Bomb Girls--Britain's Secret Army

by Jacky Hyams

  For years after Wilf had gone I’d just go to work and come home. But one day I decided to go on an Alpha course, which looks at the basics of the Christian faith. And at the course, I realised I could share my experiences with other people. And only then was I able to talk about what had happened. Then I got involved with another group, a Methodist group where you share your experiences, have a meal. That changed everything for me.

  I’d always kept up my Guiding, always took pack holidays. So when I got a letter one day last year, to say I’d been awarded an MBE, it was a truly wonderful moment. I don’t feel bitter about the war, about what happened to me afterwards. But I do feel cross at times that those of us that worked in munitions haven’t had any recognition yet. Everyone else has had some kind of thank you.

  Certainly, everyone around you was doing their bit for the war. If you went to the shopping centre in the middle of Birkenhead during the day, you’d only ever see children and old men. There were no young men at all; they were all away at war. I often used to think about that.

  We had to make our way to the factory through the bombing, feed ourselves on rations – which was very hard – and we were in exactly the same danger, working through the air raids, as if we’d been in the Forces. No air raid shelter for us if we were on a shift. We had a man with a whistle up on the roof. They told us he was up there to reassure us but I think he was up there to blow the whistle if it was a gas attack.

  You never got told anything in those days.

  CHAPTER 6

  LAURA’S STORY: AN ANGEL AND A ROSE

  ‘WE WERE TINY COGS IN A SECRET ARMY’

  Laura Hardwick was born in Trimdon, County Durham, in 1921. She has the double distinction of being both an ‘Aycliffe Angel’ and a ‘Swynnerton Rose’. She spent two years making bullets at Aycliffe until she was called up and had to leave home to work at Swynnerton in Staffordshire, where she helped make detonators for the Navy. After the war she married and remained in the Bishop Auckland area. Her husband, Bill, died in 1996, age 80. She has one son, three grandchildren and three great grandchildren. This is her story:

  The Germans knew we were there. But they never found us. Lord Haw-Haw [the nickname of Germany’s propaganda broadcasters] was always making broadcasts, saying we had been bombed – he called us ‘the angels in white coats’ – but the truth was, the factories in Aycliffe could not be seen very easily from above. They built air raid shelters for us workers – but we were never in them. We just had to carry on working.

  My very earliest memory is the day I started school, when we lived at Etherley Moor, just outside Bishop. One of the families living near us had a little girl the same age as me. So we started together, hand in hand, walking through the gate at Cockton Hill Infants School, not far from where I live now. I made friends with that little girl, of course. And then she died. When that happened, I didn’t want to go back to Cockton. I was so upset, my mum, Emily and dad, Joseph, sent me to another school, Escomb. All I can remember of that is one freezing-cold, snowy winter when the older kids pulled us little ones to school on a sledge.

  We were just an ordinary working-class family. Dad worked in the steelworks but when WW1 broke out, he and his brother were found to have hammer toes – which we all have – so he couldn’t march properly. So he went to work in the pits for a while. I was the eldest. Ethel came over four years later and my brother Robert was nine years younger than me.

  In those days, everyone you knew was poor. But we managed. It’s not like you read in books, where kids had no shoes and were running around dressed in rags. We weren’t like that. I was not brilliant at school. Ethel was the brainy one, she wound up going into nursing. I do remember one thing, as kids we always played shops for some reason. Ethel seemed too babyish to me, with nearly five years between us, yet when Rob arrived, I was nine years old and I mothered him. He always seemed to be with me as we grew up.

  In those days, you left school when you were 14. There was an 11-plus exam but I didn’t pass it. There wasn’t very much work around here, so I wound up working on a farm with a friend who was the farmer’s niece. We bottled the milk for the schools in the area and generally helped out around the farm and in the farmer’s house sometimes. The pay was five shillings a week. After a while, I found a job working in a grocer’s shop; also five shillings a week.

