Bomb Girls--Britain's Secret Army (6 page)

This was more emotionally difficult at the time than we could imagine today. Mobility for ordinary working people was quite different then: people used trains and buses for local travel or at holiday times, but in more remote rural areas, cycling or walking often tended to be the only way to get around each day.

Many women, married or single, had never ventured far beyond their home, family and locality. Car ownership for the masses was still to come; flying wasn’t yet an everyday experience. So the sheer discomfort or strangeness of being moved to an unknown place, far from home, added to the other difficulties of working in wartime. Not only did many girls miss the familiarity and warmth of their family environment, the long hours they had to work (a 50-hour working week was not unknown for those working in Royal Ordnance factories) plus the pressure to keep up production quotas, working in round-the-clock conditions, meant that the Bomb Girls, like most of the population, would be an exhausted workforce by the time the war was over.

In areas with heavy industry, like the Midlands, a small number of women had already been working in factory jobs before the war began. Yet many of the younger Bomb Girls who were called up had previously only ever worked in service, perhaps as serving maids or kitchen staff for a middle-or upper-class employer, a common mode of employment then for young women, especially in rural areas.

On the plus side, the need for large numbers of women to work in munitions factories brought valuable employment
to remote, deprived areas of Britain where jobs of any kind had traditionally been hard to find for many years. Moreover, the pay in munitions factories was good. The average for all women’s pay in the early wartime years was around £1 12s 6d. Yet a week working in a big Royal Ordnance factory would bring in between £2 and £4 a week. With overtime and bonuses, a woman’s weekly pay packet could be boosted to as much as £8. In some parts of the country it wasn’t unusual for a Bomb Girl’s pay packet to exceed the sum of money her father had been bringing home, causing family friction sometimes. Yet male pride, for now, had to be cast to one side. What mattered was winning the war.

WHEN HOME BECAME A HOSTEL

Munitions factories were often located in fairly isolated parts of the country, hence the need to construct special, purpose-built hostel accommodation for their workers. There were not enough rural homes in these areas to provide sufficient accommodation for the women being sent there. And even if the homes had been available, young women, away from home often for the first time, free of all ties and earning what was usually more money than they had ever seen before, could be regarded as an added responsibility for families in private houses who might consider putting them up. Officially, any munitions worker wishing to live in a private home near her place of work was free to do so – but such accommodation wasn’t always available.

The workers’ hostel accommodation was built close to the factories and designed to be totally self-contained. Some experienced male munitions workers and their families,
relocated from one large facility to another, would be housed in specially constructed housing estates or camps close to the factory, consisting of semi-detached bungalows with two or three bedrooms.

Many of the big hostel complexes were long, low, camouflaged brick buildings with a manager in charge. A typical hostel camp could house up to 1,000 munitions workers and the complex would have had everything the workers could possibly need: a hairdressing salon, living quarters for visiting husbands or sweethearts, (though most married women preferred to request leave to go home if their husband came home), a hospital, a chapel and an air-raid shelter, fully kitted out for any emergency.

The weekly charge for this accommodation was £1 2s 6d, which included two meals a day. These meals were served to the workers, cafe style, in a large communal dining room in the main administrative building, which also housed a kitchen, a post office and a cinema. Living quarters for the women were in ‘huts’, built in units to accommodate between 50 and 90 women in one building. Each hut usually had its own communal living room with chairs.

The women’s bedrooms were located down either side of a long corridor. At one end of the corridor were baths, showers, toilets and a small laundry. The bedrooms themselves, with flooring of plain linoleum, were just wide enough to house two women in two single beds. A bureau or chest of drawers was placed at the foot of each bed. There was also a light with a separate control switch for each bed, so that if one girl wanted to read and the other did not, they did not disturb each other. Directly opposite each bed was a window, usually with a small shelf underneath, with a
washstand with hot and cold running water. A locker and a chair made up the rest of the bedroom furniture. Some girls would place the lockers side by side to create a small partition area in the middle of the room. The furniture was modern, pale wood, with short curtains for each window. In some hostel camps, even central heating was provided.

Because the munitions factory operated 24 hours a day, the hostel accommodation was organised so that everyone living in the same unit worked on the same shift, to ensure that everyone would go to sleep at the same time and the place would not be noisy with people coming and going at different hours. Each girl had responsibility for her own laundry and washing. There was even ground made available outside for gardening, should anyone wish to use it.

This was all carefully planned – but it was still communal living. And not all the hostel accommodation was built to house women workers in small bedrooms for two. Other hostel camps offered dormitory style accommodation, where a number of workers slept in the same area. As a consequence, people were thrown together in ways they might not have experienced before, sharing with others from all over the country, total strangers whose background – and day-to-day habits – might be quite different to their own.

It’s likely that some girls, accustomed to comfortable, middle-class homes, would have found this kind of communal living spartan and unwelcoming. But for others – given that many homes in Britain did not even have bathrooms, showers or indoor toilets, and that many young women living in cramped accommodation at home had only ever slept in a shared bed with a sibling – the hostel accommodation was comfortable, even luxurious.

Just as at work, there were rules in the hostels: women had to be in at night at a specific time and they needed a special permit if they wanted to be out later, although some hostel managers or wardens did make the attempt to ease the severe homesickness and emotional upheaval that affected some of the women. They would do their best to ensure that women from the same area or newly made friends could be housed together at first until they got used to this strange new world away from home.

The idea of building hostels and accommodation specifically for munitions workers to be close to their workplace was a good one in theory, but in practice the scheme proved unpopular. Many women preferred a long commute each day to a lengthy separation from home and loved ones (workers’ transport costs were Government subsidised by an assisted travel scheme).

