Wellington Bomber

On an overcast evening at this aircraft factory in North Wales,

a few survivors of World War II will gather to reflect on their contribution to that war.

Early in the 1940s, a group of workers here set out to break a world record.

They would try to build a bomber as fast as they could.

Faster than the Americans who, in their factory in California, had taken 48 hours from start to finish.

We started on the Saturday morning.

We just got cracking. We were all like busy bees, all busy...

Hoping to do the best.

Did you think you could do it right from the very start?

It seemed impossible.

I remember all the bustle.

Oh, gosh, it was like a beehive!

Did you know that the Americans had set a world record for building a bomber?

It was fine, we always want to beat the Americans, don't we?

The plane they chose to build was a Wellington bomber.

The Wellington was, for many years, the RAF's main strike bomber.

Apart from the Spitfire and the Hurricane,

more Wellingtons were built during World War II than any other British aircraft.

Aircrew love a plane that they feel that if they do their bit, the plane will do its bit.

And with the Wellington -

fantastically strong, very robust, totally reliable - crews always knew

that even if you've been shot up on a mission, if you lost one engine,

all sorts of disasters of one kind or another, you had a very good chance that the plane would get you home.

It was a lovely aeroplane to fly. It was just built

so you could shoot hunks of it out if you had the misfortune to be hit

and it more or less shrugged its shoulders and pressed on regardless.

The designer of the Wellington was Dr Barnes Wallis, who would also design the bouncing bomb

that would breach the Mohne Dam and make legends of the Dambusters, the air crews who delivered them.

Max Hastings has written a definitive work on Bomber Command.

Barnes Wallis said he was almost prouder of having created the Wellington

than he was of having created the bouncing bomb.

It was a brilliantly inspired piece of construction.

You can't design and build an aircraft in five minutes, it takes years to do.

But in the mid-1930s, Barnes Wallis produced this inspired design.

This extraordinary geodetic construction gave it this strength

that enabled it to withstand a terrific amount of punishment.

And of course the hydraulic turrets.

The RAF was enormously proud of those - these were revolutionary technology in 1939.

Better than anything the Germans or the Americans had.

By the time that war came up, the Wellington was in full production.

This sophisticated aircraft was designed less than 30 years

after the Wright brothers had made the world's first powered flight.

Britain got an enormous amount wrong in the 1930s about its own defences.

When the war came, it didn't have anything like enough of anything -

fighters, bombers, soldiers, rifles, machine guns - anything.

But some terrific design decisions and production decisions were made.

It was undoubtedly one of the great aeroplanes of the war.

But Britain had also taken a number of acute political decisions in the 1930s.

The Chamberlain Government, while negotiating to avoid a war with Hitler's Germany,

had also drawn up plans to put Britain's industry on a war footing.

Manufacturing skills were pooled and the potential to build weapons of war were assessed.

Shadow factories were built where tanks, guns, planes could be assembled.

Broughton was one of them.

Hilda Dodd was one of the first women to work at the Broughton factory.

I went for an interview and they asked me what I could do.

I said I could use a machine. They said, "What sort?"

I said, "A sewing machine, my mother had a treadle." "Oh."

So they put me down for machine work.

Can you remember your first sight of the factory?

Oh, it was a mess.

Muddy, wasn't much there.

There was like a hangar

and that's where I went to, into this hangar.

There were men working on parts of it, putting it together like a Meccano.

At its peak during World War II, the Broughton production line

was turning out 28 Wellington bombers a week.

These workers were in the front line as much as the men who would fly the aircraft they would build.

Easy aircraft to build.

They had good, long range and they were very economical.

But they were produced quickly, that was the main thing.

Instead of 1, you'd get 100.

The target these workers set themselves that weekend so many years ago

was to build a Wellington bomber in 30 hours.

Did you think you could beat that record?

We had an idea we could.

And so this evening, Bob Wilson joins old friends in the audience for a unique film show.

-NEWSREEL:

-'This is a bomber factory in Britain...'

They started to build Wellington LN514 early one Saturday morning, all those years ago.

And because they wanted to tell the world how efficient were the British production lines,

the British made a propaganda film about the record-breaking attempt.

'We had our cameras in position when the workers arrived at the factory.'

They put a North American voice on the soundtrack to show America not only that Britons could take it,

as they had during the long years of the Blitz, but that they could dish it out as well.

Many of the men and women who built this Wellington are seeing this film for the first time.

'The clock strikes nine and the record-breaking attempt begins.

'Two sections of the fuselage are carried in.

'The dark girl with the riveter is Eileen Daphne who used to work in a rayon factory.

'One of her brothers was killed in a naval action...'

Women filled the places on the production lines left vacant by the men who had gone to war.

Betty Weaver was working on the counter

in the local Co-operative store when she was conscripted go to Broughton.

Living in a mining area, the men were either in the army or working down the pit.

-Is that why they needed women to do the job?

-Yes.

What did you feel about that - did you mind?

Not at all, it was something completely different.

I felt as if I was doing something useful for a change.

My father was in the Army, my husband was in the Army.

I felt as if I was supporting them.

Can you remember your first impressions of the factory

-when you saw it?

-I was horrified!

I was issued with a big, white boiler suit that fit where it touched.

'The fuselage parts are assembled in big frames they call jigs.

'You can get some idea now of the size of the bomber.

