Bomb Girls--Britain's Secret Army (20 page)

About nine months before the end of the war, they moved me to a section where you worked filling paper tubes with explosive material in the form of a yellow powder. You weren’t directly told that this yellow powder was going to affect your skin but you were only allowed to work in that section for a week, then you had a month off the section. And you were tested by a doctor after the week working with it. He tested your breathing, your blood pressure, so it was obvious to everyone that they knew it was a dangerous, toxic chemical.

Yet the effect of working with it didn’t happen all at once. It was gradual. Your skin, your hands, your hair, everything gradually went yellow. Even the whites of your eyes would be yellow. So then you’d go off the section and work elsewhere. Then, just when it was beginning to fade, the month would be up and you’d have to go back to the section to work with it again.

We were given thick pancake Max Factor ‘cake’ makeup for our faces because it was supposed to protect your skin when you worked with the yellow powder. But it didn’t protect your skin. Some of the girls would try to sneak the pancake makeup home, even though we were searched coming out every shift. They just wound up looking like ghosts with all the pancake on, that was all.

One good thing we did have was the dinner. They made sure we had a good feed in the canteen. Now and again, you’d be sitting in the canteen and someone would shout
‘CAKES!’ and you’d leap out of your seat and run up to get them to take home. For some reason, you were allowed to take the cakes out of the building.

In the canteen we’d sometimes play cards, or dominoes. At times they’d organise a big dance with the soldiers from the base nearby at Trentham. I loved the quickstep; Glen Miller’s ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’. I’d wear a favourite brown and cream dress with inverted pleats with very high heels. Now and again I’d resort to using gravy browning to draw a seam down the middle of the back of my stockings – that meant they were ‘fully fashioned’. But not often.

One night I went to a dance in Hanley with my friend Freda and we got chatting to two boys. One called Tom told me he was a blacksmith, which was a reserved occupation, so he didn’t get called up. Tom wanted to take me home when the dance finished. ‘Oh, our Jim fetches me,’ I told him. And that was the end of it.

But Tom wasn’t going to give up that easily. A week later I was at the Baths in Burslem – and he turned up there. I don’t know how he found out I went there but he was a fantastic diver. And I already knew he was a nice dancer. Tom was eight years older than me but from that point on, we started courting. I’d had one boyfriend before, a friend of my brother Jim, but it had fizzled out. He’d lived in the same street, but he wasn’t a dancer.

Tom would meet me at Burslem station when I’d finished the afternoon shift and he’d walk me home. It was a three-mile walk from where he lived to Burslem but we were young. And both dead keen on each other. The first time I met Tom’s mother – my future mother-in-law – I’d been working a week with the yellow powder.

‘Alice, is there a bit of Chinese in you?’ she asked me. And she was serious!

There were a lot of accidents, though I never actually witnessed one. It could be really scary if someone accidentally dropped a detonator. You’d hear the shout: ‘DETONATOR’S FALLEN!’ When you heard that, everyone had to freeze. No one could move an inch until they’d picked up the detonator.

My friend Doris worked in the cordite section and lost the end of her finger in an accident. But mostly, the bosses kept any bad accidents very secret. But of course, we’d know if there’d been something bad happening because of the security. On one occasion we were all in the changing room when we were told we just had to stay there: we were waiting there for an hour.

‘Oh, they’re not ready for you yet,’ was the official excuse. But afterwards, word got out: there’d been an accident. A bad one.

We did have a good foreman called Albert. He treated the girls nicely. I always used to think that somehow the men in the factory had an easier job than the women, we were on the production line working away all the time; to me it seemed their jobs were a little bit easier. But we’d never say anything, of course. It was incredibly tiring working those shifts week in, week out. I already had poor circulation. You were usually exhausted when you got home.

Everything was strictly monitored and checked. It really was the kind of security where no chances were taken – ever. One day I turned up without my identification card. Stupidly, I’d left it at home. They’d seen me turning up for my shift every day, they knew my face, but they were still
obliged to question me: who are your mother and father? That sort of thing. You’d get fed up with it, of course. But there was a war on and nothing could be overlooked. I never left it at home again!

Our families were involved, too. My mum wound up working in munitions at the small arms ammunition factory at Radway Green, in Cheshire, but the work wasn’t as dangerous as Swynnerton, though she never told me what she did there. She was a strong woman, my mum. Tom’s sister Annie also worked on munitions at Radway Green. Her husband was a PoW for four years; skin and bone when he came home. But at least he came home.

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 holiday 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.