Bomb Girls--Britain's Secret Army

by Jacky Hyams

  The women’s bedrooms were located down either side of a long corridor. At one end of the corridor were baths, showers, toilets and a small laundry. The bedrooms themselves, with flooring of plain linoleum, were just wide enough to house two women in two single beds. A bureau or chest of drawers was placed at the foot of each bed. There was also a light with a separate control switch for each bed, so that if one girl wanted to read and the other did not, they did not disturb each other. Directly opposite each bed was a window, usually with a small shelf underneath, with a washstand with hot and cold running water. A locker and a chair made up the rest of the bedroom furniture. Some girls would place the lockers side by side to create a small partition area in the middle of the room. The furniture was modern, pale wood, with short curtains for each window. In some hostel camps, even central heating was provided.

  Because the munitions factory operated 24 hours a day, the hostel accommodation was organised so that everyone living in the same unit worked on the same shift, to ensure that everyone would go to sleep at the same time and the place would not be noisy with people coming and going at different hours. Each girl had responsibility for her own laundry and washing. There was even ground made available outside for gardening, should anyone wish to use it.

  This was all carefully planned – but it was still communal living. And not all the hostel accommodation was built to house women workers in small bedrooms for two. Other hostel camps offered dormitory style accommodation, where a number of workers slept in the same area. As a consequence, people were thrown together in ways they might not have experienced before, sharing with others from all over the country, total strangers whose background – and day-to-day habits – might be quite different to their own.

  It’s likely that some girls, accustomed to comfortable, middle-class homes, would have found this kind of communal living spartan and unwelcoming. But for others – given that many homes in Britain did not even have bathrooms, showers or indoor toilets, and that many young women living in cramped accommodation at home had only ever slept in a shared bed with a sibling – the hostel accommodation was comfortable, even luxurious.

  Just as at work, there were rules in the hostels: women had to be in at night at a specific time and they needed a special permit if they wanted to be out later, although some hostel managers or wardens did make the attempt to ease the severe homesickness and emotional upheaval that affected some of the women. They would do their best to ensure that women from the same area or newly made friends could be housed together at first until they got used to this strange new world away from home.

  The idea of building hostels and accommodation specifically for munitions workers to be close to their workplace was a good one in theory, but in practice the scheme proved unpopular. Many women preferred a long commute each day to a lengthy separation from home and loved ones (workers’ transport costs were Government subsidised by an assisted travel scheme).

  As a result, not all of the hostel accommodation was used. In some areas, like Bridgend, there were many empty places. Eventually, these hostels wound up being used by other groups of war workers, such as the Land Girls, or families whose homes had been completely bombed out.

  Today, the exact location of many of these hostels remains unclear, partly because WW2 records of munitions factories and hostel complexes were far from comprehensive, due to the secrecy of the entire munitions operation. However, thanks mostly to diligent local research or the historical archives of the corporate enterprises that switched over to munitions facilities during wartime, some records of the hostel complexes of WW2 do survive.

  Munitions factories around the Coventry area in the Midlands, for instance, had a total of 16 purpose-built hostels, erected away from residential areas but close enough to the factories for a short daily commute. Workers living in these hostels were employed making aircraft parts, ammunition and more everyday items like braces (to hold up servicemen’s trousers). After the war, the Coventry hostels accommodated all manner of workers from across the country and abroad, during the immediate post-war period when Britain was being rebuilt.

  THE THINGUMMYBOB

  As we’ve established, there was ultra-tight security in the munitions factories, and the work had many dangers, but it would be wrong to give the impression that the Bomb Girls’ working life was unrelentingly exhausting and downbeat. As the war progressed, the Government recognised that in order to be fully productive and for morale to be maintained, the munitions workforce would need ongoing support and acknowledgement of their role.

  So workers’ safety issues were tightened up, and in the larger munitions complexes provision was made for married women’s needs, with nurseries and ‘shopping time’ organised. There was also a need for a certain amount of respite away from the demands of the production line. So within the biggest munitions complexes – which were more like large towns with rail networks and their own road infrastructure – a wide range of leisure facilities for the workers was set up.

  There were social clubs, darts teams, operatic societies, rugby and football clubs, drama groups, cinema screenings, all provided to encourage an active range of social activities away from the shop floor. All factories with more than 250 workers carrying out war work had to provide a canteen offering a fresh, hot meal of the meat-and-two-veg variety for about 10 pence (the equivalent of £1.50 today) and the workers had to be given a reasonable amount of time away from the factory floor to enjoy their meal or tea break.

  Music played a very big part in the Bomb Girls’ lives – as it did in wartime for the rest of the country whose main sources of entertainment were either the radio (or wireless, as it was known) or the cinema. (BBC Television started broadcasting in the thirties, but was disbanded in wartime and it wasn’t until the fifties that television became an increasingly popular feature of everyday life.)

