Millions Like Us (31 page)

‘I don’t see what business it is of yours if I want to look after my own child in my own way.’ Despite expanding nursery provision, childcare still presented problems for working mothers.

Despite angry demonstrations by pram-pushing women staging ‘Baby Riots’ and demanding nursery provision, little sympathy was shown for these problems. As Penny Summerfield has convincingly argued,
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schemes to help with childcare, shopping and meals were mostly a fudge: a papering-over of the wartime cracks. Officials, while urging women to adapt to the nation’s needs by joining the workplace, seemed incapable of updating their own vision of the nation’s mothers and wives. Aircraft parts and explosives had to be made, but tea also had to be on the table. Fear and conservatism prevailed, that women working in factories would bring about the collapse of home life. There was concern for the man coming home on leave to a cold hearth, unwashed dishes and even an empty bed.
This was not the cosy welcome he had pictured; where would it all end?

On the plus side, having a job was better than being unemployed, and work in the war factories was relatively well paid: better than the Land Army or the lower ranks of the services. Leaving aside the housebound wives of servicemen (some of whom found they could get paid for making aircraft components at home), the working classes found that having two or even three incomes was definitely an improvement on one, even if, as was the general case, the pay was 25 per cent less than that received by men for the same work.

Until 1942 Thelma Ryder lived
at home in Plymouth and worked packing towels for the Initial Towel Company. But that year, when she was twenty-one, two things happened which took her out of her comfort zone. Bill, her fiancé, was on board HMS
Exeter
when the Japanese sank her in the Java Sea that February. With 800 other men, he was taken prisoner, but though he sent word to say that he was alive, the message never reached his mother, or Thelma. The Devonshire lilt in Thelma’s voice becomes hesitant as she remembers. ‘I just heard about the sinking on the wireless. We never heard anything else. It was hard to believe – unreal somehow. It sort of numbs you. But you just have to go on with your life, you know … and hope that he survives. I always felt he was there, though. Mum and I went to a spiritualist, and she said he was still alive, and that helped.’

But later that year Thelma herself was forced to confront a new life when she was conscripted into war work:

I was a proper Mummy’s girl. I hadn’t wanted to leave home. So I waited till they called me up, and then I was sent to Wellworthy’s munitions factory in Lymington to make piston rings for aircraft. I was put into uniform – navy-blue overalls and hats, with a snood to stop your hair going into the machines. The first time I went home wearing my uniform Mum started crying; she said, ‘I’ve never seen you in trousers before.’

But in fact work and being called up was what helped me most to deal with not knowing where Bill was. It was an old factory, very friendly. And I just used to sit at the machine and do the work. You had to do so many a day, and you were at the job up to twelve hours a day, for £3 a week. I didn’t find it boring, I liked it. And it was something different I suppose.

Only trouble was, if you worked too fast bits of hot steel used to come flying out and stick in your eyes. There weren’t any protective masks. You’d have to go up to first aid, and they’d get it out by putting drops in and with a magnet. But it only happened a couple of times because you got used to watching that the bits didn’t go in your eyes.

Dangers of this kind beset the woman factory worker. In Yorkshire,
Emily Jones’s face
was burned with slag, and slag got into Amy Brooke’s ear. Joan Thorpe got her neck burned; Agnes Green had ‘arc eye’ (caused by intense flaming flashes in the welding shop – ‘you feel as if your eyes are full of sand’), while all of their female workmates were suffering from excessive periods. This particular group of young Yorkshirewomen was conscripted in 1942 and drafted into welding work in two foundries in Huddersfield and Penistone. They had been trained for the job in Sheffield by an experienced woman welder, Valentine Pearson, who became their friend and mentor, and after they returned to their factories the group wrote letters to Valentine which, many years later, surfaced in the Mass Observation archive. An excerpt from Amy’s letter to Valentine on 11 September 1942 gives a flavour of the girls’ everyday life:

Glad to inform you that I am quite in order, I think I must have strained myself with lifting and I have done some this week … The rate fixer came up last Monday and what a bugger he is. I have been getting 160 plates out per day and now I have to get 205 plates out per day and I get 8/- per week extra. It’s bleeding horse work, but it’s not going to come off next week. Believe me, I have come home at 7.30 half dead. I have just washed me and looked at the evening paper and gone straight to bed, buggered.

On 21 September she wrote again:

My wrist to my elbow is all burned with Welding and it is burning like bleeding hell and as red as a beetroot, where I had hold of the shield in my left hand. I have just asked Eddie [a co-worker] what time we have some lunch and he said we only stop at two … so I said ‘the hell I am having some bleeding lunch right now’. So I have put the pan on, we have a small secret gas ring in our department you see, so I am going to make good use of it.

If my letter seems all jumbled up you must excuse me because I have to keep breaking off, and doing a bit of work, to keep the production up, you know there’s a war on.

Although Amy and her friends in Huddersfield had not chosen to become wartime welders, all of them had previously worked in factories. Rather less predictably, two volunteer factory workers who started training as machine operators in February 1942 were spinsters in their forties who came from well-off middle-class families.
Elsie Whiteman and
Kathleen Church-Bliss had met through their shared interest in the English Folk Dance Society, and in 1935 had moved into a half-timbered Surrey farmhouse together and started up a tea shop. It appears that their decision to work in a war factory was not only a patriotic one but also taken ‘in a spirit of adventure’. Kathleen and Elsie were enterprising, public-spirited and educated – typical, in other words, of the great sisterhood of inter-war ‘surplus women’; there was also something of the crusade in their decision to keep a joint diary of their experiences at Morrisons’ No. 1 Factory in Croydon.

