大象传媒

In about 1942, when the children were old enough, I decided to get a job and someone said they might need a clerk at the Delta. I went to this scruffy-looking factory. It was like hell inside, because it was an iron foundry where old scrap metal of every description, like the railings off people鈥檚 gardens, was brought to be melted down and furnaced into metal rails for the war. Some went for the railways 鈥� I don鈥檛 know what else it was used for, but in peace time they made railway lines for the pit bogies.

When I first went, I wanted a job in the office, but it turned out there wasn鈥檛 a vacancy for that, so they offered me one in the foundry. I thought, oh well, here goes, as we needed the money to supplement my husband鈥檚 meagre income as a miner in the Bessie Pit at Blaydon Burn, digging coal for the war.

My first impression of the place was the dirt lying everywhere, with all this old scrap around. You were frightened to walk through in case someone was using a saw and the sparks flew on you 鈥� it didn鈥檛 hurt but it looked like Guy Fawkes night every day. The men seemed to wear flannel shirts to absorb all the perspiration, and always a scarf round their necks, which they used to take the ends of and hold them with their teeth to keep the heat off their faces when they were emptying the furnace.

It was like a scene from Hades when the molten iron came out the men had these suspended tongs, which they used to get the huge red ball of iron out over the roller, which took some time. There was a mighty hammer which came down, worked by steam, bashing the iron into shape. They had to attend to the furnace all the time, turning the load to make sure it was the right consistency to be able to roll it. It went through various rollers getting finer and finer, then on rollers on the ground it slid down to where the man was with the cutter, who used to cut it into the required lengths. He used to sling it up on the side and when it cooled off enough with water running on it, it was loaded on to a bogey with tongs and weighed.

I was behind the weighing scale and used to register in the book whatever the weight of the load was. The furnace men used to come round and see how heavy the load was. They would say anxiously, 鈥淚s that all there was?鈥� to me, so I used to say, 鈥淭hat鈥檚 all that鈥檚 registered on here, hinny,鈥� and they would walk round to look in the book to make sure I wasn鈥檛 telling them the wrong thing.

I loved my job 鈥� I couldn鈥檛 have done what some of the other girls did though, like wheeling the heavy barrows (I tried once and it nearly killed me), and I was there about a year and a half. It helped out because although you couldn鈥檛 always get the things you wanted to buy, it meant you had a bit of spare cash if one of the grocers got something in that wasn鈥檛 on ration. On two occasions when we came off night shift, we heard that one of the shops in town was going to have nylon stockings, so we went over after the 10pm-6 am shift. We walked up the towpath beside the River Tyne and over the old Scotswood Bridge and caught the old tram car on the other side into Newcastle and joined a queue 鈥� we were there so early we got two pairs of stockings each!

As told to Karen Hannah, Gateshead Central Library on Friday 21st May 2004.

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