'It's almost 65ft long.'

Women were of course absolutely vital.

First to the war effort as a whole, and secondly in aircraft production.

A lot of them proved very good at what they did.

Britain mobilised women arguably more effectively than any other wartime nation except possibly the Russians.

The main assembly at Broughton Aircraft, it was a huge space without any columns.

Were you good at electrics?

I didn't know one end of a screwdriver from the other when I got there!

No.

I am now.

What was the training like?

For the first three weeks, I never slept.

Then all of a sudden, it all slotted into place.

-Did you have to pass a test at the end of it?

-Oh, yes.

Everything was inspected and, if it wasn't right, you had to go back and do it again.

'Here is Evelyn Coates, an inspectress who used to work in a draper's shop.

'She told me at this point that she had found no faults at all.'

Boys as young as 14 worked on the production line.

Bill Anderson, who worked at Broughton until he was 64, first came here when he was 14.

War seemed nothing to fear, simply a new experience.

My father was an ARP warden. When they started dropping incendiaries,

we used to go for a bucket of sand to extinguish the incendiaries.

I think we were charging 6p for buckets of sand and they were quite grateful for it, really.

We used to go potato picking, you'd get let off from school.

Then of a weekend, you'd go collecting rosehips.

-They were used for rosehip syrups, that was for babies.

-All helping the war effort?

It was all helping the war, but it was a game to us.

'These volunteer workers are giving the bonus they are earning today to the Red Cross Aid to Russia Fund.

'They're out to break that 30-hour record they've set themselves.'

I started here straight from school.

There were a lot of women here.

They mothered you, if you like.

What was the job that you were first shown how to do?

The main wing spar was in two pieces.

We had to join them together - they didn't use bolts, they had a type of long pins.

The basic tool in those days was a copper hammer with a hide end

that we used to knock these pins in. Then they were inspected.

'In the wing assembly, there is more activity under the eagle eyes of the inspectors.

'Though you may not think they're working fast, the progress they are making speaks for itself.

'It's only 10 o'clock - one hour from the starting time.

'Grace Whalley and Hilda Dodd are doing a man's job of work,

'assembling the bomber's cabin heater.'

Hilda Dodd's peacetime job was in the local photographic shop.

I was taught how to make the fuselage and bomb floors.

Was the factory ever bombed?

We had two lights up in the ceiling.

One was amber and one red.

Then one night, the red light came up.

Everything went dark.

We were told to all link hands and go outside, and there were some air raid shelters.

And as we were going down, I happened to look to the left

and I could see some planes on fire.

They'd dropped some incendiaries.

Well, I was frightened. Well, I think the majority of us were scared.

But we were all right down in the shelters.

There was just, like, wooden seats and you could all sit around and talk and sing.

What sort of stuff did you sing?

Oh, the old stuff, Gracie Fields.

# Sing as we go and let the world go by

# Singing a song We march along the highway... #

'Back in the main assembly, the wooden floor is fitted to the fuselage.

'Notice how everything fits with precision.

'There's no bullying the parts together - one fits willingly with the other.

'The forward bulkhead frame goes in, and then the pilot's seat,

'control column and the cockpit floor, all in one unit.

'And how's the time going?

'Well, they've been working 1 hour and 17 minutes.'

-You were working long hours?

-Oh, yes, 12 hours.

8 till 8. It was dark when we went out of a morning and dark when you got home at night.

When I didn't go on the work's bus,

sometimes I used to have a lift with a chappie from Greasby,

and we used to call at a farm on the way back,

and he used to get a few dozen eggs, because we only had one a week then.

And he used to break three and swallow them whole.

But they must've been black-market eggs, mustn't they?

There was rationing at that time, of course. Did you...?

Rationing...

All I can remember of the canteen were the chips and the rice pudding.

It was all right until we went in the canteen early one night

and all the chips were all ready to be finished, you know?

And there was a cat sleeping on the top of them, so we took a dislike to the chips after that.

'Testing the flaps on the wings is Eva Williams, a nurse by profession,

'testing fractures in tubes instead of in bones.

'The short dark girl assembling the ailerons

'is 23-year-old Evelyn Homewood, whose husband is in the Royal Air Force.'

In a way, it was a job, but we were working for the boys.

You were patriotic.

Well, I was, for one, anyway.

Well, they were fighting for a cause. And that makes a difference.

Everybody had somebody in the war.

They had somebody in the forces, so it was worth fighting for, to see them home again.

Unfortunately, a lot didn't come home.

Hilda Dodd's husband Percy was in the Royal Navy on minesweepers.

Tell me about how you met him.

Through a friend that worked in the factory.

We went to a dance and she introduced us and she said, "He can't dance."

I said, "I'll ignore him." So I ignored him all night.

But we made up after.

Did you dance with him eventually?

Well... Well, you couldn't call it dancing.

It was like taking a wheelbarrow round a room.

And then I found out after he was going for dancing lessons.

He got called up to go in the Navy.

It was all done in a rush and he said, "I haven't time to go and buy the ring with you."

So I went and picked the ring myself.

And then I never saw him again for three-and a-half years.

My dad was in the 4th Battalion Royal Welsh Fusiliers,

and Harry was called up to the 6th Battalion Royal Welsh Fusiliers.

Tell me about the wedding and your honeymoon, then?

