World War I
When asked, “How long do you think the war
will last?”, Hans Heinrich XV, Prince of Pless, declared, “The war will be over by Christmas!”[1] And, for
most of the men of the British Expeditionary Force, it was. By the end of
1914, in five short months of desperate fighting, this all-volunteer, well-trained
and well-equipped, professional army had been virtually wiped out. More canon-fodder was needed to fill the
ranks, and Lord Kitchener’s plea was answered by nearly 2.5 million new volunteers.
On the very first day of the Battle of the Somme, British casualties numbered in their tens of thousands. By the end of the battle, the number had risen to hundreds of thousands. Not since the Black Death had Europe seen so
many corpses. It is not surprising that the number of volunteers dropped,
forcing the British government to introduce conscription. But, there was
more in store. The upper echelons of society, those who populated
government and the officer class, were seemingly unaware that huge swathes of
the British population were living in such squalid conditions that more than 40% of those
conscripted were too unhealthy for service.
So, as the fittest were transferred from
industry to the front, the production of materiel began to suffer. By 1915,
there was a shortage of artillery shells, which affected the prosecution of the
war, caused a political scandal and brought down the Liberal government. With manpower in short supply, Britain turned
to woman-power. Previously, many working women had been doomed to a life of domestic service or in the cotton mills.
Now, to fill the labour vacuum, they were encouraged to do their bit in the factories. They were told that the lives of the men in the trenches depended
on them, and these were the same women who were denied the right to vote!
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The photograph below shows a group of women who accepted the invitation to become factory workers. It was taken in 1917. The young woman in the centre is May Cawdery. Born in 1898, she was 18 when she started
working for British Westinghouse at Trafford Park, Manchester.[2] British Westinghouse began as a
subsidiary of its American parent, and construction of their Trafford Park
plant began when May was just one year old. However, by 1917, Metropolitan Cammell Carriage and Wagon Company (MCCW) bought a controlling interest in British Westinghouse,
which eventually became Metropolitan-Vickers, one of the largest engineering
companies in the world. The MCCW had
been contracted to build tanks, particularly the Mark V, and although
Metropolitan was a Birmingham-based company, tank engines were built at the
Trafford Park factory.[3] May Cawdrey
worked in the production of these engines.[4]
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| Click on photo to enlarge |
While the photo reveals a light-hearted
moment—someone had wrapped the group in brown paper—the emery wheel [5] at their
feet is indicative of the work they did. More of these wheels can be seen stacked on the
table and on the floor. These abrasive discs were used on grinding machines, an example of which can be seen below, and a slightly earlier model (1907) is illustrated in Modern American Machine Tools. These were driven by an electric motor, and were used for the cutting and finishing of small engine parts. The various uses and processes involved are described in Production Grinding, which makes particular reference to the use of these machines by women during World War I (pages 43-44).
May Cawdery lived at 23 West Brownbill Street, near the corner of Cross Lane and Regent Road, Salford, with her parents Francis Arthur Cawdery and May Hall Cawdery. She married John Taylor on 30 July 1921 at St. Cyprian's Church, Ordsall, Salford. She died at 23 West Brownbill St. on 30th December 1955 at the age of 57. She had three children, John, Frank and May.
World War II
On 11 November 1918, the First World War came to a close. Sadly, the prospect of a "
war to end all wars" would prove as unattainable as transforming Britain into "
a land fit for heroes". Nevertheless, the twenty years between 1918 and the outbreak of World War II was, conveniently, enough time to raise a new generation capable of fighting another war. And fight they did, though with a dogged resignation not shared by their 1914 counterparts. No longer would they harbour any illusion about the new war being a short one. On the contrary, it would be longer, deadlier, costlier and more destructive than anything they had seen before. Moreover, new technology would make the terror of war impossible to contain. At the wail of the air-raid sirens, their front rooms would become the front line.
Ethel Lomas was born at 8 Branson Street,
Ordsall,
Salford in 1906 to James William Lomas and Frances Ronan. Typical of her class, she started work immediately after leaving school at the age of 14.
[6] Her first job was a nine-month stint at
Richard "Dickie" Haworth's textile mill on Ordsall Lane, followed by twelve
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| Richard Haworth's Mill, Ordsall Lane, Salford |
months at the nearby factory of
James and John M. Worral.
[7] Established in Manchester in 1786, Worrall's moved to the Ordsall site in Salford in 1792. At their peak, they employed some 3,000 workers. Once the world's largest dyer of velvet and corduroy, their business began to decline in the face of competition from
synthetic fabrics. Worrall's closed in 1964. Except for a brief interlude at
Fleet Printing Co. in Hulme, Ethel worked at Worrall's from 1920 to 1936.
[16] During this period, she married Walter Wood (1927), had two daughters, Irene (1928) and Doris (1936), and moved to 32 Hanover Street, Salford. Ethel left Worrall's when her second child was born,
[8] and while she was busy with the traditional pursuits of housewife and mother, the Second World War erupted.
