andrewalston
RootsChat Senior
 Offline
Posts: 358
My granddad
|
Royal Ordnance Factory Radway Green was built in early 1940 on the outskirts of Alsager, Cheshire to provide ammunition for the British Army, which it still does today as part of the BAe Systems group.
The workforce was almost entirely female. Some came from far away, but most of the women were drawn from the surrounding towns - mostly north Staffordshire. A hostel was built in Alsager to house some staff.
The many thousands of women performed the operations required to take raw brass, lead and explosives and assemble cartridges and then pack them ready for transport to the front. Many engineering operations, performed to tight tolerances. Careful assembly of components which could kill you. All done hundreds of millions of times a year. This may sound a lot, but a single Vickers machine gun can fire about 500 rounds a minute. That's about 33 hours to get through a million rounds. The war lasted nearly six years.
Recently a discovery was made of a store of old documents in the bomb shelter under the old Administration block, and a sample was extracted to see what was involved. The documents included production records, publicity material, staff records (including some from other ROFs) and accident books. The material was almost entirely from the period when the ROFs were part of the Ministry of Defence.
I was involved in the decision about the fate of these documents, and as a family historian, I was very much against their destruction. After discussion with the offshoot of the MOD which deals with service records, it was decided that the best place for them was the National Archives.
By this point I had made scans of the two sample accident books recovered, which were from 1944, when Radway Green was in full production.
Accident books are a necessary evil to be filled in when something serious happens in the workplace. It was the same in 1944, but there was a genuine culture of reporting every injury, including things that today would almost certainly go unreported. Small cuts and grazes could become infected, and that would be serious in the days before penicillin.
The entries give the place, time and nature of the injury, the name and home address of the employee, and the employee's signature.
Sometimes an initial rather than the full first name is given. There is only one male name mentioned. Note that the address given may not be their normal, peacetime one.
The records refer to a period and an activity about which few records have been made public. Some of the people involved may never have spoken about their war work, treating the Official Secrets Act seriously. Some of the people mentioned may not have survived the war.
But because they refer to persons who may still be alive, I am unable to make the scans publicly available.
HOWEVER, if you believe that a person mentioned is a relative of yours, please contact me via email or PM, and I will be happy to pass on the scans of the pages mentioning that person. I've extracted the names mentioned, along with the name of the township where they were living in 1944.
The names mentioned are only a small fraction of those who worked there, but they are all I have.
The list of persons mentioned can be seen at:
http://www.andrewalston.flyer.co.uk/accidents.htm
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
Looking at ALSTON in south Ribble area, ALSTEAD everywhere, HOWCROFT and MARSH in Bolton and Westhoughton, PICKERING in the Whitehaven area. Census information is Crown Copyright. See www.nationalarchives.gov.uk for details. |
|
|
Author
