Carol Wootton on Shipbuilding

Well, you could always hear the siren go when it was lunchtime and when then when they came back, and my dad used to … different now ‘cos my dad used to come home to lunch so he walked from there up … and they lived in Parklands Avenue, he walked back and forth every day to lunch, that sort of thing. I mean you wouldn’t see anybody doing that now would you?

And it employed a lot of people because if the people were on the Floating Bridge, the entire workforce sort of filled up the Floating Bridge going back and forth to east Cowes. I mean there was a lot of people there, you know a lot of workers there.

When I come to think about it really that was the place they worked or Saunders-Roe.

That was the industries really and because were talking about … I went there when I was 16, people didn’t have cars like they do now so you were really restricted to your Cowes, Northwood, Gurnard area, you didn’t just sort of nip into Sandown or Ryde, like you do now, you didn’t do that sort of thing so you were around there and of course they always had two weeks off.

They didn’t have … they had Cowes Week and either the week before or the week after and the shipyard closed. That was it, you had no choice about when you could go on holiday, and at Christmas time I think they must have shut over the Christmas period but I think we only had three weeks holiday and you were told when you could have it, you couldn’t choose it then.

But most people that I knew worked there or their fathers worked there, that’s where they did. Some people worked for the Prison Service but not many.

In Cowes, that’s where you worked, there and other places like Ratsey’s that did sails for things but nothing really about it, it was just there, that’s how it was, you know? It was the main hub I suppose of Cowes was the Shipyard