by Lynn Russell
The Gum Block Extension also had a unique roof. Among other things, the shells of Smarties were made from a mixture of flour and sugar, and they were coated by ‘panning’ them in giant revolving copper pans. The coating mixture was not weighed or measured; skilled male workers simply poured in liquid colour until, judging by eye and experience, they decided that the Smarties were the correct shade of red, yellow, orange, green and brown. The process involved some risk, since it threw flour dust into the air that even the most powerful extractors could not entirely remove, and fine flour particles suspended in the air are a notorious fire and explosion risk – one suggested cause of the Great Fire of London in 1666 was just such a flour dust explosion in the bakery in Pudding Lane where the fire began. So to reduce the risk of collateral damage to the surrounding buildings through explosion or the spread of fire, the roof of the Gum Block Extension was deliberately designed as a weak point, allowing explosive gases to vent upwards, rather than laterally into the surrounding buildings. As a result, when the Rowntree’s factory was later adapted for wartime use, the Gum Block Extension was the obvious place to site the production of munitions, and the Smarties department became a fuse-filling factory known as County Industries Ltd, run by Ned Sparkes, leading to the long-running joke: ‘You don’t want sparks in a munitions factory.’
Florence was one of 850 women and sixty men employed in fuse-filling, and production continued round the clock, with the entire staff working alternate twelve-hour day and night shifts. Additional employees to carry out war work were recruited not just from York but from the rest of Britain and parts of the Empire as well, and European refugees from the Nazis were also employed. ‘We had Polish people and Indian people coming to work there,’ Dot Edwards recalls, ‘men and women, and it was surprising how quick they got into it. They put up some Nissen huts up on Wigginton Road for them to live in, because most of them had nothing at all when they started, just the clothes they stood up in, but they were nice people to work with, they really were.’
The factory turned out 100,000 fuses and detonators a week, which were stored in an underground magazine, constructed by the cricket field on one of the sports grounds. The underground bunkers were covered with an artificial mound and double doors shielded by blast walls, and to a modern eye would have looked strangely like the underground home of the Tellytubbies, though their contents were far more sinister.
In 1938 all Rowntree’s employees had been issued with a warning that the country might soon be at war, and had been given instructions about the safety procedures to be followed in the event of an air raid. The warning was sufficiently vivid for Florence to have nightmares about air raids that night, but it turned out to be twelve months premature, and the ‘phoney war’ of 1939–40 meant that it was the autumn of 1940 before Rowntree’s preparedness was tested in real air-raid conditions. The main air-raid shelters were built beneath the orchard near the Dining Block on the far side of Haxby Road, though there were also smaller ones under the Rose Lawn and on the Wigginton Road side of the factory, and the cellars of the larger factory buildings were also used as designated shelters. When the air-raid siren sounded, most of the workforce had to run across Haxby Road, or go through the underground tunnel and the Dining Block to reach the shelters in the orchard. As the girls hurried down the stairs and through the tunnel, there was none of the usual joking and laughter – some of them were white-faced with fear.
At first they were sent straight to the shelters whenever the air-raid sirens were sounded, but as this caused considerable disruption to production and many of the raids proved to be false alarms, a few aircraft spotters were trained in aircraft identification and then stationed on the roofs of the factory buildings to keep watch for German bombers. Only when approaching aircraft were actually sighted was the alarm raised and the employees allowed to leave their work stations and go to the shelters.
However, the aircraft spotting system was not without its flaws. When York was actually bombed, the alarm was not raised in time and some girls were still working inside the factory when the first bombs began to fall. There was no time for them to reach the main shelters and so they had to file down the stairs and sit in the changing rooms instead. Although most of the bombs fell nearer to the city centre, one bomb hit Rowntree Avenue, not far from the bunker where the detonators and fuses were stored; had a bomb hit that bunker, a large part of the factory would probably have been destroyed.
There were no deaths at the factory from the bombing, but one of Rowntree’s air-raid wardens, Harry Hawley, died in an accident that would have been farcical had the outcome not been so tragic. Seeing a car approaching along Tang Hall Lane with its headlights full on, Harry shouted to the driver to dip his lights. He was ignored and the soldier accompanying him said, ‘I’ll stop him,’ and drew his revolver, intending to fire a warning shot, but as he drew the weapon it accidentally discharged, hitting Harry, who later died of his wounds.
In addition to air-raid protection, a Local Defence Volunteers (Home Guard) company was formed from employees at the works, first aid classes were organized and many women joined the St John’s Ambulance Brigade. On two occasions they even volunteered for duty in London to give the local ambulance staff, exhausted by the nightly carnage from the Blitz, a chance to rest and recuperate. The rest centre in the Dining Block was converted to a refuge for blitzed families, and a nursery was also established there to enable mothers with young children to carry out war work. The Rowntree’s Joinery department manufactured cots and other equipment for the sixty children, from six months to five years old, who were looked after there while their mothers worked.