He came home on the Saturday, we went to see the vicar on the Sunday,

we were married on the Wednesday and he went back on the Sunday and I didn't see him again for two years.

Percy Dodd blew up the mines that threatened the convoys he was protecting.

He was up and down the Mediterranean to Malta.

I used to say my prayers every night and very often during the day when I was working, hoping he was all right.

I was very lucky he came back.

I mean, a lot didn't.

'There's our chief cameraman...'

It is 80 minutes since the attempt began.

The Airborne Division went out to North Africa,

the Glider Pilot Regiment landed on Sicily

and they came back to this country with some of the Parachute Regiment.

But the part my husband was in, they went into Italy and then they liberated Greece,

so that's why I didn't see Harry for two years.

-You wore a badge?

-Oh, my little naval badge.

He bought me that before he went. No matter where I went, I pinned it on.

That was part of him.

-He gave me that, so I always had that with me.

-Even at work?

Oh, yes, I never went without that.

'At 10.27, the foreman gives the word and into the framework of the aircraft

'pile the electrical workers armed with the tricks and the tools of their intricate trade.'

It wasn't hard work, it was fiddling, connecting wires and things up.

You had to be very careful.

'Construction went on and the inspectors beamed with satisfaction.'

Bob Wilson was superintendent of the production line that weekend.

He recalled elaborate preparations for the record-breaking attempt, a certain amount of pre-assembly.

The electric wiring and all that was done along the panel before the fuselage was built.

You just had to drop it in?

Right.

Sharp practice was that?

Exactly.

Sounds good, that, doesn't it?

How did you organise the production line?

You didn't have to, the people knew what to do.

'At 1.45 in the afternoon, the main fuselage is ready to come out of the jig.

'In the stitching and doping section,

'the four great sections which give the bomber its 80ft wingspan are now being covered with fabric.

'Flashing fingers and winking needles.

'One wrong move, the needle would hit metal and the point would break.'

Constance and Ben Mottram were courting during the war and married in 1947.

Constance sewed linen for the rudders of Wellingtons in what had been a small car factory nearby.

She worked the night shift.

My auntie always had breakfast ready when I got in from work the next morning,

and then afterwards, after I'd had breakfast, I'd brush my teeth,

wash, freshen, and then I'd spend the rest of the day in bed

until it was time to go to work.

It must've been a very long night for them, all the girls, mustn't it?

12-hour nights, sewing all night long.

There were a number of mines around the Broughton factory, producing coal to fuel the British war effort.

Coal miners were exempt from military service, and Ben Mottram worked at the Llay Main Colliery.

It started mining coal in 1921.

My father worked there.

And he was there at the sinking of the pit itself.

It was the deepest in Europe.

In Europe. That's deep.

It was as deep as Snowdon is in height.

When you're putting an aeroplane together, Connie,

how did you identify the different screws and that sort of thing?

When the plane was put together,

it would be in the flight shed, across another field.

And where I worked, it was just components.

They were put on a shelf for us to part number, to engrave,

and we put the number onto the parts that were going to go onto the aircraft.

They produced them pretty fast. They used to take them from the factory

and they'd put one in one place and another in another place.

They wouldn't put them all together because if there were raids, they would all have been bombed.

They also placed decoy lights on the hills above Ben's home

to divert German bombers looking for the factory.

They were bombing the mountains over here, which was alight for months and months on end.

They thought they'd got the factory, but they hadn't.

'The fabric is bonded to the metal frame by about 8,000 tiny bolts, and stitches tidy up the edges.

'Eight stitches to the inch, and that's a whole lot of sewing you're looking at.'

You had to be careful when you were sewing that the stitches didn't alter the tension.

Eight stitches to the inch.

On one occasion, I slipped up

and my stitches had gone bigger,

and the examiner wouldn't pass it.

If the wind should get through that, it could start to tear, so that was no good.

It had to be perfect.

-So what happened?

-I had to have it all back and unpick it.

I'll never forget that.

It took such a long while!

About 6,000 people were working on the Broughton production line, half of them women.

The immediate boss over the main assembly was a woman, Miss Littler.

-What was she like?

-Rather large... There's a little pub just outside the factory

where we used to go for a drink, and she used to sit there and drink pints.

I never saw her in a skirt. She'd always got trousers on. But she was very fair.

I was given a young girl to train to do my job, and I had her for a month,

and it was like knocking sense into a wooden door.

There was nothing there, and she was holding me back.

So I complained to the foreman and he said I had to put up with it.

So I went to Miss Littler.

I won't tell you what she said, because she wasn't very...

fussy about what language she used!

Well, give me the blanks, then.

"Get rid of this so and so girl, she's holding this one back.

"We can't have things like that, not these days."

-Because there was a war to win.

-There was a war to win.

'Back at the fuselage out of the tail, Vera Butler and her sister Joan work together all the time.

'Vera was a lady's companion before she started building bombers two years ago.

'Here is the process of weatherproofing and strengthening the fabric'.

They used to go over it with this red dope.

I think it was about seven coats of dope and camouflage that went on the top.

When it was finished, it was like a drum.

Just...strong enough to take the wind and whatever when it was flying.

There was girls sewing, and there was men spraying them with dope.

-What did it smell like?

-To me, pear drops or nail varnish.

If you do smell nail varnish, it takes you back.

