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INTRODUCTION

My name is Grace Doe. I was born Grace Seager in 1916 in Victoria Place, Southwark, South London. It was a little court we lived in there, in Union Street. There were eight houses in our court and a church hall where they had nativity plays every Christmas. We weren't far from the Royal Mail Sorting Office in Orange Street. I went to Orange Street School.

We lived at No. 2 and next door, at No. 1, lived Mrs Mackman and her two daughters, Dolly and Polly. I remember Beatty Mackman especially because it was her and my brother George who took me down the New Kent Road to get my photo done when I was only five.

I remember there was a High Church, All Hallows, in Pepper Street. There were some nuns, a Sister Grace and a Sister Ethel, who lived up one end of the court who used to take us on outings. I was named after Sister Grace and one of my sister's after Sister Ethel. They had two servants called Rose and May.

We were moved out of Victoria Place because of the Thames continually bursting its banks and flooding us out. The water would come lapping into our Court, but Upper Thames Street caught it worse than we did.They moved us out after my mum died just before the war.

Before the war, I used to make cases at a box maker’s. We made boxes for Harrod’s as well and they would be delivered on a handbarrow. You wouldn’t see that today, not in all that traffic! After that, I worked at Simon’s, an Eel and Pie shop, and then I was a lift attendant in offices in High Holborn. Next door to us was the Hacks Cough Sweets factory.

War broke out and I continued in that job for a while. Opposite us was the telephone exchange. We knew whenever there was going to be a raid coming because they would draw their blinds. Being the exchange, they would get the information before anyone else. It was then that I started work at Fortiphone’s.

WORKING FOR THE WAR EFFORT

These are a few of my recollections of the war and what it was like working in a factory for the war effort at the time. I worked at Fortiphones, soldering for the tanks. Fortiphones was a huge factory. It was just by the Gaumont cinema in Peckham. They made all sorts of electronic boards and equipment. We worked up on the second floor. I don’t know what else they were making on the other floors, but we were making and assembling radio equipment for the tanks.

We all used to cycle or walk to work, or get the bus or tram. We didn’t have cars like they do today. The trams going down Dogkennel Hill by where we lived would really have a job. The hill was so steep, they had to keep the brakes on all the way going down because the tram would fair run away with itself. I remember once I heard the tram crashed at the bottom because of that. It was lucky there was a police box on top of the hill. I think someone used it to phone for help.

The trams did what they called a Workman's Ticket. It was really cheap. You could go all the way to Southwark return for just fourpence. I always walked to work, though. I'd cut through all the back-doubles. It would be quicker and it didn't cost anything. Money was always tight.

We would get into work and go straight upstairs to our benches and start work. We didn’t have to clock in or anything. We started at nine in the morning and finished at six. I don’t remember exactly how much the pay was but I think it must have been not more than £2, maybe only 37/6 a week or something like that. Mind you, that was a lot of money in those days.

There were lots of benches, I remember. They were big, long benches with four people seated either side, eight people to each bench. They were our workstations. We each had our own place to sit. We sat at upright, wooden chairs, not stools. All our tools, soldering iron and so on, were set out on the benches.

We weren’t provided with overalls or anything like that. I used to wear the overall I wore at Simon’s. It was my own overall. I had dyed it red. It was really smart. I wouldn’t take it home and bring it to work each day; I’d just leave it over the back of my chair at my workstation. It was quite safe to leave them overnight on the back of the chair.

I had these bits of metal with holes in. I had to put the wires through the holes. You had to twist the bare wire round, and then solder it on to the connection. I had bundles of wires and I had wrap them round all tidy. I had to solder the black wire to the coil. You had to put the yellow flux on and then burn the wires on with the soldering iron. The smell would go right up my nose! It wasn't very pleasant, as you can imagine, especially as there were so many of us all soldering.

There was a roll of black wire I remember. The wires were cut for you and you had to make sure you did all the connections securely. Our lads’ lives depended on it. They were leads about 18 inches long. There was one woman there; all her wires were cut short. She kept talking away when she should have been paying attention to what she was doing. She’d stripped the casing to bare the wire and stripped most of the wire off, too! I had to keep passing her work back. I told Cath, one of our foreladies. There were two foreladies. 'Look at this,' I said. 'This isn't right.' I couldn’t let that go on and I had to tell her.

Sometimes, there would be a daylight raid. The sirens would sound and we would hear the planes and we'd go up on the roof in our lunch break. We'd watch them fighting overhead! Can you just imagine? There would be bombs dropping but, all through the war, the factory was never damaged. I was really excited by it all. I don't know why I wasn't frightened. I should have been, I suppose. I just wasn't. They were up there shooting at each other. I never thought I'd see such a sight. The spitfires were simply marvelous aeroplanes! They were climbing and diving. I'd seen the big Zeppelins. I'd seen one over Hastings. But I never thought I'd see all this.

