大象传媒

This story has been added to the People鈥檚 War website by Jenny Graham of the Lancashire Home Guard on behalf of Winifred Evans and has been added to the site with her permission.

I was an inspector in an ammunitions factory during the war. The CIA or Churchill's Idle Army as some folk called us produced the bullets for the Royal Air Force. I was conscripted in my twenties and managed to go in as an inspector because my father was in RAF administration; he got the post for me otherwise I would have been manning the machinery on the shop floor. I had previously thought of going on the buses but this was not to be and I took the position I was offered. My brother was in the Army, stationed in The Middle East but I still lived at home.

Our duty was to ensure that all the shells that the factory produced would fire cleanly from the soldiers' guns. We would check and reject any faulty shells that were misshaped and would've stuck in the gun's cylinder. If any of the shells had jammed, the gun would immediately backfire onto the soldiers, killing them instantly or if not, doing them serious damage. It was essential that they should fire cleanly. However, half of what we rejected did actually make it through to the soldiers' supplies. The RAF bosses would further sort what we had considered rejects and it would seem that what was an acceptable standard was a very fine line to judge.

I remember VE Day very clearly. It was my birthday, the 8th May and we went to a dance in Liverpool that my Aunt had organised. She would organise three dances a week, though of course I could only go to those that were on my day off. The VE Day Dance she organised at very short notice. I went with my friend Agnes Hart, we had become close friends during our time in the factory and she was a lifetime friend up until her death, 5 years ago. Agnes met her husband through my Aunt's dances and was married shortly after the war. I never married. It was a wonderful celebration that night and we danced for hours - sequence dancing, not like the disco dancing young people do today, they were beautiful dances in what we called modern sequences; it was a wonderful evening.

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