by Lynn Russell
Madge Tillett, one of Florence’s workmates who was working near the girl when the blast happened, remembers that ‘Strangely enough, they sent us up to the next floor and told us to get on with our work, while they sent the girls from there home, even though they had not even seen the accident, but perhaps the theory was that it was like getting straight back on a bike if you’ve fallen off it. Maybe they thought that if they let us go home straight after the explosion, we might not have wanted to come back again. Crazy though it sounds – we were putting TNT in the fuses and detonators after all – until then I don’t think I had fully realized how dangerous the work we were doing was.’ If the authorities had hoped to keep news of the explosion secret, they had reckoned without the power of the rumour mill in a small city like York. Florence was interrogated by her parents about it, but all they could do, while her mother dabbed at the tears in her eyes with her handkerchief, was beg her to ‘Please be careful.’ Madge Tillett also remembers ‘my poor old dad having a “ducky fit” because it got around that there’d been an explosion’, which might have mutilated his daughter as well as the unfortunate girl.
There were only two other serious injuries in all the time Florence worked there. One occurred when a girl was using a drill and somehow allowed her hair to become caught in it. Her screams alerted her workmates, but by the time the drill had been stopped, the unfortunate girl had torn out a large patch of her hair and had an ugly wound on her scalp. Another girl was carrying some detonators and, through tiredness or inattention, she dropped them and lost part of her hand in the resulting explosion. Florence and the other girls were lucky not to hurt themselves as well, because they all made mistakes from time to time, ‘but then, we were always tired out,’ she says. ‘We were only young, eighteen some of us, but we still had to do a twelve-hour shift.’ Another of her workmates, Dot Edwards, made herself even more tired by staying out late in the evenings as well. ‘I’d been to see Gone With the Wind about ten times,’ she says, ‘and sometimes I’d nod off at my box while I was filling fuses and drop one. If I’d struck my fuse on the red side instead of the yellow one, it would have gone off.’
There could easily have been another serious accident thanks to Florence’s sister-in-law, who was, in Florence’s words:
… a right one and could swear a bit, too. About one o’clock in the morning everyone used to get a bit drowsy – we weren’t used to working nights – and one night my sister-in-law saw this, swore and said, ‘I’ll wake the buggers up.’ So she got a paper bag, blew into it and then popped it with a loud bang! The charge-hand came rushing down with a face like thunder, shouting, ‘Who did that?’ and if anyone had told her, I think my sister-in-law would have been sacked on the spot, but no one said a word. The charge-hand reported us all to the manager, Mr Lambert, who was a Cockney, and he had us all in his office the next night. ‘So you ain’t done it, and you ain’t done it, and you ain’t done it,’ he said, pointing at each of us in turn. ‘Well somebody’s bleedin’ well done it.’ But none of us would say anything and in the end he just sighed, shook his head and sent us back to work, but it was the last time my sister-in-law played a trick like that in there.
After she had been working upstairs where the fuses were made for a while, Florence was then put on ‘flagging’ – carrying the detonators to and from the magazine. They did it in pairs and took it in turns, one girl walking behind, wearing a long leather gauntlet that went up to her bicep and carrying a big leather Gladstone bag full of detonators, while the other girl walked in front of her, holding a red flag so that everybody knew to keep well clear of them, just as they used to do in front of cars in the very early days of motoring. Going up and down the stairs or along the corridors, the other workers were told always to keep to the left-hand side to leave plenty of room in case the ‘flagger’ – who was instructed always to keep to the opposite side – was coming up at the same time. In some ways, Florence found it more frightening to be the one walking in front with the flag than actually carrying the detonators. If she was holding the bag, at least she knew what was going on, whereas walking on ahead with the flag, whenever there was the least noise from behind her, she could feel the hairs rising on the back of her neck at the thought of what might be about to happen.
