Bomb Girls--Britain's Secret Army

by Jacky Hyams

  My dad was incredibly brave; he kept up his rescue work in the pits right through the war. He’d go in if there was an explosion and help rescue people. He never said much but those times must have been hell.

  Tom would say all the time: ‘Let’s get married, then you’ll be able to leave Swynnerton.’ But I didn’t want to. With all the difficulties around munitions work, the yellow powder, being exhausted, I was happy living at home. Where we lived, everyone around us had always helped each other out whenever they could. And that never changed at all during the war. We were there for each other; that’s why we could get through it.

  I carried on working at Swynnerton for three months after the war ended and finally left in August 1945. I did feel a bit sad. I’d made so many friends there – Irene from Leek, Joy from Trentham, we’d loved going dancing together. You do get close when you work together for so long.

  Tom and I got married just after I left. By then, I’d gone to work at Kents in Burslem, the place I’d wanted to work at in the first place, this time as a machinist. All my neighbours donated their coupons to get food for the wedding; the rationing was still on. It was all weddings for us. My brother Joe married that September, Jim at Christmas and George the following Easter. ‘You’ve started them all off,’ my mum told me.

  We went on holiday to Majorca not long afterwards. They were very poor there then. I can remember seeing cars with no doors on. Tom and I lived with his sister for a while, then we found this house, where I still live. The rent was four shillings a week when we moved in but because I didn’t have my first daughter, Margaret, until four years after we married, I was able to save. So we bought the house.

  After I had Margaret, I worked at Adams’ Pottery as a packer, packaging crockery for eight years until Janet arrived. And after I’d had Janet I went back to Kents, making radiants for electric fires until I retired. Tom carried on in the mine as a blacksmith for 50 years. He was 88 when he died.

  A few years back, I met a woman who told me she’d received the same letter as I had after the war broke out, informing her she had to work in munitions at Swynnerton. She told me: ‘Oh, I did a week and then I got a doctor’s note, so I didn’t have to stay.’ She seemed quite proud of this.

  I told her: ‘If we’d all done that, we wouldn’t have won the war.’

  And it was true, wasn’t it? Though none of us thought, at the time, that we were doing something important in munitions. You never told anyone outside your family where you worked. The propaganda was all around us: ‘EVEN THE WALLS HAVE EARS’. So you kept quiet.

  People often say to me: ‘Oh, the girls of today wouldn’t do what your generation did in the war.’ But I don’t agree; I think our granddaughters and their daughters would do it. The difference was, we didn’t really know what was happening all around us. We were in the dark – in more ways than one.

  People just weren’t that well informed then. There were newspapers and radio to tell you about the war, but that was it. We didn’t know the truth about what happened at Dunkirk until the war was over. [Wartime censorship meant that the full story of the maritime rescue of 300,000 retreating Allied troops, stranded on the beaches and harbour of Dunkirk in France in May and June 1940, was not revealed in detail to the public at the time.]

  I was a bit miffed that we were never formally acknowledged for what we did, but it’s over and done with now. My brother George always used to say: ‘It wasn’t bad and we were all happy.’

  And I agree with that.

  CHAPTER 10

  DOROTHY’S STORY: THE GOVERNMENT INSPECTOR

  ‘DAD WAS A MINER. HE EARNED £5 A WEEK. I WAS GETTING £8 A WEEK’

  Dorothy Orwin was born in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, in 1923. A keen grammar school student, war disrupted her studies and at 16 she went to work in a grocery shop. After signing up for munitions work, she was sent on a three-month Government sponsored engineering training course in Sheffield. This led to her wartime role as an Inspector for the Ministry of Defence, testing components and materials used in armoured vehicles for over three years. Dorothy married her teenage sweetheart, Cyril, in 1944 and their son, Brian, was born in August 1945, just a few months after Dorothy’s war work ended. Cyril died in 1994. Dorothy still lives in Wombwell, the small West Riding town she has lived in since childhood. This is her story:

  My earliest memory is toddling down to the next door neighbour’s garden and pulling all the heads off his flowers. Though for some reason, I didn’t get a smack for that!

