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Name Edna Gillett
Interview Date 10th June 2005
Subjects covered War Work, Dig For Victory, Entertainment, Rationing (Tokens, Busses, Petrol Rationing)
Location Oxford, Wallingford, Morris Motors, Pressed Steel Cowley,
People Included

This is an edited extract of a recorded interview conducted by Museum of Oxford with Mrs Edna Gillett. It has been submitted to the People’s War website with her permission. A full version of the interview transcript and audio recording will be available at the Centre for Oxfordshire Studies.

War Work
I wanted all the time to join the WRENs and… but by the time I was old enough to join and I wrote in for an appointment in Queen Anne’s Gate I remember and I had a letter back saying ‘very sorry, but we don’t need any more recruits at the moment’ um…so I became a bus conductress for the Oxford Bus Company. We had a depot of the Oxford Bus Company in Wallingford and my father was in charge of it and we had I think 2 double-decker and 3 single-decker busses there so…every morning we had to get up at….and bring the workers into the Morris Motors and Pressed Steel at Cowley, miserable lot they were. It was freezing freezing cold standing on the back of a bus, and I used to get up…no central heating in those days and we lived on the top of a hill, bitterly cold up there, bedroom be bitterly cold. So I used to jump out of bed in my pyjamas, put my uniform on over the top of them and get on my bike and get down the hill quick before I froze. And the bus would always be packed, completely packed with people. And we’d come in to Pressed Steel and Morris motors, let them off then go to the Oxford Bus garage in the Cowley Road, which I think has been pulled down hasn’t it?

Dig For Victory
I tell you what I did do during the war um… somebody gave me twin goats. White Salin goats. Nannette and Spot. I used to take them for walks all over the fields and gradually the herd grew. We had one called Mephistopheles and she had four kids which was very unusual and my father built a range of mangers for them at the side of the garage. And we got up to eight goats in the end and I used to have to milk them morning and night and they… we managed to get that milk to all the invalids in the area that were allergic to cows milk. And I though nothing of going off, I mean they may have been, in those days there wasn’t much traffic, and they were tethered half a mile away in a farmer’s field, and I’d go off with my stool and my bucket in the pitch dark no light…. Freezing cold, frost… getting the milk… and then we used to, my brother used to take it on his bike in little cans and deliver it to all the invalids who needed it.

Entertainment
It was just everybody helped everybody else. Everybody was caring. Um… even though there was a sense of sadness from people who’d lost in, you know, in the war, because of course, I being that age, I used to go to RAF Benson a lot to, when they had a party and that sort of thing, and it was so sad because you knew that that night some of them weren’t coming back, and yet life went on and you couldn’t give in to it. They didn’t give in, they just went on. And it was…well luckily no-one nobody very close to me.. I didn’t loose anybody very close, I knew so many people who did and oh, I’m so glad we got through it all. What else can I say? It was just a way of life that should be… we should still have. We haven’t got it any longer.

Rationing
Well, you had a book with tokens in it and you were allowed…a dress would be 20 tokens or a shoes would be 8 tokens or whatever and sweets were a token for 2oz a week or whatever it was the ration where you’d go and buy chocolates or sweets. So if you knew anybody who wanted sweets and didn’t want clothes, you could swap your coupons over, which is what I did. Wouldn’t you?

Wherever the busses went in those days they were always full because there was no petrol, or it was very severely rationed. And I had a very good driver. My father didn’t know but he used to let me drive the bus …Busses were used much more universally than they are now because people didn’t have cars. You couldn’t afford a car…well, we had a car, but cars were few and far between and the amount of petrol you were allowed was minimal, very minimal.

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