Florence and her workmate had to go through an underground passage to collect the detonators from the main magazine at the north of the factory site. The man in charge there, Charlie, a tall, genial man with a high forehead and a habit of talking out of the side of his mouth as if he was auditioning for a part in a gangster movie, would put the detonators in the bag in a little side room and then bring the bag out to the girls, and they would always spend a bit of time down there chatting to him before taking the detonators back.
Whenever the air-raid sirens sounded, the girls had to stop work, down tools and go to the shelters, blacking out the factory above ground as they went so as not to allow the least glimmer of light to give the German bombers a target to aim at. One night, the two girls had been down in the magazine for quite a while chatting to Charlie, and when they went back up, Florence with the red flag in front and her friend behind with the bag, they discovered that the whole factory was deserted and in total darkness. They came close to panic, thinking that the air-raid sirens must have gone off while they were gone, and, being underground, they had not heard them. They could not go blundering around the factory in the pitch darkness carrying a bag of detonators, so they did a hurried about-face, went back below ground and returned them to Charlie, and then sat chatting with him again, waiting for the all-clear to sound. ‘I don’t know if we’d have been quite as relaxed if we’d heard bombs start dropping round the factory that night,’ Florence says, ‘because if one had hit the magazine, we’d probably all have been blown to kingdom come.’
No all-clear was sounded, but when they eventually risked another look above ground, they discovered that the factory was once more fully lit and fully staffed, with all the machines running. Only when one of their friends looked up and said, ‘Where the hell have you been? You’ve missed your break,’ did they realize that there had been no air-raid warning at all. They had been so busy chatting to Charlie that they had not noticed it was time for the 1.00 a.m. ‘lunch’ break. The factory had shut down for the hour-long break, and all the machines and lights had been turned off, so while Florence and her friend were huddled together with Charlie, waiting for the bombs to drop, everyone else was across the road in the Dining Block, eating their meal and wondering what had happened to them.
On other nights Florence and her workmates would be in the air-raid shelters together, packed cheek by jowl into the dimly lit, confined space, while they heard the sound of aircraft overhead and the crump of bombs detonating in the distance. Perhaps as a consequence of that claustrophobic feeling, Florence has had a fear of lifts and other enclosed spaces ever since, though she can still manage to crack a joke about it. ‘I always tell my daughters to make sure I’m good and dead before they put the coffin lid on,’ she says, ‘because if I’m not, I’ll die of fright anyway.’
Thousands of soldiers were stationed around York during the war, and an overlooker came round the factory one day and said to the girls working on fuse-filling: ‘A lot of these soldiers are a long way from their own homes, and they’ve no one to wash for them and look after them. Would any of you be willing to take a soldier’s washing home?’ They all said ‘Yes’ and the overlookers then handed out a bundle of washing to each of them. The name on the bundle they gave to Florence showed that it belonged to a Corporal Davies. From then on, she brought the clean washing back every Monday and swapped it for a fresh bundle of dirty washing, and even though none of the girls had ever met any of the soldiers, the overlookers always made sure that they gave the same soldier’s washing to the same girl every time.
‘I didn’t know anything about this Corporal Davies,’ Florence says. ‘I didn’t know whether he was an old man, a young man, a married man, or what h
e was, but my mum had a soft streak and was obviously thinking about this unknown soldier, wondering who he was and imagining him sad and lonely and far from his family so, unknown to me, she had taken to putting little gifts for him in with the clean washing.’ Every week Florence’s mother put a packet of Woodbines for the soldier among his washed and pressed clothes, and sometimes a biscuit or two or a bit of home-made cake. That was a particularly generous gift, for rationing meant she was always short of butter, sugar and flour.
Clothing was rationed too, but whatever the shortages, Florence’s older sister always seemed to manage to find the money and the coupons for a new pair of stockings. ‘She used to buy these really expensive ones,’ Florence recalls. ‘Inca Sun they were, at four shillings and elevenpence a pair, so she must have been on good money. I couldn’t afford that so I used to wait until she’d laddered them and thrown them out, and then I’d retrieve them from the bin and wear them myself – better a pair of laddered stockings than no stockings at all.’
