated that female workers were responsible for around 80 per cent of all the weapons and ammunition used by the British Army in the First World War.

  Keen to learn from such lessons, the Government ensured that the infrastructure of munitions manufacture was improved in the years before the outbreak of the Second World War. Despite this, war still necessitated a huge increase in production and in the number of munitions factories. By 1943, there was even a munitions factory under Parliament, manufacturing fuse parts and parts for submarines. Once again, with men conscripted to serve in the Armed Forces, it was women who provided the bulk of the munitions workforce.

  Without their work, the Spitfires defending the skies of southern England during the Battle of Britain would have had no bullets; the D-Day landing forces would have been lacking in tanks and artillery; and the Navy shadowing the North Atlantic convoys would have had no shells.

  While the USA, as the ‘great arsenal of democracy’, certainly helped turn the tide of the war in its later years, munitions workers in British factories were crucial to the supply of our troops through the war. It is no exaggeration to say that Britain would not have been victorious without them.

  This book, however, does not simply tell of an importan
t period in our military history but perhaps equally in our social history. With the South and East of England at serious risk from air attack, munitions production moved to the North of England, Wales and Scotland and became a truly national effort. Many of those women, who had moved hundreds of miles away from their homes to work in the factories, chose to stay after the war, permanently transforming several areas around the country.

  The attempts by these young women to retain some sense of normality in their lives in what was a far from normal situation are fascinating in themselves. It never ceases to amaze to hear a 90-year-old woman speak so matter-of-factly about experiences ranging from the horrifying to, dare I say, the scandalous. Yet after the war ended, as had been the case in the First World War, women did not necessarily expect to return to their pre-war occupations, having contributed so fundamentally to the war effort.

  My own interest in this subject stems from a meeting in 2009 with a constituent whose mother required my help with a benefits issue. She was missing a hand. Most of her other hand was missing too. My constituent explained this was due to an explosion during her time at ROF Swynnerton, just a few miles from my constituency.

  This lady had spent the vast majority of her adult life, and had brought up her children, with the most debilitating of injuries. Yet she had not received so much as a letter of thanks for her work. This struck me as fundamentally wrong. As a result, I joined with a number of other MPs who had campaigned locally on this issue to set up the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Recognition of Munitions Workers.

  We have steadily grown in numbers as we have spread the word to other MPs and made them aware of the work carried out in or near to their own constituencies. We have had meetings with Ministers in an attempt to persuade them to support our campaign but disappointingly, citing cost issues and the difficulties in finding accurate records of those individuals who worked in the munitions factories, successive Governments have not felt able to provide any form of recognition.

  The APPG feels that these issues are surmountable. As a result, our goal is simple: to find some means of recognising munitions workers, men and women, of the two World Wars. It is envisaged that this will be in the form of a permanent memorial at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire and some form of badge or medal for individual workers, together with a letter of recognition signed by a representative of both the Government and the Royal Family.

  With the help of a successful fundraising campaign, we hope to be in a position to commence with both of these in the near future. If, after reading this book, you want to help with our campaign, then do get in touch. There are many ways you can do so, ranging from fundraising for our ongoing efforts to simply putting us in touch with surviving munitions workers in your area.

  Much of our work now is establishing exactly who worked in these factories and any help with that would be greatly appreciated. You can visit our website at www.munitionsworkers.wordpress.com.

  I am delighted to have been able to help Jacky Hyams make contact with some of the munitions workers who feature in this book. Her passion for the stories that these ladies tell, and her commitment to do them justice, has been clear to see from our first meeting and this book is testament to that fact. I hope that the munitions workers of the Second World War will consider this book a fitting reflection of their work.

  I know for Jacky, meeting these ladies has been both a joy and a privilege, as it has been for me, and I know that she has spent countless hours talking to them about their work. Their stories are in equal parts tragic, uplifting and amusing, but most of all simply fascinating. Theirs was truly a different world to what we know today, with young women thrust into dangerous work on the frontline of Britain’s war effort, worried about their partners or relatives fighting thousands of miles away, in many cases living hundreds of miles from home in unfamiliar areas of the country. Yet amazingly, every single former worker I have spoken to, when asked whether they would do it again, has responded, without hesitation, that they would.

  Most of all, it is hard not to feel a sense of shame when meeting these ladies that nearly 70 years on we still have not, as a nation, given our thanks to these brave individuals who risked their lives daily to ensure we could win the fight against fascism.

  Words alone are insufficient to describe the debt which we owe to these workers but I want to pay tribute to them all – those who have contributed to this book, those I have met during the course of the campaign, those who survive and those who have passed away in recent years, and those who gave their lives in the service of their nation during the war. All made a huge contribution to the Allied victory in the Second World War. And all are deserving of a nation’s gratitude.

