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This story has been added to the Peoples War website by GMR Action Desk on behalf of Marian Sumner and has been submitted to the site with her permission.

I was just turned 17 when the war broke out and I can tell you where I was - I was in the backyard in Higher Ince just outside Wigan. I heard people shouting- they‘d just heard it on the wireless. I was working at Pecks making tarpaulins and tents and carried on doing that - we made tents for the people of Coventry after the city was bombed. When I was 18 I got a transfer to Bradley - a munition factory and there we assembled bullets- 303s and tracer bullets. We worked in threes - one of us put the casing in, the other put the lead nose in - and the third put the brass tube in and that held the powder. We worked 12 hour shifts - 5 days on and 1 day off- we did another five days- and then we had a turnover onto night turn- then we’d do 5 nights and one day off- then another 5 nights and then we’d be back on days. Woe betide you if you missed work - you didn’t do that- nobody did - I even got a dressing down from the management for taking a day off to go to my sister’s funeral. They used to bring singers and musicians - and Workers Playtime - into the factory to keep up morale but we were so tired at 2 in the morning that all you wanted to do was go home- we was shattered- I was anyway.
I8 months before the war ended they started sending some of the women to work in Blackpool on aircraft. I was very keen to go because I wanted independence and to be away from the closed atmosphere I’d been in for a long time. I was also thinking seaside and that we could perhaps enjoy ourselves for some of the time. We were all set to go and looking forward to it when the management came to us and told us we weren’t going to Blackpool we were going to Risley near Warrington! I was devastated - we all were . It was another munitions factory and we had boiler suits, turbans and steel capped shoes. The factory sheds were camouflaged with grass on the roofs and sheep would graze on top. We were making trench mortars and we were filling the cavity at the top with blackjack- a form of plasticine - and screwing the top on. They went from our section ‘over the border’ to another part of the factory which did all the detonators etc- and that was a dangerous place. We then went on to work on thousand pound bombs- we used to have to make the ‘biscuit’ first - which was boiled TNT and nitrate- which we had to carry in hundredweights up to the boiler and once it was boiled together, it went into trays that cooled down before being broken into pieces and inserted into the bombs. Finally we poured boiling tnt into the casing and it would fill up in between the bits of 'biscuit' inside. Every day before the start of the shift we had to call at the nurses station where we’d get a small glass of brown liquid of what we called ‘tnt mixture’ - we had to drink a glass of this every day- it was supposed to keep our lungs clear from the tnt. But after the war I had a very bad chest and I put it down to that time in the munitions factory.
When we started at Risley we got brand new boiler suits, turbans and shoes- and we were always proud to wear them because we didn’t like secondhand! We felt good wearing them - because they were close fitting and gave us a waist line and a bust. But the tnt used to make your hair go red and that wasn’t very nice when you were on dates! You couldn’t get it out- you just had to let it grow out. Our gang of girls got a bit of sniffiness from the other workers because after a while the management said that since the Wiganers had come to Risley the output and productivity had increased and that was thanks to us. We were proud of that!
I worked at Risley till the end of the war and I was in the factory on VE Day on afternoon turn. Suddenly all this bunting appeared from nowhere- the factory was transformed and we were all elated. But shortly after we had to clear the shops and wash all the walls that were pink from the tnt- and that was a horrible job.
Me mother didn’t like me working in the munitions factory because she thought it was a bad influence on me- because there was a bit of fraternising and canoodling went on there.

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