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George Woods — Home Guard

I left school in 1939 and soon afterwards got a job in a Shadow factory. Manufacturers had their own factories. They needed to boost production so they built other factories called Shadow factories. This one was owned by Daniels and was in Browns Lane and they were building Hercules aircraft engines, Bristol design.
I left school not knowing much about the world at all. I first worked in the wages department but then decided the engineering side looked more interesting so I enrolled at the local technical college for evening classes in engineering. There were no apprenticeships during the war, so I moved around the factory gaining experience and finished in the Jig and Tool Drawing Office. During that period I was in the Home Guard. I worked all hours. There was a platoon at the works and on top of the office block was a machine gun post and it had a battery of 4 Marlin machine guns (American) for the defence of the factory. They were only let off at aircraft once. The blitz on Coventry in November 1940 caused quite a bit of damage in the well- publicised raid, but the following April there was a worse raid. A land mine was dropped on the factory in 1942. It exploded destroying lots of machinery but we were back in production in a week. There was a continuous shift system — the factory worked 24 hours a day.
Towards the end of the war we changed to Armstrong Whitworth Aircraft airframes, not engines, and experimental Whitley Bombers. Also other aircraft not designed by company.

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