  I was 18 when war started and I’d been working at the shop for quite a while when it all happened. Where we lived was only a little village, really, so everyone was worried about it all in the beginning, buying the blackout curtaining, that sort of thing. Then came the food rationing. The idea of going into the Forces didn’t appeal to me one bit. I’d never left home before, though of course in the end I had no choice; I had to. But the general idea was, everyone had to do something to help the war effort.

  When they were building the factory at Aycliffe in 1940, my father left the pits and started working there as a labourer. Then, when it opened the following year, he went to work inside the factory. By then, nearly all the girls I knew were going to work at Aycliffe. The pay was £2 a week, which was a huge difference from my earnings. So when I was called up, I chose Aycliffe.

  When I told the lady I worked for, she said she could get an exemption for me. She even offered to put my wages up to seven shillings and sixpence if I’d stay. I don’t think she could have got an exemption, to be honest, though I think, as a farmer’s wife, she thought she could try. But I’d made my decision.

  My friend Dorothy was already working there. ‘Ask if you can be put on Group One,’ she told me, because that’s where she was working. But when I told my dad this, he put his foot down. ‘You are not going on Group One, Laura. Ask to go on 7A.’ I didn’t know what any of this meant. When I went to the Labour Exchange for my interview for Aycliffe, I asked the lady if I could go on Group 7A.

  ‘Why?’ she wanted to know.

  ‘Well… me dad works there,’ I explained.

  That was it; she arranged for me to go to Group 7A. A long time later, I found out that quite a lot of girls working on Group One were killed in accidents. You hadn’t a clue, really. Everything was just kept quiet.

  On 7A we made rifle bullets. We worked at one end of the shop floor where there was a huge machine operating a big belt. The machine would slide the bullets down and our job was to press the detonator in as the bullets came along. From there, the belt gradually worked its way down the shop floor and eventually produced the finished bullets. We had to turn out thousands of bullets a day on every shift.

  When I first started working there, we’d travel to work by bus. But then they built a special railway station near the factory. After that, a bus would collect us from the villages, take us to Bishop Auckland and then we got a train to Aycliffe. Then we would board the utility bus – ‘Tilly buses’ we called them – with wooden seats, waiting to take us to different sections of the complex where they’d drop us off at the gate; you’d show your pass and walk through to wherever you were working.

  We worked in white turbans and overalls – no grips, no jewellery, no watches or rings, nothing. When you got there you went straight into the changing rooms, left your outdoor clothes and shoes on one side of the barrier, then once you’d crossed the barrier you got your shoes, overalls and turbans on.

  I can still picture it now in my mind’s eye. It was a very long bench with all these women sitting beside it, knocking the detonators into the bullets. I was working with girls and women of all ages. There were older ladies there too; they always fell asleep on the night shift, poor dears. Every so often, one of us would make a mess and then the belt would come off. So you’d have to find a fitter to fit the belt back on. You couldn’t just press a button to do that in those days.

  Oh, it was so monotonous, and it was incredibly noisy on the shop floor – all of us sliding the bullets down, the same thing all the time. To help break the monotony we’d start singing. That was all you could do to keep your spirits up. When we went fo
r our break, we’d have Worker’s Playtime, and people like Betty Driver out of Coronation Street would come to the factory to entertain us, sing and dance for us girls. Or you’d get people who’d make you laugh, like little Arthur Askey.

  They were always checking us. We’d have men and women walking in, dressed in black coats. They would say, ‘You, you and you’, point to you and then they’d search your hair, check to make sure you weren’t wearing any jewellery. They’d appear out of nowhere. It was, of course, a random security check. They had to be diligent all the time. And there were the other girls – the ‘Blue Bands’ we called them – who would walk around the shop floor, checking everything. We called the other sections of the factory ‘the shops’. They were massive. They were so vast, you wouldn’t have a clue what went on inside.

  If there was an advantage, it was earning more money than I’d ever known. £2 a week was riches to me. I gave it to my mother and she’d give me back a little bit as pocket money. We knew that the lads who were fighting the war needed those bullets we were making: we had practically nothing in ammunition terms when the war started. I spent two years working in bullets.

