by Jacky Hyams
After the war, the factory resumed normal production. All soap production there ceased in 2001 but today, the model village at Port Sunlight is a heritage area and museum. The adjoining Unilever factory is scheduled to be extended to a high-tech factory site for personal care products like deodorant and shampoo.
ROF BLACKPOLE, WORCESTER
(MAISIE JAGGER’S STORY)
Located a mile to the north of Worcester Shrub Hill Station on the Worcester to Birmingham railway line, the Blackpole site was originally a Government owned munitions factory during the First World War. It was known as Cartridge Factory No. 3 and run by Kings Norton Metal.
In 1921, the site was purchased by Cadbury Brothers, Bournville as additional factory space until 1940 when it was requisitioned by the Government as a small arms ammunition factory producing cartridge cases.
During wartime the site had its own railway station, Blackpole Halt, to transport workers to and from the factory. The site was handed back to Cadburys in 1946.
For many years, Cadburys Cakes were produced at Blackpole until Cadbury’s merger with Schweppes in the Seventies when the site was sold. It is now a retail park.
BISHOPTON, RENFREWSHIRE
(MARGARET CURTIS’ STORY)
Bishopton was chosen as a munitions site for the manufacture of explosives because of its favourable microclimate. It was also in Clydeside, an area of high unemployment in the Thirties, and had good rail links.
Part of the site was constructed on requisitioned farm land; the southern end of the site had originally been a filling factory during World War 1, employing over 10,000 workers.
Three self-contained explosive manufacturing factories were built on the Bishopton 2,000 acre site. Construction started in 1937 and the facility, built specifically to manufacture propellant, mainly cordite, for the Army and RAF, opened at the end of 1940. The site had its own bus service and internal railway lines used to transport explosives around the site. At its peak, Bishopton employed 20,000 workers, most of them female.
Each building on the site was numbered, with Factory 0 housing the supporting services for the site. (These included a permanently manned fire station with its own fire brigade, ambulance station, medical centre, mortuary, laboratories, clothing and general stores, machine shops, general workshops and laundry).
The three main factory buildings (1, 2 and 3) each had their own coal fired power stations. Factories 1 and 2 had their own nitration plant for making nitrocellulose (known as gun cotton) which was then processed on site to produce cordite. Each factory at Bishopton had its own nitroglycerine section.
Factory 3 closed down almost immediately after WW2. The manufacture of explosives including cordite, gunpowder and other explosives continued at Bishopton in Factories 1 and 2 until the year 2000. The site is now owned by BAE Systems.
Ordnance Survey maps did not show the existence of Bishopton until after the year 2000.
Long after WW2, it remained, as did so many other wartime munitions sites, top secret.
1940: King George VI examines a tracer shell at a Midlands ammunition factory as his wife, Queen Elizabeth, chats with a worker.
© Getty Images
The Royal visits to the arms factories were a huge morale booster for the workers.
© Getty Images
Maisie Jagger: she missed her family so much that she was transferred back to Dagenham, Essex, after making gun cartridge cases in Worcester for 18 months.
Inset: Maisie’s paypacket, March, 1942: £3.12s.6d for a week’s work making parachutes.
Ivy Gardiner’s wedding day, May 1945. Like thousands of other couples, Ivy and Wilf tied the knot just after VE Day.
Acton, London, 1944: Older women workers making cannon shells.
© Getty Images
Betty Nettle: Betty started work at the Bridgend Arsenal as a 17 year old in 1942.
Betty (centre) with two of her sisters. The Bridgend factory transformed the lives of thousands of women in the area.
Margaret Proudlock (left) and her good friend Sadie. They worked as a pair, punching cotton into pans of hot acid.
Margaret (seated, front row, far right) and her co-workers at Drungans: they’d often burst into song to keep themselves cheerful.
An early shift at the bomb factory.
© Getty Images
Electric arc welding at a major shell producing factory.
© Getty Images
Doing her bit: working on shell caps in the busy afternoon shift.
© Getty Images
Munitions women drink milk to reduce the harmful effects of their exposure to lead.
© Getty Images
Margaret Curtis and husband Jack on their wedding day, December 1945.
Margaret’s reference when she left the factory as the war ended in 1945.
Margaret, (seated) with some of the other girls working on ‘A’ Shift
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ePub ISBN 978 1 78219 716 4
Mobi ISBN 978 1 78219 717 1
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First published in hardback in 2013
ISBN: 978 1 78219 442 2
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