by Jacky Hyams
One Sunday, a small group of us Swynnerton munitions girls decided to go to the local church. Not one single person said a word to us. We did make an attempt to be pleasant. We even invited some of the local girls back to the hostel, just to show them where we lived. But we were never invited back. It was that bad. They just couldn’t accept all ‘the hostel girls’, as they used to call us.
The food they gave us at the hostel wasn’t up to much. I still remember the huge bins in the canteen. You’d have to scrape the remains of your dinner into them after you’d finished, so the farmers could collect them. Nothing ever got wasted in those days, not a scrap. Lily’s mother up in Scotland had hens, so she used to send us eggs. She’d wrap them in newspaper and post them in a shoe box. She managed to send them off to us quite often – and not a single egg got broken. Lily and I would take them up to the serving hatch in the hostel and ask if they could be boiled for us. At home, things weren’t too bad for my family either, foodwise; my mother had an allotment with hens and rabbits.
My mum worried about me all the time, being so far from home. It was bad enough when I’d been working at Aycliffe. At one stage, in 1941, the Germans bombed Hartlepool, near the coast, just over 20 miles from Aycliffe and she’d stood on the step outside our house, watching the skies, thinking: ‘Are they going to hit Aycliffe? Will our Laura come home tonight?’
At holiday times, Christmas and Easter, I’d go back home. After I went off to Swynnerton my father was moved from 7A to another section at Aycliffe, operating the conveyor belts. It was good going home to see everyone but it was so hard when you had to go back. When you did go into the town back home, you could tell the girls who worked with the yellow powder at Aycliffe because their hair was yellow. Even the turban couldn’t cover it up at the front. And my dad lost his hair. At first it turned yellow, then it was gone. The men, of course, didn’t wear the turbans to cover their heads.
When you’d travel back to Swynnerton, the trains would always be packed, mostly with soldiers. We weren’t in any kind of uniform. Munitions girls could not wear any uniform outside the shop floor, because they said there was a risk of contamination. So when we got to the station, the WVS wouldn’t serve us tea. Cups of tea were only for those in uniform. In the end, we’d pal up with the soldiers, sitting on their kitbags. That way, they’d get us a cuppa from the WVS. The soldiers knew what we did in munitions and that we were part of it all. In a way, little things like that made you feel you were involved with some secret or underground force. But you didn’t want to waste your time resenting it: you were doing something worthwhile and that was what really mattered.
On one visit home, I went with Mum and Dad to see some relations in Middlesbrough. And there I was introduced to a George Hardwick. He was in the Royal Artillery and briefly home on leave. I wasn’t that keen at first. George was five years older than me and had been born in Australia. But before we left, he asked me if we could keep in touch, write to each other. And that was the start of me and George. He wound up being sent to Malta, working on the big guns.
What with having a boyfriend and with Lily as a good friend and roommate, I suppose that kept me going with the work at the factory. But it was still a struggle. I’d get very down at times, missing my family. I struggled, being away from my home.
In the last few months of the war, when we all knew it was nearly over, Lily left work and went back to Scotland. By then, quite a lot of people at the factory were leaving. Some of the Irish girls at the hostel were courting Americans – and many of them were making plans to marry them and going to live over there. Bill too had now left Malta and wound up being stationed at Catterick. So by then, we were able to see a bit more of each other.
I actually left Swynnerton just before the war finished. I went home on leave and I was very down, knowing that Lily wouldn’t be there when I went back. My mother, who was working as a cook at a children’s nursery at the time, was so worried about me, she confided in her boss.
‘Get her to see a doctor about the depression,’ was her boss’s advice.
I went to see the doctor and told him a bit about how down and unhappy I was feeling.
‘We need to sign you off from Swynnerton,’ was all he said. He’d be sending them a letter.
And that was how it all ended, my time in munitions. It had all gone on for too long, what with me being away from home and everything. Then, when Lily went, it just made it all worse. There was no official farewell at Swynnerton. I went home on leave and it turned out I never went back. So many of us then were completely exhausted, the war had gone on for nearly six years. Though I have to say now, working in munitions, dangerous as it was, didn’t leave me with any major health problems. Ok, I had the rash, but nothing else.
