Some Memories of the Dynamite - Part 1

Everybody in the seaside towns of Stevenston and Saltcoats used to call the munition factory of Ardeer “The Dynamite”. I don’t know how they refer to it now, because it hardly exists. Passing by in the train coming from Largs, and looking out of the window, you are surprised to see the tall chimneys are all gone, and the cooling towers and cordite huts are all away.

When WW2 broke out, I was a happy-go-lucky girl of 19, travelling into my job in Paisley, as a letterpress feeder every day by train from Beith (North). This tranquil way of life was soon to change, because everybody was being called up, to help the war effort. My sister May had already got herself a job at Ardeer, and purported to like it, so she used her influence on me to give up my work in Paisley, and join her down there in Stevenston. Which I did. But only because I thought she and I would be working together, and we would be good company for each other. That never happened, because it turned out to be Company policy not to let two sisters work together, in case of a fatal accident. So, while May was in a job at the Centrificles which she enjoyed, hard work though it was, I found myself on the cordite huts at New Hill, and right from the start I didn’t like it. We were 12 girls to a hut, and our job was to blend the sticks of cordite, walking round and round the huge boxes called blenders, lifting a few sticks from each, and depositing them all in the end blender. The fumes and the peppery smell of the cordite when the doors of the hut were closed, made you very drowsy, and it was worst of all on the night shift, when big black shutters were put up on the windows, so that not a chink of light could be seen from the air. None of us liked the night shift. When the harvest moon was in the sky, we felt that the German planes had the advantage. And one night it happened. It was actually on the night that Clydebank was bombed, and the planes were making their way over the factory (Ardeer). We heard the heavy droning of the engines, as we walked round the blenders, but we weren’t allowed to leave our posts to seek shelter until the air raid siren sounded, and in this case it never did, because our anti-aircraft guns opened up, and I heard that later the last two German planes detached themselves from the pack — turned, and came back, knowing they were onto something. Later, sitting in our underground shelter, it was a night of mind-numbing horror. For hours on end we heard the scream of the bombs descending, and when this happened you leaned forward on your bench because the corrugated iron shelter rattled back and forward and would in itself have caused you an injury. To begin with, all the women sang war time songs “Roll Out The Barrel”, “Bluebirds Over The White Cliffs Of Dover”, stupid songs which irritated me, because indeed it was a nerve shattering situation we were in — but the singing all stopped when an incendiary bomb rattled down the steps of the hut and made its flaming way right in among us. Some people threw — or tried to throw — sandbags on top of it, but the hero of the hour was an old inspector who actually got rid of it by kicking it out. Then word came in to us that a barrage balloon was on fire. Horrors! We were so near the TNT plant that the mind boggled as to the damage it could cause. And yet, nearly everybody trooped up the steps and out into the open, to stand and watch that balloon falling in pieces to the ground. It was a miracle nobody was killed that night, or even hurt. Two unexploded bombs were found the next day on the seashore at Stevenston — 2 duds, and subsequently they were put on display (Admission sixpence to view them) by the Red Cross at the gates of the Ardeer. I was sorry I had gone into see them, as up until then I had imagined bombs to be quite small, but these were massive.

When the all clear sounded that morning, we were all glad to get out of the shelter which had served us so well, and when we went to our hut to retrieve our outdoor clothes which we’d left hanging in the porch, we found our cordite hut smouldering, and we had lost all pieces of clothing, because the hut had got a direct hit. Later they all claimed for what they had lost, and got new clothes. I didn’t bother. Two nights after the air raid, Lord Haw Haw claimed on the wireless “We know what lies behind the Arran Hills. ARDIR (he called it ARDIR). We’ll be back”.

But they never came back.

And so our lives continued on a more even keel, and it wasn’t all doom and gloom. I look back on those days and sometimes smile at the memories. One of the girls who worked beside me was May Wilson (I have changed her name) who lived in Lochwinnoch, and who was known to our family. She presented herself as very demure and modest in the village, and indeed my mother used to say to me “Try and be demure and lady-like like May Wilson”.

Well, I got to see a different side to this young lady in the factory. The men whose job it was to be runners (pushing bogies outside, loaded with cordite) used to come into our hut on the night shift when their runs were finished and they would get an hour’s sleep at the end of the hut on the re-work bags. May took great delight, when they were fast asleep, to slip up there, and OPEN THEIR TROUSER BUTTONS, thereby exposing their privates to all and sundry. It only happened a couple of times. These two men stopped coming in.

We were a mixed bunch — 23 women from all different parts of the country, but the war was a great leveller and we all got on fine. May Wilson amused us and irritated us by turns. She had a very low boredom level, as they say nowadays, and on the back shift (3-11) she used to get fed up, and sometimes she would say “och, I’m away to get a Pass Out, to go to the Ardeer Rec”. This was the dancing. It was almost impossible to get a Pass Out — once you were in, you were in, and it entailed paying a visit to wee Cocky Roberston, the Chemist, in his office along the line. He was the Head Lad, and so important you nearly had to touch your forelock when you met him. And so we would all tell The Fed Up One that she had no chance at all of getting her Pass Out, but over her shoulder, on her way out, she would call “Well just wait and see”. And sure enough, maybe half an hour later, she would come back laughing, and triumphantly waving the precious Pass Out, with everybody asking what she’d had to do in the Office to get it. Ribald laughter and dirty suggestions would follow her retreating figure down the line to the railway station, and a good night at the Recreation Hall.

