Mabel Lethbridge The Great War Interviews

BBC Four Collections,

specially chosen programmes from the BBC archive.

For this collection, Max Hastings has selected interviews

with Great War veterans filmed in the 1960s.

More programmes on this theme and other BBC Four Collections

are available on BBC iPlayer.

My father and my brother

were at the

front,

and later my youngest brother.

And...my mother fretted

a great

deal about them.

She was an American.

She worried very much

and her only means of knowing whether they were alive

was reading

the casualty lists.

And we children used to gather

round...and

listen and watch

and look over her shoulder, even,

while she read them

and the tension was felt by us all.

Were they alive?

Were they still with us?

And even when my mother

would put

the newspaper down,

none of us really knew. We only

knew what my mother had read,

we didn't know what was

happening at that very minute.

When my father and my brothers,

uncles, relatives,

different sorts, and friends,

when they came home on leave, as they frequently did,

and they were either

staying in our house

or visiting

our house,

I noticed a strange lack

of ability to communicate with us,

to tell us what it was really like.

They would perhaps make a joke

that

you feel...sounded hollow.

There was nothing to laugh about.

They were restless at home.

They didn't want to stay home.

They wanted to get

back to the front.

They always would express

a desire to finish it.

They didn't expect it

to

go on for four years.

But the whole thing -

"It can't go on, it can't go on."

And always we thought

when we said goodbye,

always had shared their optimism

that we didn't feel they felt.

But we shared that, that

they

felt they would come back,

which many of them didn't.

And that sort of made

our strain at home greater.

I went into Hayes munitions factory,

the No. 7 National Filling

Factory,

at the age of 17.

On my way to the factory

on the first morning,

I had to

travel from Ealing Common

on

what

was then the Great Western Railway.

I was waiting down on the platform,

I had to travel, of course, to Hayes factory,

but on the way down, on the platform

I met a woman with a little boy there,

and I was

very tired, I was yawning

because

I had to get up about five o'clock.

And she said to me,

"Are you tired after your work?"

And I said,

"No, I haven't started work.

"I'm going to work this

morning on munitions."

And she said,

"Are you going to Hayes?"

And I told her, "Yes, I am."

And she said, "Oh, God, girl,

how terrible," she said.

"My eldest girl was blown to bits

there last December."

And it gave a horrid

sort of feeling to the morning.

I was prepared for danger, yes,

but not at six

o'clock in the morning

sort of

thrown at you by a remark like that.

And I arrived there

and I just was put through

a medical

examination

and I passed as A1.

And I was put onto a job

in bomb

stores

which was really

cleaning detonators,

chipping a coating of TNT and amatol off them

that was on them like paint.

We had to take it off.

It was very dull work, but

the

workers were gay and charming,

and I liked it.

Well, the day came when I got

the job that I think perhaps

subconsciously

I'd always been

looking for.

They asked for volunteers

for the

danger zone...

..and we went forward.

When I say "we", I mean everybody went

who had any pretentions to

be A1.

You could pass

the medical examination,

or who had already passed

it on coming into the factory.

And I had been there only six days

and I was transferred

almost at once to the danger zone.

And as we went through

to

work in the danger zone,

we were lined up and we were

put into magazine clothing

and you had to wear wooden shoes

and no hairpins

and no safety pins or no anything

really that was of metal.

And we went along there.

We had to

climb up onto a railway...

that

ran all along the factory

over a

ten-mile

area

and there were

sheds...

Every few hundred yards,

there

were these sheds of the danger zone.

And different... As we passed along,

as we were newcomers, the new girls,

we were singing songs,

war songs, very gay,

and the other

girls from the sheds who were

already working

were coming

forward

and saying, "Bravo, girls,"

because they were desperately short there

and they knew that

they

wanted more workers.

So we got well cheered

over

the good two-mile walk...

..passing along and singing songs,

and then when there was a vacancy

or

20 vacancies

or 50

vacancies in a shed,

so many were counted off and put in.

And I was put into

a shell-filling

shed.

We were filling

18-pounder

shells.

I was taught to fill these...

..and

there was a lot of discussion going

on,

even...

I was only there three days.

There was a lot of discussion going on then

as to whether the girls

would, in fact, continue working.

We never went into a shed

unless there were some of the older workers there to show us and help us,

but the older workers were moaning

and upset and miserable,

cos

there'd been so many explosions.

And I think they were justified.

And we heard that the machines

that

we were going to be asked to

work on had been condemned

throughout all the munitions

factories

and that Mr David Lloyd

George was at the back of it

and he was then

Minister of Munitions,

and new machines,

in fact,

were in position

but they weren't in working

order yet.

Those machines were ones in which

you

filled your shell

in a concrete

chamber...

..and so you were

saved in the event of an explosion.

You were saved

to a certain

extent anyway.

But the machines that we were

put on that morning were

Heath Robinson sort of machines

and so difficult to describe to you,

but they were operated

not

by machinery really

but by a great

weight

lifted up on ropes by girls

behind a pile of wooden boxes.

They had no other protection.

