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Glenys Smith: Working at GEC Coventry

I’m 82 now and I’ve known my husband since I was three. He worked in engineering, then joined the Air Force during the war and worked on servicing planes that came back from the Front — Spitfires, Hawks and things. He once serviced Lord Mountbatten’s plane, and he met Monty, and did his plane too. Once the planes had been serviced, they had to be flown back to the Front and, of course, some of those young pilots never returned. He served in India for four years and we were married the year after he came home.

I was in Bridgend when the war began, and I was helping in a home for children who had fits and men who came home from the Front with conditions like shell-shock. Then I moved to Coventry, working in the office at GEC until the end of the war. I didn’t mind working nights but we had a good social life as well, dances and the cinema. You didn’t think much about the Blitz unless you could hear planes coming. There were no bombs around the place where we lived, a private house for most of the time. We didn’t think about the bombs and we never thought that we might lose the war. People in general never thought about that.

When the bombing was going on, you only heard it at GEC if you went outside, because we were closed in behind huge sliding doors. Actually, the biggest noise we heard was from our own planes when they went over on the way to Germany. The amazing thing is — it’s a miracle, really — that the German bombers never managed to hit the GEC works. We believed they must be aiming for us — GEC was manufacturing the casings for shells and bullets that went down to Bridgend for the powder to be put in - but the factory was just outside the city itself, and they missed us. Not a single bomb fell on the factory. When the cathedral was bombed, everyone in Coventry wanted to see it the next day. It was roped off but we all went to look at it from a distance. My eldest daughter sang in the new cathedral when she was at Warwick University, and she was given her degree there. I really didn’t recognise the city when I went back years after the war.

I had an enjoyable time really, as far as I could. We were always mending our clothes and making things from odd scraps of material that came our way. We knew four or five Air Force men stationed there, but their homes were in London, where they sometimes went at weekends. They used to come back from London with nylon stockings which were wonderful, because then we used to colour our legs with gravy browning or cover them with brown paint.

Now I know what did happen during the war, and saw what I saw at the time, I wouldn’t want all that to happen again. It’s only men that create wars, not the women.

This story was collected by Genevieve Tudor and submitted to the People’s War site by Graham Brown of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio Shropshire CSV Action Desk on behalf of Glenys Smith and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

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