91ÈȱŹ

Wartime memories of Ampthill Part Two — Working in the offices of Elstow Ordnance Factory

Part two of an oral history interview with Mrs. Mary Smith (née Sharpe) conducted by Jenny Ford on behalf of Bedford Museum.

“You had to know all the Managers, because there were plenty of them and they all had their own room. The Head one had his own secretary which was Ethel, the one I was left with in the office. She was taken into his office as the secretary because his secretary left to get married and she went up there. That was a job that everybody thought was really special and she could order anybody around to do anything. They could call to the Typing Pool if they wanted any girl to do anything, to take shorthand and then sometimes they used to ask for a special one and that’s how it was done really. They used to have their preferences and they used to want you to do their work and they used to come in and ask you to do it in a certain way and if you did what they wanted well, they’d ask for you again. But nobody wanted Sylvia! Laughter! She made such a mess all the time. I don’t know how she ever got by. Oh, yes, she was a nice looking girl. She had lovely black wavy hair but she used to wear it in a roll but what she used to do was to tie a ribbon round and then get the hair and tuck it in right the way round so that it was like a long roll. She always used to do that but she had this lovely wavy hair and she didn’t like it. And to see her do it, she used to do it so quickly because she was so used to tucking it in. One time she came in, in her mother’s fur coat! Her mother didn’t know she’d got it! Laughter! She was going out at night and she’d pinched it. She just had something about her, you couldn’t help but like her because she was so silly, so dippy. She was a terrible typist! She used to get all sorts of things, she used to eat at her desk and she used to get bits of food all over everything. She actually had mice in her desk because she’d left sandwiches and cakes and that in her desk, pushed them to the back and left them and she had mice in the desk. She used to make everybody really crack up with the things she used to do, really funny. She used to bring all her clothes, when she was going out at night. She used to bring all the things she was going to wear, bring them in and she used to change in the office behind the door and if anybody walked in they used to have a fit, and they did. She used to be the talk of the office! You’d see these bare arms sticking out behind the door. Laughter! She was that sort of a girl! I don’t think she went until the end of the war and they drew out, the Lyons factory. It was run under the government then and called the Elstow Storage Depot and I think that’s when she went back to London. Then there were about three of us in the Typing Pool then, different girls because they went home.

There were large canteens, three or four I suppose. There were the Main Canteens and then there were smaller ones. There was a lot of stuff down there altogether, there was a lot of people, 1000s of people. They weren’t bad. We used to have because we were young we had special reduced meal tickets, until we were 16 or maybe more, I don’t remember at the end I don’t remember having them then but in the beginning we did so we didn’t have to pay a lot for our meals. They were quite good. We used to have ice cream and nobody else could have it because it wasn’t about but because it was Lyons we used to have their things that they did mainly for the Forces I suppose but because we were their factory we got them. When they left to go back to London after the war they did ask me to go back with them and work in Cadby Hall but I didn’t want to go, I didn’t really want to live in London and that was it really. But if I had have done things might have turned out a lot different.

We just went once to the filling sheds because we did all the clerical work to do with the factory, to do with the filling of the bombs and where they went and all that sort of thing but we’d never actually seen it being done. We complained and said, ‘Couldn’t we go down and see?’ And they said, ‘Yes!’ So we were given special passes to go down and then we’d got an idea as to what they were doing because it was quite an eye opener really when you got down that end, the ‘danger area’. Because you had to change all your clothes, you had special shoes and special overalls and tie your hair up so that it wasn’t showing or anything. You didn’t have to have jewellry on, anything like that. When you go down there, they are very careful, you changed in the Changing Rooms I remember and you changed into these clothes and then they let you go through to where they actually filled the bombs. They gave us a tour to see what they were doing. It was frightening really from what I can remember because I only went that once. They had these stairs that they called gantries and as far as I can recall, but I believe they had the large bombs standing up and they were on this gantry where they went up the stairs and they were filling them up with 
 there was more than one person on that. They used to have special clothes. The men used to have a little round cap and aprons tied around their other clothing, they had their special clothing on but then they used to have these big thick, they might have been rubber I don’t know. But it was hot up there! They were all running about like little ants from what I can recall, it was quite well - you couldn’t take it all in really. It was the only time I went. It seems like a dream really but it did happen. Then we went in the smaller sheds where they filled the smaller bombs.