Florence also remembers Rowntree’s employees taking collections of money and goods to help Londoners made homeless by the Blitz, and so much cash, clothing, furniture and household equipment was donated that a succession of pantechnicons was needed to transport it all to London. Twenty-six men employed in the Rowntree’s Building department were also sent to London to help carry out repairs to Blitz-damaged houses.
Before Florence began work on the fuse-filling production line, she and all the other girls had to have a medical to check their general health and particularly their skin. Anyone who was suffering from a skin complaint or had shown themselves to be prone to such conditions in the past was not taken on, because the materials they would be handling were caustic and often toxic. The fear of invasion and ‘Fifth Column’ sabotage had also led Rowntree’s to post security guards at the factory entrances and issue their employees with passes for the first time in the company’s history.
Just inside the door Florence and her fellow workers had to pass through the doorkeeper’s lobby, manned by a commissionaire wearing military uniform, where they had to turn out their pockets and surrender any cigarettes, lighters and matches. A succession of girls would tell him, ‘You’re wasting your time, love, I don’t smoke,’ but they were all searched anyway, every day. The commissionaire checked Florence’s identity card – all the munitions workers had been issued with one – and searched her for contraband, not just concealed cigarettes and matches, but anything metallic that might cause a spark; the girls were not even allowed to take food into work with them, though that was more to prevent it being contaminated with TNT (trinitrotoluene), the explosive powder used in the fuses and detonators she was to make, than any risk of explosion. In common with the other women, Florence had to remove all jewellery, and anyone who was wearing a ring that they could not take off had to cover it with tape. As a further reminder, a sign hanging over the double doors to the changing rooms read: ‘STOP! Have you handed in your CONTRABAND?’
After finally being waved through by the commissionaire, Florence went into the ‘clean area’ of the changing rooms, took off her clothes and hung them up in a kit bag, and put her shoes in a wire mesh basket under the bench. Dressed only in her underwear, she then stepped over a low wall a couple of feet high that divided the ‘clean’ section from the ‘dirty’ section of the ar
ea, where she put on her work wear: khaki, government-issue overalls and a khaki turban to cover her hair, and shoes with crêpe rubber soles – leather soles were thought more likely to create sparks through static or friction that might cause an explosion.
Her overalls had rubber buttons that had to be fastened right up to the neck, and were made of coarse serge, like soldiers’ uniforms, which chafed against her neck. They were also deliberately made without pockets to make it even more difficult for workers to smuggle anything in. All that was permitted was the usual money bag on a string round their neck to hold the coins for their teas and meals, though none of the girls were allowed to eat or drink anything while working in the fuse production area as the toxic yellow TNT powder was like talc, so fine that it hung in the air and covered every surface. If Florence wanted a drink or to eat a snack during her tea break, she had to go to the cloakroom to do so.
Before she left the changing rooms to start work, she also had to put special ‘make-up’ – a face powder and a thick skin cream, like cold cream – all over the exposed skin of her hands, neck and face, to protect them as much as possible from the highly toxic TNT. Unlike the peacetime factory, where all the women would have a fringe showing under their turban, in the fuse-filling area everybody’s hair had to be completely covered by their turban. There were showers and rows of sinks along one wall of the changing room for washing at the end of their shift, and a row of mirrors with posters above them. Like Victorian ‘cautionary tales’, these forerunners of the modern health and safety notices told horrific stories, accompanied by lurid illustrations, of the terrible fate awaiting women who did not tuck their hair under their turbans, or who tried to smuggle in contraband items.
There was an ominous feeling about all these preparations, and as she and the other girls got ready for work, Florence found the silence oppressive at first, compared to their normal chatter and laughter. However, within a few weeks, what had seemed strange and slightly sinister had become familiar and routine, and the banter and laughter resumed.
Production was spread over three floors, and the workforce was mostly women, with a few men, usually those with medical complaints that excused them from active service, who did the heavier and less skilled jobs. The protective cream worn by men and women alike was only partially effective. ‘It didn’t do much good,’ Florence recalls, ‘because the TNT powder was really fine and, whatever protective measures we adopted, it still got absolutely everywhere.’ Women working in munitions factories were given the nickname ‘canaries’ because the TNT powder that filled the air dyed their skin the same yellow hue. ‘It was an orangey-yellow colour,’ Florence recalls, ‘and it turned everything it touched yellow: our face, our hair, our hands and arms, in fact all of our skin, even the soles of our feet went yellow. When you went out of the factory everyone would say, “Oh, I know where you work,” because we were all yellow from head to foot and it wouldn’t come off. We stood out like sore thumbs.’
That was an embarrassment to Florence at first, because not only did it look like she had jaundice, but she had to put up with jokes and comments from men she passed as she walked down the street, like, ‘I didn’t know Rowntree’s were employing Chinese women now.’ They were barely funny the first time, and grew ever more tedious with each repetition. However, in a strange way, her yellow skin colour was also a badge of honour, a visible sign of the important war work she was doing. She came to feel something like a surge of pride to be recognized as a munitions worker, and she also detected a new respect towards her, even from people she had known for years.
