Bomb Girls--Britain's Secret Army

by Jacky Hyams

  You had to be a very careful worker. The men would swing a huge steel plate onto the big table to be examined. Another worker would use a grinder to grind a smooth place in one corner of the plate – and I would have to measure the imprint using a Brinell, a bit like a small version of a telescope, which measured the imprint.

  The work was absorbing and while I had to work in some very noisy places, I wasn’t on a production line; I worked on my own. I’d be based in an office, so whenever something was ready to be inspected, I’d have to go out onto the shop floor and do my work. I didn’t wear a uniform as such, just a white overall. My hair didn’t have to be covered either; I wasn’t actually working near any machinery.

  The pay was very good. I gave some to my mother and managed to save some, too. My older sister, Kay, wound up working in a similar job in an aircraft inspection department just outside Leeds at the Avro company, where they made planes like Lancaster Bombers. Then she moved and went to work for the NAAFI. She wound up travelling all over the place, and was one of the first women to land with the troops at Anzio in Italy in 1944.

  I vividly remember walking on the moors one day, thinking of Kathleen and picking a sprig of heather to send to her in Italy, a small reminder of home. She told me later it wound up being displayed in the Officers’ Mess and they nicknamed the NAAFI canteen ‘The Heather Club’.

  Others in my family were involved in war work, too. My younger sisters, Elsie and Audrey, were too young for war work but my brother Frank, a few years younger than me, worked in a steel factory in Sheffield before joining the RAF as a driver. My other younger brother, Leslie, eventually joined the Navy. As for me, I’d already started courting even before I went to work at Chilwell. I’d met my husband to be, Cyril, at the local Methodist chapel in Wombwell in 1940. He was three years older than me and in a reserved occupation, working as a joiner in the local colliery.

  After my stint at Toledo, I was sent to work at a place called Shorter Process in Attercliffe, a suburb of Sheffield. I actually thought the name meant ‘short process’ at first – but it turned out the boss was named Shorter. At Shorter they made sprocket wheels for armoured vehicles. A labourer would lift the sprockets, two feet across, and I would have to press a testing machine, called a Firth hardometer, which used a ball or a diamond pressed into the metal to measure the imprint: a diamond is harder than steel.

  I worked there for a few months, and the last place I worked at was called Firth Browns, a large engineering factory in Monk Bretton, just outside Barnsley. There were a lot of other women working there. There was also an underground firing range where they’d test the sheets of metal used in the tanks by firing live ammunition at them. I didn’t take part in the firing; my role was to measure the metal sheets afterwards.

  I never really talked about what I was doing with anyone other than my family and Cyril. And the rather solitary nature of my work meant I never really made friends in the places where I worked. I wasn’t actually involved in a process where something was being made; I was being called in to test. I did have one friend from Wombwell, who had originally worked in the grocer’s shop with me, Sadie Green. She was sent off to work in an aircraft factory repairing planes. She worked on magnetos, the electrical generators used in aviation piston engines, repairing and fitting new ones.

  You had no uniform as such in the Inspectorate but you were given an Inspectorate of Fighting Vehicles badge as a security pass. It was circular with a brown outer ring, then a red ring; the rest was green with a side view of a silver tank. And it had a number on the back: mine was 711.

  I carried on working for the Inspectorate through the war, even after Cyril and I got married in July 1944 at the church where I’m still a member, St Mary’s at Wombwell. It was just a few months before my 21st. The war wasn’t yet over, but we felt it was the right time, as we’d been courting for nearly four years.

  The local photographer turned up for our wedding photo – only to discover that he had no film for his camera, thanks to war shortages. Two weeks later, he got in touch to say he’d managed to get some film. Of course, my bouquet had had its day, but then another girl I knew, who had just been married, had kept her bouquet. Yet for some reason, the photos he took weren’t any good. I didn’t like them. In the end, I chucked them away.