AIR-RAID SIREN WAILS

For Hilda Dodd and the rest, there were often long walks home at the end of a 12-hour shift,

in the dark and sometimes during an air raid.

I was with my dad in the street.

This very bright orange light came slowly down, and the policeman across the road shouted,

"Frank, get down on the floor!" And my dad said, "Go on."

I said, "I can't, I've got a new dress on. My mother will go mad." "Get down!"

And he lay on top of me,

and this light kept coming and then, all of a sudden, there was a terrific explosion.

And all that you could hear was glass tinkling everywhere.

And I can see one dear soul now. She had her corset

tucked under her arm, covered in soot, and they were crying. They were frightened.

And we were like, "Come on in," and herding them all in the air raid shelter.

It was a dreadful night.

'This is Phyllis Evans, who was in service as a maid before the war.

'She is one of them fitting the fabric covering over the framework.'

What did you feel about Germans at that time?

Well, you wanted to beat them, didn't you? Well, I did.

My dad used to go mad.

I used to listen to Lord Haw-Haw, and he used to frighten me to death.

'The Royal Air Force is too weak.

'The Royal Navy is too weak. And as yet, the common sense

'of the British people is too weak to perceive the catastrophic nature

'of the plight into which they have allowed Churchill to lead them.'

I used to think, "I wish I could get hold of him.

"What I would do to him," you know?

'Germany calling, Germany calling.'

He was very sarky with it, you know.

I used to think, "How does he get to know all this?"

And my dad used to say, "If you don't stop listening to that man..."

and he'd take the little wireless and switch it off.

"Wasting good battery."

On happier thoughts, what did you like on the radio?

I used to love Arthur Askey.

Anything with a laugh.

I used to enjoy Workers' Playtime.

That came on every day.

It was bright, and it was dance music.

And one night, I was lucky to see Tommy Handley in ITMA.

It's That Man Again. Listening to him on the wireless, I used to love it.

All right, any more for Ogshot, Bagshot, Beaufort, Hookum, Duckum and Farham?

Now, now, come, come, don't dilly dally!

No time for letting off steam.

To entertain the production line and to improve morale, the BBC broadcast lively dance tunes every day.

They called it, appropriately, Music While You Work.

What was your favourite music at that time?

I liked Ivor Novello and those sort of things.

And we had a show occasionally in the canteen at lunchtime.

Different artists used to come and quite a lot of people in the factory

did singing or dancing or whatever.

We had these little shows at lunchtime.

-Did you?

-No. I'm too shy.

'It's a habit in this factory to rather brazenly autograph one's work.

'So we know that Blondie has had something to do with this bomber.'

How they ever flew, I never knew,

because they were only aluminium and linen.

If you stepped off the catwalk up the middle of the plane, your foot went straight through!

I never knew how they got off the ground. Dear me.

'A tiny brunette, Eva Powell, who runs a crane away up there under the roof girders,

'brings an engine the length of the shop and gently lowers it to what they call the power egg.

'It looks like an egg, at that.

'Norman Martin over there was once third officer

'on the pleasure liner Rawalpindi,

'before she was converted to a merchant cruiser.

'Norman has been working on this type of engine for quite a time,

'and thinks it's the finest in the world.'

Norman Martin died in 1975.

His son, Richard, had no idea that his father had worked on this record-breaking Wellington LN514.

I remember him telling me that the roof cranes in the factory were all driven by women,

which was unusual for that time, but I suppose that was born out of necessity.

I remember him telling me that he had a Ford 8

and, driving there in the blackout one night, he crashed into a cow.

The cow was all right, but it didn't do the Ford 8 any good.

-Did he get to work?

-Well, one assumes so.

He was British. So yes, he got to work.

Did he talk to you about the record attempt?

To be honest, no, but I did find a newspaper cutting he'd kept about it,

albeit very tatty, but it is the newspaper cutting about that attempt.

I'm surprised that he never talked about it, but then I suppose, during the war, you didn't talk about it.

-What was security like?

-It was pretty strict.

Even when we got our wages, the Home Guard used to stand there with their rifles while you got paid your money.

Sometimes workers had to be escorted on to the airfield to the aircraft to correct last minute faults.

They used to take us out with an Alsatian dog, the special police.

We called them the Gestapo.

And we used to do our jobs and they used to escort us back, because they were all so secret.

'The time has come to bring the component parts together.

'This means that the various departments are delivering their finished sections

'to the main assembly. Now we'll see it take shape as a bomber.

'The fuselage is trundled down the factory at 6.15 in the evening,

'9 hours and 15 minutes after the start.

'The cranes come lumbering overhead with the power eggs,

'which are gently and firmly lowered into place and connected up.

'Next, the tail surfaces,

'the elevators and tailfin are lowered and connected.

'Each part is installed by a swiftly moving expert team'.

We had people bussed from Liverpool, from Warrington, from Wrexham.

As far as you were concerned, you were doing something

to throw the bombs back at them, what they'd been throwing at you.

So there was that comradeship.

Were there occasions when people simply didn't turn up for work?

Yes. There was a government department within the factory,

and you had to fill an excuse form in and say what it was.

But if people persistently were absent?

-They used to fine them.

-Fine them?

-Yeah, prosecute them.

Some workers in some factories were very brave

and hard-working, but quite a lot weren't.

There was an amazing number of strikes.