We were so innocent then. You were still innocent when you got married, you just didn’t have a clue. It’s true that some girls would go with the Americans just to get nylon stockings. And our lads definitely didn’t like the Americans, but that was pure envy – they had lovely uniforms. And more money. Our lads just had the rough khaki.
Bill and I were married at Escombe Church in May 1945. He was 28 and I was 24. By then I’d got a job working at the children’s nursery where my mum worked, just helping out. Ten months after our wedding, I had my son Peter in 1946. That was difficult for Bill because he’d never been used to having children around him. He’d joined the Army at age 18 and he didn’t have a clue – he thought a baby just lay there and slept all day!
We lived with my mother for a while, and then we got a prefab in Bishop Auckland, where we lived for a few years, then we moved to a house just round the corner from where I live now. We lived there for 60 years. We could have bought it but we preferred to rent it. I didn’t go back to work until Peter was older and then I worked as a home help until I was 60. Bill and I retired together.
After the war, Bill didn’t find it easy to get work; mostly he’d find work as an odd-job man. Then they started to build different kinds of factories at Aycliffe and he went to work there as a weaver. He wound up working at the factory at Shildon for 20 years, looking after 16 looms, making nylon, until he was made redundant. After that, he worked for nine years at Patons & Baldwins, the wool factory in Darlington, until he was made redundant again.
‘I’m 60, I’ll never get another job,’ he told me. But he did. He worked at a local wallpaper factory until he was 65, and he was 80 when he died. He’d been in a home for nearly a year.
The funny thing was, we never talked much about the war afterwards, Bill and I. He always used to say that when a bomb hit a church in Malta – a Catholic country – the altar wall was always left standing. It was very, very strange. And when a priest went round visiting people, they all kept a hook outside their door for him to hang his umbrella, a sign that other people couldn’t visit because the priest was there. Just little things like that, he’d tell us. But that was all.
My grandson’s in the Marines and he’s been in Iraq and Afghanistan but he doesn’t talk about it. Some people don’t. One relative was in the Falklands War and he discussed it with counsellors afterwards, because he got post-traumatic stress. ‘I shouldn’t be here,’ he told me. ‘I should’ve got that bullet.’ This was because the lad behind him was killed. When times are really tough, I think sometimes people find it easier to keep it all to themselves.
There were parts of the war that weren’t so bad. Those weekends off, when we were at Swynnerton, were good, going to different places. And there was the entertainment they put on for us girls – the entertainers going round all the hostels, putting shows on. All kinds of things – singers, even ballet dancers. They did their best to keep morale up. There was even a tuck shop at the hostel, where you could buy cups of tea as you watched the entertainment.
We do feel a bit left out, us munitions girls. The Land Army, the Timber Girls, the Bevin Boys – they all got recognition. Perhaps it’s because they all wore uniform, so everyone knew who they were. But we were B
ritain’s hidden army. There was a lot of secrecy around what we did, but everyone in the area knew the girls who worked at Aycliffe. So it wasn’t that secret, was it?
Looking back, knowing what I know now, it would be very difficult to go through an experience like that the way we did. Perhaps because so many of us were young and fairly innocent, that helped. That way we could handle the long shifts, the secrecy, the worry about the war, your family and the boys overseas. And if you weren’t married, well, you had to do some kind of work.
There’s one very clear picture in my mind’s eye. I can still see us all now, getting off the buses that took us to work, going through the main gate, singing ‘Bless ’em All’ at the tops of our young voices as we made our way to our places on the noisy shop floor. We were just tiny cogs, the girls who made the thingummybobs, as the Gracie Fields’ song put it. But at the same time, we had each other and we had our youth. So of course there were some good memories of it all, which we still look back on, even now.
We all knew you just had to make the best of it, you see.
