Bomb Girls--Britain's Secret Army

by Jacky Hyams

  Dad was an air raid warden, just along the road from us. He had to go to Clydebank immediately afterwards. I’d never seen him look so shaken when he got home. Afterwards, I went with Mary to have a look. It was tragic to see those houses reduced to rubble, some of them with their sides sliced off, so all you could see were wrecked rooms, the pictures still on the walls, the furniture hanging in midair. Later we heard that a German reconnaissance plane was shot down on its way back from the raid. The story was that the plane was loaded with film. When it was developed, there were very clear pictures of the Bishopton plant. I never wanted to stop and think about what could have happened if that plane had made it back to Germany with those photos.

  In a way, because you had to keep your wits about you working with the machines, having to concentrate, that helped; it stopped you thinking too much about all the terrible things that were going on. And we all helped one another there. You had a lot of work to get through, but there was always someone around to help you if you needed it. Working with a really nice bunch of girls made all the difference.

  Mary – I wound up calling her ‘Cordite Mary’ because there were so many Marys at work – and I were young and lively; the war definitely wasn’t going to stop us from going out. Strangely enough, you felt safe as houses if you did have to walk around at night. There’d be men in uniform walking back to their billets. Or the air raid wardens would spot you and tell you to hurry home. If I went to a dance near home at the Co-op Hall in Blantyre, my dad would stand and wait by the door at the dance – to walk me home.

  Depending on shifts (you could get a late pass sometimes for your shift, if you had a good enough reason) we’d sometimes go dancing in Glasgow, to Green’s Playhouse, dancing to Joe Loss. Or we’d go to theatre in Glasgow for variety shows at the Kings, the Alhambra or the Pavilion. Sometimes it was Mum and I going to the pictures at the Doolkit, the local Blantyre cinema: George Raft, Anna May Wong, Richard Tauber, Bing Crosby, Deanna Durbin. Oh, I liked my musicals.

  The working hours didn’t leave a lot of time to go looking for boyfriends, mind you. I’d had my first-ever date, a young man from Blantyre who was in the RAF, but he wasn’t my type. But it was at the La Scala Picture House, in Hamilton, where I met the love of my life one night in 1942. I was 20 and it was a few months after I’d started at Bishopton. I was there with Cordite Mary, as usual. Just as we were walking towards our seats, someone whistled at us from the seats behind.

  Of course I turned round and saw two young uniformed blokes grinning at us like mad. I must admit, I gave them a dirty look. But once we came out after the film, Mary nudged me. There they were again, the same two young men, smiling at us. I would have held back, but not Cordite Mary. ‘Come on, let’s see what they’re like,’ she urged me. It turned out they were both in their twenties, in the Royal Army Service Corps.

  ‘I’m Fred and he’s Jack,’ one said, pointing to his friend who had the most wonderful, piercing blue eyes; you couldn’t miss them. ‘We’re stationed in Hamilton, near the race track. Er… can we walk you home?’

  I still hesitated, despite the piercing blue eyes. Then Cordite Mary gave me another nudge. ‘They’re alright,’ she hissed at me.

  She was right. When he left me at my front door, Jack had already asked me out to the pictures and I’d promptly said yes. He was my first proper boyfriend. I told Mum and she insisted on meeting him, of course. By then, I’d found out more. Jack had been called up in 1940. He was from down south, a place called Aldham in Essex. He’d trained at Felixstowe then he’d been posted up to Scotland.

  I knew Jack for about three or four weeks before he was posted overseas. Much later, when I’d told him how his blue eyes were the first thing I’d noticed, he said his first thought was ‘she’s got nice legs’. But once we started courting, he didn’t like me wearing short skirts! Jack ended up being posted to North Africa, then Italy. We’d manage to write. Sometimes you got the letters, sometimes you didn’t but in November 1943, just before my 21st birthday, we got really bad news. Jack was missing. He was a driver. He was driving a brigadier and a major in southern Italy when they were stopped by German gunfire and captured. Somehow, one of the two men’s wives had managed to get a letter to Jack’s mum to tell her he’d been reported missing.