It was a hangover from the 1930s and 1920s.

Industrial relations in Britain had been disastrous.

Management had been pretty poor too.

A lot of workers who had suffered through the Depression,

when the war came and their services were desperately needed,

they couldn't see why the fact that we were fighting a war should stop them from using their opportunity

to get higher wages, to impose their demands.

Churchill was absolutely appalled by a lot of what went on in the factories.

Newspaper tycoon Lord Beaverbrook,

as Britain's Minister of Aircraft Production,

warned Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the winter of 1940,

as these War Cabinet papers reveal,

that "the cumulative effect of enemy bombing is making itself felt on our production lines".

They were becoming "very thin".

I remember Lord Beaverbrook just walked round the factory and out.

Usual thing.

And Churchill was on the phone to the factory all the while.

Beaverbrook also warned about absenteeism,

the length of time production line workers spent in air-raid shelters,

and the morale of the workforce.

We had some people directed down from Scotland under the Labour Act at the time.

One or two didn't like it.

I don't know how they got on, but they weren't there for long.

They were shifted out.

Everything was done to keep the men and women at work on the production line.

To help you stay in the factory,

we had our own dentist there.

We even had our own barber there.

So you could never get a pass out to go and have a haircut.

We had a good surgery, with a doctor.

-And that was to keep you on the production line?

-Keep you on the production line.

'This is the bomb beam, like a compact miniature bridge.

'Look at the speed with which they set the bulletproof petrol tanks into the main plane.'

They had these special tanks that used to go in. They were bulletproof. Self-sealing, actually.

'When this is done, the overhead crane picks up the wings and sweeps them into position,

'where skilful hands guide them into place.

'Now the bomber is complete, with its 80ft wingspan.

'It won't be long now before this bomber is loaded with an outward-bound cargo for Germany,

'at the rate they're going.'

Tiny Cooling flew 67 missions in Bomber Command, most of them on Wellingtons.

In the air, that was where it belonged, and where you belonged in it.

And between you, you revelled in it.

He flew a Wellington over Dunkirk to protect the retreating British troops in 1940.

I remember peering down and looking at the battleground underneath.

You made damn sure to keep well clear of anywhere where our own troops were.

He flew his Wellington over the occupied Channel ports,

as the Germans then prepared to invade Britain.

They were basically river ports,

assembly places like Rotterdam, where the barges would assemble.

And, really, what you were looking down at was an expanse of water in the quasi-moonlight.

And if there was any movement, you went for that.

It is 11 hours and 23 minutes since the record-breaking attempt began.

'The night workers arrive.

'At the same time, another crew is fitting the starboard propeller.

'The workers are beginning to make bets.

'After all, there are still 17 hours and 20 minutes to go

'in that 30-hour mark they've set themselves'.

Eileen Lindfield worked the night shift.

She had unofficial uses for any discarded felt left over from the fuselage covering.

The Irish linen they covered the planes with, it didn't reach from one end of the plane to the other.

They just threw it down on the floor, and it was very sought after for curtains and everything.

We used to make slippers out of it.

Nobody could buy anything.

It was all on coupons, and slippers were a luxury.

When people say they're hard-up now and go without,

they don't know what the meaning of the word is.

The hardships people went through in the war - there was no water bottles, no cameras.

Everything was on coupons. It didn't matter how much money you had, you couldn't buy anything,

because it was all for the war, you know.

'Ivy Bennett caught my eye.

'I noticed her because she was wearing a very sheer pink chiffon blouse.

'I remarked on it, but Ivy grinned and said she'd come away from a party in a hurry

'so that she could get on this night shift

'and help to make this record-breaking bomber.'

-Do you remember going to dances and that sort of thing?

-Yeah, we did in the war, yes.

If the men were on leave, they were all in their uniform.

Were there any liaisons that the husbands might have frowned upon?

Well, I suppose so, but I don't think I got into any mischief.

We didn't have a lot of time, really.

We had the Miners Welfare Institute in Llay.

We had dances at the weekends.

But I couldn't misbehave, because my mother was always in the kitchen making tea.

SHE LAUGHS

She was always there, and I had to come home with her, so I couldn't misbehave if I wanted to.

-I'm sure you didn't want to.

-No, I didn't. No, I didn't. I was a good girl.

'The rear turret arrives on a portable crane.

'Robert Davies skilfully guides it into place.'

There was no idleness.

You got on with your jobs.

Even lavatory breaks were strictly rationed.

There was a lady in charge, and you were allowed six minutes.

If you were longer than that, she'd come and bang on the door.

"Come on, your time's up!"

One time, I wanted to go to a dance, which was not very often,

and you didn't get your hair set, or anything, then.

So I thought, "What can I do?"

So I took a comb and a little mirror in my overall pocket,

and I flushed the toilet twice to make sure the water was clean,

and I dipped my comb in, and I was setting my hair.

So I had to pretend I'd been to the toilet, but I hadn't.

Did she bang on the door?

Oh, yes. "Come on, your time's up! Out you come!"

But she didn't know what I'd been doing. She hadn't twigged.

'Before our unbelieving eyes, the bomber really looks like an aircraft.

'Ernest Tootle, who used to be a coach painter, applies the RAF roundel on the fuselage and wing.

'I don't know where he gets that steady hand at three in the morning,

'for you'll notice that he does it freehand.