  After the wedding, we moved in with Cyril’s father. Then came a surprise out of the blue: Cyril was being posted down to London, to help work on bomb damaged properties. So off he went, and I went back to my parents. Not long after he’d gone to London, I wrote to Cyril with some good news: we were expecting our first child, Brian. And, of course, by the New Year, the war was gradually drawing to a close. I carried on working until just before VE Day, in May 1945, and Brian was born in August that year, a real Victory baby. But it wasn’t until the end of the year that Cyril finally came back home to Wombwell. Then we managed to get a house of our own: I’ve lived in it ever since.

  Cyril carried on working as a joiner for a private building firm. I did go back to work after Brian started school; first I went back to the grocery shop in Wombwell for 10 years, then I worked in the invoice department at a firm called Newton Chambers in Chapeltown for 12 years. They made Izal toilet rolls. By the time I left Newton Chambers, Brian had joined the Merchant Navy and was working as an engineer officer on the QE2. Sadly, Brian died of cancer in 1992.

  I enjoyed my war work; there was a real sense of responsibility in knowing you had to be one hundred percent accurate every time you checked something, but I do consider myself very fortunate to have been given that job when you consider the dangers and difficulties involved in the factories so many munitions women worked in.

  It didn’t really strike me, over the years, that there was very little recognition for the munitions workers but now, of course, you can see that we should have had some kind of recognition for our work. I think a lot of us are like me, not angry or militant about being ‘invisible’ because we just got on with it, like everyone else we knew.

  Yet somehow I don’t think today’s generation could do what the munitions women did in wartime. They seem to think too much about themselves these days. And I’m not sure either that people nowadays are as patriotic as we were during the war. The world is so different now, everything is ‘must have’.

  In the war, there was nothing to ‘have’ but your relationships with the people around you; your family, your friends, were somehow much closer. There was a more genuine neighbourliness then: people cared about people.

  ‘Through the mud and the blood to the green fields beyond’ is the Royal Tank Regiment’s unofficial motto. That saying sums it all up for me: it gives me a sense of who I was, what I was doing during the war.

  And where I was going.

  CHAPTER 11

  IRIS’S STORY: THE GIRL ON THE BICYCLE

  ‘WE WERE SAVING THE LIVES OF OUR OWN TROOPS’

  Iris Aplin was born in 1923 in Market Drayton, Shropshire. Her parents had worked in service when they were young, so when Iris left school, she followed in their footsteps, working as a kitchen maid in various big houses until war broke out. In 1941, age 18, she went to work in munitions at ROF Swynnerton. Iris worked at Swynnerton for four years in many different sections, often working with highly explosive material, filling smoke bombs and assembling detonators and fuses. In 1948, she married her wartime fiancé Bob Aplin and moved down to Honiton, Devon to raise their family. Bob died in 1996. Iris has two daughters, five grandchildren and four great grandchildren. This is her story.

  There’s a link in my past to the TV show, Downton Abbey. My father, Charles Merrifield Young, worked in service. He was a groom in the stables at Highclere Castle, the big country estate on the Berkshire/Hampshire border, now known all over the world as the setting for TV’s fictional Downton Abbey.

  My mother, Amelia, worked in service too as a nursery nurse. My parents did their courting in Highclere village – and they were married there in 1920.

  My mot
her’s parents lived in Market Drayton, so my parents lived with them after they married; I was born there three years later. Dad had always worked with horses but after WW1, he had difficulty finding work – until he found a job as head pigman for a farming company at Kinsey Heath in Cheshire. Then we moved there.

  My earliest memory of Kinsey Heath was getting the water from the pump in the garden and going shopping in a horse drawn cart to Market Drayton, where we’d go to visit Annie Chidlow, my grandmother.

  Annie scrubbed people’s steps for sixpence a time. She made a good living out of it. In the end she owned three houses in the area, rented two out and kept one for herself.

