I remember the D-Day landings, when we were being told over the tannoy how it was going. And at lunchtime everyone went to the different churches to pray for all the boys out there. Eventually it was over, and you finished work if you were married or expecting your first baby.
(North West Sound Archive)
EILEEN TOWERS
I left school aged fourteen. The headmistress of Ladybarn School (Withington) had a friend who was a Swiss person, and this person knew Hans Renold. Now, Hans Renold was the Renold of Renold and Coventry Chain Company, at the top of Fog Lane, where it meets Kingsway, Burnage Lane. So Hans Renold was on Burnage Lane [site of the present shops, flats and supermarket]. I lived in Withington, so I could really walk there.
So I started there when I was fourteen. It was a very good firm to work for at that time; when it was just Hans Renold’s, it was very good. Oh, there was everything there, yes. We had tennis courts at the back for our use. I used to go like on a Sunday morning, playing tennis sometimes.
In the war, they made chains – well, mine-laying chains for one thing, and also they opened up one part of it and they made bullets and ammunition. That was part of the war effort.
In the summertime it used to be very hot, you know, with the glass roof, and they used to paint it over, but of course in wartime they didn’t need to do that because we were painted over, we were camouflaged. I’ve forgotten what actually we were camouflaged as, but it certainly wasn’t a works from the air! It was probably green, because you see at the back out there it was fields and that, up to Heaton Mersey.
I was married in 1944. I was twenty-one and he was twenty-eight. I married somebody that was a pacifist, which was a bit peculiar in those days, I must say. All the pacifists and conscientious objectors had to go for a tribunal. You had to register at a certain time, and then you were called up if you weren’t in a reserved occupation. My husband had been before a tribunal: I had the papers for a long time, even after he died, the two letters he had to have when he went before the magistrate. Of course he was working for the post office telephones, so that really was, for him, it was a reserved occupation. They said, ‘yes’, so that was his ‘condition’, they called it, that he kept that job.
He was OK, but other people might not have been. Because we had a friend, he was a draughtsman, and he’d been in prison because he was a pacifist. A lot were in prison. If you didn’t get through that tribunal, you were imprisoned for a certain length of time.
My husband used to fire-watch, at the hospitals. It was a group of pacifists really, that were together, you know. He used to go quite a lot, at least two nights a week. Reg used to go on fire duty at Mauldeth Home, near the golf club behind [Heaton Moor Golf Course].
DORIS WADE
[Before working for Fairey Aviation at Ringway, the speaker was a switchboard operator at the Cotton Exchange, now the Royal Exchange Theatre, off Cross Street.]
When the Exchange was bombed, we went down, and luckily the head manager’s office was standing, and we were all given references for the work we’d done there.
The Cotton Exchange after the bombing. The dome was later restored, and the building is now the Royal Exchange Theatre. (Daily Mail/Parragon/Associated Newspapers)
Fairey Aviation built 1,360 Battle light bombers at Ringway Airport during the first year of the war. They were also produced at the Heaton Chapel plant. (Manchester Airport Group)
Of course the smoke was still coming up from the fires, and Hedley Lucas, the Master of the Exchange, had booked for us to go to the Telephone Exchange, the Post Office one, to get a job there. The Cotton Exchange had finished.
So we went there and I was engaged to start on the Monday, and then I’d also gone down to the Labour Exchange, and they had a job on the switchboard at Fairey Aviation at Ringway. So I went there, and I stayed there for quite a while, until I got married when my husband came off the Ark Royal, the aircraft carrier.
At Fairey Aviation at Ringway, there were just two women; there was a woman who worked with me – we had a big switchboard there. I used to do 8 till 2 one week, and the other lady would do 2 till 8, and then we’d change over the next week.
We were connected to the switchboard at the airport, and we had a spotter that belonged to the RAF. Of course he used to spot other things as well [laughs] besides the planes! Anyhow I went there, and that job was very interesting. We used to have a day shift and a night shift and all men, and then the boss of Fairey Aviation got a secretary, a woman secretary, so there was only the three of us, and of course test pilots used to ask us if we wanted to go up in the planes. I believe the secretary did once, but I didn’t, no.
