Having put in a little post about my mother, I thought that I'd post some more. Not only [but mostly] about her, but about women in general.
My mother, being a practical Yorkshire woman taught all of her sons to cook, clean, iron and sew. All of this for no other reason than she didn't want us turning out as useless as my father who could barely tie his own shoe laces.
She always told two stories to show my father in a not so good light. The first one concerns wallparering [the height of skill and self-sufficiency, as far as my mother was concerned], the second relates to cleaning.
1. Just after they were married, for reasons that were never explained, my mother and father were decorating my dad's parents bedroom, a room of not inconsiderable size. My mother had cut and pasted the last piece and given it to my dad to put on the wall while she went to put the kettle on.
On returning from making tea, she found that my dad had put the last piece of [patterned, matching wall paper] on, upside down!
2. On returning home from hospital on Christmas Eve, after giving birth to me, she found that there was no clean crockery or cutlery left and that somebody had written "Merry Xmas" in the dust on the top of the TV.
Always being able to do "something" or even "anything" for your self is a big part of my mothers life.
When she first started work she worked at Burtons [she always called it Montague Burton's] and thus could sew like the devil. She could not, however mend / make anything to do with zips.
"I do button holes, go see your aunt Hilda if you want a zip done!"
Anyway, come 1939, and she volunteered to go into the services but ended up at AVRO [the aircraft manufacturers A V ROE] at Yeadon near Leeds. Although some of their planes were cloth covered or had the outer skin riveted on, she trained as a welder. In later years, she would never fly because she maintained that she knew how aircraft were made, having made Lancaster bombers, and that she "didn't trust the buggers to stay up in the air!"
She always speaks fondly of her time at AVRO and of the enjoyment she got from the work she did there. Many years later, I got myself an apprenticeship with the Royal Ordnance Factories at ROF Leeds [Barnbow]. Their particular specialty was [then] tanks.
During WW2, the factory had made guns, artillery and naval. Even earlier, it had been the first purpose built factory in the country to fill shell for the first world war and was known as No1 Shell Filling Factory, Barnbow. Her mother, my grandmother, worked there. The site of the WW1 factory is still there, the only remnants of its former use being the huge earth banks that surrounded all the buildings. The site is absolutely huge and when in full production had employed 16000 people. 93% of them women.
Not so long ago, Channel 4 screened a documentary on the forgotten warriors of WW1 [the women and men who worked [and sometimes died] in the armaments industry] and focused on Barnbow.. This was topped of with the unveiling of a memorial to the women of Barnbow who were killed in the three explosions at the factory.
Needless to say, my mother was not impressed by the memorial. She wasn't the only one. I've seen better lumps of rock being used to keep Gypsies off of waste ground!
above: The Shaftesbury [aka the "Shafs"], pic taken about 1950.
above: The Tower. Pic taken in the 70's.
