The Second World War began in 1939 – when Joyce was just 16 years old.

 

The war would bring many changes to Joyce’s life – working in a munitions factory, a life-threatening illness, and, not least, meeting the love of her life, my father.

 

In the early years of the war Joyce continued to work in printers, in a sweet shop and as a cinema usherette. However a major change came when she reached the age of eighteen.

 

Joyce’s call-up papers arrived in January 1941 on her 18th birthday; she could either enlist in the womens’ forces or join the Royal Ordnance Factory at Aycliffe, working with ammunitions.

 

Joyce’s father said that his daughter was not joining the forces and going away to who knows where. In the light of subsequent events this was very ironic.

 

So it was that Joyce’s working life began when she was eighteen, at Aycliffe Munitions Factory (Royal Ordnance Factory).

Royal Ordnance Factory, ROF 59 was situated at Aycliffe in County Durham. 

 

Building work began in May 1940 and the factory opened in April 1941. The huge munitions factory employed some 17,000 workers between 1941 and 1945 and was an extremely important part of the country's war effort. The workers, 90% of whom were women (as men were away fighting in the forces), worked in three shifts with production around the clock. Many of the women started work at 18, not having experienced factory work before, but the average age at the factory was 34. Workers were supposed to be under the age of 50 to work at the factory, but many lied about their age and over 1,000 of the 17,000 workers were aged over 50.

 

The factory was an enormous complex, at least eight miles long.

The huts spread well apart were disguised with corrugated roofs and topped with grass sods. From the air they were invisible. This was so successful that the factory was never bombed.

 

The Aycliffe factory was mainly a filling and assembly plant, putting powder into shells and bullets, assembling detonators and fuses.

According to a book published in the late 1940s by HMSO, written by Ian Hay, detailing the history of the Wartime ROFs, Aycliffe produced some 700,000,000 (700 Million!) bullets during it's period of operation.

 

Many of the component parts were manufactured in other places in the UK and shipped to Aycliffe by rail.

 

Some of the ammunition casings were manufactured at another nearby ROF at Spennymoor, County Durham. The Spennymoor ammunition was then filled at ROF Aycliffe.  Spennymoor is known to have produced .303 cartridges in: Ball Mk 7 and 8Z, Blank L Mk 5, Incendiary B Mk 6, B Mk 6Z, B Mk 7 and B Mk 7Z. 

 

The factory closed at the end of the war and today the site is an industrial estate, some original buildings and blast bunds remain. [Some forty years later, in a cold, bitter winter, Joyce’s son, Martin, ended up in one of the huts whilst carrying out an audit of a factory that was using the huts as storage and office accommodation.]

 

Workers were brought in to the factory from all over the region. Special trains and buses were laid on to being workers from the surrounding area.

 

Each day Joyce would make her way, walking from Walter Street to Stockton Station, accompanied by her father and always carrying her gas mask, to catch the (steam) train to Aycliffe. The fear of a gas attack was real. Almost everyone knew of people who had been affected – being blinded or maimed - by the use of mustard gas in the trenches of World War One.

 

At times during air raids the journey could be a nerve-wracking experience. The windows of the train were blacked out allowing no light to filter through. On more than one occasion these buses and trains were strafed by German Aircraft. In their panic as they heard the machine gun fire overhead from the low flying aircraft the young women tried to hide under the seats of the train.

 

Sometimes the men working at the steelworks would stand and cheer the train as it passed by and made its way to Aycliffe station. It made the girl’s feel special.

 

On reaching their destination, buses were waiting to carry passengers to their allotted bays numbered one to eight.

 

If the journey to work was dangerous, it was nothing compared to what awaited them on arrival at Aycliffe.

 

The working areas were in long, underground huts with the only windows being in the canteen.

 

On arrival at the factory shoes, outer clothing and jewelry were removed and placed in lockers. White or brown boiler suits, turbans and shoes were provided. The turbans were particularly important: they used to say their hair would turn green if they didn’t cover it up.

The women were inspected for safety purposes – to ensure that they were not carrying matches or other items that could trigger an explosion - before leaving the dirty room and stepping into the ‘clean’ area to begin an eight hour shift.

 

Joyce was one of the women in Group 1 which was known as the ‘Suicide Squad’ handling detonators and magazines.

 

The work was highly dangerous. There were a number of serious and fatal explosions. On one night shift 4 women were killed in an explosion. On another occasion eight women were killed in one blast.  Many were injured by machinery, losing fingers and limbs.

Few official records of these accidents exist, perhaps because of the secrecy surrounding the plant, which was infiltrated by several German spies during the War.

 

Trolleys were wheeled into the working area loaded with shell parts and their fillings. Workers would wear gloves and be seated behind glass screens as a further protection.

 

Joyce’s work involved filling machine gun shells and bullets. She was also responsible for carrying detonators to the magazine area.

 

In addition the hazards of explosions, there were also many side effects of working with munitions. Some girls had to have all their teeth out and also had quinsies. They developed skin blemishes and rashes, their hair turned green, and their skin turned yellow.

