Admin/biog history
Forward by Stephen Cox
'I began this oral history project in 1997 as part of the research for my Master of Arts degree in, “War in History”. I chose to research the subject of Bedford’s industry in WWII for a number of reasons. At the time I had several friend who were a generation older than myself and we often talked about their experiences of working in Bedford’s factories in the 1950s and 60s. I found this subject interesting and compared it to my experience of working in industry in the 70s and 80s. Before going to university I worked for; The London Brick Company, Hunting Engineering and IBC Vehicles (Vauxhalls Luton). Working in these industries, I gained an elementary understanding of how different manufacturing processes worked and how they differed from my friends experiences a generation earlier. I studied Business for my first degree and this gave me a better understanding of how different types of manufacturing processes work. I chose to focus the research, for my Master’s dissertation, on the Second World War as war is often the catalyst for change in many areas of life, especially technology. I wanted to investigate how local industry increase productivity to meet the demands of WWII in line with my knowledge of different manufacturing processes. I was expecting to see some process re-engineering taking place in the factories with a move from batch production to process line methods. Another reason for choosing this research topic was that there had been very little investigation in to Bedford’s industry in the Second World War. Therefore, my research would be original and perhaps contribute to a wider understanding of industrial change during this period.
I soon discovered that there was very little documentary evidence about Bedford’s industries during WWII. This was mainly due to reasons of secrecy, most companies in Bedford did not keep records of what they produced in the war, and likewise Bedford’s local press did not reported on what businesses were doing. There were however a couple of notable exceptions; W.H. Allens wrote a comprehensive account of what they had produced and achieved during the war and this was published shortly afterwards. Their neighbours, J.P. Whites produced a booklet about the same time, which referred to their war effort. There is also a thorough examination of what went on at Elstow Storage Depot by H.E. Bates, the author of The Darling Buds of May, called, “The Tinkers of Elstow”. All of these documents were available at the Bedfordshire Archive office in Prebend Street. Because of the lack of documentary evidence I decided on conducting an oral history investigation.
When I worked at Hunting Engineering (1988 – 91) one of my colleagues there, Roy Askew, had worked at Allens during the war as an apprentice fitter. I contacted him and asked if he would be prepared to be interviewed about his time at Allens. Roy agreed and also arranged for me to interview his brother in law, David Timperley, who was an engineering student at Allens after the war. David’s father had set up and run a small supply factory and homeworker production arrangement at Turvey during the war for Allens. In the 1990s some of the bigger Bedford factories still had active pensioner associations, which I contacted. Igranic’s association replied and offered me the opportunity to attend one of their meetings and give a presentation on my research. As a result of my visit I had a lot of interest and received a number of offers from people willing to be interviewed, or to complete a questionnaire. Some of these people had worked in other factories during the war and wanted to talk about their experiences. I have listed the people who contributed below.
Not everyone I spoke to was willing to talk to me. I interviewed a lady named Joyce, who lived in an old people’s home, about how she had run a cottage industry in Willington, knitting clothing for sailors. Joyce, whose surname I don’t remember, was a published author on Bedford’s history, but for some reason I did not include her interview in my dissertation and I failed to keep any record of the interview. After the interview Joyce introduced me to a fellow resident of the home and explained to him about my research. This man had been a guard at Bletchley Park and he became very angry when he found out that I wanted to talk about his experiences there. He effectively said he would have to kill me if he told me about his work there. Another avenue of oral research I explored was form the people I had worked with at London Brick Company. When I was an apprentice chef there in the 1970s I remembered the older women, in the canteen, talking about Canadian tank regiments using the brick yard pits as training grounds and camouflage. They also talked about how, as teenage girls, the used to “entertain” the tank crews. However, I was only able to track down one of the women, who declined my request to interview her.
My research methodology for gathering the oral evidence was a two pronged approach. I prepared a series of questions, which I asked the people I interviewed, I did this in order to standardise the information I received. I planned to tape the interviews and transcribe them later. Five people agreed to be taped during their interviews. However, three people, including Joyce said there did not want to be recorded. In these cases I wrote their responses down as they gave them. The second prong of my approach involved producing questionnaires, based on the pre-prepared interview questions. I distributed these after delivering my presentation at the Igranic pensioner’s association. Six people were kind enough to complete the questionnaire, although their responses were just bland statements and of course there was no opportunity to expand on any of them. In fact I think I remember that most of the responses where one liners.
The problems and difficulties of evaluating the reliability of oral history are well documented. It could be viewed that oral evidence, such as the kind I collected, can be seen as primary evidence because it was given by people who had actually been involved at the time. However, when you read through some of the transcriptions from my interviews it is clear that some of the people’s recollections are not that clear. In which case it could be argued that this evidence is perhaps not as valuable as some other sources, such as H.E Bates account of Elstow Storage Depot, which he researched shortly after the war? The elapse of time is a factor in determining the accuracy of information. I conducted the interviews in 1997 and asked people to recall their experiences from the early 1940s, which is more than a 50 year gap. Their memories can not necessarily be expected to be a clear after such a long period of time. Furthermore, it could be argued that many of them viewed this part of their life with rose tinted glasses, because it was when they were young and many of the bad experiences had been forgotten or played down. All the interviewees mentioned the long hours they had to work, in some cases 11 hours a day 7 days a week, but they all believed that it was necessary to help win the war and were happy to do it. Another issue was the age of the interviewees. To have worked in the war they must have been born in the 1920s, making them in their 70 when I spoke to them. I know from experience that mental capacity can diminish with age and some of the people I spoke to clearly didn’t remember things a clearly as some of the others. I believe this can be seen in the following transcriptions. Despite these issues the people I interviewed provided valued information and insight in the subject.
