Bomb Girls--Britain's Secret Army

by Jacky Hyams

  At one point I got involved in trying to get a memorial set up in Bridgend for the people that died there in the war; eventually the Civic Society took it over. I had an invitation in 2012 to go to the Memorial Sunday wreath-laying at the Cenotaph in London. Of course, my family wanted me to go. But when I thought about it, I realised it might knock me over emotionally. It was the first time munitions workers were being recognised for what they did in the war.

  But it had hung around for so long. These days, I get upset even at the local war memorial. The boys from the village that were killed in the war were our friends. Yet when I stop to look at it all, I enjoyed my years at Bridgend. We were young and we shared everything, good or bad. We were not rich, by any means.

  But in life itself, we were rich.

  CHAPTER 4

  MARGARET’S STORY: THE PROCESS WORKER IN ‘A’ SECTION

  ‘ONE SPARK AND YOU COULD BE DEAD’

  Margaret Curtis was born in 1922 in Lanarkshire, Scotland, and went into service as a parlour maid at age 14. She was employed as a process worker at ROF Bishopton, in Strathclyde, a huge explosives factory just outside Glasgow, for three-and-a-half years. After the war, she married and moved south to live near Braintree, in Essex. Her husband, Jack, died in 2000. She has one son, two grandchildren and one great grandchild, born in 2013. This is her story:

  I was a twin, but my sister died just a few hours after me. I was born at High Blantyre, Lanarkshire. They named me Margaret Reid Williams after my grandfather who was a coal miner: in the 1800s Blantyre had been a big coal-mining area. My mother’s father, John Boyd, was a first-class shoemaker; he died sometime during the First World War.

  My dad, Donald Stewart Reid, worked on the roads. He was a great dad; he loved his home and his garden. He’d been in the Army for a short time in France in WW1, just before the Armistice was signed. Being brought up in the country in a little two-storey house made for a happy childhood. We were always very well-fed, even though my dad had several different jobs. My mum just stayed at home with me until the war started and then we both wound up working at Bishopton. My mum was a wonderful knitter. You name it, she could knit it. Or cook or bake it.

  As a child, you made your own enjoyment with simple things. I think we were a lot happier than children are today, to be honest. My few toys were a doll and a pram. I spent a lot of time playing with my toy sweetshop, or playing hopscotch or five stones [a very old game played with five small stones or pebbles, where one stone is tossed in the air and another is picked up before catching the first stone before it hits the ground].

  You got a penny a week pocket money if you were lucky. I remember taking empty jam jars back to the Co-op; they’d give you a penny for a 2lb jar and a halfpenny for a 1lb jar. An empty lemonade bottle got you a penny. And, of course, those pennies bought you a bag of sweets.

  I was quite a good child; my mum never had to tell me off very often. I wouldn’t upset her for the world. Where we lived was very countrified. There was a coal mine just up the road: Blantyre in the late 1800s was a very big mining community with three mines. They had a huge disaster at Dixons Pit in 1877, Scotland’s worst mining disaster when 207 miners were killed in an explosion.

  Everywhere you looked, as a kid, there were ‘bings’ – big piles of waste material from the mining process. You’d often see people raking amongst it to find coal. As a kid, you’d have great fun sliding down the bing on a big coal shovel. We were at the bottom of a hill and a bit further up there was a railway, which took the coal from the pit. And further up, you were right out in the countryside.

  The only time I remember my dad being out of work was in the General Strike in 1926. Yet we never went hungry. And we were never cold – though you never had a day off from school when it snowed in those days. There was no electricity; we had oil lamps. The paraffin lamp hung on a wall bracket. We never had a cooker either, everything was cooked on a kitchen range; it shone from end to end. And we’d have what is called a ‘rag rug’ on the floor.

  Mum and Dad used to make them out of strips of rag knotted through a mesh, or an old sack. Sometimes Mum would dye the strips of rag different colours. You got your milk delivered by a man with a horse and cart. I can still see him measuring it out of a churn into Mum’s big jug. We brought fresh farm butter too. We did have cold running water; you heated it in the little kitchen at the back where we had our copper. That was where you boiled everything, including the clothes you washed. You just lit the fire underneath it.

