Bomb Girls--Britain's Secret Army (2 page)

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

C
ourage 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.

After my initial interviews with two such workers, Betty Nettle in Bridgend and Margaret Proudlock in Dumfries, whose stories were so fascinating and well-told, it was difficult to tear myself away, I asked the campaigning MPs why it had taken so long for these women to be vocal about the work they’d done for their country. Phil Wilson told me he believed it was that British national stoicism, the quiet ‘get on with it’ courage of millions, which contributed to
the women’s long silence. Many of them were no strangers to tough times, either.

‘They thought their stories were not unique because it was happening to everyone else they knew,’ he says. ‘Everyone faced the same dangers. And in many of the areas the munitions women came from, adversity was not unknown – pit, farm, or Armed Forces – those were the employment choices where they lived.’

Russell Brown, MP for Dumfries & Galloway and part of the cross-party campaign, knows munitions work well. Before becoming an MP, he worked for ICI at the Nobel’s Explosives Factory at Powfoot, Dumfries, for 23 years. Many of those years were spent in munitions work. He believes a lack of record keeping in wartime might also be one of the reasons why formal recognition has been so slow in coming.

‘At a time of war, perhaps paperwork wasn’t the most important issue of the day,’ he told me. ‘I made initial approaches in 2008 to say we should recognise the munitions veterans but frequently all that came back from the then DTI [Department of Trade & Industry] was “we have no records of these people”.

‘It’s obvious how dirty, heavy and dangerous the work was way back then, compared to the seventies and eighties when I worked at ICI. But I suspect there were many incidents in factories across the country where people were badly injured or killed, yet some seem to have been reported, some don’t. Safety wouldn’t have been the priority that it is today in many places. Robust accident records? It’s questionable.’

Yet there was more to contend with than physical danger. As I interviewed more munitions women, other less obvious factors emerged. The pain of separation from loved ones was
common enough in wartime. Communication was limited, mostly, to letter writing. But consider the emotional effect on young women not even out of their teens, girls like Maisie Jagger, ‘called up’ at 18 to work in munitions, then sent off by the authorities to a different part of the country, far away from home.

Maisie, an East Ender, told me the separation from her family and home made her physically ill. She was literally pining for home, fading away. Thankfully, the authorities recognised this and eventually allowed her to work near her home.

For Laura Hardwick, who has the distinction of being both an Aycliffe ‘Angel’ and a Swynnerton ‘Rose’, being sent to live away from her home in the Northeast to live nearly 200 miles away, in a purpose-built hostel, was an experience she struggled to endure with considerable stoicism, until the months before war ended, when depression overwhelmed her.

The final straw, she told me, was when her friend and roommate returned home to Scotland: like so many other women, only the bonds of friendship helped Laura get through the sheer, exhausting slog of it all. And it was a slog. The factories ran 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The women’s shifts were rotated round the clock. For some Bomb Girls, living several miles away from their workplace, a 12-hour day, including travel time, was common. The worst times, they all told me, were the night shifts in the blackout. Bombing raids from above created more than just a risk of lives – they meant reduced production hours. While security and safety rules were everywhere, there were still times when nothing, not even a bombing raid, was allowed to stop the production line. It was that hairy.

Rob Flello, MP for Stoke on Trent South, who helped
launch the all-party munitions campaign in 2011, reminded me of the stark reality of those times: ‘People sat in the train during an air raid in total silence for what seemed like hours in the darkness. Even the railway station that they used every day didn’t officially exist.’

For the women, most of whom had left school at age 14 to work in poorly paid domestic service, the money they earned in munitions was a huge incentive. But the relentless, exhausting routine, the danger of working constantly with toxic chemicals and the ongoing threat from the enemy in the skies above exacted a crushing toll. How on earth, you wonder, did they hold it together?

Huw Irranca-Davies, MP for Ogmore in Wales, joined forces with Rob Flello in 2011 to launch the recognition campaign for munitions workers. He confirmed what Laura Hardwick and others told me: it was the relationships the women forged with those working with them that made the difference. The strong sense of community in remote areas like Bridgend, the huge munitions factory where Betty Nettle and thousands of other women worked, played a big part.

‘In many ways, it was the making of that part of mid Glamorgan, after the war,’ he said. ‘What was special about that community is that it was particularly Welsh in the way they came together, masses of people coming together – and having to make the best of what they were given.’

‘It was just a job, they didn’t think of the danger,’ said Vera Barber, from Bishop Auckland. Vera has been very closely involved locally in keeping the memory of the Aycliffe munitions women alive for many years. Strictly speaking, Vera wasn’t a Bomb Girl. She worked at the Aycliffe
munitions complex in the administration section, as a teenage clerk.

For the office workers it was different, a 9 till 5 job, no night shifts. Yet Vera still remembers friends at work who were killed in accidents, and the many women in factories who faced the worst personal tragedies, but kept going regardless. ‘They might have lost a loved one the day before, but they still went to their shift the next day. You never heard the word “stressed”.’

Vera too believes it was the closely knit ties of the local communities that sustained everyone, got them through. ‘People just got on with it, especially northerners. We’re tough lot up here.’

These women’s stories are, if you like, brief snapshots of wartime, glimpses of what now seems an almost unimaginable scenario: family life torn apart, bombs falling from the sky, everything in people’s lives closely regulated by the authorities – including their war work.

Yet the other fascinating aspect of the Bomb Girls stories is their collective social history, the background to their lives. Many described childhoods growing up happily, in conditions that we would today regard as deprivation. And each woman’s story underlines how very different family life was then.

Parental authority, for instance, was not to be questioned under any circumstances. Nearly all the women told me they had originally hankered for a role in the Armed Forces. Yet their parents were firmly against it because the perception, at the time, was that the Forces were not suitable for a respectable young woman. Munitions work was seen (ironically) as a safer, softer option that paid well, too.

It would be difficult to recount these women’s stories out of context. The first two chapters of this book describe the background to the creation of the big munitions factories, the hazards therein and an overview of the way munitions factories ran through the wartime years.

For readers wanting to know more about the factory sites themselves, the final chapter gives brief factual details of the sites where the women in the book found themselves working. In the spring of 2013, after a gap of 70 years, Iris Aplin and her friend Mary Taylor were filmed by the BBC revisiting the Swynnerton site where they’d worked as teenagers – a poignant reminder of their personal history, and the history of so many others.

Nine women from a remarkable generation tell us their stories here. Talking to them at length – a real privilege for any writer – has only served to confirm what is part of our national conscience. Our debt to them, and the millions like them, is enormous. It can only be repaid by acknowledging their worth, time and again, and honouring their times – and all the sacrifices they made. That they did it so selflessly and quietly, without any fanfare, makes it even more remarkable.

Jacky Hyams

London

May 2013

THE POEMS

D
uring my meeting with Vera Barber, she showed me some paperwork and other material she had kept from her years working in the offices at the Aycliffe munitions factory. I was intrigued to find, scrawled in pencil on the back of a few yellowing delivery notes from November 1944, a series of poignantly worded poems.