Bomb Girls--Britain's Secret Army

by Jacky Hyams

  What we had to do in nitrates was soak the cotton in big pans of nitric acid. You had to move the cotton around with a sort of prong to make sure it was completely saturated. Then you had to put stone plates, three inches deep, on top of the punched cotton in order to press the acid out. Then water would be run on top and the acid would drain away.

  We worked on a production line. You’d press pan after pan, making the cotton brittle enough to turn it into gunpowder. This was heavy work, so we had to work in pairs. I’d put an armful of cotton in to soak and my neighbour would punch it. Sometimes, cotton with acid on it would come up and splash your face, so you’d get acid burns. And the acid would get onto your clothes, burn your bra, which would wind up in holes.

  If it did burn your face, you’d have to run to the medical room and the nurse would put acriflavine [an antiseptic powder] on the burn for you. Then you’d be sent straight back to the huge shed area where we all worked. It was an enormous area, probably big enough to house 24 double-decker buses.

  They kept a big barrel of water in the shed. This was because of the acid, in case someone got badly burned. If that happened, they had to throw themselves into it, to save their skin. But usually, the acid just splashed you in the face and you’d have to run like billy-o to get the stuff onto your face to calm it down. The ends of our fingers were always covered in little potholes where the acid had got to them.

  I made some really good friends at Drungans. We had fantastic camaraderie. One friend, Sadie, her husband was in the RAF. She stayed with her parents and little girl for the duration of the war. The other ladies on our shift came from all over the area, wives and daughters mostly, from mining families: Ayrshire girls from the Nith Valley, Thornhill, Kelloholm and Kirkconnel. A lot of the girls from Dumfries were sent to work in the munitions in Dalbeattie, at the cordite factory. Sometimes, if we finished our shift early, we could all go and have a shower at work. We didn’t have a bath in our house, so that shower was a luxury to most of us.

  In the canteen, we’d all sit there listening to Churchill on the radio, saying, ‘Today we lost a ship with 200 sailors’ and when it was that kind of bad news, we’d all feel dreadful. Thankfully, Sadie’s husband came back from the war but there were people from our village that didn’t return. You were always conscious of the war. We’d cheer up, of course, when we had the entertainment they laid on for us, like the concerts from ENSA in the canteen at dinner time. And we’d often sing and play the piano in the factory after we’d had our evening meal. We kept ourselves cheerful that way.

  One night, it was shepherd’s pie in the canteen and I put a forkful in my mouth and went, ‘Oo, this is a funny taste.’ But I still ate the lot. Then one young girl – I don’t recall where she was from – said: ‘Paraffin food, paraffin food.’ And she was right. It turned out a farmer had sent in a bag of potatoes where paraffin had been spilt all over them. But there were no ill effects.

  Sometimes you’d get home from your shift and your skin would itch really badly. You could hardly sleep. But you couldn’t take a day off or lose your work; you just carried on as usual. It was hard, heavy work, pushing the big trolleys of pressed cotton through to the steam room, where it was dried and turned into powder. It was physical effort all the time. There were times when we worked so hard, we’d work in our sleep: my sister Donna and I would throw our arms around and hit each other in our sleep – we were still working!

  When my shifts permitted, I’d go to dances in the village. My mum would play the piano and we’d have concert parties where everyone would sing and dance to the ‘Trolley Bus’ song (‘clang clang clang went the trolley’) or ‘Lily Of The Lamplight’ (‘Lily Marlene’). I had a wartime boyfriend too for a short time: Tom Hicks, he was in the Royal Yorkshire Signals. Tom was a good dancer and a great skater when there was ice on the loch. But then he got sent abroad. We managed to write once or twice. Then he met a girl while he was abroad.

  One day, I was at home, sitting at my mother’s sewing machine, taking up the hem of a coat. I had flat metal curlers in my hair. Then my sister Jean came running in.

  ‘Margaret, someone wants to meet you.’

  Jean’s boyfriend had turned up at our house with another boy.

  So there I was, outside our home, still with the metal curlers in my hair, being introduced to Roland, age 19, same as me. A nice-looking fellow, he was a farm worker, so he hadn’t been sent off in the Forces.