CHAPTER 7
MARGARET’S STORY: THE TEASING GIRL
‘WE WORKED SO HARD, WE’D WORK IN OUR SLEEP’
Margaret Proudlock was born in 1923 in rural Dalskairth, near Dumfries in the Scottish Borders. At 14, she went into service and by 1941, despite her dreams of joining the ATS, she started work in the cotton teasing section at the ICI Drungans munitions plant in Cargenbridge, where she worked for three years. Margaret’s husband of 30 years, Roland, died in 1976. She has five children, l4 grandchildren and 11 great grandchildren. This is her story:
My grandparents were in service most of their lives. My grandfather, John Hutchinson, was Head Gamekeeper for Coats, the thread company. They had a lot of land. And ten big dogs.
I was born at the Gamekeeper’s House at Dalskairth on the Dalbeattie Road, at the foot of a long wood. I was the second daughter; my older sister Donna was born two years before. Two other sisters, Jean and Alison, came after me. My father, Charles Welsh, delivered milk. He’d get the milk from his sister Agnes’s farm at Lochfoot and then he would go round selling it off the back of a van.
He had a big metal container with two handles and a spigot to run the milk out. We had the only vehicle in the village. My father was a big, handsome man but he could be a bit naughty, going drinking with another milkman on the other side of town and then driving home the worse for wear. He had a habit of buying animals from the market just before it was finishing for the day. Once he came home with a van full of hens. He told my mother, Alice, he felt sorry for them.
We lived in a village house with no running water, a loo up the top of the garden and coal fires with a great big chrome fireguard. My mother would grow cresses and trumpet shaped flowers. One day, a bee got into my little puff sleeve and my dad ran out, ripped it open and the bee flew out. It’s the little things you remember, your dad to the rescue.
We had another child living with us as time went on. My older sister Donna had to get married at 18, just before war broke out. Her husband wound up being captured at Dunkirk and was a PoW for five years. So later on, little June, their daughter, came to live with us all. Our school in Lochfoot village was just three houses up from our house. The headmistress was divorced: the village people had never heard of divorce then and they didn’t take well to her. Yet she was a good headmistress.
Many of my childhood memories were of playing in the Franky Wood, beside the Lochfoot Loch. We’d take old cooking pots down to the loch to wash, and we’d pick raspberries. I’d run home, get some sugar and we’d make raspberry jam, storing it in old meat paste jars. At other times I’d wander off and they’d be looking for me – only to find me fishing in the loch with a homemade fishing rod. I remember catching perch. The men used to catch big pike, a very rough fish. I still remember watching one man cut the pike open and seeing a dead moorhen inside.
My working life started in 1937 – in service. I’d passed my bursary exam that allowed me to go to the High School in Dumfries, but I left at 14 because my mother had found me a job. In fact, I often dreamed of being a nurse. But you had to do what your mother told you.
I started in service the day after I left school at Newtonairds House, a big house belonging to Douglas Menzies, a sheep farmer in Australia. The cook, who was ready to retire, trained me in lots of dishes. As the new scullery maid, I’d sit on a high stool beside her and learn. My first job, something I’d never done before, was to pluck 10 pigeons. ‘Don’t tear the breasts’ I was warned. ‘They’ll have to be pot roasted to go upstairs whole’. Needless to say, feathers were everywhere.
The dinner service they used in the big house was trimmed with gold. So I had to be very careful when I washed it and put away. As well as learning how to prepare the family’s food, I’d have to take the dinner trays along to the lift at the precise time and collect the empty ones when I took the sweet up. I’d have to look after the servants’ hall too, set and make their porridge in the morning and their meals during the day. Sometimes you’d help yourself to the leftovers.
I worked there for over a year; then I went to another big house, Barjarg Tower, a very old house that went back to the 16th century. The Tower was about l4 miles away, so I had to cycle there and back. I was both scullery and kitchen maid, which kept me busy all the time; I also had to scrub the whitewood chairs and tables in the servants’ hall every week. And I was still making the servants their meals and serving them.
