Bomb Girls--Britain's Secret Army

by Jacky Hyams

  In the bigger factories, as the war started to turn in Britain’s favour, the factory’s radio system was used, broadcasting ‘good news’ bulletins interspersed with Workers’ Playtime and Music While You Work. The authorities felt, right from the beginning, that emphasis also had to be made to the workers on the significance of their role in comparison with the mind-numbing routine of the everyday toil on the production line. In today’s parlance this was Government public relations, or ‘spin’, in the form of carefully planned events designed to keep workers’ spirits up – and show the public, via the newspapers and cinema, that the workers’ efforts were being supported.

  Members of the Royal Family undertook visits to the munitions factories, as did the female entertainers of the times. Vera Lynn and Gracie Fields – who were adored by millions everywhere – performed in the factories for the Bomb Girls as early as 1941. These visits were usually filmed for the newsreels. One such newsworthy event came in 1942, when Britain’s wartime Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, visited the Aycliffe Royal Ordnance Factory in Staffordshire and the Aycliffe Bomb Girls. Although it was mid-May, it had been snowing in the area in the days before the visit, and the snow had turned to brown slush. This, the workers decided, was definitely not good enough for ‘Winnie’, whose inspirational radio broadcasts throughout the war did so much to boost the spirits of the nation. So, in order to make their site more attractive for the esteemed visitor, the Angels went out to find clean snow from the surrounding countryside, and carefully laid it on top of the slush!

  In 1942, special Works Relations Officers were sent out across the country to educate the workers in the Royal Ordnance factories. These visits focused on the progress of the war itself, as a means of inspiring or encouraging workers. Events were organised, with guest speakers and educational films. On a few occasions, visits were set up to other ROF sites, so that the women from selected factory sectors could see the positive results of their efforts.

  Letters from troops themselves were read out, thanking the Bomb Girls for their efforts, and on one occasion a letter was sent from the Desert Rats (the 7th Armoured Division) in North Africa, specifically thanking workers in Bridgend for ‘never sending out a single dud mortar bomb’.

  To a large extent, this propaganda worked well. But in the Bomb Girls’ own stories of their munitions years which follow this chapter, it is obvious that the difficulties they often faced made considerable impact on their lives, both during and after wartime. They were young, innocent and inhabiting a world where everyone around them was ‘doing their bit’. And even now, what comes through loud and clear in their memories of those times, was their sheer grit, their plucky resilience in the face of being conscripted to work in a job that was dangerous, exhausting and sometimes debilitating.

  Their stories of wartime work underline the fact that theirs was very much a generation that didn’t ask questions but just ‘got on with it’. Yet only now, all those years on, can we fully recognise – and acknowledge – their worth.

  CHAPTER 3

  BETTY’S STORY: THE YELLOW LADIES

  ‘ARE YOU ANYONE’S BUDGIE?’

  Betty Nettle was born in 1925 and has lived in the Stormy Down/Kenfig Hill area of Bridgend, Glamorgan, her entire life. She started working at the Welsh Arsenal, ROF Bridgend, as a teenager in 1941 until war ended in 1945. Her husband of over 50 years, Ivor, died in 2005. This is her story:

  Work was very scarce in this area before the war came along, other than in the mines. And we were not a mining family. My father, Leonard William Cornish Reynolds, was a ganger, working on the railway, looking after the tracks. I was the youngest girl in a family of seven children. By the time I arrived, the eldest three had already left home; they were grown up, working. My sisters Edith and Nancy went into service in a big house up in London: that was the only work option then.

  Families were big in those days, so if someone had a shop, their children worked in it – or their nieces and nephew, which meant that round here, as far as work went, it was who you knew, not what you knew.

  I grew up in a respectable, double fronted house. As a child – I must have been about three – my earliest memory is of my younger brother Joe being born in the front room. (We always called him ‘Joe’, but his real name was Norman.) You didn’t have a nurse or anything like that when a baby came, you had a local lady from along the road from us: one of those ladies that ‘did’. They learned how to ‘do’ as they went along; they brought people into the world and they laid them out for the undertaker, so it was usually the same person that came to the house when someone was born or died.