  This book tells their story and I hope it will bring us another step closer to the recognition that these heroines so richly deserve.

  Rob Flello, MP

  Secretary, APPG on Recognition of Munitions Workers

  May 2013

  INTRODUCTION

  Courage in the Second World War – not the defiant, angry, in-your-face bravery of the captured resistance heroine, or the awesomely daring exploits of the Battle of Britain pilots, or those who gave all for Bomber Command – the people in this story represent a very different kind of courage. A quiet, steady, some would say typically British stoicism in the face of adversity.

  Yet their bravery in wartime was a national secret. They didn’t wear uniforms to demonstrate their role in the war effort; they weren’t allowed to. The places where they worked each day were shrouded in secrecy of the highest order. As a consequence, like the millions of uniformed men and women whose combined efforts helped win the war, they too were forbidden to talk about what they did. Their day-to- day work was so crucial to the survival of the country, only their loved ones and colleagues could know about it. And even then, most of these brave people were only aware of the set or specific tasks they were required to perform each day.

  While the nation itself lived through a time when all information was censored, these wartime heroes worked under conditions where strictly enforced secrecy dominated everything they did. They had an important job to do, but no questions could be asked.

  So who were they? They weren’t codebreakers, nor were they spies or espionage agents working undercover. They didn’t form part of some elite group operating behind the scenes. Yet effectively, theirs was a very significant hidden army, mostly female, teenage girls, young war brides, ordinary mums, war widows and even, in some instances, grandmothers.

  As Winston Churchill described them in a radio broadcast of 1940, their role was defined as ‘soldiers with different weapons – but the same courage’. Unquestionably, without the work of this hidden female army, the story of the Second World War might have ended in a very different way.

  But why, you might ask, are the people of this hidden army perceived as such brave fighters? After all, everyone in Britain during WW2 had no choice but to hold their nerve for nearly seven years, enduring much deprivation, devastation, separation and sorrow as a bomb-blasted land shakily made its way towards peacetime. The need for fortitude, certainly, existed for everyone, wherever they were.

  The reality was, as part of the Home Front (the mobilisation of Britain’s civilian population to support the war effort) these women calmly faced even more danger than the ordinary civilian. The nature of their jobs, the work they did around the clock for many years, put them right in the firing line, their only ‘weapons’ being their tireless ability to keep going – and the strength of their relationships with each other.

  Theirs was a world where the slightest accident or a tiny mistake or slip-up at work had the potential to blow them all to smithereens and leave Britain’s war effort in jeopardy – because these women worked in the country’s munitions or explosives factories. Their job was to help build the bombs, fill the bullets, create the spare parts for the ammunition and firepower the country needed so badly – ‘Bomb Girls’ whose role, until
recently, went unheralded in the history of Britain’s fight for national survival, even though their numbers were estimated at 1 million-plus throughout the war.

  Danger of the very worst kind was ever-present in a vast wartime munitions factory. Everyone working on the factory floor handling highly toxic chemicals risked their health. Each day carried the risk of sudden, accidental explosions causing disfigurement, blindness or loss of limbs – or worse.

  As Phil Wilson, Labour MP for Sedgefield, told me: ‘They went to work in the morning and came home at night – but sometimes they didn’t come back at all.’ Phil, whose grandmother filled shells at the munitions factory at Aycliffe, is one of a small cross-party group of British MPs campaigning for greater recognition for Britain’s munitions women for many years.

  My own involvement with the Bomb Girls came about after reading a brief newspaper story in 2012. For the very first time in history, a small group of munitions workers from across Britain, now in their eighties and nineties, had marched in London alongside all the other wartime veterans on Remembrance Sunday.

  In some cases, their stories and memories of their wartime experiences in munitions factories had been told locally. There were memorials to the munitions heroes in a few places, yet there had never been any national, wider acknowledgement of the significance of their work in WW2.

  A phone call to the British Legion, who put me in touch with the organisers of the Remembrance Sunday munitions march, revealed the long silence surrounding the Bomb Girls and their work was about to end. A cross-party group of MPs from around the country was now overseeing a big campaign for greater recognition for the munitions workers. With their help, I was able to contact a number of surviving Bomb Girls across the country, all happy to talk to me about their lives and experiences. After war ended, they’d all returned to normal life, married, raised families and put it all behind them. Yet when I sat down to talk to them, the memories came flooding back without any prompting: their recall of those years working on the factory floor seemed as vivid as if it had happened just a few years back.