  As you can imagine, I was very upset. But I kept telling myself: ‘He’ll be alright. I know he will.’ Even when the postman turned up one day to hand me a pile of letters I’d written to Jack that were being returned to me, I still clung to the idea that ‘missing’ meant that. It didn’t mean ‘gone for good’, I kept telling myself – though of course it did for many women, back then.

  At work, most of the other women had husbands away in the Army, so we’d always be comparing notes, what we were hearing, whether letters had been coming through. One or two of the older ones were very reassuring.

  ‘Look, he was with a brigadier and a major. He’ll be ok, Margaret,’ they told me. In fact, that was exactly the case. When the Germans captured them, one of the officers pointed to Jack and said: ‘He’s my batman’. [The term ‘batman’ means personal servant to a commissioned officer.] So he was ok.

  In January 1944, my mother got good news from the major’s wife. She’d written to say all three men were in Germany as PoWs. Jack was alive! I’d lived in perpetual hope – and my optimism paid off. Though years later, Jack told me that being a prisoner-of-war was so bad, if it hadn’t been for the Red Cross food parcels, he didn’t know what he’d have done. Those parcels, distributed by the Red Cross to prison camps in Germany, were a lifeline. They didn’t contain much – some tobacco, a bar of soap, a tiny packet of tea or a tin of sardines – but they made the difference.

  So those last 18 months of the war weren’t too bad for us. Jack was alive, that was what mattered, though the winter of 1944/45 was an exceptionally harsh one. You’d often go out in the morning with socks over your shoes, to protect them, and it was a real slog getting to work, especially if you were on the early shift. But somehow you’d get there and do your shift. And in our section, we were lucky compared to the women working in cordite, which was so dangerous.

  When the news came through that the war was over, my group, ‘A’ shift, were the last to leave. I finally finished work at the factory in October 1945. The factory itself stayed open, but we women had to pack everything up. We wore these enormous greatcoats they’d supplied us to pack up. And although everyone was relieved that it was all over, there was a bit of sadness at saying goodbye to the girls. In spite of it all, we’d had some happy times together, and that helped get us through it all.

  That spring, I’d got the best news of all from Jack’s mother: he was on his way home. He’d already asked me to marry him in one of his letters. I’d written back and said: ‘As long as you don’t think you’re making a mistake, Jack.’ Sometimes I’d get a couple of letters and then a few months would go by and nothing… so when I heard the news he’d be back, I was really over the moon.

  Oh, how happy we were to see each other again that day in April! Jack wasn’t very well. He had a skin disorder and other health problems. But we were officially engaged in May 1945 and my parents were very happy about it all. My gran liked him so much; she would never hear a word said against him!

  On 22 December 1945, not long after I’d turned 23, we got married in the church in Blantyre. My little sister May was bridesmaid. It was a bitterly cold day. I had to go to Edinburgh to get the wedding dress because they were so hard to come by. Lots of girls I knew had to borrow wedding dresses because they were so difficult to find. But I found a lovely long white slipper satin dress with a white silk veil. I even had a bouquet with pink and white carnations.

  We had about a hundred guests at the Community Hall in Blantyre. It was a smashing party, all the girls I’d worked with on the A shift were there and I managed to have a two-tier wedding cake. We had a week’s honeymoon at Clacton-on-Sea in Essex. Jack’s Aunty Mary owned a guest house, so we stayed ther
e. Jack was a butcher by trade, but he was out of a job. He found work as a mechanic up in Scotland for a year or so, but although it was a bit of a wrench for me, we decided to move down to Colchester in 1947.

  At first, we had to live with Jack’s parents, then he got a job working on a farm in Stanway, and there was a little cottage we could live in that came with the job, just across the road from where I live now. It had a nice garden, so we could grow our own vegetables. We even had a few chickens – and a lovely dog called Judy.

