大象传媒

Towards the end of the war, in Coventry, I was 18 and working about nine hours a day in a munitions factory (the old Daimler factory).I was working on a centre lathe, working with men, boys and women. I was making tractor forks, a small object like a fat key. Each end had a small hole that tapered off. We actually shaped the hole cone-shaped. I don't know what this was for.

We started work at about 7.30 am and there was a works bus which collected workers but I had to walk a mile to catch it. I lived in a mining village, my father was a miner. He went to work in the same factory as I, as he had rheumatism, and had left the mines. We used to walk up to the bus together.

The workshop had about 100 lathes, each operated by one person. Everyone was friendly. Your work was inspected. We only had a short training - the setter-up put your machine accurate and he showed you what to do. If anything needed changing he'd come up and re-set it for you.
There were capstans, lathes, drilling machines; there was a Work Chaser who followed the jobs around. We'd have a pile of objects which were afterwards taken on to the next process. We weren't told what happened to these products afterwards.

We only earned 75% of the wage the boys did. We were a bit disgruntled about that.

We left 5.30 - 6pm, and got home 7-7.30.

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