We had a factory that made the fuselages at Heaton Chapel, and the fuselages were sent up to Ringway, and then were finished off there, and then part of my job was to phone aerodromes and tell them that so many aircraft were ready for collection. The pilots used to be flown up to Ringway, and put up at the airport hotel, and I had to book the rooms for them there.
Then of course we had paratroopers, they were in one of the buildings as well, training and jumping down. I’d fix the pilots up at the airport hotel, and when they were due to fly out I had to contact the airport to make sure the weather was OK – as much as possible, I mean they didn’t wait for it to be absolutely ideal. Then they’d take off, well then I had to contact the different aerodromes they were passing over, to let them know they were ours. Because I remember once Heaton Chapel factory phoned up and said, ‘will you find from the airport what those planes are that are over?’ and of course the controller there [laughs] – he swore quite a bit – and he said, ‘Don’t they recognise their own **** planes?’
We got women working at the airport after a while, because of course we’d got less men to work, and they were allowed to go inside the fuselages [laughs] – I don’t know what they did, probably tightened the screws – and that had to be stopped because, you know, there was some carrying-on with the men and the women in the fuselages, so they had to make the rule that no woman had to go inside them.
(North West Sound Archive)
OLIVE QUAYLE
I was posted to Ringway in early 1942. Packing parachutes was easy once you knew how to do it – just a job like anything else. We did about twenty a shift. If you packed it wrong, if you weren’t just thinking of what you were doing and the rigging lines dropped in the wrong place, that would cause what we called a Roman candle. Well, he’d come down like a Roman candle.
Parachute packers at Ringway. (Manchester Evening News)
I worked on the ’chutes for Arnhem day and night. That was a fiasco. Terrible, terrible! We knew a lot of the boys who had gone over with the Germans waiting for them.
Only once this lady packed a parachute wrong and he was killed. They took her off straight away. We never heard of her again. They were able to connect a particular parachute to a particular person: every parachute had a log book. We had to sign it, and the man who took it having signed for it, you knew exactly who had taken which ’chute.
We only saw one mishap when we went to watch them training. I think he forgot to hitch his static line up. He came down and dug his own grave. We were not allowed to go any more. But they once wanted us to jump off balloons, just so we would know what it was like. But our supervisor said: ‘None of my girls are going up there.’
When you come to think of all those ’chutes we packed in the war and only one person was killed through somebody making a mistake, it was marvellous, really. I have a photograph of the six of us when we had packed 10,000, individually, 10,000 each. I was there all the time the war was on, so I packed a lot more.
(The Guardian, 14 January 2002 – Peter Lennon)
HARRY CAPPER
In 1940, the firm of E. Pass in Denton started making trepanning machines for drilling unexploded bombs. My father worked along with the Earl of Suffolk who was in charge of bomb disposal, and in Hyde Park, using the machinery from Pass, he cut the largest landmine ever dropped i
n Britain, because they wanted to see what was inside.
They realised they could make these machines for drilling holes in bombs, because there were a lot of unexploded bombs and they wanted to steam the TNT out and defuse them. They had machines that lined up on the fuse, drilled it out and removed it. But the Germans got wise to this, so they started putting one fuse on top of the other so, when they drilled one out and thought it was safe, they took it out and it exploded, because there was one below.
The Earl of Suffolk and his team were blown up because of this. Luckily for my father, he wasn’t there.
(From Denton Voices)
NANCY DRUMM
I worked in a shop during the war; it was a grocer’s shop, a continental butcher’s and grocer’s, and I used to do the books. In West Didsbury, there was a big pub, used to be called the Midland [now the Metropolitan], on Burton Road, and the shop was opposite. It was a Jewish butcher’s; it sold kosher meat and smoked salmon, right through the war. We had rationing books, same as everyone else, but Mr Samuel used to deal with Cini’s, in London. We sold olives and cucumbers, herrings, and like cottage cheese. Three or four kinds of olives: stuffed ones, black ones, and most of those things came from Cini’s in London, or a place in Broughton. We had bread, and bagels, and that special bread that Jewish people have on Friday night, and a tinned loaf sort of thing.
