Bomb Girls--Britain's Secret Army (15 page)

It was incredibly dangerous work, filling detonators and
cleaning them. We were being paid two shillings and sixpence a week extra to work there – but we knew all too well how dangerous it was. We already knew that girls who had worked in Group One had been killed at Aycliffe, though during my time in Swynnerton, I didn’t hear of any girls who had been killed in our section.

One very scary day at work stands out in my mind, though we were never told exactly what had happened. We were sitting on our stools, working away, when there was an explosion, though we couldn’t quite see or hear where it had come from. All the ‘danger men’ rushed in, and we were ushered out to the canteen, given a cup of tea and the entire area, the shop floor where we worked, was sealed off. The next thing we knew, we were all being sent back to the hostel. Yet by the time we turned up for our next shift, the shop floor was ready for us to start work again. It was as if it had never happened.

Some of the girls were quite daring in the way they worked. There were a lot of Irish girls working there and, for some reason, they’d take risks, or that’s what you heard, because you never really knew for sure what the workers in the next shop did; you knew so little beyond your immediate area of work. One day, someone told me these Irish girls had put through more detonators than they should have done – and one went off. The explosion had blown the girls right onto the clearway. I didn’t see it happen. I don’t think they were hurt. But the story was, they were trying to do too much.

One consequence of working with the mercury powder was something called ‘The Rash’. Your face and arms went red and itchy. They didn’t give you anything for it, but once you saw the doctor, he’d examine your rash and then he’d
clear you to go and work in a different group called 7C. In that group, you’d be making parts for bazookas [a portable rocket-propelled anti-tank weapon]. You’d be making little cartridges, pushing them into one particular part of the bazooka. It was about as monotonous as it could be, but it was far less dangerous.

You’d work in that section for a few weeks until the rash calmed down. Then they’d send you back to the detonators and the mercury powder. At one point, I’d gone back to Group One for about a day when the rash reappeared. So the doctor told them to send me back to the bazooka parts job for good. And that was the end of my time in Group One: no more rash.

Then I was given a different job. I sat at a table on my own with a big oil can with a big spout. Inside the can was shellac, which was used as a moulding compound or sealant. My job was to put a drop of the shellac onto a small cartridge. You had to be very careful. If you spilled the shellac over the side of the part, it would be a reject; you needed a very steady hand. I don’t remember ever spilling it.

At one point, I’d made friends with a girl called Lily; she came from Perth in Scotland and, like me, she was very homesick. We decided to ask the manager at the hostel if we could share together, and she said she’d see what they could do. In the end, we did share a room and that made a huge difference for me. We became really good friends. In fact, Lily and I are still friends to this day. She lives up in Fife but we remember each other’s birthday, that sort of thing.

They did lay on entertainment for us at the hostel. They organised dances and the soldiers used to come with a band and play. On our weekends off, Lily and I started going out
together to Wolverhampton. It was all new for me, that kind of thing, walking around a city centre, arm-in-arm. I wasn’t used to city life. We’d go round the shops, have something to eat, so different from the familiar things I knew at home. Somehow, as young girls, our instincts told us we had to enjoy what we could, when we could. You couldn’t dwell on the fact that you were away from home, missing your family. And no one knew what the future held.

In the village at Eccleshall where Cold Meece, the Royal Ordnance Factory, was located, the villagers found it difficult to accept us. The local girls made it very plain they didn’t like the Swynnerton girls being there one bit. They said we were taking jobs away from them. So we were never invited into anyone’s home locally.

One Sunday, a small group of us Swynnerton munitions girls decided to go to the local church. Not one single person said a word to us. We did make an attempt to be pleasant. We even invited some of the local girls back to the hostel, just to show them where we lived. But we were never invited back. It was that bad. They just couldn’t accept all ‘the hostel girls’, as they used to call us.