  One of my most vivid memories of childhood is my mum standing outside the back door doing her washing in a big wooden tub on a hefty wooden stand, complete with washboard. She’d let me turn the mangle – no spin dryers around then! At one time we moved to a house in Dundee in a place called Lochee with a small back garden. Dundee’s a lovely city, but we had a robbery there. They stole money from the gas meter, and they smashed my beautiful doll to bits by sitting on it.

  As I child, I had diphtheria, which was quite serious then and I wound up in hospital for six weeks. It was complete isolation; I didn’t even see my parents. Then I went home for a month and I got measles: another month in hospital in isolation. As a result, I developed a real phobia of injections. To this day, I hate them.

  I went to a convent school in Dundee for a while, then to a local primary and from there I went to Calder Street Secondary School in Lower Blantyre. You had to walk to school but if it rained, you were given tuppence for the bus. Sometimes I’d walk anyway and spend the money on sweets. I wasn’t very clever. I quite liked History, and Music. One big childhood memory is singing ‘Flow Gently Sweet Afton Among Thy Green Braes’ on Burns Night.

  At secondary school I always did well at cookery and laundry. My needlework was good too. Domestic Science was a big part of our secondary education – and Scottish Country Dancing, which I liked. You were taught how to clean and polish in a school bungalow – for me, that was a real relief from written or desk work. I didn’t take any exams, so I left school at 14 in 1936. I’d have loved to take a course in cookery but I didn’t have enough confidence in myself to do so. I was always good at the practical in cookery, but not the theory.

  The only jobs around for girls like me were in domestic service. You went to the local labour exchange if you wanted to find work. And I was lucky to find a job as a parlour maid in a big house in Cambuslang, a suburb of Glasgow. I’d get a bus and then walk up the hill. I used to have to wear a black dress, a little white apron, a little white cap and black lace-up shoes and stockings.

  The parlour maid’s job was to help with the meals: first, serve the meals in the dining room then tidy up afterwards. I’d start work at 8.30am and get away by about 6pm. I considered myself really lucky earning about 20 shillings a month. I’d give my mum half and keep the rest. The people I worked with were a lady and gentleman with two grown-up daughters living at home. One of the daughters used to make lampshades, the other was some sort of therapist. You’d get Sundays off and one half-day off on a Saturday, unless there was a function in the house, like people coming for a meal; then you had to work all day. I was their only servant. The lady of the house did all the cooking.

  Just before war broke out in 1939, we moved to a house in Springwall, Blantyre, a nice house with a garden where Dad could grow his veggies and keep chickens, so we always had nice new-laid eggs. Blantyre had a railway station too, so I’d often go to Glasgow with my mum – just a bit of window shopping and some lunch. Or my friend Mary and I would go to the pictures in Hamilton; you could get the bus from Blantyre to Hamilton.

  In those days, if you saw someone wearing the same thing as you, you wouldn’t like it, so I used to go all over the shops in Glasgow to find something a little bit different. My mum would knit all my jumpers and cardigans, but I still loved looking for something new: one dress has always stuck in my mind, a lovely green dress with a V yoke and a V at the back with a flared skirt. The material was some sort of knitted silk; you probably can’t b
uy that now. But I still remember it. And the little ankle-strap black patent shoes I wore with it. I thought I was Queen of the May with those shoes.

  In March 1939, my sister May was born, so Mum and I were preoccupied with the new baby. I was at home, with Mum and Dad, just three months away from my 17th birthday, when we heard the news that war had broken out. We knew it was coming; everyone knew. I did find it all a bit frightening, especially when we had the blackout, but we got used to it. Sometimes my friend Mary and I would be walking home from the pictures and the siren would go off: we’d run like mad to get home and into the Anderson shelter in our garden, waiting for the all-clear. I carried on working at the house in Cambuslang through 1940 and 1941 but it was obvious I was going to have to do something. But what? I didn’t fancy the idea of the Forces; nor did my parents. In the end, my dad said: ‘Don’t wait for call-up, Margaret, I don’t mind if you go into munitions.’