  There’s one very vivid memory of Aycliffe that stands out. I often think about it, even now. Once, I was sitting on the train going to work. There was a girl next to me, moaning to everyone: ‘Oh, I dunno, I just don’t feel like going to work today.’ That, to me, sounded daft. Did any of us really feel like going? What was the point of going on about it?

  She must have been having some sort of premonition, that girl. Quite a while afterwards we found out that there was a young lad wheeling bombs on a trolley in another section and one went off accidentally and the girl on the train caught the blast. She survived, but she was very badly injured. It couldn’t have been a very big explosion because the whole place would have gone up if it had been. But it was enough to ruin her life.

  Not very long after that we got more news, something that was going to affect a lot more lives – including mine. We were informed that some of us young single girls would be having to move – to work at another filling factory at a place I’d never heard of called Swynnerton in Staffordshire. They’d be sending us there on a train and we’d be living in a hostel near the factory. Of course, none of us wanted to go. My mother wasn’t very pleased, as you can imagine. A lot of us girls had never been out of Bishop – you never went on holidays in those days. I’d been on a school trip to Redcar and that was it. At nearly 21, I’d never even had a boyfriend. I was very shy.

  But there it was, it was war work and single girls had to go wherever they were sent. We all turned up at Darlington station for the special workers’ train and they issued us with red, white and blue labels to tie to our case, to show which part of the new building we’d be living in. The train took us from Darlington to Manchester, a hundred miles or so, not very far nowadays but a distance none of us had ever travelled before. It all felt very strange.

  Once we got to Manchester, the WVS were parked there outside the station in vans, waiting to give us all a cuppa and a piece of spice loaf. Then we all had to get on another bus to the other side of Manchester and then get on a train to Stoke. Then we boarded yet more buses to take us to where we’d be living, the hostels. There were four different hostels – Raleigh Hall, Drake Hall, Frobisher and Nelson Hall, all a distance apart, for security reasons, and my group was going to Raleigh.

  There was a little cottage at the edge of the hostel where the manager and his wife lived. Inside Raleigh, you were assigned to different ‘houses’. I was in Juniper House: two rows of rooms with bathrooms and toilets at the end. You had a wooden bed with a wooden base, two girls to one room. I thought we had the best hostel because we had wash basins in the room with hot and cold water – a luxury for us. The room had two windows, one bed down one side, the other down the opposite side. There was even a shelf for your family photos to remind you of home.

  The munitions girls living in the hostel came from all over the country, so there was a great deal of homesickness. At first, I shared a room with a girl who told me she was getting married soon. Then she went home to her village, a very poor place called Whitton Park. And that’s what happened, she was married. If you got married, you didn’t have to come back. So I was on my own for quite a while in that room. I didn’t like that one bit – I wanted company more than I wanted privacy.

  We all knew so little. We didn’t know there were all these other munitions factories around the country. Now, at Swynnerton, I was sent to work on something called Group One. And it was much more dangerous munitions work than I’d done before. We had to go to a training area before we started. We were told we’d be making detonators for the Navy, though we never actually saw the finished product.

  The lady that trained us was a bit of a shock to the system: when we all saw her, we wanted to run home straight away! She’d been in an explosion and had an artificial arm. She had also lost one eye. Part of her face still had shrapnel in it. And she walked with a limp. She stood there, in front of all of us, telling us what our new job entailed.

  You were given a small tub of mercury, in powder form. The job was to fill the detonator with the mercury. The tub was pushed through a hatch to you and then you took the tub over to a ‘hopper’, a tray of detonators. Then you had to sprinkle the powder over the top of the detonator; then it went back into the hatch. You worked behind a steel shield with a Perspex window while you did the work. You also had to wear a cotton wool mask to do the work. This turned out to be so uncomfortable, it made your mouth sore as you filled the detonators. But, of course, you had to wear it. There was also a bench where we would be given special tongs to clean the detonators: each girl took a turn to do that as well.

  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 f
or 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.