  My son, Donald, was born in 1949 and three years later I went to work in a children’s home in Stanway. One of my friends looked after Donald in the day and during the school holidays they let me bring him with me. When Donald started primary school, I started working in a pub in Colchester. I started off cleaning and wound up as their cook for many years. Then I got a job in a local secondary school kitchen. Many years on, Donald taught there; Jack was an assistant caretaker and I was in the kitchen. I carried on working there until I retired.

  Jack had been in pretty good health until his late seventies but he had a series of mini strokes and went downhill in the last couple of years of his life. He died in his sleep at Colchester Hospital in March 2000, age 81. We’d had a wonderful, happy marriage for 55 years.

  On the whole, when I look back to that time in munitions, I think we did a good job. What I could never understand was later on, you’d hear about the Land Girls or the girls that worked in aircraft factories but not very much about the girls who did the job I did. Where’s our medal? I do think we should have a bit of recognition. We were young, of course. So we did have the stamina for 12-hour working days – by the time you got home from your shift, that’s what you’d done.

  But the work had to be done. If you didn’t do the work, you’d have been thrown out, no question. If you turned up five minutes late, you lost 15 minutes pay. You might have got away with it if your train had been late for some reason. But that didn’t happen very often. Was it fair treatment? I think it was the same for everyone. You had to know your job. You had to be 100 per cent responsible. And you had to be prepared to pitch in. The supervisor only had to say, ‘Oh we need extra’ and those girls would work like hell to get it done and out. There was no overtime in A Section – everyone just pitched in and worked that wee bit harder.

  Have we lost that sense of being there for each other, helping each other out? I don’t think people are as dedicated to looking out for one other as they were then. There we all were, walking around there in the dark, in the middle of a war, bombs falling from the skies, lives upside down all the time. Nowadays – well, people are too scared to cross the road. You had neighbours then who’d run into your home and help you, whatever happened. Nowadays you might not even know who your next door neighbour is.

  CHAPTER 5

  IVY’S STORY: THE GIRL WITH THE LATHE

  ‘SHE SCREAMED THE PLACE DOWN:

  SHE WAS COMPLETELY SCALPED’

  Ivy Gardiner was born in Wallasey, Cheshire, in 1924. At 15, she went to work as a factory hand at Lever Brothers (now known as Unilever) at its Port Sunlight village complex in the Wirral, Liverpool. When production at Lever Brothers switched to munitions in 1940, she assembled jeeps and worked as a lathe turner, making undercarriages for bombers, until war ended. Widowed at age 52, after 29 years of marriage to her childhood sweetheart, Wilf, she has one daughter and two grandchildren. In 2012, Ivy was awarded the MBE (Member of the British Empire) for dedicating nearly nine decades of her life to the Brownie movement, which she joined as a five-year-old in 1929. This is her story:

  Wilf and I were married just after VE Day. As a wedding present, my mother paid for us to fly to the Isle of Man – on one of the first planes to leave Liverpool airport after the war. It was our first-ever flight, and when I looked out and saw all the guns along Liverpool Bay from above, it was a sharp reminder of what we’d all lived through.

  ‘Oh Wilf, thank heavens it’s all over,’ I said to my new husband, who was holding my hand tightly as we went up. Wilf just looked at me and smiled. And then I remembered that night when the German bomb came through the roof of the Ritz Cinema in Birkenhead and killed 10 people. The bomb had exploded right in front of the circle seats. Wilf and I had been there, in the circle, with all the other courting couples. But we’d ducked out, just in time.

  The air raid siren went off and I’d leapt out of my seat immediately – with Wilf somewhat reluctantly trailing out after me. Now, I didn’t even have to mention that terrible night to Wilf. He knew exactly what I was thinking. ‘Oh, Ivy, we’ve been so lucky,’ he sighed. ‘Suppose I’d been daft enough not to follow you.’

  Things like that you never ever forget. We’d all been desperate for war to be over. But the memory of it all, well, when you talk about it now, you think ‘did we really get through all that?’ Yet when you were doing it, you never thought about it at all. Not really.