Ernest Tootle worked on Wellingtons throughout the war.

He nearly lost his life in one of them, as his son Peter remembers.

He'd been working inside the bomb hatch.

The bomb hatch was closed up, and he was working inside it.

And this plane was off down the runway with him in the bomb hatch.

He went for a few circles round the aerodrome in the bomb hatch!

Can you tell me what he said?

Well, I couldn't remember the exact words, but...

there were a lot of stars and asterisks involved!

I don't know whether he thought he was going to die,

but he was quite explicit with some of the things that he said.

Ernest's grandson James now works in the same hangar

in which his grandfather built Wellingtons all those years ago.

James helps to build the wings of the giant, hi tech Airbus.

I'm a manufacturing shop support engineer.

It's providing support to the operators manufacturing the wings.

If they have any problems, they come to us about issues they might have -

if they've drilled holes in the wrong positions, oversized holes.

When you're on your placements around the factory,

you get to see the billet of aluminium that the wing starts from, from start to end.

It's strange at Broughton, because you're just seeing a wing. You don't see the complete aircraft.

It'd be nice to see something from start to finish.

The Broughton factory is the British partner in the long-established European Airbus project.

It also involves factories in Spain and Germany and France.

Once the wings are built here at Broughton, they're transported by air and road

to be assembled into the complete aircraft at Toulouse in France.

Does it ever cross your mind that your grandfather used to build Wellington bombers in this place?

It was funny, cos a few weeks back, it was mentioned about the 24-hour bomber that was made.

But you can imagine now how different the factory is compared to what it was then.

'At half past ten at night,

'the landing wheels are installed - wheels 4.5ft high that weigh 300lb.

'Meanwhile, further inspections are taking place

'and checked off on the progress charts as each detail is OK'd.'

Wilf Williams was 16 when he first enrolled at the Broughton factory.

That weekend, he'd worked all day Saturday on Wellington LN514.

I came in at the second stage, after the fabric had been put over the fuselage.

I went home at 3 o'clock on Saturday afternoon.

On the Sunday morning,

I was very surprised to find it had left the production line

and gone into the running shed.

'As the clock at the end of the assembly line points to 3.20,

'a tractor tows the bomber to the running shed.

'This is a is huge area at the end of the production line

'where final inspections and the first engine tests are made.'

Curiously, in an affair that mainly concerned Britain's Fighter Command,

the Wellington heavy bomber, unintentionally,

was to play a vital role in the Battle of Britain.

In the summer of 1940, when Britain and the Commonwealth stood alone and at bay

against the apparently irresistible might of Nazi Germany,

the Luftwaffe were weakening the RAF's Fighter Command

by bombing its airfields and radar stations,

and sometimes catching the fighters as they climbed to meet them.

The Luftwaffe brought Fighter Command in the southeast of England

very, very close to the edge of defeat by its attacks on airfields and radar stations.

By late August, things were very, very serious indeed.

Then, by accident, some German bombs fell on the outskirts of London.

Churchill was furious.

Churchill insisted that the RAF MUST retaliate against Berlin.

And on the night of 24th/25th August,

the Wellingtons and some Hampdens and Whitleys set out for Berlin.

Very few of them dropped bombs even anywhere near anything that mattered, but they enraged Hitler.

INAUDIBLE

And Hitler, from that moment, insisted that the Luftwaffe shift its aiming point to major British cities

And it was one of the turning points of the Battle of Britain.

London suffered terribly.

The cost to Londoners was enormous, but London could take it.

Churchill described it as like a great, enormous wounded animal,

but it could go on receiving punishment, whereas, if the Luftwaffe had gone on attacking

Fighter Command airfields and radar stations, strategically, this would have been far, far more serious.

So that RAF raid against Berlin and others that followed

did have a significant effect on the Battle of Britain.

It is 18 hours and 20 minutes since work began on Wellington LN514.

'There is a feeling of high expectancy in the air,

'for there in front of us is what we think is the fastest job of bomber construction in the world.

'Now, will it run?'

They are only two complete Wellington bombers in existence today.

This one, at the aeronautical museum at Brooklands,

was rescued from Loch Ness, where she'd crash-landed on December 31st 1940.

She ditched so gently that the crew were able to walk out onto the wings

into their rescue dinghies and onto the Scottish shore.

This aircraft was one of Bomber Command's main strike-force of Wellingtons

in the early years of the war.

Bomber Command continued to hit at Berlin and other cities.

There was a wonderful moment later in the year,

when the Germans were trying to convince the Russian Foreign Minister, Molotov,

that the British were beaten, that it was all over,

and in the middle of a dinner at the Russian embassy,

suddenly the air-raid siren goes - in Berlin - and they all have to go down to the cellar.

And Molotov ENRAGED the Germans by saying to them,

"If the British are really beaten,

"then why do we have this air-raid alarm? And who is dropping these bombs?"

And it was probably a Wellington that did it.

'Like seagulls following a liner, the workers tag after it to continue their jobs.

'From Ivy Bennett in her chiffon blouse, to George Williams, who is almost blind,

'every one of these British men and women has given of his best.'

Have you any idea, Hilda, how many Wellingtons you actually worked on?

Crikey! No.

You were doing miles and miles of machine work,

so you just took each day as it came.

You just knew it was going towards making a bomber.

Cos it did make you think, when you were doing them.

