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When war did come in 1939, the building department built thousands of air raid shelters in the Pontefract and Castleford area, an army camp at Hessle near Hull, and a huge defensive ditch was dug at Tranby. Several search light emplacements were built near Ripon, and in the Wakefield area. Concrete tank traps and gun emplacements were built on the North East Coast. Surprisingly, beach material could not be used in the concrete, so river sand and gravels had to brought on to the sites.

Work was also found for the factory, and large contracts were obtained from the MOD for thousands of fold flat chairs and wardrobes for the RAF, innovative designs by Mr Warters, bedside cabinets, and officers camp beds. 250,000 bunk beds were also made for the American Army, and the construction of thousands of work benches and cupboards to equip shadow factories, such as those for Rover.

In 1943, Charlie Drake obtained a contract to build 16, later 72 Landing Craft Assault or LCA’s were built in 72 days. In order to fulfil this contract a quick expansion of the labour force was required and 800 girls were taken on. The company were christened the boat builders of Back Street by the Navy. So unusual was this development that the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio interviewed Charlie Drake and a newsreel was made. Charlie Drake’s nephew by marriage, Eric Bradley, saw the film as a Captain on the staff in Bombay. These small boats were used on D-Day to transport soldiers from large troop ships to the beaches.

These were simple flat bottomed craft with armour on them, 43feet long, with a 10 foot 6 inch beam, and weighed 12.5 tonnes. The engines that were fitted to the original 16 were conversions of motor car engines, carried out by Harry Warters, often ford V-8’s. They were built on specially produced jigs in the factory, and due to shortage of teak and plywood, mahogany was used in their place. Wearing their grey overalls, and forged into a team by Bob Warters, the girls could be found tapping screws, they not only planked the hull and built the frames, they made the internal fittings, oil and water coolers, female electricians made the instrument boards and switch panels. They worked too on the sheet metalling, the highly skilled girls worked on the adaptation of aero engines to marine use. The female workers duties also included the hammering of thousands of rivets, tightening of hundreds of nuts and bolts and to give the craft the necessary strength. They also bolted on and manufactured the armour plate, assisted in the installation of engines and to give the craft their final coat of grey paint. The craft had two half decks to afford the infantry onboard protection during landed and had plate armour capable of turning a machine gun bullet. The later LCA’s were fitted with two purpose built Austin engines capable of developing 390hp each. Fully laden with 50 troops, and equipped with machine guns and mortars, the craft had a draught of less than 2ft and the propellers were shielded in shallow tunnels to prevent damage upon landing. The preferred age of the women workers was15 to 30, and one noticed the number of educated women working in the factory; but skill, the experienced foreman would tell you, had nothing to do with education. The vast majority of the girls had never worked before and some had come from officers where they worked as typists or receptionists.

One great advance made in the production of the craft was the establishment of a central brain, albeit 1944, to establish the supply all the small factories, which would order so many craft from a place and provide the required number of pieces from the keel to a screw and deliver it to them, like a conveyor belt, by road or rail, at the precise moment that a place needed them. Central stores were set up, and daily lorries or the railways collected the next portions of the craft required. You could have an LCA delivered to the factory in pieces like a giant jigsaw in its component parts. The first LCA’s were made from scratch, with only the aid of diagrams, blueprints and input from a Mr Lehman, who was appointed to assist in their construction by the MOD.

One novel aspect of the contract was the fact that Wakefield was, and still is, land locked, the factory being a mile from the nearest waterway. Once finished an LCA was rolled out of the works main entrance, and a special frame was erected to load the LCA onto the back of a low loader, nick named the ‘Queen Mary’. They were then taken by road to Earnshaw’s Timber Yard in Doncaster Road, a distance of nearly a mile, where a dock was excavated. The craft were then launched into the Canal to run trials; a system controlled by Naval Officers and the MOD. The first trip was several miles along the Calder & Hebel Navigation, through a series of locks, to the River Aire at Knottingley. Here in the presence of Naval experts, the craft had to pass their tests on a measured mile, and prove that they were capable of achieving the required speed. Few naval craft have such a peculiar start to life as these assault craft built in Yorkshire. The Naval officers present at the tests were inevitably Lieutenant Charles Warren and Sub Lieutenant Geoffrey Canadine.

The first LCA, no 1144, was launched on 13th October 1943, and was thrilling day for the employees of Drake & Warters and the citizens of Wakefield who flocked to see ‘Wakefield’s War Effort’. The first craft took 6 weeks and four days to build from laying of the keel. By the first launch seven other craft were on the stocks in various stages of construction, and by 1944 there was a launch a week.

With the end of the war, the company was a very different one to that of 1939; it was now heavily biased towards manufactured joinery. Shop fitting required little machinery and much expenditure on each item, each item being individually produced.

After the War, reconstruction of war-damaged Britain became the staple work of Drake & Warters. Housing had become an urgent priority, the new Labour Government announced the building of 400,000 prefabricated houses, a large proportion of the contract being obtained by Drake & Waters. In total 178,000 prefabricated wooden houses were shipped to Dunbarton on 2 lorry loads a week. In addition to this, a further 16,800 prefabricated houses had been shipped to other towns in Scotland by 1950 and 8,000 prefab housing units for Glasgow. In total, just over half of the total number of prefab housing units ordered by the Government had been supplied by Drake & Warters. As well as building pre-fabs, 3000 brick houses had also been built by 1950 in both Wakefield and Scotland.

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