  We lived in a little rented cottage with my baby sister, Ruth, who arrived three and a half years after me. I hated the cottage. At night, there were insects like cockroaches, horrible black things that had a nasty habit of crawling into your clothes. One got down my back one morning as I was on the way to school – poor mum, I was yelling the place down. But we were happy living there, in the countryside. Ruth and I used to have to walk a long way to school because the houses in the area were quite a distance apart.

  One day my mum put up some curtains in the window of the cottage and the owner of the cottage decided he didn’t like the curtains – they weren’t good enough for him and he didn’t like the colour either. His daughter lived next door to us so my mum soon got the message ‘alter those curtains’. But my mum wasn’t having any of that.

  A week later we went to see an old house nearby at a place called Coxbank, about two miles from the cottage. Mum knew the owner, who lived in Crewe, and the owner agreed to rent it to us. I was really pleased. It was a beautiful old house – eventually it had to have a thatched roof because we had to galvanise it because of the incendiary bombs in the war, though in the end, we didn’t get hit.

  I was the biggest girl in my class. I was a well-made girl, as they used to say, mainly because we ate well. My parents grew their own veg and fruit and we even had plum trees in the garden. Mum and dad also kept chickens and our own pig. Me and Ruth used to help dad outside sometimes; we all worked together.

  I didn’t like the school headmaster, Mr Coffin. He was always going on about ‘the old days’, the Victorian era, when everyone slept in one bed, parents and children.

  He was telling my class about it one day and he managed to upset me no end.

  ‘Iris was in the middle,’ he told the kids.

  ‘And when she turned over, they all had to turn over.’

  Everyone laughed but I never ever forgave him for that comment.

  I was not a shiner at school. At 12 I was sent to a secondary school in Audlem, Cheshire. I definitely didn’t want to go to the big posh grammar school. We had cooking, washing, gardening lessons. I came top of cooking, making a Swiss Roll. But I left at 14.

  Round our way the only kind of work available for girls was in service. You just followed everyone else into it. Straight away, I found a job as a kitchen maid at the old Rectory in Adderley, Shropshire, a very big house but just me and the cook doing almost everything. The pay was five shillings a week and I went to live in, up in the attic.

  Downstairs I can remember seeing rows of brass bells for every room, so there must have been a lot of servants there at one stage. But now it was just a parson and his wife – with a cleaning lady coming in to help out. They were nice people but it was hard work, day in, day out, with only Sundays off.

  A year later I switched jobs to a place in Market Drayton called The Grove Hall, same kind of job, still sleeping up in the attic, and then I moved jobs again, to another big house in Market Drayton. I worked for a couple, a Wing Commander and his wife.

  By this time, the war had broken out. My dad, who’d been in the first war, said ‘Oh no, not again’ though as a 16-year-old, I didn’t quite understand it all. But it wasn’t very long before I understood what war really meant. I was at a dance one night at Audlem; Dad worked on the door sometimes. One of the local boys was at the dance in his uniform, off on leave from the Army. Two weeks later, we heard he’d been killed. That struck home to everyone.

  I wasn’t called up. What happened was that my Wing Commander boss and his wife suddenly had to move from Market Drayton to Reading in Berkshire. They told me they needed to find someone to work for them as a servant, and much to their surprise, I said I’d be willing to go with them. At 17, I was happy to move away from home. I liked my employers. The lady of the house was bedridden, so I got to do different things helping her and she was a very pleasant person to work for.

  My parents’ attitude was ‘well, we had to do it for work’ so they were fine about me moving to Reading. I was still sleeping up in the attic, but I was now that much older and starting to understand that because of the war, there were other things I could do for work. Girls like me from rural families who’d only ever known service welcomed the fact that there were opportunities for us to do something different for the first time – and earn a bit more money. So I left and moved back home.

  In the spring of 1941, I turned 18. My best friend Mary, who was also working in service, was of the same mind as me: we’d be better off doing war work. We’d heard there were lots of jobs for young girls at Swynnerton in the munitions. At first, I’d wanted to go into the ATS. But when I broached the subject, my parents wouldn’t hear of it.