You used to wonder what happened to the bombers. Were they lucky or not?

Tiny Cooling piloted a Wellington bomber into action 67 times.

My policy was, when I came up to the target,

to have a good look around and to see what was going on

and see which was the hottest place, and go and find one that was the quietest.

And if it was hot at 10,000ft, I'd drop down to 8,000, or something like that,

and I used that throughout the war.

If you were briefed for a particularly hot place, you had this trepidation, a sort of...

Well, I suppose you might say a windy feeling in the pit of the stomach,

much like when you were a schoolboy waiting to go and see the dentist.

But as soon as you got in the aeroplane, it had gone.

-Do you think that applied to everybody?

-I've no idea.

It's not a thing one talked about.

-You never discussed fear?

-No.

Did others show fear?

Not show it, no. Nobody ever showed it.

'Then, at precisely 15 minutes past six on this Sunday morning,

'exactly 21 hours and 15 minutes from the start of construction,

'the bomber is a complete fighting unit

'and sees the light of the first dawn of its lifetime.'

Aircrew called the Wellington the Wimpy,

because there was a legendary cartoon character of that period called J Wellington Wimpy.

And the Wimpy was a term of terrific affection.

They loved this aeroplane. They thought it was marvellous.

'So, like a gallery at a sporting event, the workers stand and watch.

'Then comes the big moment.

'The engineer climbs into the cabin and the engines are started up for the first time.'

I can't think of any occasion when the aircraft let me down.

There might have been one or two occasions when one got into trouble

through one's own fault.

Believe you me, you just sort of let the aircraft take over and it would pull you out.

Tiny Cooling flew his 67 missions in Wellingtons -

more than two complete tours of duty -

between 1939 and 1945 in Europe, Italy and the Middle East.

In that time, more than 10,000 members of Bomber Command were killed in action.

You didn't stop to think about that.

-Why not?

-Because it wouldn't happen to you.

It might happen to the next chap on the next table, but it wouldn't happen to you.

'We all know that time is racing, but a generator and an airscrew need some last-minute adjustments.

'And there's a final bit of stitching to do. This holds us up almost two hours.'

It was one of the toughest and most dangerous jobs in the war.

To complete a tour of operations, you had to do 30 trips.

And for a lot of the war,

Bomber Command was losing about 1 in 20.

That meant you had a better chance of dying than you did of surviving your 30 trips.

'Everything has received its final test and OK and the bomber is ready for the takeoff.

'It's full daylight, and ten minutes to nine in the morning.

'Ten minutes short of an exact 24-hour day

'that the finished bomber is rolled out onto the tarmac adjoining the factory.

'The record is going to be really shattered, and no mistake.'

In a way of course, in a Wellington bomber, each member of the crew fought a slightly different war,

because if you think of the rear gunner, he's miles away from you.

He is, yes. You gave him a shout once in a while to say, "Hi, Tex. You still awake?"

The wireless operator is wrapped up in wires and earphones

and God knows what, and never says anything to anybody.

The navigator's sort of in and out every few minutes with a chitty saying, "Change course to this"

or, "ETA there," and that sort of business.

And Bill, my bomb-aimer, was the man who stood beside me in the well whilst I flew

and who, if I got stiff or needed to pee or something like that,

I'd say to Bill, "Take over for five minutes, would you?"

I'd get out of the seat and he'd climb in and he'd fly it for a while.

And there was this total reliance, one upon the other,

that you never even questioned their ability to do what you asked them,

or whether they would give you to the utmost if required.

Is that a definition of love?

In a sense, yes.

In the Shakespearean sense, yes.

I never cease to be deeply moved

by what those very young men did and the letters they left behind them.

In the last year of the war, Tiny Cooling wrote a poem.

..I dare not look for my own It should be there...

..Was he 20 when he came into my room

And cried like a child the night Bob Hewitt died

Leaving a pregnant wife?

Naylor was a young navigator.

And I remember lying in bed one morning -

I think we'd just come back from a place like Cologne or something -

and there was a tap on the door,

and young Naylor walked in and stood at the foot of my bed.

He just fell to his knees,

buried his face in the blankets of my bed and cried,

and I said, "What's up?"

He said, "Bob Hewitt's missing."

Everybody liked young Naylor,

but nobody took the blindest bit of notice of him

because he didn't look as if he'd been out of his pram

more than a few days.

Was there anything you could say to comfort him?

No, no, no, not really.

It was just the luck of the game.

It required a very special kind of courage to fly with Bomber Command.

In the most literal sense, they died with their shoes clean

because they had a very cosy, comfortable, cosseted life at their bases in England.

They were nicely fed. They had bacon and eggs before they took off.

Some of them were able to live in quarters with their wives.

And then they would, every night, get in these planes

and fly out from these calm, still Norfolk and Lincolnshire fields

into the darkness over Germany, into the whitest teeth of war.

These brightly coloured lights went shooting past, and there seemed to be lots of them straight ahead,

and as we got up to them, they seemed to part and let us through.

Then, all of a sudden, there was a smack.

Flak guns, night-fighters and searchlights.

They were seeing their mates being shot down every night.

I remember calling out to Dougie, "We've been hit."

And he said, "Where?" And I told him. He said, "Keep an eye on it."

And they would go through this fantastically intense and terrifying experience for six, eight hours.