Mrs Cameron was another of our fellow workers, a different type altogether. If you kept in with her, she would bring you yards of lace, because her husband was an undertaker and this was what he used to line the coffins with. I myself got enough to stitch the hem of two petticoats, and I felt as if I had won a watch.

Ruth was older than all of us, a real lady, and working in the factory in order to gain experience to write a book. Rumour had it she wasn’t interested in the money, and that she gave it to charity. I knew this to be true, because walking behind her one day I saw her drop her unopened pay packet into one of the big boxes just inside the gates of Ardeer, which was there to collect money for the war effort. Her husband was a Captain at sea, and she never really mixed with the rest of us, or told us her business, but I remember her confiding in me that her husband told her that when his ship was in action against the enemy, our guns back-fired, and this was because the cordite hadn’t been evenly blended. This was a practice that I detested, that the girls in all the huts had got into. We were making our own pay — the more you produced at the end of the week, the better your wages — it was called the BEDOIS system, and had something to do with a Frenchman.

We were all given wooden contraptions that fitted onto our right hands, and this opened to lift about six sticks of cordite from each blender, thus giving an even blend. But because they were on ‘piecework’ this method proved too slow for them, and when they knew there were no inspectors about to see what they were doing, they lifted great bundles of cordite, and just dumped it into the end blender. Ruth told me that when the guns back-fired they could kill a man. Doesn’t bear thinking about.

At the beginning of each shift, the foreman would visit each of the huts, and decide where the labour was to go. If he was short of bogey runners for instance, he would just pick out the required number and tell you to go and get equipped with the proper clothing for the job — big coarse navy blue fire-resistant trousers which rub your legs raw when they touched, and big Charlie Chaplin boots. I only had the ‘pleasure’ once, of being picked — me and another girl, and it was on the night shift, so it was really a mixed blessing, as I didn’t fancy the idea of a possible air raid. Well, that didn’t happen, but that night I did have an unfortunate experience.

With the passage of time, I forget what we were delivering that night on our bogey, but I remember that we were being sent to another part of the plant, maybe three miles away. So there was Liz, a girl from Kilmarnoch that I had just met for the first time that night, and I, pushing our bogey away along to the building where the men were employed in polishing bullets with black powder. After we had disgorged our load of whatever it was, and were ready to leave, one of the men asked if we would like a packet of the black powder to take home to our Mothers to “polish the grate with”. Apparently if the said black powder was mixed with methylated spirits, it made a grand job of polishing a grate. So, nothing loath we each accepted some powder, wrapped up inside some white waxed paper, and I felt happy to be going to present something to my Mother that she couldn’t get in the shops. I remember it was winter, and the snow was lying thick on the ground, and I remember too, that I started to get very apprehensive about having to smuggle it out of the factory. I always was a “Big Fearty”. But you see, at the end of a shift when you were all going home, they had searchers waiting at the gates to search you, and these ladies standing in their little boxes could pick you out at random for what they called A DOUBLE SEARCH. I had hidden my packet of black powder down my bra, but as I neared the gates I was suddenly overcome with fear, and I dipped into my bra, pulling out the packet in order to throw it away in the snow, and in my nervous yellow-bellied haste, I managed to rip the wretched packet, and it spilled all down my stomach. What a mess, and the searcher never even looked at me. My Mother was mad at me. Mad angry at my underwear being spoiled because it never washed out. Moreover, it was no use anyway for polishing grates. Liz told me so, a few days later.

There were lots of hazards on the night shift — real and imagined. The toilets were situated quite a long way from the huts, and to visit them in the middle of the night, and in total darkness wasn’t a very pleasant experience, especially as you were stumbling over tufty grass growing on top of the sand dunes. These toilets were very primitive, and they consisted of a pail inside a little hut. A rumour went round the place that a girl had been attacked by a weasel on one of these forays, and that it had clung on to her bare bottom with its wee sharp teeth until they drew blood. Commonsense told us that this was hardly likely, but then you thought there might be a modicum of truth in it, as weasels did run about the place. There was a lot of wildlife in Ardeer. It was the only place that I ever saw the cuckoo, a notoriously shy bird, and in there, I saw several of them. My father told me that in his young days, they employed game keepers to control the wildlife in the factory. And so I was always very chary of using their makeshift toilets in the night, just in case a weasel was lying in wait to spring up at a bare bottom.

Many memories of those days come to mind. We got a tea-break in the middle of the night, and when we got “the SHOUT” we all scrambled out of the huts and down the line to the Mess Room. On two nights a week they served mutton pies, but they were in short supply, so if you wanted one, you had to be smart, and run all the way to the Mess Room. They were a great treat, and eagerly sought after, in the days when our carried pieces were becoming more unpalatable. The bread was brown — or rather, it was a yellowish brown and we hadn’t had much to put on our pieces. If our meagre ration of cheese was finished for the week, my Mother used just to spread margarine and her own home made jam on the bread. When you opened your poke in the wee sma’ hours it would all be soaked in, and the bread would be hard. So a hot mutton pie was a treat. Then a rumour spread like wildfire that a girl had taken the lid off her pie and to her horror she was confronted by a SHEEP’S EYE lying there!! They sold no more pies after that. You could always get soup — 4 pence a bowl for thick white mutton soup with pieces of leek floating on top. But we had learned not to be too choosy in wartime, and on a cold winter night we were pleased enough to get a warming bowl of soup.

END OF PART ONE

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.