This is a film made by a Sheffield filmmaker William Gordon Gregory.  Gregory, known as ‘Pop’ to his students, taught chemistry (and possibly physics) at Sheffield’s Central Technical School on West Street – later moving to Gleedless and becoming Ashleigh School.  On ‘Friends Re-united’ it has been claimed both that his Chemistry Lab was situated on the top floor of Holly Street, and also on Townhead Street, opposite the Playhouse.   According to another posting there Gregory had a...

This is a film made by a Sheffield filmmaker William Gordon Gregory.  Gregory, known as ‘Pop’ to his students, taught chemistry (and possibly physics) at Sheffield’s Central Technical School on West Street – later moving to Gleedless and becoming Ashleigh School.  On ‘Friends Re-united’ it has been claimed both that his Chemistry Lab was situated on the top floor of Holly Street, and also on Townhead Street, opposite the Playhouse.   According to another posting there Gregory had a photography shop in Union Street called "Burncross Photos" and his house in Chapeltown was also called Burncross – furthermore, that he had a penchant for dishing out punishment using a Bunsen gas pipe!  For more on Gregory see the Context for Tinker, Taylor . . ? World Of Opportunity (1941).

With his science and technology background Gregory was well placed to film these subjects, and at the end of the war, in 1945, he made an extended two part film called, The Story of Good Steel, which shows in detail how steel was then made, and what proportions of substances went into making it. No doubt this film, as with many of his films, would have been used by the school when there was a push to get students into technical jobs after the war.  The school itself was originally associated with Firth College, whose benefactor was Mark Firth - a successful local steel manufacturer and philanthropist.

With a population of around 560,000 in 1940, and its central position in steel and engineering, Sheffield, like neighbouring Rotherham, was hugely important in the making of munitions during the Second World War, as it was during the First.  It housed the only drop hammer in the country, at Vickers, ironically made in Germany, which was capable of forging crankshafts for the Rolls Royce Merlin engine which powered the Supermarine Spitfire fighter plane and later in the war the Avro Lancaster bomber.  In addition, Hadfields was also the only steelworks in the UK at that time where 18 inch armour piercing shells were made.  Stewart Dalton states that: “Every steam turbine powered battleship, cruiser and destroyer constructed during the war, had its steam turbine blades made at Hadfield’s.” (References, p 92)

It isn’t known which factory is featured in this film, there were plenty of them making munitions in Sheffield, and more in Rotherham, at the Newton Chambers Factory at Thorncliffe and Samuel Fox’s in nearby Stocksbridge.  Virtually every steel and engineering works in the area was involved in one way or another in the manufacture of munitions, large and small – Stewart Dalton’s excellent book provides a detailed account of the involvement of many of the companies.

The use of women to work on the production of munitions, and other war related war work, was a re-run of what happened in the First World War; when, from 276,000 women being employed in industry in the UK in July 1914, this figure rose to 4,808,000 by April 1918.  Between the wars women worked in the cutlery industry in Sheffield, in places like Viners or Dixons, of which most of the 900 workforce were women.  They usually worked on specific ‘women’s’ jobs, like file cutting or as ‘buffer girls’.  Many worked in small workshops or at home – as can be seen in Hand Forging (The Blades For Spring Knives)  (c.1929).

At the beginning of the Second World War there was a severe labour shortage, leading to all women aged 19 to 41 having to register at employment exchanges from March 1941, and the introduction of the National Service Act on 18th December 1941. This called up unmarried women aged between twenty and thirty, later being extended to married women, exempting pregnant women and mothers with very young children.  This allowed women to choose between the women's services, civil defence or the munitions industries, with most being placed in the Auxiliary Territorial Service or industry.  In part the extension of work in industries like electrical engineering was a continuation of pre-war trends in women’s employment, away from traditional work such as textiles and domestic service.  By 1943 all women between the ages of 18 and 50 had to register for work directed by the government.  In that year 37% of the female workforce in South Yorkshire made munitions. 

Penny Summerfield claims that in fact, “women’s access to ‘men’s work’ was extremely limited”.  Yet some 1.5 million women were employed in factories in total, mainly conscripted, greatly outnumbering the men, who were usually in managerial roles.  There was a rapid expansion of local authorities providing day nurseries – from just a handful in 1939 to 1,450 in 1943: married women paid the pre-war rate of about sixpence a day, with the Government contributing a further sixpence.   In fact three quarters of new workers were married women, eventually reaching 3 million married women and widows working – almost double the pre-war total.  Amazingly, the number of women who died in child birth more than halved, and the infant mortality rate fell by 28 percent – see also the Context for (1940s).