The food they gave us at the hostel wasn’t up to much. I still remember the huge bins in the canteen. You’d have to scrape the remains of your dinner into them after you’d finished, so the farmers could collect them. Nothing ever got wasted in those days, not a scrap. Lily’s mother up in Scotland had hens, so she used to send us eggs. She’d wrap them in newspaper and post them in a shoe box. She managed to send them off to us quite often – and not a single egg got broken. Lily and I would take them up to the serving hatch in the hostel and ask if they could be boiled
for us. At home, things weren’t too bad for my family either, foodwise; my mother had an allotment with hens and rabbits.

My mum worried about me all the time, being so far from home. It was bad enough when I’d been working at Aycliffe. At one stage, in 1941, the Germans bombed Hartlepool, near the coast, just over 20 miles from Aycliffe and she’d stood on the step outside our house, watching the skies, thinking: ‘Are they going to hit Aycliffe? Will our Laura come home tonight?’

At holiday times, Christmas and Easter, I’d go back home. After I went off to Swynnerton my father was moved from 7A to another section at Aycliffe, operating the conveyor belts. It was good going home to see everyone but it was so hard when you had to go back. When you did go into the town back home, you could tell the girls who worked with the yellow powder at Aycliffe because their hair was yellow. Even the turban couldn’t cover it up at the front. And my dad lost his hair. At first it turned yellow, then it was gone. The men, of course, didn’t wear the turbans to cover their heads.

When you’d travel back to Swynnerton, the trains would always be packed, mostly with soldiers. We weren’t in any kind of uniform. Munitions girls could not wear any uniform outside the shop floor, because they said there was a risk of contamination. So when we got to the station, the WVS wouldn’t serve us tea. Cups of tea were only for those in uniform. In the end, we’d pal up with the soldiers, sitting on their kitbags. That way, they’d get us a cuppa from the WVS. The soldiers knew what we did in munitions and that we were part of it all. In a way, little things like that made you feel you were involved with some secret or
underground force. But you didn’t want to waste your time resenting it: you were doing something worthwhile and that was what really mattered.

On one visit home, I went with Mum and Dad to see some relations in Middlesbrough. And there I was introduced to a George Hardwick. He was in the Royal Artillery and briefly home on leave. I wasn’t that keen at first. George was five years older than me and had been born in Australia. But before we left, he asked me if we could keep in touch, write to each other. And that was the start of me and George. He wound up being sent to Malta, working on the big guns.

What with having a boyfriend and with Lily as a good friend and roommate, I suppose that kept me going with the work at the factory. But it was still a struggle. I’d get very down at times, missing my family. I struggled, being away from my home.

In the last few months of the war, when we all knew it was nearly over, Lily left work and went back to Scotland. By then, quite a lot of people at the factory were leaving. Some of the Irish girls at the hostel were courting Americans – and many of them were making plans to marry them and going to live over there. Bill too had now left Malta and wound up being stationed at Catterick. So by then, we were able to see a bit more of each other.

I actually left Swynnerton just before the war finished. I went home on leave and I was very down, knowing that Lily wouldn’t be there when I went back. My mother, who was working as a cook at a children’s nursery at the time, was so worried about me, she confided in her boss.

‘Get her to see a doctor about the depression,’ was her boss’s advice.

I went to see the doctor and told him a bit about how down and unhappy I was feeling.

‘We need to sign you off from Swynnerton,’ was all he said. He’d be sending them a letter.

And that was how it all ended, my time in munitions. It had all gone on for too long, what with me being away from home and everything. Then, when Lily went, it just made it all worse. There was no official farewell at Swynnerton. I went home on leave and it turned out I never went back. So many of us then were completely exhausted, the war had gone on for nearly six years. Though I have to say now, working in munitions, dangerous as it was, didn’t leave me with any major health problems. Ok, I had the rash, but nothing else.

We were so innocent then. You were still innocent when you got married, you just didn’t have a clue. It’s true that some girls would go with the Americans just to get nylon stockings. And our lads definitely didn’t like the Americans, but that was pure envy – they had lovely uniforms. And more money. Our lads just had the rough khaki.

