大象传媒

My name is Roy Brooker, I was born in 1926 in Ilford East London and went to school there until the start of the war in 1939, when my school evacuated to Ipswich, However as l was an only child l stayed with my family throughout the war, often as a companion for my mother because my father was a policeman and usually worked six days a week, often on a twelve hour shift alternating each month between day and night duty, right throughout the blitz, sometimes on duty in East Ham and West Ham as well as Ilford. He was often in great personal danger from enemy air raids.

In 1941 at the age of 14陆 I started work in the chemical laboratories of Ilford Ltd, the famous producers of photographic materials. For the first 2 years l was the lab boy, washing up dirty chemical apparatus polishing and so forth. Then some of the senior chemical workers were called up for war service and so, to replace them l was promoted to doing their work, having recently obtained Matriculation from evening classes. I was also joined by 3 others who had obtained their Matriculation from day school studies - two young men and a young lady. Together we produced the chemicals used in the production of photographic film used in Arial Photography, which was so very important in military operations during the war.

Throughout the war of course, like everyone there, we suffered from bombing raids, Incendiary Bombs, Parachute Bombs, Butterfly Bombs and eventually V1 Buzz bombs and V2 Rockets, frequently taking shelter in air raid shelters. Near the end of the war several V2 rockets landed nearby, one on our factory, killing 3 workers and bringing down a whole row of houses in an adjacent street. After the war we had a new laboratory built on that bombsite. Throughout the war period there was a great sense of working together for a common cause, all of us shared the difficulties of a family firm.

At the end of the war the management called us together to congratulate us on our war effort, and secondly to warn us that work would now become very difficult because of new competition from other photographic companies. Sadly poor leadership meant insufficient money was put into research and development, and the company eventually lost key workers and it passed into other hands. Unfortunately the family firm feeling was gone forever.

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