A few minutes later, he said, "Anything to see?" And I said, "No, it's dead quiet."

He said, "All right, fine. We'll be home in an hour.

"Wait until we get down and we'll have a look."

And then they would come back.

This calm, quiet Lincolnshire or Norfolk airfield.

I could smell petrol.

It was dripping from the self-sealing tank on the starboard side.

And Dougie saying to me, "Oh, we're back in time before the bars close.

"Come on, I'll buy you a beer to mark your first trip."

They'd go to the mess, they'd have the bacon and eggs,

then two nights later, they'd be asked to do the same thing again...

but usually with two or three less of the crews than had gone out the previous night.

'Here comes the test pilot,

'a really amazed man.

'He was planning to fly the bomber this afternoon.

'But so fast has this aircraft been completed

'that they got him out of bed to put the bomber through its paces.'

I was told that they'd gone to fetch the pilot

and, obviously, he didn't expect it to be so quick.

And I think his words were, "I hope to God they haven't missed anything."

Everything went like clockwork.

I was really overwhelmed, but I was fascinated as well,

to think that you could start a plane and then it could go down the line and actually fly.

We all went out onto the tarmac to watch the scene.

Everybody was pleased that they'd done it.

I mean, there were no parties that I can remember, or anything like that, like.

The whole factory saw it take off. They were all outside to watch it.

-That must have been quite a moment?

-Oh, it was, really.

'Here it comes. And the bomber is airborne. The record?

'Yes, they broke it, those workers.'

What was that moment, when it took off?

There was a great, big round of applause and shouting.

He did a few circuits.

So we were very pleased with that.

It was a job well done.

APPLAUSE

Airbus marked this unique occasion with an official photograph.

So, on the count of three, let's go for it.

One, two, three!

Everybody wave. Now, here's the hard one.

Wave and smile! OK?

Wave and smile! Let's go for it. Wave and smile!

For these people, this was simply a 24-hour snapshot of their lives during World War II.

But the war was to last six years. Their men came home eventually.

And for the women who had built Wellington LN514, life changed yet again.

-Did you continue to work at Broughton?

-No.

I had the sack!

I was made redundant.

A few weeks later, they turned over to prefabricated houses.

The girls that were single, they were kept on.

-But I was married and I had to finish.

-How did you feel about that?

A bit annoyed, actually.

I signed on the dole.

I had dole for three weeks and that's the only thing I've ever had off the government.

And because I wouldn't go to Bolton to work in the cotton factory, they stopped me dole.

So what did you do?

Lived on my Army allowance until Harry came home.

What was that day like, when he did come home from the war?

There was no telephones in those days.

I was outside the local church, watching a wedding.

And my mother was there, and she went home for something and she said,

"I think you'd better go home. Harry's at home waiting for you."

And I got a little cottage ready for when he come home.

The people he worked for before the war, they got a little estate, and there was two little cottages on it,

and I had one. It was furnished, ready, when he came home.

Me dad came home Christmas morning.

Did either of them ever talk about what they did in the war?

No.

Did it affect Harry?

Never the same again.

Hilda Dodd's Percy came home in 1944.

Oh, well, I was over the moon.

Couldn't believe it, you know?

It was wonderful.

It's a very funny feeling after three-and-a-half years

and then I thought, "I wonder if he's gone off me.

"Or whether he still likes me!"

He hadn't altered much, to me.

He had fair hair, but he was fairer and he was a well-built lad.

And he came in and he was hungry and he cooked himself egg and bacon,

and of course when his mum got up -

"Oh," she said, "I see you've had some breakfast."

He'd only eaten the whole rations for the week!

He didn't know!

Throughout the war, Percy carried with him this photograph of Hilda.

He brought it back with him at the end of the war?

Yes. I have the photograph,

and when he showed it me, I said, "Ooh, it's coloured."

Because I sent it just ordinary.

He said, "Yes. Don't ever lose this," he said.

"I treasure this." I said, "Why?"

He said, "Well, one of my mates had his hands blown off.

"He held a brush in his mouth and tinted it up."

I was very upset about it at the time,

but I've never parted with it.

It doesn't seem to lose any of its colour.

Eileen Lindfield found it hard to adjust to the reappearance in her life of her husband Stan.

We were so independent, and the women did a man's job and they behaved like men...

and I think it took us a little while to sort of get going.

I'm glad I experienced the war,

but I wouldn't like to think it happening again.

Nobody wins a war,

so better without.

Over a single weekend, from first bolt to last,

these workers built this Wellington bomber in 10 minutes less than 24 hours.

They smashed the existing world record by a whole day.

Wellington LN514 took off 24 hours and 48 minutes into the workers' weekend.

Tiny Cooling flew HIS Wellington into action over Germany and France,

Belgium and Egypt, Sicily and Italy, 67 times.

It was always nice when the word came up from under your feet, saying, "Bomb's gone!"

The navigator would be up almost before the words were out of Bill's mouth.

Saying, "Course to steer."

He'd set us on the compass and you'd weave your way home.

And you'd see the flare paths flickering ahead,

and you'd come in on a final approach,

and that lovely softness as you closed your engines down on finals,

and felt for the ground.

And the good old Wimpy just let you down, like a babe on a cushion.

And that was another one over.

In all, during World War II,

British factories turned out 11,461 Wellington bombers.

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