  ‘Are you coming to the dance Friday night?’ he asked me.

  You bet. I cycled to the dance that Friday, me in my nice new dress and shoes, my holey bra, burns on my face covered with acriflavine (which turned the burn brown). But my war wounds didn’t seem to matter a bit to Roland. Soon, we were seeing each other all the time. My parents were a bit worried about it all at first. I was only 19, after all. On our first date in the town they even watched us meeting up to go to the pictures, standing far away enough that we couldn’t see them, my mother told me later. But he soon won them round.

  The routine at work was one week night shift, one week day shift so going to the Saturday night dance depended on your shift. But no matter what, you had to be in by 11pm, my dad said. Donna’s husband was a prisoner-of-war and my dad would get angry with her if she came home late.

  As far as I knew, there were no serious accidents in the factory. But you also had to work with a constant threat from the fumes from the acid as well as the burns. If a tiny bit of water got into the cotton treated with acid, the pan of acid and cotton would catch fire. Thick yellow smoke would fill the shed and go up through the slatted roof. When that happened, we all had to rush outside. And if it was your pan that caught fire, you’d have to lose your bonus payment. The security was extra tight, too: you’d be searched coming in and going out to see if you were carrying cigarettes or matches. But our attitude to it all was, well, we’ve got a job to do. We were helping make the ammo for our boys to fight in the war. And the thing was, even though the job itself could be dangerous, we didn’t feel it was as dangerous as fighting at the front. I was really proud that I was doing my bit.

  I was 21 when the war ended, after three years working at Cargenbridge. At first, we couldn’t quite take it all in that we had actually won. I’d already been engaged to Roland for quite some time. About a year after we’d started going out, he’d turned up one night with a turquoise ring – he’d already asked me my favourite colour. I was thrilled to bits. I took the ring to work and gave it to the super to look after while I was working. Roland said he wanted us to marry after the war. So now, the news that the Germans had capitulated meant I could start planning our wedding.

  For my sister Donna, it meant her husband Graham was coming home. We put out the welcome sign for him but he looked so thin when he returned after all those years in the PoW camp. He’d had bronchial trouble beforehand, so being a prisoner for all those years didn’t help his health.

  ICI closed down as soon as they announced war had ended. No more clocking in with a policeman standing by for every shift. It all ended without any fanfare at all. One day we just clocked out – for the last time. It was over.

  We got married in August 1945. It was the first wedding in Lochfoot village after the war. I went round all the farms in the area and bought extra clothing coupons, and a woman who lived two doors down made the bridesmaids’ dresses. I managed to borrow a lovely oyster satin dress. The whole village turned out. In a way, it was a double celebration, our marriage and no more war. For my going away, I wore a mustard-coloured linen suit with a three-quarter jacket. I was crying – I was leaving my family, my parents, everyone I’d been so close to during the war. It was the end of something. And we didn’t go for a honeymoon, as such. Roland had a wee racing car, a Midget, a two-seater, so we drove off in the ‘selfish wee car’ to a hotel in Newcastle.

  Within a year, our daughter Louise was born. Two years later, Alison arrived. Roland managed to get a farm cottage until we settled in the farmhouse, three miles u
p the road from Shawhead. Louise was just a baby when we got the cottage half a mile from the farm: outside loo, no running water, you’d go up into a stream in a field for water to drink. Roland worked hard on the farm. He also played percussion in a dance band and he was a great singer. So some weekends I’d be left alone. Then in 1951 we moved to the house in Shawhead, where I still live now.

  Elizabeth arrived 18 months after Alison and then Roland junior came three years after Elizabeth in 1953. My youngest, Malcolm, arrived in 1960. By this time, Roland had taken on an agricultural contractors’ business – he got all the machines, the combine harvesters, the tractors. He’d buy the machines and the local farmers and farm workers hired the machines from him so that they could farm. It got so busy he had to have three men working for him.

