Bomb Girls--Britain's Secret Army (21 page)

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.

You had to be a very careful worker. The men would swing a huge steel plate onto the big table to be examined. Another worker would use a grinder to grind a smooth place in one corner of the plate – and I would have to measure the imprint using a Brinell, a bit like a small version of a telescope, which measured the imprint.

The work was absorbing and while I had to work in some very noisy places, I wasn’t on a production line; I worked on my own. I’d be based in an office, so whenever something was ready to be inspected, I’d have to go out onto the shop floor and do my work. I didn’t wear a uniform as such, just a white overall. My hair didn’t have to be covered either; I wasn’t actually working near any machinery.

The pay was very good. I gave some to my mother and managed to save some, too. My older sister, Kay, wound up working in a similar job in an aircraft inspection department just outside Leeds at the Avro company, where they made planes like Lancaster Bombers. Then she moved and went to work for the NAAFI. She wound up travelling all over the place, and was one of the first women to land with the troops at Anzio in Italy in 1944.

I vividly remember walking on the moors one day, thinking of Kathleen and picking a sprig of heather to send to her in Italy, a small reminder of home. She told me later it wound up being displayed in the Officers’ Mess and they nicknamed the NAAFI canteen ‘The Heather Club’.

Others in my family were involved in war work, too. My younger sisters, Elsie and Audrey, were too young for war work but my brother Frank, a few years younger than me, worked in a steel factory in Sheffield before joining the RAF as a driver. My other younger brother, Leslie, eventually joined the Navy. As for me, I’d already started courting even before I went to work at Chilwell. I’d met my husband to be, Cyril, at the local Methodist chapel in Wombwell in 1940. He was three years older than me and in a reserved occupation, working as a joiner in the local colliery.

After my stint at Toledo, I was sent to work at a place called Shorter Process in Attercliffe, a suburb of Sheffield. I actually thought the name meant ‘short process’ at first – but it turned out the boss was named Shorter. At Shorter they made sprocket wheels for armoured vehicles. A labourer would lift the sprockets, two feet across, and I would have to press a testing machine, called a Firth hardometer, which used a ball or a diamond pressed into the metal to measure the imprint: a diamond is harder than steel.

I worked there for a few months, and the last place I worked at was called Firth Browns, a large engineering factory in Monk Bretton, just outside Barnsley. There were a lot of other women working there. There was also an underground firing range where they’d test the sheets of metal used in the tanks by firing live ammunition at them. I didn’t take part in the firing; my role was to measure the metal sheets afterwards.

I never really talked about what I was doing with anyone other than my family and Cyril. And the rather solitary nature of my work meant I never really made friends in the places where I worked. I wasn’t actually involved in a
process where something was being made; I was being called in to test. I did have one friend from Wombwell, who had originally worked in the grocer’s shop with me, Sadie Green. She was sent off to work in an aircraft factory repairing planes. She worked on magnetos, the electrical generators used in aviation piston engines, repairing and fitting new ones.

You had no uniform as such in the Inspectorate but you were given an Inspectorate of Fighting Vehicles badge as a security pass. It was circular with a brown outer ring, then a red ring; the rest was green with a side view of a silver tank. And it had a number on the back: mine was 711.

I carried on working for the Inspectorate through the war, even after Cyril and I got married in July 1944 at the church where I’m still a member, St Mary’s at Wombwell. It was just a few months before my 21st. The war wasn’t yet over, but we felt it was the right time, as we’d been courting for nearly four years.

The local photographer turned up for our wedding photo – only to discover that he had no film for his camera, thanks to war shortages. Two weeks later, he got in touch to say he’d managed to get some film. Of course, my bouquet had had its day, but then another girl I knew, who had just been married, had kept her bouquet. Yet for some reason, the photos he took weren’t any good. I didn’t like them. In the end, I chucked them away.

After the wedding, we moved in with Cyril’s father. Then came a surprise out of the blue: Cyril was being posted down to London, to help work on bomb damaged properties. So off he went, and I went back to my parents. Not long after he’d gone to London, I wrote to Cyril with some good news:
we were expecting our first child, Brian. And, of course, by the New Year, the war was gradually drawing to a close. I carried on working until just before VE Day, in May 1945, and Brian was born in August that year, a real Victory baby. But it wasn’t until the end of the year that Cyril finally came back home to Wombwell. Then we managed to get a house of our own: I’ve lived in it ever since.