As a result, not all of the hostel accommodation was used. In some areas, like Bridgend, there were many empty places. Eventually, these hostels wound up being used by other groups of war workers, such as the Land Girls, or families whose homes had been completely bombed out.

Today, the exact location of many of these hostels remains unclear, partly because WW2 records of munitions factories and hostel complexes were far from comprehensive, due to the secrecy of the entire munitions operation. However, thanks mostly to diligent local research or the historical archives of the corporate enterprises that switched over to munitions facilities during wartime, some records of the hostel complexes of WW2 do survive.

Munitions factories around the Coventry area in the Midlands, for instance, had a total of 16 purpose-built
hostels, erected away from residential areas but close enough to the factories for a short daily commute. Workers living in these hostels were employed making aircraft parts, ammunition and more everyday items like braces (to hold up servicemen’s trousers). After the war, the Coventry hostels accommodated all manner of workers from across the country and abroad, during the immediate post-war period when Britain was being rebuilt.

THE THINGUMMYBOB

As we’ve established, there was ultra-tight security in the munitions factories, and the work had many dangers, but it would be wrong to give the impression that the Bomb Girls’ working life was unrelentingly exhausting and downbeat. As the war progressed, the Government recognised that in order to be fully productive and for morale to be maintained, the munitions workforce would need ongoing support and acknowledgement of their role.

So workers’ safety issues were tightened up, and in the larger munitions complexes provision was made for married women’s needs, with nurseries and ‘shopping time’ organised. There was also a need for a certain amount of respite away from the demands of the production line. So within the biggest munitions complexes – which were more like large towns with rail networks and their own road infrastructure – a wide range of leisure facilities for the workers was set up.

There were social clubs, darts teams, operatic societies, rugby and football clubs, drama groups, cinema screenings, all provided to encourage an active range of social activities
away from the shop floor. All factories with more than 250 workers carrying out war work had to provide a canteen offering a fresh, hot meal of the meat-and-two-veg variety for about 10 pence (the equivalent of £1.50 today) and the workers had to be given a reasonable amount of time away from the factory floor to enjoy their meal or tea break.

Music played a very big part in the Bomb Girls’ lives – as it did in wartime for the rest of the country whose main sources of entertainment were either the radio (or wireless, as it was known) or the cinema. (BBC Television started broadcasting in the thirties, but was disbanded in wartime and it wasn’t until the fifties that television became an increasingly popular feature of everyday life.)

Dancing, too, became more popular than ever. Across the country, every town or village had a church or school hall where men and women could gather to dance the ‘old fashioned’ dances – the waltz, tango, foxtrot and the quickstep. In the big city dancehalls the youngsters would try out the newer dance crazes, especially the energetic and athletic jitterbug, imported by the hordes of lively American troops stationed in Britain in the mid-1940s.

People needed an escape and dancing fulfilled a dual function – as an accepted way of men and women pairing off, certainly, but also as a huge distraction from the sheer hard slog of living and working in wartime. Everyone needed something to look forward to. In the bigger factories, music would be played constantly in the shops from loudspeakers, and the most popular wartime radio programme of all, the BBC’s
Music While You Work
, providing continuous live popular music, was broadcast twice daily, Monday to Friday. Launched in June 1940, the programme
was specially aimed at factory workers and those in the Forces – though it was so successful it outlasted wartime and continued to be broadcast until 1967.

Another important BBC Radio programme that started out as a morale booster for factory workers was
Workers’ Playtime
. This was broadcast at lunchtime, three days a week, live from the big canteen area of a different factory ‘somewhere in Britain’. Singers, musicians and comic performers would perform their acts, watched by an audience of applauding munitions workers. Many of the performers were professionals but occasionally the broadcasts used local amateur talent.

For the broadcaster, it meant transporting crew, equipment, pianos, producers, musicians and variety artists up and down the country three times a week for performances – yet many of the popular comedians and singers of the time were involved. These included future stars such as Peter Sellers, Tony Hancock, Frankie Howard and Bob Monkhouse, as well as big-band singers of the time like
Coronation Street
’s Betty Driver, who died in 2011.
Playtime
was one of the first-ever touring variety shows on the BBC. It ran for 23 years.

Dance music by orchestras also dominated the airwaves and local dancehalls: bandleaders such as Harry Roy, Jack Payne, Geraldo, Joe Loss, Victor Silvester, Billy Cotton, Henry Hall and Mantovani were wartime household names, and the popular songs of the time – romantic and sentimental tunes that echoed the innermost feelings of millions – would frequently be heard over the radio, allowing listeners to spontaneously join in. Or small groups of munitions workers would start singing the songs together in the canteen as they
relaxed between shifts, or on their daily journey to and from the factory.

Songs such as ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’, ‘We’ll Meet Again’ and ‘There’s a Boy Coming Home on Leave’ were a powerful expression of many Bomb Girls’ feelings about their lives, with sweethearts or husbands in the Forces far away – and no end in sight to the conflict. Everyone knew all the words. With music and dance, they could momentarily forget about the war, lose themselves in romantic dreams and hope for a better time ahead.

Even today, so evocative are the sounds and words of those wartime songs it is very easy to understand how such a relatively innocent thing as a group of women singing their hearts out really did help to bolster flagging spirits – and deal with the difficulties they all faced.

Halfway through the war, the Bomb Girls even had a popular song written about them: ‘The Thingummy Bob (that’s going to win the war)’ was a song about the factory worker making the parts or components for the wartime weapons. Recordings of the song by big-name entertainers like singer Gracie Fields and comedian Arthur Askey made millions smile – and reminded everyone that without such women’s work, the war might never be won.

The song started: