Read Online Bomb Girls--Britain's Secret Army by Jacky Hyams - Free Book Online

women got on well with their male colleagues and they would usually enjoy a joke and a laugh together. But some men, perhaps disgruntled because health problems or their age prevented them from joining the fighting forces, didn’t feel very happy about this ‘new order’ of having women working alongside them. The men weresometimes concerned about the safety of their own jobs, especially in rural areas where unemployment had been high for years. It was an attitude along the lines of, ‘I’ve worked hard to get here and you women think you can just come in here just like that’. It didn’t help, of course. Old habits die hard.
    One consequence of this resistance from a few male workers was that the special government training for certain types of jobs requiring engineering or technical knowledge was not always put into practice afterwards. A woman might undergo a four- or eight-week training course for a specific engineering role only to discover, once she started work, that she was assigned to a lower level factory job because a male supervisor or colleague didn’t believe it was ‘women’s work’.
    This was frustrating, especially as, before war started, organised training for women had mostly been restricted to domestic service work. But the engineering training itself was, nonetheless, a step forward. And Bomb Girls who were good workers were rewarded with promotion: a diligent, careful worker could be moved up to ‘Blue Band’ (supervisory status) sometimes being placed in charge of more than one facility (or ‘shop’). Yet most of the Bomb Girls’ factory work was routine, unskilled labour: the majority of women went straight from the labour exchange to the factory floor.
    THE PROPAGANDA MACHINE
    Poster campaigns and filmed footage of Allied victories shown in cinemas were important for the nation’s wartime morale. But the need to keep war workers fully motivated,to keep munitions production at its peak, also meant passing the positive message on in other ways.
    Despite all the secrecy around the day-to-day factory routine, it was clear to the authorities that the so-called secret army needed to see some form of appreciation for their efforts. The general public couldn’t be told what these women were actually doing or where they were. (The newspaper captions in the ‘spin’ stories never gave the location of the factory.) But the authorities knew that somehow, they had to do everything possible to keep the women’s motivation high.
    In the bigger factories, as the war started to turn in Britain’s favour, the factory’s radio system was used, broadcasting ‘good news’ bulletins interspersed with Workers’ Playtime and Music While You Work. The authorities felt, right from the beginning, that emphasis also had to be made to the workers on the significance of their role in comparison with the mind-numbing routine of the everyday toil on the production line. In today’s parlance this was Government public relations, or ‘spin’, in the form of carefully planned events designed to keep workers’ spirits up – and show the public, via the newspapers and cinema, that the workers’ efforts were being supported.
    Members of the Royal Family undertook visits to the munitions factories, as did the female entertainers of the times. Vera Lynn and Gracie Fields – who were adored by millions everywhere – performed in the factories for the Bomb Girls as early as 1941. These visits were usually filmed for the newsreels. One such newsworthy event came in 1942, when Britain’s wartime Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, visited the Aycliffe Royal Ordnance Factory inStaffordshire and the Aycliffe Bomb Girls. Although it was mid-May, it had been snowing in the area in the days before the visit, and the snow had turned to brown slush. This, the workers decided, was definitely not good enough for ‘Winnie’, whose inspirational radio broadcasts throughout the war did so much to boost the spirits of the