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My name is Gordon Jones; I was born in Maesbury on the 9th October, 1928. I went to the local council school and after that I went to Oswestry Technical School. Then just in the middle of the war I worked for ‘Coventry Climax’ which was evacuated from Coventry to Oswestry in early 1941. They set up three premises with machine castings and forgings to make into engines for turning over pumps and generating sets.

One machine factory was set up in the Cross Market (where Woolworths is now: 2005). Another machine factory was set up at Crosville Bus Station (where Aldi’s is now: 2005). They also build a factory on the outskirts of town (where Guttercrest is now) — and in this factory they assembled and tested the engines.

We worked 12 hour shifts — Seven in the morning until seven at night if you were on days, nights were seven at night ‘til seven in the morning. You had meal breaks though. I worked on what you call a Capstan Lathe, I was machining all my working life — I’ve done nothing else.

After the war I was made redundant, and then I went to work for the old Sentinel Steam Wagon Works in Shrewsbury, because that was our nearest type of engineering — there was nothing in the town. There was only the railway works, and I’ll put it this way — if your Father wasn’t an engine driver you couldn’t get into the railway works: it was sort of a ‘semi-closed shop’. So I went off to Shrewsbury instead. I earned good money with Climax — as much as five pounds a week (that was very good money) when I went to Sentinel, my wage went down to 87½ pence a week, (17 shillings and sixpence). They ran a bus from Oswestry to Shrewsbury to the Sentinel and the bus fare was 2 shillings and sixpence a day, so most of the days I took off on a bike to save myself the bus fare.

I’d worked at the Sentinel for six years after 1952 and one of the directors who’d been at Coventry Climax in Oswestry started his own little factory up that manufactured pumps for fighting fires. He was actually given a small pump as a golden handshake for after the war. Then he approached me to come and work for him, and by then it was getting quite a long way to travel over to Shrewsbury. In the meantime I’d bought a motorcycle but petrol was expensive and the wages were going down. My Mother had a saying: ‘It isn’t what you earn, it’s what you don’t have to spend’ and it’s quite true! So I came and worked at Gobowen for 42 years with them.

This story was collected by Sian Roberts and submitted to the People’s War site by Becky Barugh of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio Shropshire CSV Action Desk on behalf of Gordon Jones and has been added to the site with his permission. Mr Jones fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

See more of Gordon's stories:

• Crash and Burn
• We cycled 12 miles to get a rabbit

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