  There were glassworks and paper mills in Barnsley then but mining was the big employer in the area. My father, Leonard, found a good job working for the Wombwell main colliery when I was four, so we moved to Wombwell then – my parents, me and my sister Kathleen or Kay, 18 months older than me. After we moved, four more children, two boys and two girls, were born.

  Wombwell has always been a nice town, well looked after. All the men in the area worked in the colliery; there was no sign of any poverty around us. It was definitely a happy childhood, living in a nice little three-bedroom semi, rented from the local council. My father wasn’t actually working in the pit, cutting coal; his job was road making for the colliery (the collieries were all privately owned at the time). This road-making job meant he had to hire his own labour: he had someone working with him that he paid out of his own wage.

  We had our grandparents around us too. My mother, Harriet Elizabeth, had her parents living in Bramley, just outside Leeds and we saw a lot of them on weekends and holiday times. We’d get a bus first to Leeds, then a tram from Leeds to Bramley. Grandmother Sophia was quite deaf – you had to really shout at her to get through. And she was a very strict Christian. No work at all was permitted on a Sunday. In my gran’s house, Sunday lunch was always cooked on Saturday and you ate the meat cold on Sunday.

  My dad’s parents, in Barnsley, were quite different. Oldroyd, my grandfather, sang in the church choir and Grandma Louisa was a plump, motherly woman, always on the spot, ready to care for her family or help out wherever she could. It was an outdoor life for us children, walking a lot, climbing onto a swing where you’d play for hours – happy times. I was quite naughty; most kids are, aren’t they? But we were not allowed to be cheeky. We were taught to say grace before meals, to leave the table properly, be well-mannered.

  We were a church-going family: church every Sunday without fail. Everyone did that then. You always wore your Sunday best for church. One aunt was a dressmaker and she made a lot of our clothes: we always had new clothes for Whitsun. In Lancashire and Yorkshire, there is a Whit Monday tradition: a big walk around the town by the local church and chapels. We’d meet up at the church and then we’d all walk along with the local brass band playing. Each chapel carried its own banner. Then we’d troop back to the church for a lovely tea – a highlight of our year, really.

  At home, of course, we kids all had our jobs around the house. Lots of washing-up and dusting, cleaning some of the windows, scrubbing the doorsteps. The edge of the step always had to be scoured with a special donkey stone [a scouring block made from pulverised stone, cement, bleach powder and water in different shades of cream, brown or white]. Every doorstep was scoured with the donkey stone – it gave your doorstep a nice decorative finish.

  At five, I started at Wombwell Park Street Primary. I was fairly good at school. I passed what was then the 11-plus exam and moved to a secondary grammar school, at Wrath upon Dearne, just a few miles away. I was there from 1935 to 1939. I left school just a few months before my 16th birthday, weeks before war broke out.

  I’d enjoyed studying, but with war on the horizon for us, there didn’t seem much point in me staying on with a view to going to university: had I done so, I’d have been the first in our family to go, though my sister Kay was an equally good student. But we all knew that times were about to change – and that things were going to be increasingly difficult.

  That summer, we’d all been looking forward to our annual family camping ho
liday in Penistone, in the foothills of the Pennines. But at the last minute, we had to cancel. Dad couldn’t go away because he was suddenly needed by the colliery. They had to keep everything fully manned so we couldn’t go. We wouldn’t dream of going without him.

  To tell the truth, I was a bit frightened that Sunday morning when we heard the news that we were at war. The idea of fighting in our country, being invaded by German soldiers – well, I had a vivid imagination, anyway, so it did affect me, though I kept my thoughts to myself. Yet the fear didn’t stay with me – it was more the effect of listening to those sepulchral tones pronouncing: ‘We are at war with Germany’, that did it for me. And, of course, nothing happened straight away, the phoney war period.

