Bomb Girls--Britain's Secret Army (7 page)

I’m the girl that makes the thing

that drills the hole that holds the ring

that drives the rod that turns the knob

that works the thingummy bob.

In other words, my job may be boring and repetitive – but I’m an important part of the war effort.

OTHER ENTERTAINMENTS

The dance floor was the acceptable place for socialising between the sexes. (Pubs and bars were then very much a male domain: unaccompanied women weren’t, as a rule, likely to go into them.)

The wealthy, or the officer classes in the Forces, had nightclubs and smart hotels or specially organised dances in the Officers’ Mess for their off-duty socialising, while the Bomb Girls frequently had dances organised for them in their factory canteens or at the hostels. Women were always encouraged to invite ‘a friend in khaki’.

For single girls, when their shifts permitted, an evening off at a local dance hall brought a welcome chance to dress up, get on the dance floor and meet new faces in uniform. In the remoter rural areas, spending hours getting to the dance, even if it meant cycling 10 or 12 miles or more to join in the fun, wasn’t seen as an obstacle: the break from the relentless factory routine was what mattered most of all.

Even the tea break at the hostel or factory canteen was a time for the women to gather together in small groups, sit around drinking tea and chatting. Camaraderie or comradeship between friends and workers never ran so high as it did for these women through the war years. It also did much to help alleviate the loneliness of life for married women while husbands were far away.

Apart from
Workers’ Playtime
, other live entertainment from ENSA (Entertainments National Service Association) was
also staged in the factories as a means of maintaining factory workers’ morale. ENSA was set up in 1939 by theatre producer Basil Dean specifically to entertain the troops and factory workers. Its first live show took place at the Woolwich Arsenal in July 1940 and as the war went on some of the performers – many of them big entertainment names of the day such as Vera Lynn, Tommy Trinder or Anne Shelton – visited the factories and travelled all over the world to entertain the troops.

ENSA shows weren’t always a success because the quality of the concerts tended to vary – not for nothing was ENSA nicknamed ‘Every Night Something Awful’ – but the shows still gave workers the chance to let their hair down, laugh and relax for the briefest of times. And the performers worked hard at it: at times, groups of ENSA performers would give three shows a day in canteens in the larger Royal Ordnance factories.

The local cinema too was a very popular form of escapism, with its chance to see a double bill: a major film, a ‘B’ movie (a low budget film, often with lesser-known actors which was, essentially, a ‘two for one’ value offer for the cinemagoer) and a newsreel like Pathé News.

Without television, the cinema was the only opportunity for people to see filmed news stories of the battlefront. Sometimes, the women in the audience would sit transfixed, peering at the screen, hoping for a longed-for glimpse of sons or husbands or sweethearts. Shots of the RAF shooting down German planes would be greeted with cheers and clapping.

SPENDING MONEY

As a rule, single girls living at home would hand over most, if not all, the contents of their pay packets to their mother – a time-honoured tradition in homes where the extra money was often badly needed. Because their munitions pay was better than any previous earnings, a small sum was often handed back to the wage earner as spending money. For some of the younger Bomb Girls, this represented an opportunity to go shopping.

Despite the heavy rationing restrictions – items like fabric or material for new clothes were rationed as well as food – their factory work meant many of these girls could spend money at will for the first time. (This was also the case for women who hadn’t worked before but found themselves doing a part-time paid job in wartime.) The shops were far from being crammed with goods, and many items, like cosmetics, were in short supply, but having money, no matter how little, to spend as they pleased, was a novelty and gave a real uplift. Yet it was mostly the Bomb Girls in their teens and twenties who could enjoy the dances and the shopping trips during their time off, whereas women with families were more restricted.

Some women held down two or three part-time jobs through the war. This kind of juggling of part-time work had not been known for women before, yet now the women were in demand, and their employment was secure. In war work you needed official release from the job, you couldn’t just hand in your notice without formal approval. Most Bomb Girls who did leave the factory job left for health reasons only, though a few of the cheekier ones did take
advantage of the fact that their jobs were relatively safe and would take sick leave when it wasn’t strictly necessary.