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| Detail of an advertisement |
Advertisement 1922
The prosecution of the war meant unparalleled government centralization in order to mobilise all necessary resources. The National Service (No. 2) Act 1941, extended previous legislation to include the conscription of women between the ages of 18 and 40 into the armed forces, civil defence or industry. Ethel, being married with children, was exempt from this regulation. However, she was feisty and patriotic, and decided to support the war effort by going to work once more.
[9] It was to prove a transformative moment, because when she started working at
Sir James Farmer Norton's Adelphi Iron Works in Salford in 1939, she developed a passion for engineering, which endured throughout the rest of her life. At the Adelphi Iron Works
[10], she
learned to read a
micrometer and operate machinery in the production of
diamond dies for
wire-drawing.[14] These dies were
strategically crucial in making very fine wires used in range finders, gun sights and communication equipment. She also operated a lathe in the production of parts for
Sptifire fighters.
After that, Ethel went to work for Thomas Bradford & Company at the Crescent Iron Works, Salford, where she produced munitions.
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| Thomas Bradford, Salford |
Industrial sites like the Adelphi Iron Works were always a target for the Luftwaffe, and it was during one of their raids (June 1941) that the nearby Salford Royal Hospital was
bombed, killing fourteen nurses. The adjacent
River Irwell, may have been mistaken for the
docks, or the Adelphi Street complex of factories may have been the intended target.
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Proximity of Salford Royal Hospital to Adelphi Iron Works
click on map to enlarge |
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Adelphi Street factories [11] with the Adelphi Iron Works in red.
The R. Irwell is in the lower left-hand corner.
Photo credit: Britain From Above
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Salford Royal Hospital at the corner of
Chapel St. and Adelphi St.
Before
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| Salford Royal Hospital: After |
Ethel's oldest daughter,
Irene, who had been evacuated to the
Hambleton, near Poulton-le-Fylde, in September of 1939, returned home to Hanover Street during the
Phoney War period. Within weeks of her homecoming, Salford experienced its worst
blitz of the war. Over two consecutive nights, Sunday (
22/23) and Monday (23/24) of December 1940, the Luftwaffe attacked the Manchester and Salford area with over 440 planes, dropping 467 tons of high explosive and over 1900 incendiaries. Consequently, the run up to Christmas was spent in a bomb shelter, which had been hurriedly built to cover their back entry. For those who are unfamiliar with terraced housing in a British industrial city, a 'back entry' is found between parallel rows of terraced houses, and is used for access into the back yards, where coal was stored.
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Schematic drawing of terraced houses with back entry
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| Section of prefabricated bomb shelter over a back entry. |
Of course, these bomb shelters were ineffective against a direct hit, but they did protect against flying shrapnel. However, the adjacent brickwork was vulnerable to blast, and eventually Irene's family had a Morrison shelter placed in the front parlour of their house. Irene's maternal uncle, Harry Lomas, lost his house in West Fleet St. during the Christmas blitz, but he and his wife survived thanks to Groves and Whitnall Brewery opening its cellar to the public. Even so, the brewery was badly damaged. While her mother was engaged in war work, Irene helped to shoulder some of the responsibility of caring for her younger sister. However, when she left school
[12] in 1942 at the age of 14, Irene started work at Glass's, a Manchester garment factory, where she made utility clothing for displaced persons, and for a six day work-week, she received 10/6.
[13]
Post War
The end of the war marked the end of Ethel's employment at Thomas Bradford's. It was back to hearth and home along with some
two million other women war-workers.
[15] As the men returned home from the battlefield, women in engineering plants became surplus to requirements. Undaunted, Ethel found work
candling and
grading at a local egg supplier in Trafford Park, but her appetite for engineering never waned, and eventually she found work at Dorman & Smith's (
1937) Ltd., a firm of electrical engineers.
Charles Mark Dorman and
Reginald Arthur Smith established the company in Manchester in 1881, but they subsequently
moved to Salford in 1892, operating under the name of
Ordsall Station Electrical Works. In August 1958,
Dorman and Smith closed their Salford plant and moved to Preston. For fourteen weeks, Ethel was bussed to the Preston plant, where she trained new personnel, but she found the commute tiresome and resigned. She then went to work for A.J. Flatley Ltd., a manufacturer of
washing
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Ethel operating a drill press at Ward & Goldstones,
and following in her father's footsteps! [17] |
machines and dryers, until it went out of business in 1962. At the time, Flatley's was operating from
Irwell Bank Mills in Stoneclough, near
Kearsley. From there she went to
Ward and Goldstone (Frederick Road), Salford's largest industrial employer, where she worked until she was made redundant at the age of 61, and forced into an unwelcome retirement.