  ‘Not a place for a woman, Iris,’ my mother said.

  And so Mary and I got on our bikes at Coxbank one day and pedalled furiously over the mile and a half to Audlem, where we were able to leave our bikes with friends. Then we boarded the bus for the journey to Swynnerton, over 30 miles away. It took ages but the time flew by, mainly because we were singing all the way there. We sang war tunes like ‘I’ll be with you in apple blossom time’. Other people on the bus joined in. That’s what you did then.

  At Swynnerton, they took down our details and told us we’d need to have a medical first –this would be done by our local doctor. So they handed us both a receipt which we were told to hand over to our doctor. Then, after the medical, the doctor handed us our reports. Within a week or so, we were on our way to Swynnerton again to get ready for our first ever shift.

  Swynnerton was huge, a world of its own with strict security and lots of rules and regulations. Mary and I were put on Group Six to start with. That was where they made the smoke bombs. The overalls were white and you had your clock-in number stencilled on the back. My turban was green – to denote Green Shift – and you also had to change into the regulation shoes they provided. I take a size eight, so they had a job finding a pair. They were brown shoes with a crêpe sole and an arrow on the toecap.

  And so I found myself standing on a big production line in a large area with double doors at the bottom and the top, and an annexe attached at each end of the shop so the truckers could get the stuff in.

  What I didn’t realise beforehand was the fact that you were going to be on your feet while you worked. The shell cases came along on the production line and about 25 of us all had to do exactly the same thing; fit a little upside-down adaptor – like a little wheel – on the top of the shell case. That was our part of the process. Then it was passed down the line to another place for the next step in assembling the smoke bombs.

  As we worked, a woman would be walking past us, keeping an eye on everything we did. Her armband said ‘Chief Inspector of Armaments’ and she was there to check (and double check) that the work was being done properly. No-one was taking any chances.

  The head or boss of the shop was called a ‘Blue Band’; his name was Jack. Jack was good to us girls, but he did have one or two funny ways. For instance, we frequently sang while we worked to cheer ourselves up and relieve the monotony. But if you were on night shift on a Sunday, come midnight, if we were singing a hymn – which we often did – Jack would always say ‘Sunday’s gone, girls’ which was code for ‘no more hymns, please’.

  Jack was also known to use colourful language sometimes if something we
nt wrong – but that didn’t happen very often. At times a smoke bomb would be filled too full; they were only little things, but if that happened, it would put the machine out a bit.

  The girls liked Jack because he had the right attitude: the priority was to get the work done. So he was respected by us. And he always allowed us that little bit of time before we took our hour’s break, the point when we had to make sure that everything was safe, the machines switched off, before we could leave the floor for the canteen. It was just a matter of a minute or two. But it meant a lot to us.

  Jack was also very good to the girls when we worked on nights. There’d be times when the shop got too misty – with all the grey powder that was being used – so he would get us all to stand there, with the lights out, while the doors were opened very briefly for a bit of fresh air. (At night, of course, the total blackout meant all the shop doors had to remain closed so not a chink of light could get in). We’d all stand there for less than a minute, then he’d shout ‘close the doors!’ and then the lights could go back on. Jack was a very understanding man.

  At home, my job at Swynnerton had another effect on the family finances. I can remember going home with my first pay. Dad was sitting at the table and I put my wage packet down in front of him.

  ‘Look at that dad, sixteen shillings,’ I said, pleased as punch with myself.

  Dad just picked it up, looked at it and said: ‘Right. That’s the end of me working on the farm.’ His daughter was earning more than him! So he found a munitions job, as a fitter’s mate at Ternhill airfield.

  War work meant that I had real money for the first time. Half my pay packet went to my mother, the rest was mine. The old people in the village would sell me and Mary their clothes coupons. As a result, we had more clothes to wear when we went out dancing.