Shipping News

The following is a personal account by Christina Cunningham MacLeod.

In 1938 aged 14yrs I left Dalziel High School and joined Miss Coubrough's drawing office at 81, St. Vincent Street, Glasgow. Three flights of stairs up and no lift! For 5 shillings a week I had started on a three year apprenticeship as a draughtswoman, though when war broke out the following year the apprenticeship was cut short. The office dealt mostly with the overflow of work from The Admiralty and other shipping companies such as the Donaldson Line, Redpath Brown, Stewart and Lloyd's, Yarrow's,Scott's of Greenock, Harland and Woolfe, Stevens of Linthouse and Barclay Curle.

We produced large-scale drawings of a wide variety of ships with a view to changing their specification from peacetime usage to wartime. Initially, passenger vessels were converted into troop carriers but as the war progressed they in turn were converted into hospital ships. One such ship, the 'Laetitia' became a troopship, then hospital ship, then a GI Bride ship before going to Australia and renamed the 'Empire Brent'. Listening to wireless news bulletins we sometimes heard of the ships we had worked on being torpedoed, though most were only known to us by a number. Many damaged vessels were towed back to Clydeside for repairs.

I worked under an Essential Works Order, which meant my work was deemed of national importance and so I could not be called up into the forces, though I tried to get out of it. I wanted to join the land army but wasn't allowed. I needed permits to get into the various shipyards.

Along with another girl, Sheena Malone, I was sent to the Admiralty Office in St. Enoch's Square, Glasgow, known as the British Shipbuilding Corporation, though each Friday we returned to Miss Coubrough's to collect our wages. We worked in the back office with four or five others, beneath which was a bakery: the delicious smells permeated throughout the building and we were allowed to go there for our elevenses, provided we didn't take too long! Two draughtsmen from the leading shipbuilding companies in Scotland were sent to work with us, e.g. Caledon of Dundee and Cammell Laird.

As the war in Europe began to draw to a close attention was turned more to the Far East, where there was a need for small, fast vesels with sharp bows to match those used by the Japanese around the islands and inlets of the Pacific. These were known as the 'Loch Class' frigates, either 300 tons (one deck with 30 guns) or 600 tons (two decks with 60 guns). At the same time, Canada agreed to contribute twelve such frigates, known as the 'River Class.'

Clothing was rationed of course, but the drawing office provided a solution for one colleague about to become a wartime bride. The tracing cloth used for our drawings, made from very fine linen dipped in wax, some parts of which were difficult to see through, could be boiled to remove the wax. The result was a fine white linen cloth, ideal for making a wedding gown!

Towards the end of the war there were growing fears that Germany was developing a range of secret weapons. We began to receive small fragments of drawings with German writing on, sent from different parts of the country. Our job was to fit them together rather like a jigsaw puzzle and produced one large drawing. We were not told what the drawings represented. Every so often a man who was never introduced came along to scrutinise our progress and though we completed the task we were left completely in the dark.

The first time censorship touched our lives was when one of our office colleagues, a lad from Northern Ireland, wrote a letter home to his fiance. He'd been denied leave to return to Belfast in order to get married, and was understandably annoyed with the boss. In his letter he described the 'slackness' and easy-going attitude of the management, which was more or less true. The censors alerted the management and as a result both he and several others in the office were sacked.

Soon after, the office closed down and I returned to 81, St. Vincent Street.

Christina Cunningham MacLeod (nee Turner)
Wiganthorpe,
York.
14th November 2004.

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