  At home, we’d already had a change: my grandmother, who’d worked as a spinner in a jute mill all her life, fell over and broke her leg. So my mother brought her home to us and she stayed with us, helping look after May, the baby. So me doing war work would be ok.

  In the early months of 1942, I was off to the local labour exchange to register for munitions work. I went with my friend Mary and they told us we’d be earning £2 a week, a lot more than I’d earned in service. We’d already heard it was good money, because the word had got around. And we knew it was an all-girls’ environment. They hired us on the spot, but there was not much information about what work we’d be doing. They said: ‘You’ll be shown what to do once you start.’ They did say we’d either be working in the cordite section or the gun cotton section.

  On my first day I was told I’d be in gun cotton, and my friend, Mary Paterson, was in cordite. To be honest, I didn’t mind what work I did. Being so close to Glasgow, a lot of the girls I’d be working with were city, salt of the earth types, who turned out to be great women to work with. And, right from the start, everyone was of the same mind: ‘This is the war effort and we’re all helping. That’s it.’

  The shift pattern was 6am to 2pm, 2pm to10pm, or 10pm to 6am. You changed your shift every week. The journey to the factory was, walk to the train station at Lower Blantyre, get the train to Bishopton and then walk to the factory gate. They’d lay on special trains for the munitions girls, so for the early shift I’d get up at 4.30am for the 5.10am train.

  Once you got there you went into a special area to change; I had to wear a white jacket and trousers, a white turban and rubber boots or Wellingtons. You wore those summer and winter in the plant, but you could not leave the plant in your wellies – that was forbidden. In my section, the floors were always damp. And to prevent explosions the plant was not allowed to dry out.

  There were lots of other things you were forbidden to take into the building. No metal anywhere, no safety pins, no hairpins, no matches, no ciggies – the tiniest spark could put everyone at risk from explosion. There were men, the ‘danger building men’, whose job it was to carry out spot checks for any dangerous items, going round all the time, double checking on us.

  My section was one of a number of buildings on the site. The cordite section was extra dangerous because they were working with highly explosive nitro glycerine, so these sections were underground buildings. You could only see them by the huge grass mounds. The women who worked there wore the same uniform as us, but they had to wear felt-soled shoes for safety reasons.

  I started out working in a section with 12 other women and a supervisor. We made squares and plugs out of the gun cotton. The gun cotton came to the factory by rail, then it was stored in vats to be mixed with water and other chemicals. It looked just like snowflakes. First it was processed, tested and then drained off. Then it was piped into individual machines where it arrived to be blended, or rather shovelled, from one bin to another and back again until it was ready for use.

  Our job was to get it into the squares or plugs before it was pressed into shape. There was no music or radio to listen to while you were working. You had to concentrate completely on what you were doing because you were working processing machines. One of the supervisors showed me how to work the machinery on my first day. I soon got the hang of it.

  The gun cotton would be handed to me in a small container; it was a fine powder, not quite the consistency of flour but near enough. I’d put a funnel into the machine and shake the stuff in until it was filled. Then I’d close the lid on the machine, push the handle to press it and the gun cotton would come out in an oblong shape as a block, about two inches deep.

  Then these blocks would go into a tray to be carried over to a pressing house where it was weighed and pressed into shape. Some of the blocks would make little round shapes and these too went over to the pressing house. After that, in the drilling room, holes would be put into the blocks and the cores and then they were dipped in acetone, in another section, for protective coating. Then these were dispatched and became part of the detonator assembly for depth charges and other explosive devices.

  We were all told we had set targets to achieve on each shift. Whatever the target was, it had to be achieved on that shift. Sometimes the forewoman would come up and ask you to do ‘a bit extra’. You just had to get it done. God help you if you didn’t keep the girl in the pressing house going.

