Bomb Girls--Britain's Secret Army (3 page)

Vera, aged 20 at the time, told me she believed these had been written by a book-keeper around her own age, a girl called Marian Taylor. The girls had worked together for some time and Vera recalled her colleague writing the poems to help her when she learned that her young fiancé, posted overseas, had been killed.

In many ways, the existence of these poems serves to underline the camaraderie between workers that became a hallmark of the munitions factories – and the small, unobtrusive ways in which people supported each other through the bad times.

Here they are.

TO A HERO

Far away in a distant land ’neath the blazing stars

Away from all the ones he loved

A corner of England lies.

Lost to all the world around,

A hero, unhailed, unsung;

His soul we know by God is found,

And his crown of Victory won

We often wish to have seen his face,

When he was safely laid

Into his last resting place

And military honours paid.

THE MEMORY

Why do you seem to keep smiling at me?

Though your dear face I never more will see

I picture you smiling through the rosy twilight glow,

And stop to throw a kiss before you turn and go.

Although you went away so very long ago

I still recall you there, and really you must know

You’ll always find me writing dear and I will never go

You always knew the answer dear, because I love you so.’

The following three short poems are untitled:

As I wing my way through the clouds into the blue above

I take one last look at the city, the city that I love,

And whisper from my heart, I will come back again some day

Until the last smouldering ruin has gradually faded away.

As the notes of the Last Post thrill,

I imagine I see them salute;

And their hearts with emotion fill,

And their voices all remain mute

His short, young life is done

His earthly task is o’er;

The pounding of the gun,

His one, last farewell.

Although the logs have fallen and light is fading fast.

And still you stand before me, until I feel at last

I bear the imprint of your smile, impressed upon me here,

Then with a tiny sigh you slowly disappear.

CHAPTER 1

BUILDING THE SECRET WAR MACHINE

T
he history of Britain’s female munitions workers goes back to the First World War, when women played a vital role in munitions production. Yet, 3 September 1939, the day the Second World War was declared in Britain, marks the point at which the wartime story of the women in this book began. Though in reality, preparation for the looming inevitability of war with Germany – the world war everyone hoped might never happen – was already underway.

The big warning signs came with the appointment in Berlin of Germany’s new Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, in 1933. This news was received all over Europe with much trepidation: until that point, Germany’s Armed Forces were not considerable, a direct consequence of the German military defeat at the end of the First World War in 1918.

Yet by the thirties, as his power gained momentum, Hitler’s plans for full-scale domination of Europe and beyond
quickly became all too visible. By 1934, the German Armed Forces were rapidly increasing – and the country’s war machine was expanding at an incredible rate.

In Britain, the Government was initially reluctant to accept the idea of this immensely powerful threat. Who wanted war? With the shadow of the First World War still looming large after just two decades, the argument for pacifism was heard everywhere. Wouldn’t it be better to wait and see what happened? Couldn’t there be negotiation for peace?

These were, of course, false, flimsy hopes. It became very clear that Britain urgently needed to set about re-arming, building up its Armed Forces – and, most importantly, building brand new factories to produce the planes, the ammunition, the bombs, the guns, the bullets, everything that would be needed in the increasingly likely event of a German onslaught.

The new Government-owned munitions factories, called Royal Ordnance Factories (ROF), would be built solely to supply Britain’s Armed Forces in wartime. Armaments factories like these were not new: the first ROF facilities had originally been built to increase munitions production during the First World War.

They were sited around London, in Woolwich and Enfield and Waltham Abbey in Essex. The historic Royal Arsenal at Woolwich, on the River Thames to the Southeast of London, had been, until war with Germany became imminent, Britain’s principal producer of armaments. But now it was agreed that the Woolwich site was out of date. Moreover, its central location made it highly vulnerable to aerial bombardment by Hitler’s airforce, the Luftwaffe, since it was known that the conflict ahead would involve bombing raids.

As a result, the all-important decision was made: brand new big armaments factories in safer, more suitable places away from the Southeast of the country had to be built, and quickly. This decision to avoid new construction in the Southeast proved to be tragically accurate. Throughout WW2, while over 30,000 people continued to work in armament production at the Woolwich Royal Arsenal, 103 factory workers were killed and over 700 injured during a series of bombing raids from V1 flying bombs and V2 rockets.

FINDING THE FACTORY SITES

The locations for the new armaments factories had to be very carefully chosen. The criteria were strict: the new sites had to be on level ground and they had to have the right geological conditions, so that some of the buildings could be built underground. The sites would be recruiting thousands of workers from within a 25-mile radius – yet for safety reasons, the ammunition factories could not be near a large centre of population. Nor could the factories be easily visible from the air.

The new factories producing the weaponry also needed to have good road and rail connections, though their existence – and their construction – would have been shrouded in the utmost secrecy.

As soon as war was declared in the autumn of 1939, all possible existing factory resources were needed, too: large private companies like ICI Nobel and Lever Brothers (known as Unilever today) and a number of other firms had to switch their normal production to manufacturing goods for the war effort, making everything from uniforms to
aircrafts, ammunition and tanks, all under the auspices of the Government. Meanwhile, normal peacetime factory production was suspended, resulting in huge shortages of everyday goods for sale around the country (in addition to the food and other forms of rationing that were introduced early in 1940).

There were four different types of munitions factory:

• Engineering factories producing the metal casings for bombs and shells or, in some instances, producing parts, rifles, guns and tanks.
  
• Small-arms factories producing the bullet casings. (These factories were often existing engineering factories turned over to war production.)
  
• Explosive factories manufacturing various explosive agents.
  
