My Wartime Contribution

I was born in 1922 and raised in the East End of London.I was seventeen when war was declared, and was working in a small business which made silk underwear. I had always had a talent for sowing and had taught myself dressmaking while still at school,my job was to cut and sow the underwear. A girlfriend of mine had told me that a company called Dorville Models who made exclusive clothes for Harvey Nicholls were looking for a sample machinist so I went to the west end for an interview and got the job which was in Nottingham, but I decided to take it and left London. These were the months of 1939 known as the 'Phoney War'. Although I liked the work because every piece had to be hand made I was unhappy in Nottingham. I came home for Christmas and heard that I could get a job doing war work near London in a factory that made parachutes. I caught a train to Woking in Surrey and found the factory and asked if I could work there. I was summoned to the top office where I was met and interviewed by Sir Cuthbert Quilter who ran the factory ( I believe he was a first world war veteran )he offered me a job making flying suits and I accepted. That day I got digs at the YWCA and returned to London to let my parents know what was happening. I started work that week. It was very heavy work and the early flying suits had integral parachute packs sown in.I was just under five feet tall and not very strong but because I was a good seamstress I was kept making the suits. I had seen the silkroom where they made the actual parachutes and asked Sir Cuthbert for a transfer. When he realised I had worked with silk in the past he agreed and I transfeered straight away. After a few months I got a frantic message from home that I had been called up to do war work and that they wanted me to report immediately to a factory that made jam, I refused and to my parents consternation the government office responsible for the call up of citizens for war work threatened to arrest me and put me in prison, they even came to my parents house. Thankfully Sir Cuthbert interviened and that was the last we heard of it. I spent over two and a half years at Woking even making tiny chutes for boxes that contained pigeons which were dropped behind enemy lines, to this day people dont believe we made these tiny parachutes. In late 1942 Sir Cuthbert called me to his office and asked if I would like to work nearer home, I said yes and he told me he could secure me a job overseeing the making of a new parachute pack that would be seperate from the flying suit. Because I could read blueprints and pattern drawings he had suggested me for the job and so I returned to London to work in Stoke Newington, only a twenty minute busride from where I was born and raised. I stayed on here until almost the end of the war and have never forgotten this important work. Although I have many wonderful memories about the time I spent doing war work there were also times when the reality came home in the most vivid way. On one occasssion early on while I was at Woking they bought in a suit where the parachute had failed to open, it had been returned to the factory for inspection, I was asked to see if I could discover what may have caused the chute to malfunction. To this day I still wonder whose blood stained the suit, how old he was and what anguish his family had gone through. I remember how all the girls fell silent when they bought in the suit and placed it on the work bench. I also remember thinking how many other chutes may have failed to open that we did not know about. We all took our work seriously and knew that at that final second before a serviceman jumped it was us who they had to put their faith in as the cord was pulled. Our way of contributing to the war effort and helping those that were risking their lives every day to insure our freedom and future security.

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