大象传媒

WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE WAR GRANDMA?

In all the exhibitions based on "What did you do in the war grandma" we see land girls, uniformed service girls, and war factory girls. What about all those who simply stepped into the "men's" jobs, they also did Trojan work and are badly under represented.

At the start of nineteen thirty nine woman taxi drivers were so rare that one I met dressed like a man to fit in with the job. Women bus conductors, women bus drivers, woman butchers, woman road sweepers and women on delivery rounds were practically unheard of.

At around this time my father became transport manager for a dairy, and soon it was only kept going by women taking over the "man's" job of delivering the milk.

Some of the rounds were accomplished with horses and carts and some with motor vans. Those women who were given horses to work with had often never seen one at such close quarters in their lives and the horses were for the most part just great big cuddly dopes as horses go. They were far more interested in snitching titbits out of customers hedges and scrounging sweets from the children than in trying to do anything dramatic, such as trotting, except of course when it was time to go home at the end of the day.

THE SITTING HORSE

One such horse was used to deliver milk to a seafront cafeteria which required the rounds girl to lug the milk down a great series of steps and the empties back up. One day an experienced horseman saw this animal - "down in the shafts."

Now if a horse, harnessed to a cart, fails for some reason to remain on all four legs it is a laborious task to get it back on its feet. It is necessary to un-harness it, push the wagon back off the horse, get the horse to its feet, and re-harness it. As this horse was lower than the cart on quite a steep hill the girl would obviously need help. So the horseman waited. The girl came up the steps, clicked her tongue, the horse stood up, she dumped the empties in the cart, and was about to release the cart's brake when the man asked her about it.
"Oh" she replied "he always does that, he likes to sit there and look out to sea.

The first the stableman knew about it was when a photo appeared in the local paper a couple of days later.

BATHTIME

There were a number of unexpected hazards with the job though.
One rounds girl had a private arrangement with a customer which was strictly outside the dairies rules. The customer only had one key and went to work shortly before the milk arrived. The arrangement was that the rounds girl entered the house by the unlocked back door, bolted it, put the milk in the larder, and let herself out the front pulling the door behind her. One day she started this routine, went into the kitchen with the milk and a man was sitting in the bath in front of the fire having a soak. I was not told who was most shocked but the customer apologized the next day. Her husband was home on leave and she had forgotten to tell him about the arrangement.

VICE VERSA

Sometimes though the boot could be on the other foot. Father was standing in for a roundsgirl one day when a customer opened her door in a very see through night-dress, uttered the momentous words "Oh it's a man." and then hid discretely behind the door to complete the transaction.

TEARS TIME

Delivering to a mine sweeper tied up to the harbour one day the crewmen were rather slow coming on deck to collect their milk. "Come on you lot" chided the girl, "you'd be a darn sight quicker if the Jerries were after you."

A week later she heard that the ship had been lost with all hands. She arrived back at the dairy in a state of shock, of course she blamed herself for possibly putting a jinx on the vessel.

NO TIME FOR GOODBYES

Another rounds girl arrived back one day with all her milk and lots of tears. She had no customers left.
Row upon rows of houses comprising her entire round had been flattened by the bombers during the night. All the people she had spoken to and joked with the day before were either dead, injured, or in any case homeless and she had no idea what had happened to any of them.

MAN PROBLEMS

Of course the usual hazards of being a woman, and one of the reasons many jobs were exclusively "man's work" before the war, still existed. One lass had the job of collecting churns full of milk from the railway station, these she had to get up onto a lorry at about shoulder height and father had taught her how to throw them up safely.

At the station there were always redcaps (military policemen) to deal with any recalcitrant servicemen, one of these had his eye on her and was making himself a bit of a nuisance.

One day when he saw that she had a particularly heavy churn he tried to be the big macho man, push her aside and do the job for her, but he finished up on his back counting the daytime stars.

"I just picked him up like you showed me to lift the churns and dumped him in the road." the girl told father when she got back. She had no more trouble.

A LESSER HAZARD

One round included both the fish quay and a rather up market, hoity-toity part of town, and there was concern at the dairy about how the girl was coping. How managers get these crazy ideas I cannot imagine, even the most "toffee nosed" employ staff not of their ilk.

Anyway father was despatched to see if she was able to handle the situation. He found that around the fish quay it was "Morning dear, only half today I'm afraid." and up the hill it was "Good morning madam, I'm sorry it can only be half a pint today". He concluded that the bosses had no need to worry.

SHORT CUT

Father had an alarming report that one of the vans was being driven dangerously so he had to investigate. The scene of the crime was where a new housing estate had been abandoned when war broke out.

Approaching this part of the round there was a fork in the road with the left fork going uphill and the right fork going down. No houses had been built near the fork and the round started at the top then went along the lower road. Sure enough the van appeared from the upper road on its way back, turned left by the last house and slid down the mud of the steep earth bank to the lower road. Had it overshot it would have gone on into the valley with nothing to stop it until it was in the stream and with a load of crates of milk in bottles this could be rather messy. Also replacement vans were impossible to get. He had to ask her why she did it.
"Oh it's all right, we all do it, the post office vans, the bakers, everybody."
"But with the load you have up the van could be unstable at that angle."
"Oh sometimes is goes down sideways or backwards if its wet but it always stops when it gets to the road."

OLD BEN

Of course it was not only the women who had problems about horses. Around about nineteen forty five, fodder for horses was getting so expensive in towns that dairy horses were being retired off to the country and replaced with electric milk floats.

One old horse driver resisted this as long as he could but with only one horse left in the stable the stable man retired. Then old Ben was given an electric whether he liked it or not. Unfortunately for the plan old Ben was very much the carriage driver, and always drove crossed reins. Consequently his habit of pulling left to go right was quite unbreakable, when the electric went the wrong way he cussed it but could never remember to actually steer it the "wrong" way. (Cross reins were used to steer the horse. The reins were held across your hands so that you could steer the horses left and right more easily).

The dairy brought the horse back and old Ben had to look after it himself.

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