HEALTHCARE

Employing large numbers of factory workers in dangerous work also meant that on-site medical facilities were essential. Accidents took priority, of course, but the general health and wellbeing of the workers was seen as being equally important in the case of ordinary sickness like flu, gastric upsets or dental health problems. Having medical staff on site helped reduce loss of production due to sickness.

In the early war years, the factory medical facility was sometimes run by voluntary workers, but eventually qualified doctors and hospital trained staff were recruited into the bigger munitions factories, though labour shortages meant recruitment was never easy. Some factories would have one fulltime nurse on site with trained doctors on call by phone in the event of an emergency. Others, such as Bridgend, had six fulltime Medical Officers and a staff of 60 nurses, dispensers and orderlies by late 1944, as well as a fleet of ambulances.

THE OTHER KIND OF WAR…

Most munitions women got on well with their male colleagues and they would usually enjoy a joke and a laugh together. But some men, perhaps disgruntled because health problems or their age prevented them from joining the fighting forces, didn’t feel very happy about this ‘new order’ of having women working alongside them. The men were
sometimes concerned about the safety of their own jobs, especially in rural areas where unemployment had been high for years. It was an attitude along the lines of, ‘I’ve worked hard to get here and you women think you can just come in here just like that’. It didn’t help, of course. Old habits die hard.

One consequence of this resistance from a few male workers was that the special government training for certain types of jobs requiring engineering or technical knowledge was not always put into practice afterwards. A woman might undergo a four- or eight-week training course for a specific engineering role only to discover, once she started work, that she was assigned to a lower level factory job because a male supervisor or colleague didn’t believe it was ‘women’s work’.

This was frustrating, especially as, before war started, organised training for women had mostly been restricted to domestic service work. But the engineering training itself was, nonetheless, a step forward. And Bomb Girls who were good workers were rewarded with promotion: a diligent, careful worker could be moved up to ‘Blue Band’ (supervisory status) sometimes being placed in charge of more than one facility (or ‘shop’). Yet most of the Bomb Girls’ factory work was routine, unskilled labour: the majority of women went straight from the labour exchange to the factory floor.

THE PROPAGANDA MACHINE

Poster campaigns and filmed footage of Allied victories shown in cinemas were important for the nation’s wartime morale. But the need to keep war workers fully motivated,
to keep munitions production at its peak, also meant passing the positive message on in other ways.

Despite all the secrecy around the day-to-day factory routine, it was clear to the authorities that the so-called secret army needed to see some form of appreciation for their efforts. The general public couldn’t be told what these women were actually doing or where they were. (The newspaper captions in the ‘spin’ stories never gave the location of the factory.) But the authorities knew that somehow, they had to do everything possible to keep the women’s motivation high.

In the bigger factories, as the war started to turn in Britain’s favour, the factory’s radio system was used, broadcasting ‘good news’ bulletins interspersed with
Workers’ Playtime
and
Music While You Work.
The authorities felt, right from the beginning, that emphasis also had to be made to the workers on the significance of their role in comparison with the mind-numbing routine of the everyday toil on the production line. In today’s parlance this was Government public relations, or ‘spin’, in the form of carefully planned events designed to keep workers’ spirits up – and show the public, via the newspapers and cinema, that the workers’ efforts were being supported.

Members of the Royal Family undertook visits to the munitions factories, as did the female entertainers of the times. Vera Lynn and Gracie Fields – who were adored by millions everywhere – performed in the factories for the Bomb Girls as early as 1941. These visits were usually filmed for the newsreels. One such newsworthy event came in 1942, when Britain’s wartime Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, visited the Aycliffe Royal Ordnance Factory in
Staffordshire and the Aycliffe Bomb Girls. Although it was mid-May, it had been snowing in the area in the days before the visit, and the snow had turned to brown slush. This, the workers decided, was definitely not good enough for ‘Winnie’, whose inspirational radio broadcasts throughout the war did so much to boost the spirits of the nation. So, in order to make their site more attractive for the esteemed visitor, the Angels went out to find clean snow from the surrounding countryside, and carefully laid it on top of the slush!