 

The conditions and nature of the work meant that there was always a fine layer of yellow dust comprised of combustible material (T.N.T.) floating in the air, coating everything including the women. For safety’s sake it was important to keep the T.N.T. damp, even a dropped component could cause a spark that could ignite the dust.

The cordite in the explosives left a fine yellow dust everywhere. .Because of the constant handling of the chemicals the woman became coated with a dusting of yellow. Consequently the women became known as the ‘Yellow Canaries’.

 

Joyce recalls how her skin took on a yellow hue. ‘It must have been good, because I still have smooth skin’, she laughs.

 

Joyce seemed to have avoided most of the staining by following her mothers advice; cleaning her face and neck with a saucer of milk on her arrival home each day.

 

The shift rota system was twenty four hours of 6-2, 2-10 and 10-6, most shifts with the travel time added ended up a twelve hour day.

The work was extremely repetitive, fragmented and boring, but high levels of companionship existed amongst the women as they risked their lives on a daily basis filling the bombs and bullets.

 

Lunch time was generally spent in the canteen. Joyce’s mother made meat pies for her to take to work. The canteen staff would heat them up for her.

 

Both in the factory and in the canteen the radio was a source of entertainment.

 

Radio was very important during the war. It provided information about the progress of the war, the inspirational speeches of the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and above all else entertainment.  At home Joyce would listen to the radio late into the evening – enjoying the music provided by the dance bands at Grosvenor House in London, led by Roy Fox, Harry Ray, and Henry Hall. Listening to the music, Joyce would sometimes think of the days prior to the war when she would listen to the bands that played in Ropner Park.

Joyce had a number of favourite singers: Annie Shelton and Vera Lynn. One of her favourite songs was ‘I’ll get by as long as I have you’. She particularly enjoyed listening to the Ted Heath Orchestra with (local girl) Lita Rosa.

 

The radio also provided a source of laughter. The radio show, ITMA (It’s That Man Again), Gracie Fields, George Formby, helped to cheer people up during that sad, dreadful time as did Stanley Holloway’s poems, “With her ‘ead tucked underneath her arm”, “Albert, pick up thy musket” and “Let battle commence”.

 

Newsreels were also played in the canteen so that the workers could keep up with what was happening and how the war was progressing; one of the women picked out her husband as a prisoner-of-war and was inconsolable.

 

Despite the hardships Joyce also has happier memories of her time at Aycliffe, in particular of the friends she made.

 

WARTIME PLEASURES

 

The blackout during the war years was depressing. Everything was rationed – food, soap, washing powder, coal, clothes, kitchenware, pans, kettles. People drank a lot of cocoa, tea rationed, and saccharine tablets in place of sugar. Egg powder for baking – not eggs!. There is a view that people were healthier on the food rationing. Certainly there was less obesity. But with everyone smoking and damp housing conditions there was a lot more bronchial illnesses and lung cancer was developing.

 

All the buildings had balloon barrages (like inflatable elephants) on the roof-tops as did ships on the river and in the docks. Piles of sand bags were placed at all buildings to be used to smother the enemy incendiary bombs. There was the black-out to contend with and little transport: few cars and the local buses finished operating at 9:30pm.

However the North East didn’t suffer such a lot of bomb damage – unlike the major towns and cities, London, Bristol, Coventry etc, which suffered a lot of air raids and bomb damage.

 

And despite the problems, or perhaps because of them, the young girls, Joyce included, were determined to enjoy themselves.

After all, they faced the possibility of death on a daily basis.

The cinemas were very popular and Joyce had her own favourite movies and stars. She particularly enjoyed musicals, such as those featuring Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald such as ‘New moon’ and ‘Naughty Marietta’. She liked the thrillers with Bela Lugosi. And as the war progressed she enjoyed movies such as ‘Danger by Monlight’. ‘Mrs Minver’, and ‘The Way to the Stars’.  Heart-throbs included Ronald Coleman.

 

However the main attraction was the dance halls.

 

When not at Aycliffe much time was spent dancing the night away, if the girls were not too tired.

 

Quite often the girls would alight from the trains after a shift at Aycliffe and head straight to the dances.

 

Joyce’s favourite dance-halls were the Maison, with the resident band, Jack Marwood and his Orchestra, and the Palais de Danse, with. The Maison was situated on Yarm Lane (opposite the Garrick pub). Other dance venues included the Corporation Hall and the Norton Co-op.

Joyce’s father did not approve of the dance-halls so she and her sister would have to put their make-up on when they got to the venue. Not that there was much make-up available during the war. Girls used to use boot black for eye-shadow, and would paint their legs brown then use a pencil to draw a seam at the back to represent stockings.

 

Before she mat Frank Joyce had a few boyfriends – one airman was killed whilst flying over the North Sea. Later, when she was based at Swinnerton in Staffordshire, she would go out with some Yanks. One of these came to stockton on leave, stayed at a local hotel and brought a lot of food with him. Did Joyce nearly become a ‘GI Bride’?

 

And if so, would the family story have been so much different?