  My dad, Albert Reston, was in the Navy in the First World War and worked for a time at Cammell Lairds, Birkenhead, as a boiler maker. One of the ships he helped build came in recently into the Mersey. But after the war, he couldn’t get work. It was tough for us. My grandma had a shop, a general store and a coal yard; people would come to fill a bag of coal up for sixpence. I do remember that as a kid. I was the eldest. My brother, Ronald, came two-and-a-half years after me.

  I was just nine years old when my dad died, in 1931. It was very, very sad what happened. He got tuberculosis but not that bad, borderline. But for some reason, they chose him to participate in a drug trial in a convalescent home in Market Drayton, Cheshire. It was a place where they took people with TB. There were nine other people there, men and women. None of them were very bad.

  The trial involved an injection. And my dad bled to death. My mother, Annie, never even got his death certificate until he’d been buried. She was left widowed at age 32, with two children. At the time we lived in Clawton, Birkenhead, in a terraced house next door to my grandmother. She watched over us while my mother went out to work. My mother took anything she could get. At one point she had three jobs, though she did get a widow’s pension: ten shillings plus five shillings for me and three shillings for my brother. Less than £1 a week. And the rent on the little house we lived in was twelve shillings and sixpence.

  She worked so hard, my mum, she was exhausted all the time. Then one day, she just collapsed on the floor in front of me. I ran down to Grandma, her mother, and she made a decision: the best thing for us was to all get a house together. The house we rented had a sitting room and a bedroom for each of us, and my mother continued to work. In those days, if you saw a house you liked the look of, and you were ok to decorate it, you would tell the landlord: ‘This place needs decorating, so how many weeks’ rent can I have off?’

  We moved around a lot in the thirties. We lived in about five different houses. One house in Eton Road, Birkenhead, was a very nice house; that’s where we were living when war broke out. The thing was, you didn’t envy others because no one you knew had anything in those days. I had lots of friends. I went to every social evening the church put on. I really was a joiner. I joined the Brownies at five, the Girl Guides at 11, a long, long association. And I was a good runner, one of the best runners at my school, St Johns, a church school in Birkenhead. After that I went to Conway High. I didn’t pass the 11-plus; we were moving at the time we were doing it. So I left school at 14.

  At first, I didn’t want a job. But then they put on a course at the college in Birkenhead to show you how to get a job, teaching you how to behave in the adult world, instead of just being a schoolgirl. One day, coming back from the course, I spotted an advert in the window of a florist shop: ‘Apprentice wanted. Two shillings and sixpence a week’. I got the job. I handed my mother the two shillings and got the sixpence back from her. That was my pocket money. By then, she was working as a waitress at weddings, that sort of thing.

  I stayed at the florists for a year. I did learn – I was shown
how to make wreaths, but the moss you used to make them with was full of ants. They’d crawl all over me. It was horrible. In the end, I’d go to bed at night and have nightmares about the ants. My mother had been quite keen for me to be a florist, but when she saw the state I was in she said: ‘Enough of this.’ And anyway, I’d already had a bright idea. Why didn’t I try to get an interview at Lever Brothers at Port Sunlight?

  They were the biggest employers in the area and everyone knew it was a beautiful place to work, a purpose built ‘village’ where they really looked after the employees. If you got a job there as a youngster, you went from one department to another. They’d move you around; it was a huge place. And it only took 20 minutes on the bus to get there.

  They took me. I started out working in the Lux flakes section. [Lux was a popular laundry and beauty soap at the time.] I worked on a machine filling the soap packets. The packets came along to us on a conveyor belt and we boxed them. You had to keep up with the machines. Then they sent me over to Bromborough Village, where they made Stork margarine. They gave you clogs to wear there because there was always water under your feet – because the machines were always being steamed. They told us we could keep the margarine that was past its sell-by date and couldn’t be sold. I’d be scooping it out of the carton with my hands; then it went in a big vat to be sent off for making soap. My hands were soon beautifully soft. The clogs were comfortable, too! After Stork, they sent me back to Lux Flakes again. I was still under 18 and they didn’t employ you fulltime until you’d turned 18. But being moved around got me used to working in a factory environment.