  I’ll never forget Annie, the girl in the pressing house; she was a cracking worker, a big girl and an absolute gem. She’d stand there, hands on her hips waiting for us to fill up the trays. ‘WHAT THE BLOODY HELL ARE YOU DOING?’ she’d yell at us. At first, I was a bit worried about Annie’s yelling. Then I got it. We all wanted to do our best. She just happened to be an extremely hard worker. In fact, she kept us on our toes.

  They really didn’t tell you too much. You didn’t even know where these things that we were making were going. We just knew that what we were making was something related to depth charges. In fact, what we were doing was making explosives for the mines being carried by the submarines. You didn’t have any real sense that it was dangerous work in the beginning. But then, after I’d only been there for a few days, something happened that surprised me. The danger man came over to me. He had spotted something I’d completely forgotten to remove – a small Kirby grip in my hair.

  ‘Ooh sorry, forgot to take it out,’ I told him. Then I got a bit of a shock. I wasn’t expecting to hear what he said next: ‘You’ve not been here long, so I’ll let you off. But do it again and you’ll be suspended.’

  I was mortified. Then I realised just how dangerous anything metal, no matter how small, could be. One little spark and we could all be dead, every one of us, burnt to a cinder. Stories about the danger would go round all the time, as I soon discovered. One day, in the canteen, a girl told me how someone had been cleaning a big machine with a brush. Somehow, a single hair from the brush had got into the mechanism. It caused one spark and whoosh, everything went up, though the girl didn’t know for sure if any workers had been killed.

  Then, after a few months at Bishopton, I came in one day to start my 2 to 10pm shift. It was a lovely day. I was on my way to the changing room. For some reason, I had a library book in my hand. The next thing, I heard a huge explosion and the book flew up in the air and hit the ground. One of the underground cordite houses had just gone up. The rumour we heard later was that two or three people were killed. But even though you couldn’t see a thing, it brought it all home to you: these explosives really do kill. And we’re working with them; anything can happen. You never did find out why or what happened that day. They kept all those sorts of things, that information, close. We didn’t work in the area, so it was nothing to do with us. You just had to get on with what you were doing.

  Mum started working in the gun cotton section after me. If we were on the same shift, sometimes we’d go in the canteen together; that was the one place where we’d all let off steam. The food was nice: soup, steak pie, about a shilling for a hot meal. I don’t
know if they were allowed a little bit more, but it was always plentiful. No desserts, mind you, thanks to sugar rationing.

  The canteen was very sociable. The men would come in from the machine shops and a big group of us would sit there, playing cards. The radio would be playing, Joe Loss, Henry Hall, Betty Driver. I’d always join in when everyone started the singing. We used to sing a lot. Your time in the canteen depended on the shift. On day shift you’d get a break at 12 noon; you’d get an hour. There was no point in leaving the factory, and anyway, you weren’t allowed out until your shift ended.

  There was one time I remember when the machines were shut off and we all stopped work completely. I was on night shift and a call came through, then the sirens went off. We were all told to leave and go straight to the changing room. All the lights went out around us and somehow we had to make our way to the changing rooms. It was so, so scary. Then we had to stay there, praying for the sound of the all-clear. Mum was working night shift too that night, for some reason.

  Of course it was frightening, hearing the drones of planes overhead with no idea where they were heading. That particular night, I realised afterwards, the entire factory had shut down, though luckily, that night, the German planes didn’t do any damage. We’d already experienced that terrible time in March 1941, the two nights when the German bombers attacked the Clyde shipyard and bombed Clydebank. I’d been at home both nights. My dad just plucked up little May from her bed and rushed us all into the Anderson shelter.

  It’s funny what you remember. May was only two at the time and she seemed fascinated by the reflections of lights coming through the small space under the door of the shelter. We could hear it all because the River Clyde runs through the middle of Blantyre on its way to Glasgow, so the bombers were using the area as a road map. Sure enough, in the morning, when we came out after the all-clear, we found the remains of a spent flare in the garden. [The Luftwaffe dropped flares, attached to a tiny parachute, for target illumination and marking at night.]