FOREWORD

This book tells a story of heroes, ordinary women who responded to the call to serve their nation in extraordinary and dangerous times. But this is no work of fiction. Their often gruelling experiences should already be well-known and a source of national pride. Yet for nearly 70 years, these women’s stories have largely gone untold.

Over the last few years we have seen recognition for a number of groups of veterans of the Second World War, most notably on the Home Front. The Bevin Boys and Women’s Timber Corps in 2007, the Women’s Land Army in 2009 and the participants in the Arctic Convoys in early 2013 have all received long-deserved recognition of their service.

Yet, perhaps surprisingly, there remains a group of veterans, numbering well over a million people, who remain without any form of recognition. The munitions workers of the Second World War, the majority of whom were women, were carrying out highly skilled, dirty, and extremely dangerous work, with the threat of accident or enemy action a constant threat. It goes without saying that the consequences of an explosion in a munitions factory could be horrific.

An enormous explosion at the RAF Fauld underground munitions storage depot in Staffordshire of 1944 killed 81 people, and the 1940 bombing of the Vickers aircraft factory at Brooklands, near Weybridge in Surrey resulted in the deaths of 86 workers, with 630 people injured. At Royal Ordnance Factory (ROF) sites across the country, workers toiled day and night amidst risks such as these to provide the munitions Britain needed to maintain the war effort.

But perhaps because the highly secretive nature of the work during the war bred in them the habit of not talking about their wartime experiences, or maybe because the attitude of so many meant that they didn’t feel the need to draw attention to themselves, this ever-dwindling number of people in their late eighties and nineties now find themselves the true unsung heroes of the Second World War.

This book explains in vivid detail the trials and tribulations facing women in munitions factories, be it the ever-present risk of explosion, the effect that the chemicals they worked with would have on their bodies, or simply the day-to-day difficulties of living in a strange place and dealing with the restrictions of wartime. Theirs is an incredible story and one which has taken far too long to tell.

Even I, as a member of the campaign for recognition, was not aware that my partner’s grandmother had worked in a munitions factory until recently. A member of my staff mentioned the campaign to a friend, who also told him that a relative of his had worked in munitions.

I know of other members of the campaign who have only recently discovered that their relatives were former workers, thanks to their involvement with the campaign. It is likely that taking into account the sheer numbers of workers in the munitions factories, most people in Britain will be related to, or will know someone who worked in the factories during the war years. Many are perhaps just not aware of it, or do not fully appreciate its significance.

At the outbreak of the First World War, Britain found herself woefully underprepared and in no position to provide anywhere near the number of shells required by the British Army. This ‘Shell Crisis’ was a major contributory factor to the fall of the Liberal Government in 1915, which in turn led to the formation of a coalition Government and the appointment of David Lloyd George, future Prime Minister, as Minister of Munitions. The Government came to realise that the only way to win the war would be to move the economy onto a war footing and prioritise the manufacture of munitions.

Women had previously worked in munitions factories but the changes made by the Munitions of War Act in 1915 not only made it a penal offence for a munitions worker to leave their employment in a munitions factory, but also led to an increase in the number of female workers from 212,000 in 1914 to nearly 1 million by war’s end in 1918. It is estimated that female workers were responsible for around 80 per cent of all the weapons and ammunition used by the British Army in the First World War.

Keen to learn from such lessons, the Government ensured that the infrastructure of munitions manufacture was improved in the years before the outbreak of the Second World War. Despite this, war still necessitated a huge increase in production and in the number of munitions factories. By 1943, there was even a munitions factory under Parliament, manufacturing fuse parts and parts for submarines. Once again, with men conscripted to serve in the Armed Forces, it was women who provided the bulk of the munitions workforce.

Without their work, the Spitfires defending the skies of southern England during the Battle of Britain would have had no bullets; the D-Day landing forces would have been lacking in tanks and artillery; and the Navy shadowing the North Atlantic convoys would have had no shells.

While the USA, as the ‘great arsenal of democracy’, certainly helped turn the tide of the war in its later years, munitions workers in British factories were crucial to the supply of our troops through the war. It is no exaggeration to say that Britain would not have been victorious without them.

This book, however, does not simply tell of an important period in our military history but perhaps equally in our social history. With the South and East of England at serious risk from air attack, munitions production moved to the North of England, Wales and Scotland and became a truly national effort. Many of those women, who had moved hundreds of miles away from their homes to work in the factories, chose to stay after the war, permanently transforming several areas around the country.