The pair started out with four months of training in which they learned tool-grinding, screw-cutting, lathing and scribing; they were taught to use gauges, trigonometry, and to be accurate within a thousandth of an inch. In June they arrived at Morrisons’ to start work. Despite the ‘hellish noise’ and eleven-hour days, they soon settled in. Elsie discovered that she was making ‘a small part of a Spitfire’, while Kathleen was working on the aileron of a Wellington bomber – ‘this gives a zest’. However the novelty soon wore off. Though some of their skilled operations required enormous concentration, too much of the work was mechanical:

‘We nearly die of boredom. The hours drag interminably, the clock never advances and Sunday seems a long way off.

Fortunately, factory life had other compensations:

The only thing which quickens the pace at all are Rumpuses or Love. Love seems to have passed out of our lives … but Rumpuses crop up two or three times a week and do make a nice change.

Rumpuses included the horrible accident that befell Rachel, a turner at Morrisons’, whose hair became entangled with a revolving rod protruding from one of the lathes; there was a terrible shriek, and she was found to have been half-scalped. It turned out that Rachel had obstinately refused to tie her hair up properly, but
the row simmered on as she threatened to sue the management for negligence.

For Elsie and Kathleen, their world had narrowed to the confines of the factory; breaks and small comforts became all-important. They were plaintively indignant when management brought in an ‘efficiency expert’ to reorganise the tea room: he packed all the tables tightly together, altered everyone’s ‘special place’ and had a wooden barrier put up to segregate the office staff eating area from that of the shop-floor workers. How mean to do such a thing, while at the same time refusing to provide the workers with stools to sit on because of the timber shortage. Occasionally the diarists raised their heads from the all-consuming job in hand to note greater events – ‘At 9.o’c. this morning we heard the splendid news of the American landings in French North Africa’ (8 November 1942) – but, not surprisingly, the majority of the entries are preoccupied with gossip, work, rumpuses, relationships with co-workers, food, physical discomfort, boredom and breaks. Yet very few of the nearly 2 million women who worked in the war industries recorded their daily lives in this way; Elsie and Kathleen’s journal is a rare document.

‘She’s Most Important – in Her Way’

Women’s presence in the war factories, as Elsie and Kathleen were all too aware, had become indispensable. Their diary was consciously written in part to give a voice to the million and a half women now spending their waking hours on the shop floor.

But from the male point of view, this presence was often jarring, incongruous and out of step with the sexual orthodoxy of the time. Their arrival caused consternation among male managers, who feared for their jobs and their virility. It became a matter of prime importance to them to maintain sexual discrimination in the workplace. To begin with, money spent on training women was looked on as money wasted, since it was taken for granted that the women would be going back to their homes and would not need special skills once the emergency was over. Women factory workers were persuaded by their anxious employers that they were not really the same as men. They were allocated ‘easy’, ‘clean’ tasks, more suited to semi-skilled workers
and told it was for their own protection. Their work was presented to them as being an extension of familiar domestic skills that required patience and dexterity, like knitting or needlework.
Among the Yorkshire welders,
Enid Haley had been a seamstress who could do invisible mending; Agnes Helme had pre-war experience of decorating cakes. Both of these contributed to their skills with the welding rod. At the same time women workers were often manipulated by factory managers into working within semi-skilled ‘ghettoes’, redescribed as being appropriate to their sex, so as not to compete with the skilled male workers. Sometimes, too, women’s work was sabotaged by male workers in the same factory. There were cases of women arriving to find their machines tampered with, their work undone.

The men’s behaviour was often primitive and thoughtless. Factory work had an image problem; it was reputed to take mainly girls from the bottom of the social heap. Hardened male workers gazed in awe and wonder as the first female conscripts arrived, in trousers and nail-varnish. Were they ladies or whores? Did you show them respect, or did you rape them?

The Yorkshire welders endured annoyance from their male co-workers, who teased, snubbed and harassed them. Helena Marsh remembered how the charge hand would sneak into the welding booth where she was working and grope her; ‘you daren’t say a right lot’.

For many girls it took nerve to deal with the rough manners and coarse language of their fellow hands. ‘
My initiation
into factory life was shattering,’ recalled Rosemary Moonen, a peacetime hairdresser who found herself on the night shift producing assault barges and aeroplane wings, side by side with a crew of die-hard proletarians. On day one she was humiliatingly singled out by the foreman, who spotted that she was somewhat well-bred and reserved. Having allocated everyone else their tasks, he flung a broom at her with the words ‘Take this! And sod around!’, before walking off. Staunchly, Rosemary sat down and waited for him to return. A dreadful row then ensued as he accused her of neglect:

Summoning all my courage I retorted that until he had the decency to show me the job I had to do, presuming it
was
to help the war effort, I intended staying where I was. Somewhat taken aback he treated me to a stream of foul language calling me some of the filthiest names imaginable. I was so angry and disgusted by this time, that I brought up my hand and slapped him hard across the cheek.

The foreman apologised; Rosemary went home that night and wept bitterly. ‘How was I ever going to stand the atmosphere?’ But it wasn’t just the men who gave her a tough time. Just as in the barracks, class wars were played out on the factory floor. And for Rosemary the hostility of her own sex was almost harder to deal with: caustic, foul-mouthed, uncouth women, who made it only too clear that she was not their sort, and not welcome.
Margaret Perry was another
conscript who worked in a Nottinghamshire factory making wire insulation for the Admiralty. She too found herself the butt of abuse and innuendo from her ‘rock bottom’ co-workers.