Blown to atoms? 1917
"Smile, smile, smile…"
This piece was going to be sort-of related to my earlier one about novelist Arnold Bennett’s secretary, Edith Evors (who interviewed Christabel Pankhurst). My research led me to Arnold’s youngest brother, Septimus (1876–1926), a Staffordshire ceramicist who had on occasion provided illustrations for Woman, the magazine that his older brother edited. Septimus also kept a journal of his own between 1915 and 1918, giving meticulous detail about his work in a Sheffield munitions factory during the First World War. Fairly cosseted beforehand, this was a shock to him: on his first visit to the munitions works, he described the Brightside district as…
… absolutely forbidding. Belching furnaces, the rumbling noises of hidden machinery, the hissing of steam jets over black pools of water, the vast prison-like places employing seven, eight and ten thousand hands – make me shudder to think of having to work amongst such surroundings, not to mention living.
But with apologies to Septimus, whose diary is certainly a valuable account of this work,1 I’ve been drawn to another account a little more colourful in tone. So our subject this week completes this little trilogy of interesting female voices from the early 20th century.
It’s estimated that in the third quarter of 1918, around three million people were employed in Britain’s munitions industry – and about a third of them were women, collectively known as ‘munitionettes’. Some of them, the Canary Girls, had the particularly grim and dangerous job of manufacturing the explosive TNT (work which could turn the skin canary yellow). Liver damage and the risk of explosions were the order of the day.
The Imperial War Museum (IWM) in London holds a number of first-hand accounts of women in this industry, including diaries, memoirs and oral history recordings, all part of its Women’s Work Collection. A decade ago, as part of marking the centenary of WW1, the BBC TV series Great War Diaries drew upon these, dramatising the experiences of one of the munitions workers, Gabrielle Mary West.
She kept a diary from pre-war 1914 until Armistice (she wrote it for her brother Michael, serving in India, and he was later able to return it to her), although the volume for 1918 has not been found. The surviving wartime volumes are at the IWM – she donated them in 1977, when she was 89, and her reminiscences were also recorded.2
Gabrielle was born in 1890, her father George a well-to-do churchman turned headmaster in Bournemouth on England’s south coast. When Gabrielle was a teenager, the family (she had four siblings) moved to Gloucestershire. When war broke out, her leisurely life of lunches and horse riding began to change. On 5th August 1914, she wrote:
Just to think that last week we seemed as peaceful and quiet as we could possibly be and now we find ourselves launched on the greatest war the world has ever seen.
She and her mother Florence began helping the Red Cross at a local convalescent hospital, and her diary becomes notable for her sharp observations:3
We hear from one of the Stroud nurses that there is a fearful scandal at the Fever Hospital at Cainscross. The matron is too fond of the bottle. There is only one trained nurse to look after as many as thirty beds; all the others are untrained. There is only one bath for all the patients…
At the start of 1916, she needed paid work, and took a place in the canteen at the Royal Aircraft Factory in Farnborough, Hampshire on “a salary of £60 year and two meals a day”. Her first impressions again record a slightly under-resourced setup:
Our first day at canteen work. Found that there was hardly any gas pressure, so that it took hours to get the potatoes to boil, and it seemed almost impossible to get the meat to roast. And if you light more than two of the five comic little stoves, they all go out.
She also records details of the workers in the factory itself – such as the ‘dope girls’ whose job was to varnish the planes, using a very poisonous varnish which “affects the liver”, so were under careful medical supervision. A few months later, she has moved to another factory, near London, and she is given a tour:
As soon as you go in, the lyddite in the air gets into your nose and mouth and makes you sneeze and splutter as if you had violent hay fever. It gives you a horrid bitter taste at the back of your throat.
As the year came to a close, she decided to join the new Women’s Police Service, which sent women to supervise the female workers in the munitions factories. And it was presumably her role as an early policewoman that led to her lifelong nickname of Bobby thereafter.
By January 2017, she had already been promoted to sergeant, and was moved to a new factory – “the most terrific collection of stinks… that you could possibly imagine” – at Pembrey in south Wales. A regular part of her job was to stop the factory girls from smoking – an obvious danger when surrounded by explosives! And yet again, scarcity of resources was a theme:
This factory is very badly equipped as regards the welfare of the girls. The changing rooms are fearfully crowded, long troughs are provided instead of wash basins and there is always a scarcity of soap and towels. The girls’ danger clothes are often horribly dirty and in rags… Although the fumes often mean sixteen or eighteen casualties a night, there are only four beds in the surgery for men and women, and they are all in the same room… There were until recently no lights in the lavatories and as these same lavatories are generally full of rats and often very dirty, the girls are afraid to go in.
Danger was ever present. Ether in the cordite, a propellant used in the shells they made, gave the girls “headaches, hysteria, and sometimes fits”. And sometimes worse came, as we’ll see in the story Bobby tells below, dated 3rd April 1917.
Such a day! I was on morning shift this week so came back at three o’clock to my rooms. We are now living in Pembrey, the village being about 2½ miles from the factory. At about six o’clock there was a tremendous explosion and then a whole succession of little bangs. I rushed upstairs and from the window saw flames and smoke rising in volumes. The landlady wept and wailed and said we should all be killed, and that poor Miss Buckpitt was certainly already dead and the poor Women Police and all the girls blown to atoms.
I flew into my uniform with the old girl clinging round my neck and bolted off to the bicycle shop. There I hired a bike (my own, of course, was punctured, just when I wanted it). When I got near the factory I met several girls running for their lives. One of them stopped me to say she had left her case containing her food in the dining room, would I please be sure to go and rescue it as soon as I arrived at the factory!
When I did arrive I found the Danger Gates barred and all the girls huddled just inside them. A large shed behind the guncotton section was in flames and going off in small explosions every now and then. All the policewomen on duty were busy pacifying the girls and attending to various cases of fainting and fits. After about half an hour of this performance, the fire was put out and we were told to get the girls back to their sheds. This was easier said than done. However, after another half an hour of persuasion, one girl announced she was going back and she hoped if she perished the policewomen would remember that she had left all her money to her mother; we should find the will under the drawing room carpet. Of course, when one started, all the rest followed, and back they all marched singing:
What’s the use of worrying?
It never was worthwhile, so
Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag,
And smile, smile, smile.
Bobby never married. After the war, she ran a tea room in Chepstow, in the south-east corner of Wales, and later spent many years caring for her elderly parents and other relatives. She herself would go on to reach the age of 100.
It was published in 2001 as Septimus Bennett: Artist in Arms by Martin Phillips and John Potter (Pentland Press).
Some extracts of Gabrielle’s diary were published in The Imperial War Museum Book of the First World War (ed. Malcolm Brown, 1991) but the best and most detailed source is by Bobby’s great-niece, Sarah Beddington (née West), writing as Avalon Weston in 2016: Menus, Munitions & Keeping the Peace: The Home Front Diaries of Gabrielle West 1914–1917 (Pen & Sword).