When war broke out in 1939, evacuees from Glasgow were sent to stay in the house. It was all very confusing for everyone. The staff were moved from the servants’ rooms to the gentry’s changing rooms to make way for the evacuated people. In the end, though, the Glasgow people went home. They hated it in the big house out in what to them was the middle of nowhere.
One day, I went into my room and found that two older housemaids had written ‘slut’ in dust on my mirror. I cycled home that evening and told my mother I wanted to leave. Not long after, I was employed at Comlongan Castle, near Gretna, working for the Earl and Countess of Mansfield. They’d just got a new kitchen maid who knew nothing. Within a few weeks of starting there, all the staff, including me, had to go down to London to work in their town house in Cadogan Square. I still remember my high scullery window. I’d be working away, looking at all the people’s feet going by on the pavement.
The war was starting to have an effect on everyone’s lives. One day, the butcher’s boy who came to deliver told me they were building air raid shelters everywhere. He had one at the bottom of his garden, he said. It felt so strange being so far from home. London was so big and scary, let alone thinking about the war. One night, the kitchen maid, who came from Carlisle, told me she’d had enough. She was leaving. Did I want to go with her?
That was enough for me. With our little cases packed, we slipped out of the door the next night. We went to stay the night with her sister who lived in London. The next day we were on a bus to Carlisle, and eventually I got home to Lochfoot. My mother was disappointed but pleased to see me. She’d had a telegram from the cook saying I’d run off. But I was really happy to be home.
My dad was too old to be called up. An old woman in the village got me a job in a hosiery factory. At 17, I was the youngest one there, making woollen gloves for the Forces. You made khaki for the Army, blue for the Airforce and navy gloves for the Navy. It was quite intricate work: a machine knitted the base of the glove and then you had to pick on so many stitches for the thumb and work out how many stitches for each finger. I got quite good at it.
But then, out of nowhere, something bad happened. At work, I started having these terrible stomach pains. The forewoman at work sent me off to the doctor. It was appendicitis. And unfortunately it had burst, so I needed a life-saving operation: peritonitis had set in. After the operation, I had a month in a convalescent hospital. There were soldiers there who had suffered snipers’ bullets when they were on assault courses.
Once I got home, war work was on my mind: no one was talking about anything else now. It was 1941 and I’d turned 18. I’d seen the ATS convoys in Dumfries and I’d watched the girls in their uniforms and thought, ‘Oh, I’d love to be one of them.’ Yet when I told my dad about this, he wouldn’t hear of it.
‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘Get yourself a job at ICI, like your sister Donna.’ Donna was already working at ICI Drungans munitions plant near Cargenbridge, helping make gun cotton. I was still quite fragile from the appendix operation, but I went to the labour exchange anyway, and it was decided that they would give me a ‘light’ job in the cotton teasing department at Drungans.
That was my first job in munitions, while I got up my strength. I did it for about three months. We worked with big bales of cotton, feeding the wads of cotton into a machine that tore it up, a mechanical process. When it was close enough to fluff, we had to pack it all into three-foot-square metal boxes. Then we’d have to place the boxes onto trollies to be collected by the girls who worked in the nitrates section.
It was lovely and warm in the teasing department. Even when we’d finished our shift, we wouldn’t rush out; we’d lie down on the floor, enjoying the warmth. And sometimes we’d all start singing ‘You Are My Sunshine’.
I soon got used to the journey to work. We were picked up at 6am by a small utility bus, with slatted wooden seats, to get us there for the 7am to 3pm shift. By this time, I’d already decided I wanted to work in nitrates. You got double wages – which meant I’d earn about four times as much as I’d got in service. That, to me, was fantastic riches. I’d see the nitrates girls coming through in their wellingtons and rubber pinnies, coarse trousers and a bonnet with a wide band to tuck their hair in. It wasn’t as comfy as the cotton teasing uniform, the trousers and woollen jumper with drill shoes we had to change into when we got to the factory each day but of course nitrates was completely different – it was dangerous work. I knew that. But I still wanted to work there.