  None of my sisters learned to drive, but I did. Sometimes I’d have to drive the men out to where the tractors had been left in the fields. The farmers would often ring us at 5am when they needed a machine to get started. So it was always a hectic life, helping Roland, looking after the children. If it was dry, Roland could often work till 11pm.

  In 1971, we went on a big holiday to Australia. Roland’s brother, David, had gone there for £10 on an assisted passage so it was high time we visited him. Our bank manager was shocked when we said we were going to Sydney for two months. ‘How can you afford that?’ he said. We could. The business was going very well at the time.

  It was just as well we made that big trip, because five years later, in 1976, one frosty morning, everything was set to change forever. Something was very wrong with Roland. The men who worked with him were so worried, they came into the house and spoke to me about it.

  ‘He keeps sitting there, holding his head, Margaret, but he won’t tell us what’s wrong,’ one of them said. Then, when I started pushing him to tell me, I got the truth: Roland admitted he was having the most terrible headaches.

  ‘But I’m not going to any doctor,’ he warned me.

  ‘They only tell you there’s something wrong with you,’ were his words.

  The next night he’d been out playing at a staff dance in Dumfries and didn’t get home until 3am. Even then, he insisted on going out to collect some coal. Then, as he bent over our coal bin, he clutched the back of his head suddenly. I could see he was in terrible pain.

  ‘Margaret… I can’t see now,’ he told me. Then he collapsed.

  I rang for the doctor and after he’d looked at Roland lying there, semi-conscious, he took me into the kitchen.

  ‘It’s a haemorrhage, a burst artery,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing I can do for him.’

  I went with Roland in the ambulance but when we got to the hospital they made me wait while they took him up to the ward. When they finally directed me to the ward, I found him unconscious in the bed. He remained that way for three days until he died. All the family came and rallied round us, but there was nothing anyone in the world could do. We’d been married for 30 years.

  It was tough, afterwards. We had to close the business down. One of his brothers was a partner but he couldn’t drive. Roland always did the books. But I knew I just couldn’t run the business on my own. With the help of my daughter, I managed to collect all the money we were owed by the farmers. Then we managed to sell a lot of the equipment. Roland had bought three new tractors but they weren’t yet paid for, so they had to go back. There was a lot of money lost, too.

  It was very strange afterwards, but my three daughters were all expecting at the time Roland died, so the next year three babies arrived. That made a huge difference. Now, I can say my children have all done well in life. And I have 14 grandchildren and 11 great grandchildren.

  I don’t mind living alone at all. Elizabeth is four miles away and Malcolm is the same distance. I’m out a lot, anyway. And healthwise, there aren’t many problems; maybe a pain in my hip when I climb the stairs, but that’s it. I still do the Scottish country dancing every Monday night. And I drive myself to church every Sunday – I never miss that.

  To be honest, I don’t think the world is now any better than it was all those years ago. My children were able to play out like I used to when I was young. Any mother in our area wanted to know where her child was, they were here. That’s exactly how it was. But nowadays people won’t let their children out to play and they’ve all got their computer machines. No conversation, all playing with these machines.

  There’s such a difference, living in the countryside. To me, even Dumfries is like living in the big city. Some folk smile at you in the street, but in the main, you’re not part of a small community, the way you are round here.

  I’m proud of what I did in the war. I’d describe myself as someone who tries to do everything as well as they can do it, and who tries to do as much good as possible. My only regret in life is losing my husband the way I did. But then, when I think about it, I wouldn’t have liked him to be an invalid for the rest of his life.

  My Roland would have hated that.

  CHAPTER 8

  MAISIE’S STORY: MAISIE FROM ESSEX WITH THE FACEPACK

  ‘ON NIGHT SHIFT, I’D GO INTO THE TOILETS AND FALL ASLEEP’

  Maisie Jagger was born in 1922 in Woolwich, Southeast London, and grew up in Dagenham, Essex. She worked as a shop assistant and a machinist until war broke out. In 1940, she was conscripted for munitions work making gun cartridge cases at the small arms ammunition factory in Blackpole, Worcester. Like thousands of other women, leaving home and relocating to a strange environment proved to be a very difficult, unsettling experience for Maisie. After 18 months at Blackpole, her health deteriorated and she was moved back home. Towards the end of the war she continued her munitions work in Dagenham, making parachutes and masts for dinghies until she married her wartime sweetheart, George, in 1945. George died in 2007. Maisie has one son, three grandchildren and four great grandchildren. This is her story:

  People often ask me, ‘What was life like then, how did you manage to live with all the rationing, the bombings, being away from your family?’ I always tell them the same thing: you just got on with it; you accepted it; you couldn’t do anything else.