  Our local lady that ‘did’ was also a herbalist. We lived just outside the village, about one-and-a-half miles away, just a few scattered houses, really. You rarely saw a doctor. It was always the lady that ‘did’ that came round. If you were sick, she’d make you up a medicine. She’d never really tell you what she was doing; she didn’t say what was in the medicine. Yet people came from a long way in our area to see her, so she must have been doing something right.

  We were well shod, always plenty to eat, lots of friends around us. My mother, Elizabeth Jane, was a good manager. My dad was allowed to hunt rabbits by a local farmer, so we had chickens, ducks, geese. Everything had a home with us: cats, dogs, even people sometimes. My mother was a good cook, too. At home we had porridge or boiled eggs, and sandwiches in school – it was too far away to go home for lunch – and always a cooked meal at 5pm, when Dad came home from work.

  Our home revolved around our father, which the way life was then. If my mother said ‘no’, it was no good going to my father. We all knew the rules and we didn’t go beyond them. My mother was a churchgoer and my father’s favourite saying was: ‘You be careful of our name. You’ve got it till you marry – the boys have to carry it all their lives.’ It was our good name we lived to. That was it.

  In 1930, I started school. Bryndu was the name of the school. Walk a mile-and-a-half to the village, then walk another mile up the road to get to the school. We could have gone to a nearer school, but we chose to go there. My brother Jack was there, my sister Mary, and then me. As long as you behaved yourself, it was fine.

  I was bright enough, I suppose. I wasn’t naughty, not in school. We had a very old teacher who lived in Porthcawl. Any naughtiness and he’d be warning us: ‘I’ll see your father.’ We didn’t know if he did see him, but we didn’t risk Dad’s displeasure. It was my mother who was the ‘flipper’, who had a bit of a temper. I only saw my father lose his temper once. If you were reading something, whatever it was, my mother, if she wanted me to do something would give me a ‘flip’ – not exactly a smack, but you knew she meant business. I can still hear her now: ‘Betty, get your ’ead out o’ that tuppeny novel.’

  Us kids played out everywhere – under the trees, in the woods, the fields, by water, everything a kid could wish for. I was good at sports, especially rounders [a game played with bat and ball]. And I was a good sprinter. My sisters would come home from their jobs in service once a year, just for a week. They’d get half a day off a week and that one week a year. The world they lived in seemed so far away to us then. Today, of course, you’ve got that world in your living room. We had radio and the newspapers to tell us about the world. We’d listen to things like Children’s Hour or Dick Barton or a variety show. But you didn’t have much interest in politics because it wasn’t there, in your living room, in the way it is now. I honestly don’t remember my parents ever talking to us about what was happening in Germany with Hitler. So we lived with ignorance, and innocence, too. There is a real difference. You had a life to live and none of that stuff about the world concerned you in the way it does now. And I don’t think you really looked to the future; the idea of the future didn’t push me forward that much. As a kid, you lived in the present. Whatever else was going on was very far away.

  At school, there were poor, sickly kids who would have to be given things like malt regularly [malt extract
was popular in the twenties and thirties as a dietary supplement for children who might be deficient in minerals and vitamins] but my mother kept us fit, both with what we ate and certain things she would do.

  For instance, every spring my mother would mix up a basinful of treacle and sulphur till you could stand your spoon in it. Each one of us would give our spoon to our mother and she would put it through the mixture. We’d line up for that spoonful; we called it medicine. In the winter, if you had a cold coming, you either got elderflower tea or a blackberry concoction with hot water and sugar to sip. Now, of course, we call those things natural remedies, buy them in a shop. But then, they were never shop-bought.

  Every Monday morning, a man with a horse-drawn cart would come round; he’d sell everything you could think of – soap, cloths, tea towels, paraffin for the oil lamps. We didn’t have electricity for many years. My parents were dead by the time we had electricity here, many years after the war. They were offered it, of course, but they said it was too expensive. We didn’t have running water indoors for many years, either. We had a tap across the road, or we went further on to the well on the other side of the railway line. The loo was an earth closet down the bottom of the garden.