  Dancing, too, became more popular than ever. Across the country, every town or village had a church or school hall where men and women could gather to dance the ‘old fashioned’ dances – the waltz, tango, foxtrot and the quickstep. In the big city dancehalls the youngsters would try out the newer dance crazes, especially the energetic and athletic jitterbug, imported by the hordes of lively American troops stationed in Britain in the mid-1940s.

  People needed an escape and dancing fulfilled a dual function – as an accepted way of men and women pairing off, certainly, but also as a huge distraction from the sheer hard slog of living and working in wartime. Everyone needed something to look forward to. In the bigger factories, music would be played constantly in the shops from loudspeakers, and the most popular wartime radio programme of all, the BBC’s Music While You Work, providing continuous live popular music, was broadcast twice daily, Monday to Friday. Launched in June 1940, the programme was specially aimed at factory workers and those in the Forces – though it was so successful it outlasted wartime and continued to be broadcast until 1967.

  Another important BBC Radio programme that started out as a morale booster for factory workers was Workers’ Playtime. This was broadcast at lunchtime, three days a week, live from the big canteen area of a different factory ‘somewhere in Britain’. Singers, musicians and comic performers would perform their acts, watched by an audience of applauding munitions workers. Many of the performers were professionals but occasionally the broadcasts used local amateur talent.

  For the broadcaster, it meant transporting crew, equipment, pianos, producers, musicians and variety artists up and down the country three times a week for performances – yet many of the popular comedians and singers of the time were involved. These included future stars such as Peter Sellers, Tony Hancock, Frankie Howard and Bob Monkhouse, as well as big-band singers of the time like Coronation Street’s Betty Driver, who died in 2011. Playtime was one of the first-ever touring variety shows on the BBC. It ran for 23 years.

  Dance music by orchestras also dominated the airwaves and local dancehalls: bandleaders such as Harry Roy, Jack Payne, Geral
do, Joe Loss, Victor Silvester, Billy Cotton, Henry Hall and Mantovani were wartime household names, and the popular songs of the time – romantic and sentimental tunes that echoed the innermost feelings of millions – would frequently be heard over the radio, allowing listeners to spontaneously join in. Or small groups of munitions workers would start singing the songs together in the canteen as they relaxed between shifts, or on their daily journey to and from the factory.

  Songs such as ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’, ‘We’ll Meet Again’ and ‘There’s a Boy Coming Home on Leave’ were a powerful expression of many Bomb Girls’ feelings about their lives, with sweethearts or husbands in the Forces far away – and no end in sight to the conflict. Everyone knew all the words. With music and dance, they could momentarily forget about the war, lose themselves in romantic dreams and hope for a better time ahead.

  Even today, so evocative are the sounds and words of those wartime songs it is very easy to understand how such a relatively innocent thing as a group of women singing their hearts out really did help to bolster flagging spirits – and deal with the difficulties they all faced.

  Halfway through the war, the Bomb Girls even had a popular song written about them: ‘The Thingummy Bob (that’s going to win the war)’ was a song about the factory worker making the parts or components for the wartime weapons. Recordings of the song by big-name entertainers like singer Gracie Fields and comedian Arthur Askey made millions smile – and reminded everyone that without such women’s work, the war might never be won.

  The song started:

  I’m the girl that makes the thing

  that drills the hole that holds the ring

  that drives the rod that turns the knob

  that works the thingummy bob.

  In other words, my job may be boring and repetitive – but I’m an important part of the war effort.

  OTHER ENTERTAINMENTS

  The dance floor was the acceptable place for socialising between the sexes. (Pubs and bars were then very much a male domain: unaccompanied women weren’t, as a rule, likely to go into them.)

  The wealthy, or the officer classes in the Forces, had nightclubs and smart hotels or specially organised dances in the Officers’ Mess for their off-duty socialising, while the Bomb Girls frequently had dances organised for them in their factory canteens or at the hostels. Women were always encouraged to invite ‘a friend in khaki’.

  For single girls, when their shifts permitted, an evening off at a local dance hall brought a welcome chance to dress up, get on the dance floor and meet new faces in uniform. In the remoter rural areas, spending hours getting to the dance, even if it meant cycling 10 or 12 miles or more to join in the fun, wasn’t seen as an obstacle: the break from the relentless factory routine was what mattered most of all.

  Even the tea break at the hostel or factory canteen was a time for the women to gather together in small groups, sit around drinking tea and chatting. Camaraderie or comradeship between friends and workers never ran so high as it did for these women through the war years. It also did much to help alleviate the loneliness of life for married women while husbands were far away.

  Apart from Workers’ Playtime, other live entertainment from ENSA (Entertainments National Service Association) was also staged in the factories as a means of maintaining factory workers’ morale. ENSA was set up in 1939 by theatre producer Basil Dean specifically to entertain the troops and factory workers. Its first live show took place at the Woolwich Arsenal in July 1940 and as the war went on some of the performers – many of them big entertainment names of the day such as Vera Lynn, Tommy Trinder or Anne Shelton – visited the factories and travelled all over the world to entertain the troops.

