大象传媒

It was a Small Arms Ammunition Factory, employing 15,000 staff, most of whom were "Industrial Staff" working shifts in enormous workshops full of machines. However, as an "Engineering Assistant", I was based in the Administration Building and worked office hours.

In September 1943 the office hours were 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday to Thursday; 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday; 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. Saturday; and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. Alternate week-ends were free. Earlier in the war the Industrial Staff had worked 12-hour shifts, but now they worked three 8-hour shifts.

I spent my first six weeks in the Progress Department, learning about the operations carried out in the workshops. I was then moved to the Planning Department to work with a Mrs. Morris under the direction of men who were setting up Quality Control in the factory.

We worked mainly on the cases for bullets that were made in A Block. We did our paper-work in the Planning Office, but spent a lot of time on the shop floor.

The offices were light and airy. Only the Superintendent's office had a carpet, to which he was entitled through earning 拢1500 p.a. Nobody else qualified. Our own salaries were something like 拢230 p.a.

The Departments of Progress and Planning shared a large open-plan office with wide aisles between the desks. The tea-trolley came down the aisles at 10.30 a.m. and 3.30 p.m. each day, loaded with cheese and ham sandwiches.

It was urn tea. Once the office-boy was seen stirring it with a lavatory brush. At the time I thought they meant the brush end, but it may have been the handle. We never missed tea if we could help, and hurried back for it from A Block, or wherever we were working in the factory. A girl called Jean used to buy our sandwiches for us if we were not there on the dot.

The Department of Progress Manager was a large gentleman called Mr. Stone, who could handle several telephones at once. "STONE HERE" he would shout importantly into every telephone that rang. Cheerful and self-satisfied, he was slightly out of touch with female clerical staff, who regularly burst into tears at their desks. Once a lone woman had loud hysterics while Mr. Stone continued patiently with his work.

One day Mr. Stone found out that I was eating my lunch in the Lower Staff Canteen with some typist friends. He insisted that I must join Mrs. Morris in the Higher Staff Canteen, where we lunched in the company of Shop Managers and such. Clerks and foremen ate in the Lower Staff Canteen, while machine operators and fitters were fed in vast "Industrial" canteens.

Mrs. Morris had two small children living in a nursery, and had her name down for a house on the factory estate. I later guessed that she had taken on this war work partly in order to get a house.

Once, when a bus was passing the factory estate, a man remarked "The scum live there". The man in the seat in front of him wheeled round and got him by the throat. "I live there," he hissed.

The cases for the bullets were made in A Block out of brass made in the Foundry. The brass was first rolled into thin sheets in the Rolling Mill, then stamped into tiny cups in the Cupping Shop next door.

The noise in A Block was deafening. On top of the din of the machines there was the clatter of trolleys that were driven around continually, taking boxes of cases from one operation to the next.

At each operation there was a row of machines, each with its own girl operator. She took handfuls of cases out of a wooden box on one side and fed them into the machine, which disgorged them (duly extruded, indented or "necked") into another box. Once, on the night shift, a girl lost a finger and it came out with the work.

For every six machines there was an overlooker, who took samples of cases from each machine and checked the measurements with a micrometer. If the measurements were outside the tolerance she had to stop the machine and call the fitter.

"Quality Control" was supposed to give advance warning of machine trouble. Part of our job was to take large samples of cases from an operation and work out a normal distribution for the measurement. We then ruled charts with lines showing upper and lower limits which were well inside the tolerance.

The overlooker was shown how to plot values on the chart for hourly samples from each of her machines. If a value fell outside the limits, it meant that the machine was beginning to slip. If it was stopped at that point, no defective work need be produced.

The Production Managers and foremen hated all this. They couldn't bear having machines stopped before they were producing defective work. They wanted high production figures at all costs, and there were frequent noisy rows between Production and Inspection.

Of course, Quality Control wasn't foolproof. On the charts, machines were numbered 1 to 6. Once, in the Loading Factory, I found a group of machines where the overlooker on one shift numbered her machines correctly from the left, while the girl on the next shift numbered them backwards from the right. On the third shift the correct No. 1 machine had broken down, and Nos. 2 to 6 had been re-numbered 1 to 5.

Whenever we went to the Loading Factory we had to change into ill-fitting asbestos footwear, in which one could barely shuffle around. We were also supposed to cover our heads with scarves, but Mrs. Morris thought this ridiculous, and refused, which meant that the "Danger Man" was always chasing after us in angry mood.

We spent hours weighing out portions of cordite on balances. Once I fed some loaded bullets into a machine. It wasn't long before I put one in crookedly, and there was an explosion. It wasn't the bullet going off, as I had thought, but some kind of safety device.

Christmas drew near and one afternoon Jean spent a long time decorating the Planning Office. But without authority. Late that evening Mr. King himself, head of the administrative staff, appeared. Silence fell at once.

Mr. King wasted no smiles. Standing before us at the top of the office he announced "Christmas Decorations" - and paused, to indicate that this was the heading of the notice he was about to promulgate. No decorations were allowed before the 16th December. These must be taken down forthwith.

At Christmas we had a party in the office and put on a show. I don't remember seeing much drink around that year, but after Christmas it was rumoured that 拢40 worth of empty bottles had been collected on the factory site. In those days you could get one (old) penny on a bottle, so that was about 9,600 bottles - good for wartime.

The factory gates were guarded by police, and just inside the gates was a building known as "The Search". Any night, as you left the factory, you could be picked out of the crowd and sent in to be searched. My worst moments walking past the Search were after I had bought a black-market fruit set from a cleaner in A Block. You couldn't buy china in the shops and I wanted it for a wedding present.

By that time I was working in A Block all the time, in a shop-floor office used by Assistant Forewomen. On one shift there was a buxom lady called Meg, whose husband and son were called Big John George and Little John George respectively.

One afternoon Meg was eating a bun that she had bought from the Canteen trolley. Suddenly she let out a terrible shriek and threw the bun to the farthest corner of the office. "There's a tooth in it!" she screamed. Moments later she realised that it was her own tooth, and seemed relieved. "I thought it was the Canteen girl's," she explained.

One day Mr. Wilkinson, the Production Foreman, had a dreadful row with another foreman. "Was it about politics?" somebody asked. "No, about the towels." How silly, I thought, to quarrel about towels. How little I knew, then, that office towels can arouse the very deepest feelings, involving pride and self-respect.

I can't finish without mentioning Miss Milner, Superintendent of Typists. She was a squat, middle-aged lady with dark hair, who ate in the Higher Staff Canteen. When there was no typing to be done, her girls sat in silence at their desks, with folded hands.

One morning Mr. Bradshaw, the Inspection Foreman, sent me to the Typing Pool to ask whether they could type some index cards for us. I approached Miss Milner apprehensively, to explain my errand - and was suitably snubbed at once.

"Mr. Bradshaw?" she exclaimed. "We don't type for all and sundry."

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