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| Ethel (standing centre) with workmates at Flatley's |
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Ethel installing 1/5 horsepower electric
motors in Flatley's washing machines (circa 1961) |
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| Ward & Goldstone (Frederick Road, Salford) |
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| Ethel's Union Contribution Card |
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| click on images to enlarge |
One wintry afternoon, thirty-six years ago, I was sitting in the front room of Ethel's council flat, warming myself by the fire, when she came in holding a micrometer. She asked me if I had ever seen one. I hadn't, and she proceeded to show me how it worked. I remember asking myself, How had my grandmother, now in her late seventies, acquired this arcane skill? The answer came as she began recounting the history of her working life. The micrometer was the one she had used at Farmer Norton's during the war. It linked her to the world of engineering, and she was proud of this association and of the opportunity it gave her to serve her country. My grandmother believed in the nobility of work. How could it have been otherwise? Work had filled most of her life, but its rewards were not monetary. Actually, she earned very little, and certainly less than her male counterparts. To Ethel Lomas Wood, work was a means of demonstrating her worth. I hope this was enough, for when she died, she left no will, for there was nothing much to leave.
Of Interest
Notes
[1] The Kaiser I knew; my fourteen years with the Kaiser
[2] Metropolitan-Vickers Electrical Co. Ltd. 1899-1949. p. 2: "During the war, the number of workpeople increased from 5200 to a peak figure of 8000 in May 1917, but the old skilled workers nearly disappeared. Women came into the factory in large numbers, growing from 620 to 2500—nearly a third of the employees. They worked on munitions such as 9-2 and 3-3 shells, Hotchkiss fuses Marks III and IV, and magnetos, thus adding machining, inspecting, and varnishing to their normal occupations, and they were also employed for storekeeping, crane-driving, transport and maintenance work."
[3] Metropolitan-Vickers Electrical Co. Ltd. 1899-1949. p. 48: "Actual war material manufactured included field gun parts, engines for tanks and submarines, mines and mine-sweeping paravanes, shells, bombs and fuses, and aircraft magnetos."
[4] May Cawdery was my paternal grandmother. This information was conveyed by her to my father.
[5] A modern emery wheel.
[6] See Poverty and Aspiration: Young Women's Entry to Employment in Inter-War England
[7] Known locally as 'Worrall's', 'Jimmy Worrall's' or occasionally the Salford Dye Works.
[8] Ethel's shift started too early in the morning to get Irene ready for school, so during the week the child stayed with her grandmother, Frances, who lived in Ordsall, which was close to Worrall's. Between 4 and 6 years old, Irene attended Nashville Street Infants School.
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| Nashville Street School |
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| Map of Ordsall area (1932) |
[9] By 1943, nearly 3,000,000 married women and widows were in employment as compared with 1,250,000 before the war. Among women aged l8-40, it is estimated that 90% of the single women, and 80% of the married women and widows without young children were involved in war work. (Production and Engineering Bulletin vol. 3 (1944:301).
[10] And its subsidiary, Wire Drawing Dies (Manchester), Ltd., Adelphi Iron Works, Salford. See also: Interview with Mrs E B Matthews
[11] See also aerial view further along the Irwell
[12] Irene went to Windsor Institute. Pendleton Ragged School was founded in Ellor Street in 1858, its name being changed after a few years to Pendleton Sabbath and Week Evening School. The school building was closed in 1902 but accommodation was found for the pupils in Bethesda School and in a building in Peel Street once used as a school. In 1907 it acquired premises in West George Street, Windsor Bridge, Cross Lane, The name "Windsor Institute and Pendleton Ragged School" was adopted in 1914 and from 1920 it was known as the Windsor Institute. Its officers worked under a Board of Trustees established or re-established from time to time. In the1950s attendance at the Institute considerably diminished as nearby houses were demolished and the Institute was closed in 1966, its work being taken over by Manchester City Mission. Information on its wide range of activities, which included Sunday evening schools for children and adults, the encouragement of temperance, physical education, the "Little Folk Choir", the maintenance of a penny bank and the use of the buildings as a cinema and for recreational purposes, is given especially in its annual reports.
[13] In 2011 labour-cost terms about £63 (GBP). George Glass had a factory in Manchester. Originally, he opened in 1932 a little drapery shop on Regent Road, Salford. He called himself "the cheapest man on earth" and sold shirts for a penny. The business he started with 200 pounds mushroomed into a chain of 22 stores. The family slogan was "Look into the Glass Window". They also had a factory at Brynmawr, Wales.
[14] See GEC Research Laboratories, 1919-1984 ; Diamond Dies for High Speed Drawing of Copper Wire
[15] See When the War Was Over: Women, War and Peace in Europe , 1940-1956
[16] Ethel's nephew, Norman Lomas, was a foreman there.
[17] On Ethel's marriage certificate, her father's occupation is a 'driller'.