  In the beginning, there were no air raids, though the blackout started straight away. We went out and bought black material for the windows: we couldn’t use torches at night. And the streetlamps were not lit in certain places. We weren’t very far from Sheffield, either. It was already believed that the city would be a target because it had so much heavy industry, including steel and armaments works. But right at the very beginning of the war, no one really knew what was going to happen. So at first, life went on pretty normally.

  In 1940 I got a job in a grocery shop. Soon, I was serving people coming in with their ration books (buff coloured for most, green for pregnant women and under-fives, blue for children ages five to 16). That January of 1940, bacon, butter and sugar were rationed, quickly followed by the rationing of virtually everything else you could think of. My years at school doing arithmetic came in very handy in the shop. We didn’t have tills then where you just pressed a button to calculate everything; it was all done mentally. You handed the goods over from the counter and you added everything up with a pencil, on the spot.

  My dad was still working at the mine – a reserved occupation, of course – so there was still money coming in. But the food shortages got worse as time went on. Yet there were no angry customers coming into the shop, complaining about it all. People just seemed to accept the situation. Of course, some people got a bit peeved about not being able to get as much as they wanted but the main idea of rationing was that everyone had an equal share – that was the theory, anyway. The big cities with docks like Liverpool or London was where the black market [rationed goods being sold off for cash] really thrived, because there was greater opportunity to unload ‘black’ goods. But in our part of the world, you didn’t see or hear much about it.

  After we’d closed the shop for the day, we had a fire-watching rota system where we would have to take it in turns to stay on duty in the store for a couple of hours. Fortunately, nothing much happened, but by the summer of 1940, the German planes were flying over Sheffield, and that December there were two terrible bombing raids – the Sheffield blitz – which killed nearly 700 people, demolished thousands of houses and damaged some of the steelworks.

  That, of course, brought the truth of war, the devastation and the heavy losses, home to everyone. We could see the flashes and hear the noise at Wombwell because we were right on the top of a hill, overlooking the valley. So we saw it all happening – from a distance.

  Towards the end of 1941, I turned 18. Now I had to register for war work. I definitely didn’t want to go into the Forces, so I signed up for munitions. I didn’t have a clue what it might entail, of course, so I was entering completely unknown territory. But because I’d gone to grammar school and my studies had been disrupted by war, rather than sending me straight off to work in a factory, I was considered to be suitable for some kind of training. So for 12 weeks I was sent to a government training school in Sheffield. It turned out to be an engineering course where I learned about all kinds of machinery, along with a number of other girls around my own age. The training involved using different machinery; learning how to operate a turning lathe, for instance [a lathe is a machine tool which rotates the workpiece on its axis, so it can carry out other operations like sanding, cutting or drilling] or how to use certain measuring instruments, like callipers [a calliper measures the distance between two opposite sides of an object].

  The training school in Sheffield was about 14 miles from home and it was a bit tiring because it meant shift work, which I wasn’t used to. I didn’t like working at night, climbing the stairs at Sheffield station to get a train at 8pm, finishing training at 6am to get back on the train home. It was a bit scary for me sometimes, after the big bombing in Sheffield, though the December raids turned out to be the worst of it. [The bombing raids on Sheffield ended in July 1942.] But the training was only for a matter of weeks – and I didn’t know it then, but I wouldn’t be asked to do shift work again.

  At the end of the training period, all the trainees in my group had to sit a written exam. From that they chose three or four girls to work as armaments inspectors, checking items before they were assembled – and one of those girls was me. I was told the work would be as an inspector with the Ministry of Defence. Our section was called IFV, the Inspectorate of Fighting Vehicles. That meant inspecting tanks, Bren gun carriers, anything that was armoured.