We had the ration book, and they got butter and sugar, same as everybody else in Manchester, or anywhere else. These were all extras that came, and people were used to them. We used to buy rice, a big sack of rice.
The people who had big houses on Palatine Road had their order delivered, we had six order boys, with those bicycles.
I also worked for the fire service, when I went to live with my cousin, in Wythenshawe, near St Luke’s, and we had to go to Mount something-or-other [Sharston Mount?], the fire station. We had to go there to train, how to put a fire out. They switched the water on, and you’d be surprised how heavy the hosepipe was, it took off and we wet everybody in sight! [laughs] Eventually we threw it away, you know we were drowning everybody.
There was a warden on Brownley Road, and we had to report there if there was an alert, for duty. We had an arm band and a tin hat, and a bucket. The warden detailed us where to go, you know, to stand, waiting for incendiary bombs to be put out. Sometimes, you know, when the all-clear went we’d go back home, and many a night we’d be out four or five times a night. And then we had to go to work in the morning.
Actually my cousin was a machinist, but she gave that job up and she went to the Co-op, delivering milk. The men were called up, so they needed girls or women to take over. She loved that job, delivering milk, but she had to give it up when the war was over.
HELEN SEPHTON
My father had a protected job, working for the GPO in Manchester, but he decided he wanted to join up and do his bit. So he joined the Marines; he was stationed in Scotland.
My mum worked nursing at Crumpsall Hospital, and if there’d been a heavy blitz within the past twenty-four hours, there was no buses at all – there was no transport to get her to work. So she used to set off on foot from Abbey Hey [Gorton], because she knew how badly she was needed there.
It was awful because if there’d just been a blitz, and the firemen were there trying to put the blaze out, the roads were all scattered with debris and bricks and rubbish, and there were bodies amongst it all, so she had to just stride over this lot, you know, and just carry on to get to work.
At that time my mother was on the mental health side, people suffering from nervous breakdowns, shellshock.
ANON.
To stop the airmen [in Heaton Park] getting bored there was a lot of entertainment organised. We had dances in various places; there was a very big blister hangar [arched, portable aircraft hangar] and we had dances at least twice a week. And we had entertainments, concerts and things in there. At the beginning they let local girls come to the dances but they very soon had to stop that as they had such a job getting them out of the park afterwards! It was a good job they never bombed Heaton Park.
We were able to use the boats on the lake, and once or twice we had regattas which were great fun. In the afternoon we could use the boats, and the NAAFI was open so we could have refreshments.
(North West Sound Archive)
JEANNE HERRING
Ivan [boyfriend and future husband] had told me that he was a teacher of radio engineering and Morse code at the Wireless Telegraphy College in John Dalton Street, and that he taught several evening classes as well as during the day. He had only been in Manchester a week and had digs in Derbyshire Lane, Stretford. His last job had been in Aberdeen with Royal Navy students but he found it very cold and decided to come south in the summer.
His brother Paul had spent some time working in Birmingham but was now home again in Dublin. He had another brother, Joey, in the RAF.
He also spoke about his family and the fact that several sisters were nurses as well as his mother, who ran a nursing home. I wondered whether he was spinning me a yarn, and in fact several dates later I did check up on him. I noticed the address on the front of one of his textbooks, St Heliers, 450 North Circular Road, Dublin. So one lunch time I went into the Head Post Office in Spring Gardens and looked at the telephone directory for Dublin. Sure enough, the address of the maternity home was there with the name O’Reilly. Although I was very smitten by him, I was cute enough to check his story. Remember, I was seventeen.