Bill and I were married at Escombe Church in May 1945. He was 28 and I was 24. By then I’d got a job working at the children’s nursery where my mum worked, just helping out. Ten months after our wedding, I had my son Peter in 1946. That was difficult for Bill because he’d never been used to having children around him. He’d joined the Army at age 18 and he didn’t have a clue – he thought a baby just lay there and slept all day!

We lived with my mother for a while, and then we got a prefab in Bishop Auckland, where we lived for a few years, then we moved to a house just round the corner from where I live now. We lived there for 60 years. We could have bought
it but we preferred to rent it. I didn’t go back to work until Peter was older and then I worked as a home help until I was 60. Bill and I retired together.

After the war, Bill didn’t find it easy to get work; mostly he’d find work as an odd-job man. Then they started to build different kinds of factories at Aycliffe and he went to work there as a weaver. He wound up working at the factory at Shildon for 20 years, looking after 16 looms, making nylon, until he was made redundant. After that, he worked for nine years at Patons & Baldwins, the wool factory in Darlington, until he was made redundant again.

‘I’m 60, I’ll never get another job,’ he told me. But he did. He worked at a local wallpaper factory until he was 65, and he was 80 when he died. He’d been in a home for nearly a year.

The funny thing was, we never talked much about the war afterwards, Bill and I. He always used to say that when a bomb hit a church in Malta – a Catholic country – the altar wall was always left standing. It was very, very strange. And when a priest went round visiting people, they all kept a hook outside their door for him to hang his umbrella, a sign that other people couldn’t visit because the priest was there. Just little things like that, he’d tell us. But that was all.

My grandson’s in the Marines and he’s been in Iraq and Afghanistan but he doesn’t talk about it. Some people don’t. One relative was in the Falklands War and he discussed it with counsellors afterwards, because he got post-traumatic stress. ‘I shouldn’t be here,’ he told me. ‘I should’ve got that bullet.’ This was because the lad behind him was killed. When times are really tough, I think sometimes people find it easier to keep it all to themselves.

There were parts of the war that weren’t so bad. Those
weekends off, when we were at Swynnerton, were good, going to different places. And there was the entertainment they put on for us girls – the entertainers going round all the hostels, putting shows on. All kinds of things – singers, even ballet dancers. They did their best to keep morale up. There was even a tuck shop at the hostel, where you could buy cups of tea as you watched the entertainment.

We do feel a bit left out, us munitions girls. The Land Army, the Timber Girls, the Bevin Boys – they all got recognition. Perhaps it’s because they all wore uniform, so everyone knew who they were. But we were Britain’s hidden army. There was a lot of secrecy around what we did, but everyone in the area knew the girls who worked at Aycliffe. So it wasn’t that secret, was it?

Looking back, knowing what I know now, it would be very difficult to go through an experience like that the way we did. Perhaps because so many of us were young and fairly innocent, that helped. That way we could handle the long shifts, the secrecy, the worry about the war, your family and the boys overseas. And if you weren’t married, well, you had to do some kind of work.

There’s one very clear picture in my mind’s eye. I can still see us all now, getting off the buses that took us to work, going through the main gate, singing ‘Bless ’em All’ at the tops of our young voices as we made our way to our places on the noisy shop floor. We were just tiny cogs, the girls who made the thingummybobs, as the Gracie Fields’ song put it. But at the same time, we had each other and we had our youth. So of course there were some good memories of it all, which we still look back on, even now.

We all knew you just had to make the best of it, you see.

CHAPTER 7

MARGARET’S STORY: THE TEASING GIRL

‘WE WORKED SO HARD, WE’D WORK IN OUR SLEEP’

Margaret Proudlock was born in 1923 in rural Dalskairth, near Dumfries in the Scottish Borders. At 14, she went into service and by 1941, despite her dreams of joining the ATS, she started work in the cotton teasing section at the ICI Drungans munitions plant in Cargenbridge, where she worked for three years. Margaret’s husband of 30 years, Roland, died in 1976. She has five children, l4 grandchildren and 11 great grandchildren. This is her story:

My grandparents were in service most of their lives. My grandfather, John Hutchinson, was Head Gamekeeper for Coats, the thread company. They had a lot of land. And ten big dogs.