  When I came home that evening and told my parents all about what I’d be doing, they thought it was wonderful, they were quite proud of me. And they were pleased to hear it didn’t involve any more shift work – but perhaps not quite as relieved as I was! What we didn’t realise at that point was that my earnings would be so good, I’d eventually be earning more than my dad – he got £5 a week, I wound up earning £8 a week sometimes.

  My very first job as an inspector involved a posting away from home to Nottinghamshire. I was sent to work at the Ordnance Depot at Chilwell, an area between Derby and Nottingham. During the First World War, Chilwell had been the country’s most productive shell filling factory, but just weeks before WW1 ended, there had been a shocking explosion at Chilwell, killing over 134 people and injuring 250. After that it became a storage facility.

  So there I was with my new job, away from home for the first time. Another girl, Joan Pollard, was also starting the same work for the Inspectorate, so we wound up sharing a room in a boarding house in Long Eaton, the first time I’d ever shared a room with a total stranger. But as it turned out, we got on really well, so well that on weekends, we didn’t go home. We’d go into Derby or Nottingham for a look round. We had to pay for the accommodation but we did get an allowance for it in our wages.

  That first day at the Chilwell Depot involved a medical inspection. About a dozen girls my age were all ushered into a little ante-room and told to undress to our knickers. Then, after a bit, the door opened. Naturally, we were expecting a doctor or a nurse but to our surprise, in walked a squaddie [an ordinary soldier]. He ignored us – all desperately trying to cover ourselves – walked up, whistling, to a cupboard, opened it, took out a sweeping brush, and calmly walked out. As you’d imagine, we all fell about laughing once he’d gone. We reckoned he did it deliberately every time a new group of girls came for their medical!

  Then came the medical itself, lots of tapping and checking nose, ears, throat – more a basic check-up than a thorough medical. We didn’t question it, or its purpose. After that, we were interviewed individually by an officer. He talked to us about what we’d already learned in our training. Then our duties were explained to us. We’d be checking all manner of items: the general idea of the training course had been to get us used to using different types of machinery which would help us do our work, inspecting and checking different parts or components that were being assembled. In simple terms, we’d be testing these things to make sure they’d been made correctly.

  Chilwell seemed like a huge place. It seemed to be run by the Army and the ATS: very big tanks were being tested there. But as a novice inspector, you started out small. My first job at Chilwell involved inspecting small items like rubber circles. You had to measure the item to make sure that the rubber was the correct width and was suitable to fit onto the component it was made for. We worked with drawings, to make sure the
items matched the measurements on the drawings. My maths lessons at school had not been wasted, after all.

  I didn’t spend very long at Chilwell, as it turned out. I worked there for a matter of weeks. After that, I travelled from home to wherever they sent me: no more boarding house. My work after Chilwell involved tanks, working for a company called Toledo Woodhead Springs. They made springs for heavy automated transport, coil springs and leaf springs that fit onto the body of the tank. These had to be tested for hardness, to make sure they could withstand the wear and tear on the tank. We’d also have to test the hardness of the sprocket wheels before they were fitted onto the tank. I was also testing the armour plating, the hardened sheets of steel used for the body of the tank.

  I’d look through a microscope to measure the imprint of a steel ball, to work out how hard or soft the imprint was making the steel. If the imprint was too big, it meant the steel was too soft and it wouldn’t work. If the imprint was too small, the steel was too hard and it would have cracked. So there was a tolerance you had to abide by.

  The odd thing is, at the time I was doing the work, I just got on with it. I didn’t focus on what it all really meant, making sure these huge tanks were safely assembled and could be sent out for combat in the front line. It was only afterwards that the significance of what I had been doing really sunk in. Get it wrong just once and lives were at risk. Had I made a mistake and passed steel that was not worthy of its job, it could have been chaos. For example, if a steel plate on the body of a tank had been over-treated it would be too hard, and a shell would shatter it. Too soft, and the shell would go through it. Quite often, the steel plates had to be rejected. Then they were re-heated and quenched again to get the correct hardness.