After sending Corporal Davies small gifts for a few weeks, Florence’s mother then put a note in with the clean washing one day. It read: ‘If you want to come and spend a bit of time with a family here, you can come round one Sunday for a cup of tea, and if you don’t want to come on your own, then bring a friend with you as well.’ Florence’s mum was not alone in sending notes to lonely soldiers; one woman working on the production line packing vitamin chocolate for the troops remembers that ‘When the supervisors weren’t looking, some of the girls used to put notes into the chocolates for the forces with their names and addresses on. I don’t know if any of them ever got a reply!’
The next Sunday afternoon, Florence was in her room upstairs when she heard a knock at the door. Her mother opened it and Florence could hear men’s voices that she didn’t recognize, and then her mother shouted up the stairs, ‘Flora, come down and see this young man you’ve been bringing the washing home for.’ When she went downstairs there were two soldiers sitting in the living room, and Corporal Davies turned out to be a tall and very handsome man. He and Florence started chatting – he told her his name was Arthur and he came from Wolverhampton – and then after tea they went for a walk round the streets and through the park. She was very shy with him at first, but he soon put her at ease, telling her tales of his home town and the things the Army were putting them through before sending them off to war. He was a good listener too, plying her with questions about her work and what she liked to do in her spare time, and it was almost dusk by the time they came back to the house. Florence’s mum took one look at her daughter’s flushed face and sparkling eyes, and smiled to herself; the packets of Woodbines and the home-baking had been money well spent. From then on Florence and Arthur were courting.
A lot of other romances began at Rowntree’s, sometimes with a workmate acting as Cupid. Beryl Thornton might never have met her husband had one of his workmates not taken a hand. Denis Woodcock came out of the Army at twenty-three after doing his National Service. He’d already done a seven-year full apprenticeship as a painter and decorator in York, and soon got a job in the Paint Shop at Rowntree’s, one of more than fifty painters working there at the time. Usually they worked in pairs, but on a big job ten or twelve of them would come in together at a weekend to redecorate a large room. Denis was paired with a man called Johnny Holmes, who was an outgoing, larger-than-life character. They had been given the job of painting the office of Miss Billen, the formidable manager of the Cream Packing department where Beryl worked. They’d been in there a day or two and he was painting the inside of the window frame, when he glanced down into the yard and saw Beryl. He turned to Johnny and said, ‘I like the look of that girl down there.’
‘Which one?’ Johnny said.
‘That girl there with the black hair,’ he said. The next minute, Johnny had put his brush down and was heading out of the room. ‘Where are you going?’ Denis said, but Johnny just said, ‘It’s all right, I’ll be back in a moment,’ and walked out of the door.
When Denis looked down into the yard again he saw Johnny come out of the building. He walked straight up to Beryl and said, ‘My friend likes you.’
‘So where is your friend then?’ Beryl said.
Johnny pointed up at the office window. ‘He’s up there.’
As Beryl looked up she just caught a glimpse of Denis, who was so embarrassed that he ducked down out of sight. So she said to Johnny, ‘Well, if he likes me, tell him to come and tell me himself, instead of sending his friend to do it for him.’
Johnny went back into the building and walked into the office with a big grin on his face.
‘What have you done?’ Denis said.
‘Oh nothing,’ Johnny said airily. ‘I just told her you liked her and were keen on her.’
‘Why did you do that?’ Denis said, even more embarrassed, and then, after a pause, ‘So what did she say?’
Johnny passed on the message, and a couple of minutes later, feeling a bit sheepish, Denis went outside, but by then Beryl had gone back in to work. He managed to find out who she was, though, and the next day he left a red apple on her workbench and waved to her through the window. ‘I hadn’t really noticed him before to be honest,’ she says, ‘but I wasn’t going out with anyone at the time, so when he finally plucked up the courage, spoke to me and said, “Would you like to come out with me on Friday night?” I said, “Yes.”’