Ladies work in there and their hair used to get all yellow in the front. You could say they’d had it dyed, these days you’d say, ‘Oh, yes, she’s had it done!’ But no, it was the cordite it made the face yellow. You could smell it, I wouldn’t have liked to have worked there. There’s a lot of them that did I’m sure, but I wouldn’t have liked it. They had three shifts as far as I can recall. They had two days shifts, one night shifts, three eight hour shifts. They were working all the time and I read somewhere that they had the largest output in the country, might have been in the Library and I didn’t know half the things they were telling me and I worked there! I didn’t know how many different sizes of bombs they filled, not altogether, it never occurred to me. It’s all gone now but you wouldn’t have imagined that that had all happened on that site would you?
The munitions used to be transported by rail, they had a special siding, it used to go right into the area and be shipped onto the trucks and then they used to go to various places, to be used I suppose. I believe they made the biggest one, I think I read that in the Library. 12,000 lb. was the biggest one and they actually did the one I believe that bombed the dam, they bounced didn’t they? I didn’t know that, I read all those facts! It would be secret you couldn’t talk about it or anything like that. Whatever you did, you’d signed that Act to say that you wouldn’t tell anybody and you never did. Whether my mother was aware what they were actually doing I never did really know but nobody seemed to bother much about that factory. It was so secret that nobody ever really knew what it was there for I think. And now if you didn’t actually work there nobody would ever know that it had been there. Which is a great shame really because nobody really knows the history of that site and they never will because the people have gone that have worked there, they won’t know. There are still a few people that have worked there around.

Some of the Jewish girls, they came out of London because of the war, because of the bombing. They moved out and Lyons being a Jewish firm well naturally they kind of came to get a job there and so there were a lot of Jewish girls. And also there were a lot of Irish girls because they used to come over from Ireland. A lot of Irish men as well in the factory and in the offices there were a lot of Irish girls. They were quite jolly, they used to go out and enjoy themselves.

I didn’t go to dances, well not up to that time because I hadn’t got much time really. We used to go into Bedford to the pictures, anything like that, any concert that was going on. I mean it was quite a quiet time really. I never did go to the dances because, well I wasn’t all that old really and my mother wouldn’t have let me go anyway. Laughter! But we found plenty to do and there were some girls that went to dances but depended on your parents really. Some of them they went with the Americans and have a jolly good time. A girl that worked with me, in my office she was a nice girl, Sylvia her name was. She used to go out with the Americans but she wouldn’t go out with the ordinary ones, it always had to be the Officers and she used to have a jolly good time. She used to go out to these dances where Glenn Miller was playing on the Air Bases and that, think nothing of it. Or a club in Bedford, the ‘American Club’ where all the film stars used to come to visit to see the Forces.

I can remember the planes going over in the mornings to do the bombing, the Americans, because we used to do the night times didn’t we and they did the day. Sylvia was always very interested because she’d always got a boyfriend and she always knew when they were going, they used to talk about it, saying, tomorrow we are going out. I don’t know why she used to watch them really she couldn’t have known where he was could she? They used to come back in the afternoons but they didn’t all come back at the same time. Some of them didn’t come back. But going out they were all in formation when they went over here.

I can remember when it was ‘D-Day’ they came over and they were each towing a glider. Yes, I can remember those gliders going over. Because you didn’t know why they were towing these gliders. They used come in waves and you’d get one lot that would go and then you’d get another lot would come over and loads and loads of them, it seemed forever that they came over. And that was what was happening but we didn’t know anything about it until after when they announced it. It was different, we knew it was different to the ordinary planes going but we didn’t know why because nobody told you anything.

You could tell the difference of the German engine, yes. Then you used to shout, ‘Oh hear that, that’s not ours!’ It was a different sound, you could always tell a German. If you heard that noise you knew that they were German planes because they used to come over to bomb Coventry, they came over us then. Going back they used to empty as they went back, but you could always tell and you would wonder where they were going. That was awful really, but then again you got used to it. You got used to all these things happening and it didn’t seem, after a while, it didn’t make any impression really. Well not to us because we were younger, whether it would if you had people in the Forces or older people that worried about things, I’d probably worry now! My brother, he was in the Navy. They were all in the Navy, even my husband was in the Navy and I didn’t even know him then, but all the ones that I knew were mostly in the Navy. One was in the Marines but, yes mainly in the Navy”.

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