• Filling factories to fill the bomb and shell casings with the explosives. The risky nature of working with combustible explosive material meant that these were the most dangerous of all munitions factories. In these, located right across the country, the raw ingredients of explosives, shells, casings and detonators were brought together to make bullets, shells and mortar bombs.
  

The four different types of munitions factories and their locations are listed below. Staff from the Woolwich Arsenal helped design and, in some instances, oversaw the construction of the new factories.

THE FILLING FACTORIES

Woolwich, London

Hereford, Herefordshire

Chorley, Lancashire

Bridgend, Glamorgan

Glascoed Usk, Monmouth

Swynnerton, Staffordshire

Risley, Lancashire

Kirby, Liverpool

Thorpe Arch, Yorkshire

Aycliffe, County Durham

Rearsby, Leicestershire

Burghfield, Reading, Berkshire

Healey Hall, Rochdale, Lancashire

Ruddington, Nottinghamshire

Walsall, Staffordshire

Elstow, Bedfordshire

Featherstone, near Wolverhampton, Staffordshire

THE ENGINEERING FACTORIES

Woolwich, London (Woolwich had a dual function as a filling factory)

Enfield, Middlesex

Birtley, County Durham

Blackburn, Lancashire

Cardiff, Glamorgan

Cardonald, Glasgow, Scotland

Dalmuir, Dumbartonshire, Scotland

Fazakerley, Liverpool

Leeds, Yorkshire

Hooton, Cheshire

Newport, Monmouthshire

Radcliffe, Lancashire

Maltby, Rotherham

Wigan, Cheshire

Patricroft, Manchester

Ellesmere Port, Cheshire

Hayes, Middlesex

Poole, Dorset

Nottingham, Nottinghamshire

Theale, Berkshire

Hirwaun, Glamorgan

THE SMALL ARMS AMMUNITION FACTORIES

Radway Green, Cheshire

Blackpole, Worcestershire

Spennymoor, County Durham

Steeton, Yorkshire

THE EXPLOSIVES FACTORIES

Waltham Abbey, Essex

Bishopton, Renfrewshire

Ardeer, Stevenson, Ayrshire

Drungans, Dumfries

Edingham, Dalbeattie, Kircudbrightshire

Pembrey, Carmarthenshire

Wrexham, Denbighshire

Drigg, Cumberland

Bridgwater, Somerset

Ranskill, Notts

A VERY DANGEROUS JOB

While all the new munitions factories were sited in areas that made them difficult to locate from the air, had the Germans been sure enough of their targets, there would have been few, if any, survivors of an air raid, given the extremely hazardous nature of working with explosives. The factories needed to take every possible precaution to minimise every risk, with the bombing threat being the most deadly. The hundreds of different chemicals used in the manufacture of weaponry and bombs made the ongoing risk of a bombing raid a terrifying proposition.

Then there were the risks involved for the workers handling the highly explosive material. Some of the chemicals used in production, like cordite – a ‘low explosive’ propellant comprising nitro-cellulose and nitro-glycerine, made in the form of cords or sticks and used to send projectiles to a target – were regarded as safe to handle.

Yet some of the materials used in detonators, the small copper shells used to initiate the triggering process, could only be filled by hand with very sensitive materials like lead azide, which looked similar to castor sugar, or fulminate of mercury, a highly toxic yet harmless-looking light brown powder. These explosive materials were so sensitive, they could cause injury to hands, fingers and faces during the filling process itself.

Fulminate of mercury, for instance, is sensitive to friction, heat and shock and can decompose violently into mercury, a lethal element absorbed through the skin, the lungs and the
digestive system. Mercury has long been known to cause mood swings and, in extreme cases, madness. The common British expression ‘mad as a hatter’ to describe a crazy person, had its origin in the 18th and l9th centuries when mercury was used to manufacture felt for hats.

Making the millions of pellets that boosted the ignition of weaponry was a highly hazardous process, too. An explosive component in the pellets, called tetryl, also a highly sensitive chemical, was a yellow powder which could affect the skin and cause a number of skin complaints. Workers’ skin turned yellow, leading to some of them being nicknamed ‘Canaries’ or ‘Yellow Ladies’. Hair would turn a yellowish hue (hair was supposed to be covered at all times, but even then, the proximity of the chemicals could still cause discolouration). And the sensitivity of tetryl made it a high-risk chemical for causing accidents and explosions.

Some people experienced breathing problems and asthma from handling the many chemicals used to make the bombs and weapons. Cases of dermatitis (skin rashes) and other skin problems were much higher in filling factories than any other industrial disease. In some instances, people’s teeth fell out as a direct result of the chemicals they worked with.

These were the known hazards in munitions work. Scientists tried to come up with solutions to these problems, sometimes with creams and ointments, but the priority in wartime, irrespective of all the serious hazards, remained the same: to keep the production line running continuously.

When contact with an offending chemical reduced a worker’s ability to do the job, they could be taken off the production line and moved to another, less hazardous,
section of the factory. Yet the nature of the production line – and the filling factories were very much round-the-clock, seven days a week operations – involved a constant balancing act: taking one worker off the production line created an urgent need for a replacement.

Throughout the years of war, some effort was made to reduce risk for munitions workers. Regular checks were introduced for employees working with certain bomb-making chemicals such as TNT (trinitrotoluene). TNT poisoning can damage the stomach lining and cause other serious complaints such as anaemia, jaundice, heart problems, liver failure and lung cancer. These checks did lead to a reduction in cases of poisoning, yet for some workers they came too late. It is not possible to say how many workers in munitions factories died as a direct result of working with chemicals.