  ENSA shows weren’t always a success because the quality of the concerts tended to vary – not for nothing was ENSA nicknamed ‘Every Night Something Awful’ – but the shows still gave workers the chance to let their hair down, laugh and relax for the briefest of times. And the performers worked hard at it: at times, groups of ENSA performers would give three shows a day in canteens in the larger Royal Ordnance factories.

  The local cinema too was a very popular form of escapism, with its chance to see a double bill: a major film, a ‘B’ movie (a low budget film, often with lesser-known actors which was, essentially, a ‘two for one’ value offer for the cinemagoer) and a newsreel like Pathé News.

  Without television, the cinema was the only opportunity for people to see filmed news stories of the battlefront. Sometimes, the women in the audience would sit transfixed, peering at the screen, hoping for a longed-for glimpse of sons or husbands or sweethearts. Shots of the RAF shooting down German planes would be greeted with cheers and clapping.

  SPENDING MONEY

  As a rule, single girls living at home would hand over most, if not all, the contents of their pay packets to their mother – a time-honoured tradition in homes where the extra money was often badly needed. Because their munitions pay was better than any previous earnings, a small sum was often handed back to the wage earner as spending money. For some of the younger Bomb Girls, this represented an opportunity to go shopping.

  Despite the heavy rationing restrictions – items like fabric or material for new clothes were rationed as well as food – their factory work meant many of these girls could spend money at will for the first time. (This was also the case for women who hadn’t worked before but found themselves doing a part-time paid job in wartime.) The shops were far from being crammed with goods, and many items, like cosmetics, were in short supply, but having money, no matter how little, to spend as they pleased, was a novelty and gave a real uplift. Yet it was mostly the Bomb Girls in their teens and twenties who could enjoy the dances and the shopping trips during their time off, whereas women with families were more restricted.

  Some women held down two or three part-time jobs through the war. This kind of juggling of part-time work had not been known for women before, yet now the women were in demand, and their employment was secure. In war work you needed official release from the job, you couldn’t just hand in your notice without formal approval. Most Bomb Girls who did leave the factory job left for health reasons only, though a few of the cheekier ones did take advantage of the fact that their jobs were relatively safe and would take sick leave when it wasn’t strictly necessary.

  HEALTHCARE

  Employing large numbers of factory workers in dangerous work also meant that on-site medical facilities were essential. Accidents took priority, of course, but the general health and wellbeing of the workers was seen as being equally important in the case of ordinary sickness like flu, gastric upsets or dental health problems. Having medical staff on site helped reduce loss of production due to sickness.

  In the early war years, the factory medical facility was sometimes run by voluntary workers, but eventually qualified doctors and hospital trained staff were recruited into the bigger munitions factories, though labour shortages meant recruitment was never easy. Some factories would have one fulltime nurse on site with trained doctors on call by phone in the event of an emergency. Others, such as Bridgend, had six fulltime Medical Officers and a staff of 60 nurses, dispensers and orderlies by late 1944, as well as a fleet of ambulances.

  THE OTHER KIND OF WAR…

  Most munitions women got on well with their male colleagues and they would usually enjoy a joke and a laugh together. But some men, perhaps disgruntled because health problems or their age prevented them from joining the fighting forces, didn’t feel very happy about this ‘new order’ of having women working alongside them. The men were sometimes concerned about the safety of their own jobs, especially in rural areas where unemployment had been high for years. It was an attitude along the lines of, ‘I’ve worked hard to get here and you women think you can just come in here just like that’. It didn’t help, of course. Old habits die hard.

  One consequence of this resistance from a few male workers was that the special government training for certain types of job
s requiring engineering or technical knowledge was not always put into practice afterwards. A woman might undergo a four- or eight-week training course for a specific engineering role only to discover, once she started work, that she was assigned to a lower level factory job because a male supervisor or colleague didn’t believe it was ‘women’s work’.

  This was frustrating, especially as, before war started, organised training for women had mostly been restricted to domestic service work. But the engineering training itself was, nonetheless, a step forward. And Bomb Girls who were good workers were rewarded with promotion: a diligent, careful worker could be moved up to ‘Blue Band’ (supervisory status) sometimes being placed in charge of more than one facility (or ‘shop’). Yet most of the Bomb Girls’ factory work was routine, unskilled labour: the majority of women went straight from the labour exchange to the factory floor.

  THE PROPAGANDA MACHINE

  Poster campaigns and filmed footage of Allied victories shown in cinemas were important for the nation’s wartime morale. But the need to keep war workers fully motivated, to keep munitions production at its peak, also meant passing the positive message on in other ways.

  Despite all the secrecy around the day-to-day factory routine, it was clear to the authorities that the so-called secret army needed to see some form of appreciation for their efforts. The general public couldn’t be told what these women were actually doing or where they were. (The newspaper captions in the ‘spin’ stories never gave the location of the factory.) But the authorities knew that somehow, they had to do everything possible to keep the women’s motivation high.