  We had a ‘copper’ in our garden shed. [A copper was an early water heater and boiler, built into a corner of a room with space underneath for a fire to heat it.] It was made of brick with a big copper bowl. You filled it up with water, lit the fire underneath and it boiled. So you’d have a wash with the hot water every day and a bath whenever. The bath would hang on a nail outside.

  Of course, this was a mining area. The coal ‘lords’ built the houses for the workers, though that didn’t involve us, as a non-mining family. The history of Wales, of course, is all about coal – I believe the first-ever million-pound cheque was written in Cardiff and that was for coal. At one stage, much later, I remember going up to the Rhonda Valley with a friend and we’d walk up to the houses – they all looked the same, everything was the same. It was easy to walk into the wrong house!

  Financially, at home, everything depended on the money the father brought into the home – and how well the mother managed the wages. There’d be gambling, drinking, womanising going on, so it really did depend on what your parents did or were up to when it came to how the family lived. I appreciate the fact that I had good parents.

  In July 1939, I left school. I was 14 and my mother said to me, ‘Betty, there’s a job going at Kenfig Hill, minding a little one-year-old, start Monday morning.’ So I literally walked out of school on the Friday and started work the following Monday. It was all arranged. My mother knew these people.

  It was lovely minding the baby, a real little doll. Get him up in the morning, wash him, dress him, feed him, take him for a walk in a big boat pram. That pram was posh but the family had a drapers shop. It was actually in the front room of their house, but it was still a drapers and sold everything. I’d come away at about 6pm and the pay was half-a-crown [2s 6d] a week, a half-day off on Saturday and no work on Sunday mornings.

  The day they told us we were at war, that September, my mother was crying her eyes out. She’d lost a brother in the First World War. And she had sons. My dad was too old to be called up. But of course, you couldn’t see what was going to happen. We had a new aerodrome a few miles away at Stormy Down and we already knew the big arsenal was being built at Bridgend. But who knew what was ahead?

  Not long before war started, my brother Jack, seven years older than me, was already helping build the arsenal. He’d worked in quarries locally before that. Of course, once word went round about the arsenal – and that working there paid more money than the quarries – off he went to work there.

  Nothing much happened in those first few months of the war. Women were encouraged to volunteer and, of course, all single women were conscripted by 1941 and this was later extended to married women. But I was too young to be conscripted. My sister Mary, a year older than me, wound up working in the arsenal in pyrotechnics. My sister Nancy had married and left service, so she wound up working at a paper mill – Dickensons in Watford, near London. Just a couple of days after war had been declared she brought her little son, Leonard, down to our house – and left him with us. Nancy’s husband was going into the Forces straight away. All the talk was they were going to bomb London, so Nancy left Leonard with us for safety. After that, the family always called Leonard one of the first evacuees.

  I carried on working with the baby for about 18 months after war was declared, then an older person started running the drapers’ shop so I found a different job, still childminding, in the next village. I was looking after a little boy and a small baby.

  By Christmas, 1941, there were uniforms everywhere. For a 16-year-old, that meant good fun at the dance. I know it sounds stupid now, but you didn’t dwell on the war itself. To an extent, all the changes around us – the building of the arsenal, the uniformed men everywhere, all the new people coming into the area to work at the arsenal – it all made life more exciting. One minute this was a place with no one around, then there were all these new people to meet.

  In January 1942, I was 17-and-a-half. Until then, I’d been living-in at my job in the village. They were a family of farmers and other members of their family suddenly started coming to live with them. They wanted me to look after them too but I got fed up and just came home to stay with my mother. Then, one day at home my sister Mary told me: ‘They’re taking on youngsters at the arsenal, Betty.’ And my ears pricked up instantly. I knew Mary had money to spend, and I didn’t. I knew her money was quite good – about £3 a week – which was a lot more than I was getting. I had so little from the village job, I’d walk home from the village to save thruppence to put towards things I had to save for, like clothes.