Yet although the government made some provision to help working mothers, including also the registering of child minders, there were several campaigns – such as the Women's Power Committee and the Equal Pay Campaign Committee, both chaired by the Conservative MP Mavis Tate – over women’s issues; and Penny Summerfield states that the government were still keen not to upset traditional gender roles – see the discussion in Sonya O. Rose, References.

The recruitment of women into war work was accompanied by posters and other propaganda portraying women, usually young and single, heroically doing work previously done by men: as with the wartime posters of Jonathan Foss,  John Cosmo Clark, Abram Games and the distinctly socialist realist like work of Philip Zec.  This was an image that was also cropped up in J B Priestley’s 1943 book promoting women’s mobilisation, Women go to War; and in the propaganda film of that year, Millions Like Us, about a single girl, Celia, posted to a factory making aircraft parts.  In fact, as can be seen from this film, many of the women were older mothers, often working with their grown up daughters – in their collection on Women in the Home Front, the IWM has a photo of a mother and daughter team working on a shell painting machine at a Sheffield munitions factory.  Kelham Island Museum has a collection of material relating to women workers in Sheffield during the war.

Whatever the image, the reality was that the work was hard and dangerous, and often boring.  Monica McMurray, a 17 year old working at Laycock Engineering , Sheffield, recalls, in 1941: “This eternal smell of oil combined with next-to-no ventilation and artificial light at work is suffocating, I think I shall have to try to get on the land.” (cited in Goodall, References).   As well as the frequent burns and other injuries sustained in the course of the job, many were killed or maimed in industrial accidents or air raids as the Luftwaffe tried to halt production of supplies.  Documents captured at the end of the war show that the targets for the raids included the Atlas Steelworks, Brown Bayley Steelworks, Meadowhall Iron Works, River Don Works, Darnall Wagon Works, Tinsley Park Collieries, East Hecla Works and Orgreave Coke Ovens, mostly located in the east end of Sheffield where the River Don flows. 

What is more women, even doing skilled work, got less pay than the men, even those doing unskilled work.  Although women's pay did increase during the war this had to be fought for, not least against some initial  trade union resistance: the main engineering union, the AEU, didn’t drop its ban on women members until 1942. By 1945 female membership of TUC affiliated unions had trebled, and several engineering factories had elected women as their TGWU convenors.  Of course, rather conveniently for the employers, any industrial action was branded as traitorous. 

But this didn’t stop women working at the Rolls Royce plant at Hillington, near Glasgow, going on strike for a week in October 1943 for being paid at a lower rate than unskilled men doing the same work.  As shop steward  Agnes Maclean recalled, "we were marching along the street, getting eggs and tomatoes thrown at us . . . suddenly the men came marching to support us . . . They were very sympathetic once they realised we were being used for cheap labour!  After that women on big machines got the male semi-skilled rate, but not the skilled rate.”  (Quoted in Peter Lewis)   According to The New Propellor (later The Metal Worker) of December 1943, this was provoked by Trotskyists in the Clyde Workers Committee – but as this was published by shop stewards in the engineering and aircraft industry (connected to the Engineering and Allied Trades Shop Stewards’ National Council), which had a very a strong Communist Party influence, this may not be entirely accurate.

But despite the poor treatment of women munitions workers, as might be gathered by the women grouped together at the end, and evidenced in interviews, the women bonded together.  As Lynne Fox states at the conclusion of her research: “In whatever industry they were employed most women reported great friendship and camaraderie among the female workers – those on the day shift did shopping for those on the night shift.  Many factories even put on lunchtime concerts during wartime.”  It also meant that, despite the men returning to their old jobs, by 1948 there were 683,000 more women in industry and over 750,000 more women in trade unions than before the war.  After a long campaign against the lack of recognition for these workers, finally, in 2012, for the first time ever, women of the Munitions Workers Association participated in the Cenotaph ceremony and march past in London.

References

Stewart Dalton, Sheffield: Armourer to the British Empire, Wharncliffe Books, 2004.

Felicity Goodall, Voices from the Home Front, David & Charles, 2004.

Peter Lewis, A People's War, Methuen, 1986.

Sonya O. Rose, Which people's war? : national identity and citizenship in Britain 1939-1945, Oxford University Press, 2003.

Penny Summerfield, Reconstructing women's wartime lives, Manchester University Press, 1998

Teacher memory, Central Technical School (West Street ), Friends re-united

Women On The Home Front 1939 – 1945, IWM

Sheffield Blitz, Wikipedia

National Service Act, Spartacus Education

Lynne Fox (Summarised by Jessica Thomas) South Yorkshire Women in Industry

The Second World War Experience Centre

British War Posters

The New Propellor December 1943

Judith Orr, The women's army