They would bring a cup of tea round to us but I don't recall there was a canteen or anything. We just kept working. I'd go home to lunch. I had to prepare my dad a dinner, or just cook one I'd already prepared the previous evening. I'd maybe make some soup or stew for quickness with some Beefex or some Foster Clarks cubes. I loved to put the wireless on and listen to the Grand Commodore Orchestra, on the Light Programme I think it was, at 1 o'clock.

My mum had died in 1937 with cancer and he was on his own poor devil. It took 15 minutes to get there and back. I don't know how I did it all in the time I had. I had to give him his wash down in the tub each week as well. He just couldn't manage on his own. I was only 5 stone, but I was wiry. The smallest of the bunch my mum called me. She said she could have put me in a pint pot!

At the end of the day's shift, they'd have volunteers to do fire watching. We'd take it in turns. There'd be three of us. We'd walk about the factory floor keeping watch in case an incendiary came down. It would be our job to raise the alarm and get it tackled before it could take a hold. We'd stay about three hours on patrol, and then the two watchmen would come and lock up.

Night after night of the blackout we had. We'd take a flask down the shelter and sit and chat down there. Every night at nine o'clock, though, I used to go and stand at the shelter and look out. I was the only one looking out like that. I must say I felt quite brave, although, you might think me rather foolish. The searchlights and the flashes of the anti-aircraft guns lit up the sky. It was all a sight.

The guns were up on Dogkennel Hill not so far away from our ground floor Council flat. It was a three-story block we lived in. Even inside the shelter, you could feel the 'thump, thump' of the guns vibrating. I think the Nazi planes were trying to hit the railway line. It was over that way. Their bombs were falling short and coming our way instead. We got bombed out. The curtains fell down with the blast. There were shouts of 'Turn out those lights!' and the Wardens got us all down the shelter quick.

It was a bad night, a very bad night. And the shelter next to ours suffered 37 people killed. All of them dead, no survivors. It was a direct hit. They were brick shelters, solid, but nothing's going to stand up to that. And it didn't. It could as easily have been us. Why we survived and not them I'll never know. It's all just chance in the end, in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The Council were very good. They got all our stuff together, dried it out, what could be salvaged, furniture and all, and put it into storage for us. I went round the flat to see if there was anything left. The flats were badly damaged. The walls were still mostly standing, but you couldn’t live there. It was unsafe. There was our big old radio still there. I salvaged that, although a lot of the valves were broken inside.

We were really worried, though, because dad had put his pension money he got from when he retired from Reynolds into his mattress! All our stuff had been waterlogged from the fire engines and the burst water mains. I went and checked it all to see what had survived. We thought the mattress might have got destroyed in the bombing. Worse, if it had survived in one piece, we thought the money would be gone or all sodden and useless. Miraculously, it was all still there in one piece and had dried out alright!

The Council had done us proud. I don't know how we would have managed to cope with it all on our own. Well, we wouldn't, not really. It's as well everyone pulls together at times like that. Everyone feels for everyone else. We hunted around and found a flat in Grovehill Road with a Mrs. Mc Neill. The rent was 16 shillings and 6 pence a week. There was a pub on the corner, but I don't remember its name. My old dad, Gilbert Seager, a retired compositor with Reynolds press, used to drink in there with his pal, Bert Rodgers, who lived nearby.

When my dad was working at Reynolds, he used to come home after his long shift and give me the Sunday edition fresh off the press. Reynolds was a Sunday paper. I used to walk proudly out with it and I'd hear people whisper, 'How'd she get the Sunday paper, it's not out yet!' Sometimes, they'd ask me direct, out loud, and I'd tell them my dad worked at the paper. That made me feel really proud as you can imagine.

Of course, I had to cope with all this going on and get into work the next day on top of it all. Well, we all did; I wasn’t the only one in that situation. Everyone had to just get on with it and cope. I worked at Fortiphones all through the war. I showed my boyfriend, Frank Doe, around the factory when he was home on compassionate leave in 1944. That was when we met and I had to show him what we were doing on the home front for the war effort. I was proud of my work. And I was proud of him.

Towards the end of the war, we had the buzz bombs. They used to make a noise as they went over. You knew you were safe as long as you could hear them. It was when they stopped you had to worry. It all went silent and everyone held their breath. It was scary. It was a scary time for us all. And I don't think I'll ever forget it, even after all these years, even though so much seems so far off and distant now.

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