  Clothes were very important to me, even though I didn’t have any money. My mother always used to say: ‘Always keep something tidy to wear because if you’re invited somewhere, you might be able to afford the fare there, but you won’t have enough to buy something new.’ At the time, my mother had bought a new costume for me on the understanding that I’d pay her back for it. I’d spotted it in a shop window in Bridgend. Her motto was: ‘You can’t have anything unless you work to pay for it.’

  That suit was fawn with a brown pinstripe skirt and jacket. It cost a guinea [£1 1s], which was a lot then; I’d repay her a shilling a week. I’d knitted a brown jumper to go with it, but it would be a struggle to save up for brown shoes to match. So when I heard about the jobs at the arsenal, I didn’t think twice. I’d join all the other under-18s they needed there. The place was divided up into different sections making ammunition, pellets, pyrotechnics, detonators, and so on, but only over-18s could work there; you were not allowed to come into contact with explosives until you’d reached 18. So they hired lots of youngsters like me to work in the ‘clean’ sections, like one of the canteens or in textiles. I was told I’d be working in textiles. What I didn’t know was what I’d be doing was making factory clothing, overalls and headgear.

  On my first day, I walked into this huge area with hundreds of people doing all sorts of different things – sitting at cutting tables, with row after row of sewing machines or pressers [to press finished goods]. Half of us had never seen a sewing machine in our lives. I had tried asking girls I knew ‘what are you doing?’ before I started but they all said they didn’t know! They just allocated you the job and you went where they told you to go – and from that point you more or less got on with it.

  That first day, they sat me down at a sewing machine. It was a heavy-duty electric machine and I was given a piece of cloth about a yard wide, two yards long. I sat there, staring at it. A woman leaned over and said: ‘Just put it under.’ So I did what I was told, put it under, put my foot on the treadle, and tried my best to work it. But really, I didn’t have a clue. I’d gone right across the material. It scared me to death, it was so quick the way it just kept sewing, making stitches.

  There wa
s no one around to tell you off. Some of the girls working near me had already worked in a factory before, and they had a good laugh at my efforts. ‘Oh, you’ll get used to it,’ one girl said. And sure enough, after a couple of hours at it, I learned how to control the machine. I could start making things.

  We were making the uniforms for the over-18s working in the different sections – coats, belts, caps, turbans, jackets, waistcoats; trousers for the men. White coats for the women. The belts were in different colours for different shifts for the workers in the ammo section. Blue for one shift, green or red for another. When I started work there, I already wore trousers. You couldn’t buy them, I just wore my brothers’ cast-offs.

  I worked two shifts, either day or afternoon for about eight months. It wasn’t a very long journey to work by bus, because we were living less than five miles away from the arsenal. Because of the bus timetable, I tended to have a break between the time I finished work at 3.30pm and when the bus left for home. So I soon got into the routine of it.

  At one point in textiles, they gave us parachutes to repair. These were made of fine cotton, lawn, ecru-like silk; they would bring them in for us to mend, take a panel out and put a new one in. Some of the girls would take a panel out of a parachute to repair it and if the bits that were left over were any good, they’d hand them around: ‘Ooh, I’ll have that bit!’ One girl was so good at making things, she could literally just look at you and go: ‘Oh, you’re 36-24-38’ and then she’d cut it out, without a pattern, and make something to fit you out of parachute silk or cotton. She’d make you a petticoat or cami-knickers.

  Of course, you’d have to put them on and wear them before you went home. You were always searched, every time you went in or left the arsenal. The police and the searchers were always there, at the kiosks, on the way in and out. You had your pass to show on the way in. But they could always do a random search. I was lucky; I never got caught with the parachute camiknickers. If I had, I’d probably have been out of a job, but the reason we did it was the rationing: you couldn’t buy anything without the rationing coupons we all used. I know a few people got sacked for stealing powder bags [bags made by the workers in textiles to store the powder for ammunition].