Read Online Bomb Girls--Britain's Secret Army by Jacky Hyams - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Jacky Hyams
Ads: Link
nation. So, in order to make their site more attractive for the esteemed visitor, the Angels went out to find clean snow from the surrounding countryside, and carefully laid it on top of the slush!
In 1942, special Works Relations Officers were sent out across the country to educate the workers in the Royal Ordnance factories. These visits focused on the progress of the war itself, as a means of inspiring or encouraging workers. Events were organised, with guest speakers and educational films. On a few occasions, visits were set up to other ROF sites, so that the women from selected factory sectors could see the positive results of their efforts.
Letters from troops themselves were read out, thanking the Bomb Girls for their efforts, and on one occasion a letter was sent from the Desert Rats (the 7th Armoured Division) in North Africa, specifically thanking workers in Bridgend for ‘never sending out a single dud mortar bomb’.
To a large extent, this propaganda worked well. But in the Bomb Girls’ own stories of their munitions years which follow this chapter, it is obvious that the difficulties they often faced made considerable impact on their lives, both during and after wartime. They were young, innocent and inhabiting a world where everyone around them was ‘doing their bit’. And even now, what comes through loud and clear in their memories of those times, was their sheer grit, theirplucky resilience in the face of being conscripted to work in a job that was dangerous, exhausting and sometimes debilitating.
Their stories of wartime work underline the fact that theirs was very much a generation that didn’t ask questions but just ‘got on with it’. Yet only now, all those years on, can we fully recognise – and acknowledge – their worth.
CHAPTER 3
BETTY’S STORY: THE YELLOW LADIES
‘ARE YOU ANYONE’S BUDGIE?’
Betty Nettle was born in 1925 and has lived in the Stormy Down/Kenfig Hill area of Bridgend, Glamorgan, her entire life. She started working at the Welsh Arsenal, ROF Bridgend, as a teenager in 1941 until war ended in 1945. Her husband of over 50 years, Ivor, died in 2005. This is her story:
Work was very scarce in this area before the war came along, other than in the mines. And we were not a mining family. My father, Leonard William Cornish Reynolds, was a ganger, working on the railway, looking after the tracks. I was the youngest girl in a family of seven children. By the time I arrived, the eldest three had already left home; they were grown up, working. My sisters Edith and Nancy went into service in a big house up in London: that was the only work option then.
Families were big in those days, so if someone had a shop,their children worked in it – or their nieces and nephew, which meant that round here, as far as work went, it was who you knew, not what you knew.
I grew up in a respectable, double fronted house. As a child – I must have been about three – my earliest memory is of my younger brother Joe being born in the front room. (We always called him ‘Joe’, but his real name was Norman.) You didn’t have a nurse or anything like that when a baby came, you had a local lady from along the road from us: one of those ladies that ‘did’. They learned how to ‘do’ as they went along; they brought people into the world and they laid them out for the undertaker, so it was usually the same person that came to the house when someone was born or died.
Our local lady that ‘did’ was also a herbalist. We lived just outside the village, about one-and-a-half miles away, just a few scattered houses, really. You rarely saw a doctor. It was always the lady that ‘did’ that came round. If you were sick, she’d make you up a medicine. She’d never really tell you what she was doing; she didn’t say what was in the medicine. Yet people came from a long way in our area to see her, so she must have been doing something right.
We were well shod, always plenty to eat, lots of
In 1942, special Works Relations Officers were sent out across the country to educate the workers in the Royal Ordnance factories. These visits focused on the progress of the war itself, as a means of inspiring or encouraging workers. Events were organised, with guest speakers and educational films. On a few occasions, visits were set up to other ROF sites, so that the women from selected factory sectors could see the positive results of their efforts.
Letters from troops themselves were read out, thanking the Bomb Girls for their efforts, and on one occasion a letter was sent from the Desert Rats (the 7th Armoured Division) in North Africa, specifically thanking workers in Bridgend for ‘never sending out a single dud mortar bomb’.
To a large extent, this propaganda worked well. But in the Bomb Girls’ own stories of their munitions years which follow this chapter, it is obvious that the difficulties they often faced made considerable impact on their lives, both during and after wartime. They were young, innocent and inhabiting a world where everyone around them was ‘doing their bit’. And even now, what comes through loud and clear in their memories of those times, was their sheer grit, theirplucky resilience in the face of being conscripted to work in a job that was dangerous, exhausting and sometimes debilitating.
Their stories of wartime work underline the fact that theirs was very much a generation that didn’t ask questions but just ‘got on with it’. Yet only now, all those years on, can we fully recognise – and acknowledge – their worth.
CHAPTER 3
BETTY’S STORY: THE YELLOW LADIES
‘ARE YOU ANYONE’S BUDGIE?’
Betty Nettle was born in 1925 and has lived in the Stormy Down/Kenfig Hill area of Bridgend, Glamorgan, her entire life. She started working at the Welsh Arsenal, ROF Bridgend, as a teenager in 1941 until war ended in 1945. Her husband of over 50 years, Ivor, died in 2005. This is her story:
Work was very scarce in this area before the war came along, other than in the mines. And we were not a mining family. My father, Leonard William Cornish Reynolds, was a ganger, working on the railway, looking after the tracks. I was the youngest girl in a family of seven children. By the time I arrived, the eldest three had already left home; they were grown up, working. My sisters Edith and Nancy went into service in a big house up in London: that was the only work option then.
Families were big in those days, so if someone had a shop,their children worked in it – or their nieces and nephew, which meant that round here, as far as work went, it was who you knew, not what you knew.
I grew up in a respectable, double fronted house. As a child – I must have been about three – my earliest memory is of my younger brother Joe being born in the front room. (We always called him ‘Joe’, but his real name was Norman.) You didn’t have a nurse or anything like that when a baby came, you had a local lady from along the road from us: one of those ladies that ‘did’. They learned how to ‘do’ as they went along; they brought people into the world and they laid them out for the undertaker, so it was usually the same person that came to the house when someone was born or died.
Our local lady that ‘did’ was also a herbalist. We lived just outside the village, about one-and-a-half miles away, just a few scattered houses, really. You rarely saw a doctor. It was always the lady that ‘did’ that came round. If you were sick, she’d make you up a medicine. She’d never really tell you what she was doing; she didn’t say what was in the medicine. Yet people came from a long way in our area to see her, so she must have been doing something right.
We were well shod, always plenty to eat, lots of
Similar Books