  I was one of five: two boys and three girls. My parents were Londoners, my mother, May, was from Leytonstone in East London. My father, Albert, worked as a labourer at the Daily Mirror newspaper in Holborn. At first we lived in Woolwich, Southeast London, but Dad managed to buy a house on a new estate in Dagenham, Essex, so we moved not long after I was born.

  Our youngest, Jean, arrived 14 years after me. Jean was always with me, all the time, wherever I went, when she was little. By the time I was a teenager, if I went to a dance or to the pictures, I went with a crowd – but little Jean was always with us. We were a very close-knit family, that’s for sure.

  At the top of our road in Dagenham there were quite a few shops. I left school at 14 and went straight into shop work. I was never once out of work. I think I worked in every shop near us: a grocer’s shop first, then a shop called Perk Stores, then a shop called Gunners – they had biscuits in tins all along the front of the shop. I worked on the counter of a fish and chip shop and I also worked in a place called Maypole. I can remember the cheese they sold, covered with something like a sack, or a type of webbing all around it.

  I was quite a friendly girl. You had to get on with everyone in the shop, didn’t you? But I’d also change jobs quickly for a penny or tuppence more a week. By the time war broke out, I was working as a machinist, making haversacks and binocular cases in a big factory in Oxo Lane, Dagenham. Whatever I earned went straight to Mum on a Thursday – when I knew she wouldn’t have any money left until Dad got paid on Friday night. In return, I’d get sixpence a week as pocket money.

  Every Saturday night I’d go dancing at the British Legion Hall in Dagenham: the foxtrot, the waltz – I liked dancing, all right. I won’t say I was good at it but I was dead keen on it. One of the daftest things I always remember is if I was going dancing and it was raining, oh how I hated it because
all the mud would splash up the backs of my legs. I’d have to rush into the cloakroom, pull down my stockings and wash my legs, pull up the stockings and then out to the dance floor… it’s quite daft the things you remember. But you do.

  My mum worked in the police station as a cook until the war started. Then she had to be evacuated to Ilfracombe in Devon with my sister Queenie, my brother George and little Jean. My oldest brother, Harry – we used to call him ‘Chink’ – was two years older than me so he was old enough to be called up. Almost overnight, this close family, the Rushbrooks, was scattered, leaving just me and Dad in the house, which I hated because I missed everyone so much. Dad was very lucky – or unlucky, depending on how you saw it. He’d just finished 12 years in the reserves for the Navy when war broke out so they didn’t want him.

  ‘Chink’ was really unlucky. He was captured almost at once, in Africa, by the Italians. He hated the Italian PoW camp, then the Germans took over and he wound up as a PoW in Germany. We got letters from him sometimes but it was all very unsettling for everyone.

  I had wanted to go into the WRNS (‘the Wrens’) but my mum put her foot down, she wouldn’t hear of it. Mums and dads used to be able to say what they wanted you to do and you did it. They had some funny ideas then. A lot of people believed the Forces were bad places for a young girl. ‘The Navy’s no place for a young woman,’ my mum kept saying. I didn’t know what she meant but there was no way I would disobey her.

  In the end, of course, because I’d turned 18, I went to sign up for war work. At the Labour Exchange, with a group of other girls, we were told we’d be ‘directed labour’ doing war work. In other words, you’ll be working wherever we want to send you. It turned out I was being sent to Worcester, nearly 150 miles away. My best friend, Lily, was in the same boat, also called up as directed labour. But she was being sent to Rugby, which was a bit of a blow, though we managed to keep in touch throughout the war – and have done ever since.