In 1942, special Works Relations Officers were sent out across the country to educate the workers in the Royal Ordnance factories. These visits focused on the progress of the war itself, as a means of inspiring or encouraging workers. Events were organised, with guest speakers and educational films. On a few occasions, visits were set up to other ROF sites, so that the women from selected factory sectors could see the positive results of their efforts.

Letters from troops themselves were read out, thanking the Bomb Girls for their efforts, and on one occasion a letter was sent from the Desert Rats (the 7th Armoured Division) in North Africa, specifically thanking workers in Bridgend for ‘never sending out a single dud mortar bomb’.

To a large extent, this propaganda worked well. But in the Bomb Girls’ own stories of their munitions years which follow this chapter, it is obvious that the difficulties they often faced made considerable impact on their lives, both during and after wartime. They were young, innocent and inhabiting a world where everyone around them was ‘doing their bit’. And even now, what comes through loud and clear in their memories of those times, was their sheer grit, their
plucky resilience in the face of being conscripted to work in a job that was dangerous, exhausting and sometimes debilitating.

Their stories of wartime work underline the fact that theirs was very much a generation that didn’t ask questions but just ‘got on with it’. Yet only now, all those years on, can we fully recognise – and acknowledge – their worth.

CHAPTER 3

BETTY’S STORY: THE YELLOW LADIES

‘ARE YOU ANYONE’S BUDGIE?’

Betty Nettle was born in 1925 and has lived in the Stormy Down/Kenfig Hill area of Bridgend, Glamorgan, her entire life. She started working at the Welsh Arsenal, ROF Bridgend, as a teenager in 1941 until war ended in 1945. Her husband of over 50 years, Ivor, died in 2005. This is her story:

Work was very scarce in this area before the war came along, other than in the mines. And we were not a mining family. My father, Leonard William Cornish Reynolds, was a ganger, working on the railway, looking after the tracks. I was the youngest girl in a family of seven children. By the time I arrived, the eldest three had already left home; they were grown up, working. My sisters Edith and Nancy went into service in a big house up in London: that was the only work option then.

Families were big in those days, so if someone had a shop,
their children worked in it – or their nieces and nephew, which meant that round here, as far as work went, it was who you knew, not what you knew.

I grew up in a respectable, double fronted house. As a child – I must have been about three – my earliest memory is of my younger brother Joe being born in the front room. (We always called him ‘Joe’, but his real name was Norman.) You didn’t have a nurse or anything like that when a baby came, you had a local lady from along the road from us: one of those ladies that ‘did’. They learned how to ‘do’ as they went along; they brought people into the world and they laid them out for the undertaker, so it was usually the same person that came to the house when someone was born or died.

Our local lady that ‘did’ was also a herbalist. We lived just outside the village, about one-and-a-half miles away, just a few scattered houses, really. You rarely saw a doctor. It was always the lady that ‘did’ that came round. If you were sick, she’d make you up a medicine. She’d never really tell you what she was doing; she didn’t say what was in the medicine. Yet people came from a long way in our area to see her, so she must have been doing something right.

We were well shod, always plenty to eat, lots of friends around us. My mother, Elizabeth Jane, was a good manager. My dad was allowed to hunt rabbits by a local farmer, so we had chickens, ducks, geese. Everything had a home with us: cats, dogs, even people sometimes. My mother was a good cook, too. At home we had porridge or boiled eggs, and sandwiches in school – it was too far away to go home for lunch – and always a cooked meal at 5pm, when Dad came home from work.