On the following Friday we went to see George Formby in Bell Bottom George. It was a daft film but I didn’t see much of it; we were on the back row of the cinema.
ANON.
A rumour swept round that Glen Miller was on camp [in Heaton Park] and we all said ‘ridiculous!’ Anyway, there was a concert at night, and we went in this big blister hangar and there were one or two poorish little turns, then all the lights went out – it was quite dark – and very faintly Moonlight Serenade and the lights came on and it was Glen Miller with the whole orchestra. It was a wonderful concert.
(North West Sound Archive)
ELIZABETH CHAPMAN
Everyone used to listen to ‘I.T.M.A.’, a famous radio comedy programme called ‘It’s That Man Again’, starring a comedian called Tommy Handley. It was a programme of pure nonsense, but it was just what the country needed at that time. It was so light-hearted that it did much to dispel the gloom which some of the radio bulletins of the war sometimes engendered. Occasionally the regular programme would be ‘blacked out’ and a superior voice in a carefully cultivated Oxford accent would announce ‘Germany calling, Germany calling!’ and would then proceed to enumerate various disasters at sea or on land, appertaining to the British troop movements. (These announcements were mostly lies.) These broadcasts were intended to depress and demoralise the listeners in Britain. They did not! No one ever believed what was said. The broadcaster from Germany was known as ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, who became something of a figure of fun and ultimately almost an ‘I.T.M.A.’ character. I always remember going to school the next day after a ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ broadcast and discussing it in the playground along with the Tommy Handley programme amid roars of laughter!
(From One Child’s War)
ANON.
One thing I do remember was being taken to Belle Vue and taking part in a film. A full-length film, and we were the crowd scene. I’ve got the film and it’s often on television and it’s called Journey Together. And everybody in it bar two, I think, were serving RAF. And one of the two was Edward G. Robinson, and the other one was the lady who played his wife. Richard Attenborough was in it. The shot that we are on is just a few seconds. It was real morale-boosting film. I think it was 1944 or it may have been 1945.
(North West Sound Archive)
JENNY JOHNSON
The Arcadia cinema [central Manchester] was only a small place, we used to go there when they used to have a matinee for kids, and it was only tuppence [approximately 1p]. And oh the noise, the noise, the noi
se! And as soon as the manager came down with the programme, you could have heard a pin drop. And he gave us all the instructions, you know, if ever there was a fire or anything, one row goes left and the other row goes right, and of course, me, I jumped over, I should have gone left, but I jumped over and went the wrong way. He said, ‘Your row should have gone left.’
I said, ‘Well my friend’s in the other row.’
He said, ‘It doesn’t matter, you should have gone left. Anyway, you’ll stay until the place empties.’ So I had to stay. He was very good like that.
But to get on to war work, I was conscripted, and somewhere on Deansgate where we were interviewed, and she said, [posh voice] ‘We none of us like being told where to go, do we?’ Anyway, I went to Metropolitan Vickers and it was a month on days and a month on nights, I forget what the pay was. I first started on floors, the floors of the plane. First of all we went in the Training School, we had two weeks in the Training School inside the Metropolitan Vickers works. We learned how to use a file, learned how to use a hammer, and then you had to use a drill, make the hole, and then you had another thing what you called countersink, so when the rivet went in, it was flush with the skin of the plane.
And then of course you went out on to the floor to work with the men, and I was underneath with this man, and every half hour the rivets had to be changed because they had come out of some heating place and they were malleable, and in a few minutes, say about half an hour they went hard, so they had to be changed every so often. And then, well, one Sunday they put me with a fellow, god and it was hot. We had to wear overalls, green overalls, and ooh it was hot, and so I took off the top and just had the trousers on. And it was this fuselage and I was with this fellow, and I know I was naughty, really, because he didn’t know his rivets, and he was putting short ones in when he needed long ones. Anyway, I said, ‘I’m not working with him anymore,’ and I went and sat down in the old place where I was on the floors.
Manchester at War, 1939-45 Page 10