They arranged to meet outside the Theatre Royal in Exhibition Square, but their first date wasn’t exactly a conventional one. Denis had been planning to take her to the pictures, but he was a keen water polo player and the day before their first date, he was told that he had been picked for a tournament in Leeds. So when Beryl turned up and said, ‘Where are we going then?’ he said, ‘I was going to take you to the pictures, but I’m sorry to say that I’m swimming in a competition tonight and I’ve got to get the team bus to Leeds. Would you come there with me instead?’
Beryl said she would, so their first date took place at Armley Baths in Leeds, with Denis in the pool and Beryl perched up in the spectators’ gallery. Relationships have ended for less, and it was a miracle there was a second date after that, but Beryl liked him enough to give him a second chance, and that time, rather more conventionally, he took her dancing instead. They went dancing a lot after that, and were married in 1958.
Courtship was often a painfully slow, formal process in pre-war years, but the outbreak of war lent an added sense of urgency, and wartime shortages also led to some rather more unusual love tokens than the traditional flowers or chocolates. Madge Tillett’s suitor played a trump card when he gave her a pair of almost unobtainable silk stockings. ‘He’d got them from Iceland of all places,’ Madge says, ‘but stockings of any sort were as rare as hen’s teeth then, and these were really good quality. So I thought to myself, “Well, he must be keen,” so I got talking to him, we started going out, and that was it, we were married a few months later.’
Florence’s courtship was almost as quick. She and Arthur had been ‘stepping out together’ for only three or four months when he was posted overseas. Almost all of the soldiers in his unit had been having their washing done by Rowntree’s girls, and she was not the only one to have begun a relationship with a soldier. As a reflection of the close ties that had developed, the night before they left York, Rowntree’s organized a party for the soldiers and their girlfriends in the Dining Block at the factory. Like all the girls, Florence had been privately imagining the farewell kisses and the promises and vows that she and her boyfriend would exchange before they parted – perhaps he would even propose! – but at the end of the evening there was not even a chance for them to say goodbye in private, because there was a heavy military police presence to deter any soldiers who might have been thinking of deserting and staying in York. So Arthur and Florence had to say their farewells within earshot and under the disapproving gaze of a heavy-set military policeman, and they parted with no declarations of undying love and
certainly no proposal of marriage, just a brief kiss and Florence’s promise to write regularly and to wait for him. She was not to see him again for almost five years.
In 1943, after Florence had been working on fuse-filling and red-flagging for two years and the company had produced almost eight million fuses, Rowntree’s contract with the Government expired and was not renewed, but awarded to another factory instead. The girls all gathered to watch the very last fuse of all, number 7,809,579, come off the assembly line. A series of commemorative photographs was taken and the girls all ‘sat around posing for the photographer’, while Ned Sparkes filled the very last fuse.
Although they were all still on Rowntree’s books, the company either wouldn’t or couldn’t take Florence and a lot of the other women back into the factory at first, so instead she had to go and work in Leeds for sixteen weeks, training to be a mechanical engineer. In peacetime, it would have been almost inconceivable that a woman would have trained as an engineer, but these were rapidly changing times and she was one of hundreds of women taking on highly skilled and physically demanding work that had previously been the sole province of men. In order to qualify, she had to make two gear rings from scratch to prove that she had mastered the necessary skills, machining them, filing them down and balancing them. They had to be perfect and it took her the full sixteen weeks to make them.
She travelled to Leeds by train every day, and continued to live at home so that she could save the costs of lodgings. So did Dot Edwards, who had been sent to a training school at the Crown wallpaper factory in Leeds to train as a fitter for the Army and Air Force, and Joan Martin, who was sent to the Silver Cross pram factory in Guiseley near Leeds, which had been requisitioned by the Government to make parts for aircraft, including the Hurricane and Spitfire. Other girls were not so lucky. Madge Tillett was sent to Barnoldswick to work on aircraft repairs and had to stay in a hostel. ‘It was all right really,’ she says, ‘except for one thing: there was never enough to eat. I used to work fourteen nights straight, so that I could get two days off and come home on the train to York, go to my mum’s and get something to eat!’