And they had to drop

the weight down on top of the shell

and the person who was working...

There were only two machines, boys and girls.

If you were working the boys,

you

called, "Right away, boys."

And you put, after they'd already

filled the shell,

you put a sort

of cabbage stem

into it

and waggled

it each time the shell was hit.

And you were only allowed, say 12,

12 blows.

You called to the girls,

and then

you'd call, "Steady, girls,"

and

they dropped that weight

very slowly

and bring a lever out to stop it.

Only...

that first morning I was

there

some girl didn't call, "Steady,

girls,"

but she put her head forward,

so the weight came on her head

and

that was goodbye to her anyway

and a

very unhappy feeling for us all.

All the time there were

people walking to

and fro,

emphasising

the great danger.

We wore magazine clothing,

which

really consisted of brown

drill trousers

and a brown drill tunic

and a cap with a tape tied in it

and we were continually searched.

Cigarettes, matches,

anything that you might

have of metal was taken from you.

And this went on, sort of,

hour

after hour -

you were pulled out for a search.

And there was a great feeling

all the time of tension,

not exactly of fear,

because we were very merry

and we were always singing

and very gay about it.

The only difficulty I found

when I

was put onto one of these machines

was it was very

tiring work.

The shells were very heavy

and we had to kneel down

in front

of the machine.

Knees... You

just felt you hadn't got

any

knees when you stood up.

And you

hadn't got any back as it was

an aching mess from carrying them,

the long hours and the wait.

You had to wait for the shell

to be

filled and clamped in

and then deal with your pullers

at the back, who were on a bonus.

And I've always felt that

the

subsequent explosion was...

..perhaps largely due to the fact

they were on a bonus.

So they would get very annoyed

if we couldn't make room for the

fuse by the cabbage-presser thing...

we couldn't make enough

room for the fuse,

they would have

to perhaps hit it

20 times.

Well, 18 was the limit.

And a woman came up to me and

she said, "How are you getting on?"

And I said, "Well, not very well,

it's taking a lot of blows."

"And the pullers, who had to pull

that

great weight up,

"are getting very angry with me."

And my carrier, that's a girl

who

carries the shells to you

and carries them away from you,

she's a stacker and a carrier,

she said, "I think the mixture's

too

cold. It should be hot."

And the overlookers told her

to

shut up

and told me to scrape a little out...

..and to try again.

Well...

..I went on like that

for two

more days

and always the mixture was worse

and always on both sides,

boys and girls,

the two machines,

we were giving 18 blows.

That's the maximum. You were supposed

to

hit nine or ten. As a maximum!

And 20 is dangerous,

very dangerous.

And she came along again

and said

I must scrape more out

and I could give it up to

22.

Well, I said, "All right,"

and my carrier, a girl who was

helping me to carry the shells,

she said, "I don't like that. I don't like any scraping out."

Well, the whistle blew

and we went to the canteen lunch

and there...there was...

The topic

of conversation was the girl who'd been killed

in the morning.

And they were all angry

when they got back to their shed

on that afternoon, third afternoon.

They were all angry

and you're only

allowed to work on those machines

half a day...

and nobody... They said,

"We're not going to work on those.

"Why haven't you got

the new

ones in working order?"

The overseer said, "Come on,

volunteer, one of you."

And they were calling out,

"It's not your skin you're risking.

"It isn't yourself. You won't even

be

here. You're going away."

And I stood up and said I would go.

And there was an outcry

against that,

probably because I was very young.

And I looked it at 17.

There was a sort of outcry against my going on

and they said, "You've worked there

the whole morning,

"and you're young,

and do you want to kill yourself?"

Anyway, one of the older

girls stood forward,

one I had become very friendly with,

she stood forward,

a girl called Violet,

and she said,

"I'll come with you."

So I hauled her up onto

the box

that the foreman had got us to stand on as volunteers.

And she came

and she worked through the afternoon

and the shells were

filled like magic

and going

down at about nine blows

with

some of the mixture scraped out.

I didn't know

anything about munitions

except what the girls had taught me.

I knew that... You know

they were always sweeping the floor,

every bit of grit,

every bit of loose powder,

everything you'd possibly think

of was swept up and taken from us

and we were hauled

off our machines for searches.

They did take trouble in that way.

And at three o'clock in

the afternoon,

each afternoon,

they brought us milk to drink.

A trolley came round and

we went

and we drank this milk

and I, sort of being curious,

asked

why, and that...

really it is to

save you from

getting

the TNT

poisoning.

It acts as a neutraliser.

And TNT poisoning was

really

a yellow poisoning.

You went completely yellow and

your

clothes came off you yellow.

It even affected your clothes.

I don't know what it was,

what it was caused by.

It was very unpleasant.

And you got

it very quickly and you carried it.

You never got rid of it,

just stayed there.

You got more and more yellow

and people looked at you then.

When you got into a bus or Tube

or

anything like that,

they sort

of looked at you. They

wondered

what was wrong with you.

We felt like lepers going home.

But on that day...

..well, I'd just

had my milk and on that day the...

We didn't go home like that

because...

..my shell exploded.