Bias is another recognised risk of oral history. In the cases of the people I interviewed there was little bias in evidence. Although some people expressed criticism of management or unions. Most of the people interviewed, with the exception of David Timperley, were not management or professional level, so the views expressed by them did had a shop floor bias in terms of their view of how the factory worked. They were able to describe what work they did and how things changed in the war with regard to their work and what went on around them. However, in some cases they were only aware of what was going on in their own areas, although they did had a broad idea of what was happening in other parts of the company. What they didn’t necessarily have was an overview of the corporate business strategy of the organisation they worked in. These are criticisms of my research, not of the people I interviewed. I perhaps should have interviewed managers who worked in Bedford’s war factories, but I never found them. The people who offered their help were the ones I interviewed and I was grateful to them.
After finishing university I took further qualifications and pursued a career in Quality Assurance. I ended my working life as a Quality Manager and Lead Auditor for a large plant hire company based in St Neots. In this role I became accustomed to planning and writing operational procedures and interviewing a wide variety of people as part of my audits. When I began to transcribe the interviews this year I quickly realised how naïve my interview technique had been. I concentrated on sticking to the prepared questions rather than following more interesting or pertinent pieces of information. One explanation for this was that I was time constrained because I felt that I couldn’t take up too much of the interviewee’s time. However, the main reason was that I was inexperienced and lacked the confidence to deviate from my question agenda. The questions I choose for the interviews covered; where people worked, what they did, how the work was organised before and during the war, their involvements with unions and work based home guard units. These questions were designed to get people talking about how the war not only affected them but how their work changed to maximise output for the war effort. I also included questions on the role of women in industry during the war and a number of the interviewees were women who talked about their experiences in the factories, while the male interviewees gave their opinions of female workers. The main reason I included questions about women in the project was that one of my dissertation supervisors was writing her doctoral thesis on women in WWII and I wanted to ingratiate myself with her. Although I did produce an additional 5000 word piece of work on this subject.
When it came to transcribe the tape recordings I came across a number of problems. The first was the lack of a tape player. In the 1990s recording to tape was still the norm, in the 2020s tape players are not so widely available. Fortunately my son in law works in IT and he got the tapes digitised and downloaded to a memory stick, which I put my laptop. After 25 years the quality of the recordings was not so good due to the deterioration of the tapes. Some of the conversations are difficult to hear. This could also be due to the interviewee occasionally moving away from the microphone and indeed the quality of the tape recorder. I tried to transcribe the interviews verbatim, but occasionally I had to improvise and insert what I believed they were saying. However, this was rarely done and I believe does not diminish from the value of the interviews. The tapes and the digital downloads are available if anyone wishes to hear them.
The title of my dissertation was “How was Bedford’s Industrial Output Increased to Help Meet the Demands of Britain’s War Effort during the Second World War”. The short answer is, increased production was achieved by throwing resources at the challenge. More people were drafted into work in the factories, both men and women. Companies received “loans” to upgrade and improve machinery and working hours were increase, for example following Dunkirk annual holidays were suspended for that year and people worked 11 hour day, seven days a week to increase productivity in preparation for the expected invasion.
When I started my research I had expected to find a transition from batch production to production lines as a method for increasing productivity. However, it soon became apparent that most of the industries in Bedford were conducive to batch production methods and little or no advantage would be achieved by introducing production line methods. Some of Bedford’s industries changed more than others. Meltis made sweets before the war, but in the war it made parts for aeroplanes. J. P. Whites did architectural woodwork and joinery, but the skills of the workforce were adapted to make wooden wings for gliders, which were used in the D Day landings and disposable wooden fuel tanks for mosquitos to give them extra range for attacking deeper into Europe. On the other hand, W. H. Allens did much same as they had done before the war, which was making turbines and generators for ships and civil utilities. However, they did expand their operations into sub assembly units in Biddenham and Turvey, where they operated a cottage industry of women working from home threading beads onto copper wire for electrical circuits. As I stated earlier, war has often been a significant factor in technological advancements and this was true for W. H. Allens who worked on, and after the war developed, electrical turbines that significantly increased the performance of warships. New industries were also established in Bedford such as Elstow Storage Depot, which was a munitions manufacturing base. Brown Brothers moved to Bedford from London, where their factory had been bombed out. They also made parts for aircraft, in a factory unit, near Kathy Road, described by Peg as “having no roof and only heated by braziers”. The workforce was motivated to work in poor conditions or for long hours by a combination of entertainment and properganda. This might be dances at Cardington camp and in the town centre, or visits to the factories by war heroes and stirring films in the cinemas. As Roy Askew said, he would go to the pictures and watch a film in which the plucky British soldier/sailor/airman would beat the odds and the evil Nazis and then he would go home thinking let them come, I’m ready for them.
Stephen Cox, 2022
Contributors
Interviews
• Allen, Fred – J.P. White
• Askew, Roy – W.H. Allens
• Crouch (Mrs) – Cardington Camp and Pobjoys
• Cyril – J.P White
• Edwards (Mrs) – Cardington Camp
• Fuller, Stan – Igranic
• Joyce – Cottage industry Willington
• Peg – Brown Brothers
• Timperley, David – W.H. Allens (Turvey operation and cottage industry)
•
Questionnaires
• Hammond
• Harlow. R
• Lack. F
• Newman. R
• Tatman. A
• West. B'