Florence worked for a while in the main magazine where they weighed out the TNT pellets and, she says, ‘The powder there was awful. You had to wear a breathing mask over your mouth and nose as well as everything else, but you could still smell the sulphurous stink of it and the powder was so fine that it was just like dust.’ No matter how careful she was about handling and pouring it, clouds of it hung in the air like fog all day long. The toxic TNT dust even seeped through the filters in her breathing mask and left her choking so badly that sometimes she had to fight down a feeling of panic as she struggled to get her breath. However, her stay in that section proved to be a brief one because after just a few days, she noticed a sore and itchy rash on her arms as she got ready for bed one night. The next day it was worse and by the end of the week it was covering her arms, her face, her back and torso. After the company doctor had examined her, she was moved out of the downstairs room where the TNT powder was worst, and sent upstairs to work on waterproofing the fuses, where conditions were a little better – but only a little.
Contact with the TNT powder caused a lot of women to suffer skin irritation. Like Florence, a number of them had to be transferred to different work after developing impetigo and similar complaints, and the other effects on their health could be even more serious. They were advised to drink milk rather than tea or coffee at their mid-shift break, presumably to put a lining in their stomachs that might prevent the absorption of some of the toxic constituents of TNT. People exposed to TNT over a prolonged period tended to experience anaemia and abnormal liver function, and an enlarged spleen from ingested or breathed TNT. Consumption of the powder also led to a person’s urine being stained pink or red as the TNT was broken down within the body. The first time that Florence saw that, she panicked, thinking that she was suffering from internal bleeding. She spent a sleepless night worrying about it and was only reassured when she got to work the next morning and discovered that all the other women were complaining of the same problem. Some found it equally puzzling, if rather less disconcerting, that when they washed the yellow powder off their hands, the water they were using would turn red.
Summer heat made the working conditions even more intolerable. There was a total blackout, with blinds fitted or the windows painted black, and to keep the blackout the windows all had to stay closed at night, even in the hottest weather.
The fuses they were making were for twenty-five-pounder shells that were mostly destined for the campaign in the Western Desert in North Africa. The fuses came down the conveyors in wooden trays containing ten fuses, and all the parts to be fitted into them were in separate little recesses around the sides of the trays. As they moved along the conveyor, all those parts had to be fitted into the fuses. To minimize casualties in the event of accidental detonations, the girls all worked in separate cubicles, which made it difficult to talk to anyone other than their immediate neighbours, and they did their work inside steel boxes that had toughened glass windows to look through and two holes for their arms. Inside was a pipe like a red fire bucket, sealed at its bottom end and filled with sand to absorb most of the blast if a fuse detonated, and each girl had a brass set of scales – all the tools they used were made of brass because anything made of iron or steel might strike a spark and cause an explosion. Another of the canaries working on fuse-filling, Dot Edwards, recalls that she ‘used to take this thing like a washer with a red side and a yellow side out of the fuse and put it on the scales. I used to have to scrape all this gunpowder in, until it was full, and then pass it on to the next girl who put black stuff into it and then passed it on again, to someone who’d crimp it, and so on.’
Florence and her workmates were surprisingly relaxed about working with fuses and detonators, because initially none of them seemed to realize the dangers of the work they were undertaking. Had they been told they were making bombs, they would no doubt have been much more nervous and circumspect, but perhaps fuses and detonators did not sound as perilous as bombs, even though both were just as capable of killing the person assembling them. Whatever the reason, there was a remarkably relaxed and happy-go-lucky atmosphere. Even when there was no music playing over the Tannoy to entertain them, the girls would sing anyway, belting out their favourite songs unaccompanied. One group of women called themselves ‘The Cowgirls Union’ because their favourite song was ‘Ragtime Cowboy Joe’ and they all used to sing along to it at the tops of th
eir voices. During the Battle of Britain their songs were punctuated by news bulletins and there were big cheers from the girls whenever there was a report of a German aircraft being shot down. The girls all had to carry gas masks and do regular drills, including having to work at their benches or conveyor belts with their masks on. ‘They made an awful noise when we put them on,’ one of the workers, Marjorie Chapman, says, ‘so we sat there making farting noises through our masks!’
Despite all the dangers, serious accidents were extremely rare. One did occur, however, when a woman working on the night shift blew off her fingers. The girls had to ‘stab’ the detonators – make three little marks in them with a sharp tool – and there was a safe and an unsafe side on which to do it. Unfortunately, probably through tiredness – they were working long shifts after all, one from half past seven in the morning until seven o’clock at night, and the other from eight o’clock at night until seven o’clock in the morning – the woman stabbed the wrong side and it exploded. One of her hands was inside the box when the detonator went off, and she lost her fingers as a result. The protective shield was also buckled in the blast, and it was then left in a prominent position in the department as a warning to the rest of them about what a moment’s inattention or carelessness might lead to.
