Carol Wootton on Shipbuilding
There was Miss Hussey and she was in charge and Miss Harwood. Miss Hussey’s bit was sectioned off. Everybody else was all round this big room and we were right up on the top floor then ‘cos funnily at lunch times, we used to look out the windows and look at all the men going in ‘cos that’s what you do when you are 16 isn’t it? All these young men you fancy them, or fancy that whatever.
But all the men we could see down there, and I used to stay there to lunch with sandwiches or something like that.
I didn’t always go home but it was just fun bartering up and down but anyway, in this office and nobody in there was married. That was the thing at the time, nobody was married, and I thought, ‘crumbs they’re not married in here, I’ll be here for ever, I’m never going to get married’. Now what a stupid thing to think. Absolutely stupid.
And when you’re the junior there you have to … ‘cos you’re doing with a scribe pen and you have these rags to wipe the ink off so as juniors we used to go up in the corner behind the screen and soak the linen first and then wash it all out. We had to wash it out. My nails wouldn’t stand it now would they, but wash out the slime off it so these were the rags for the Tracers to use, right?
Also there was a little peep hole going down to the Design Office down there and messages I found out afterwards used to go down back and forth to the men because we weren’t with men, we were completely separate but one of the jobs we had to do as the junior was to take the tracings when they were done, down to the Drawing Offices.
Well, I mean if you were 16 today you wouldn’t think twice about it , but now you go down there where there is maybe 60 young men in each one and they obviously make remarks and say things and you’ve got to breeze through there somehow but you know that was the sort of thing … it was a bit sort of, I don’t know, it was exciting in a way because I’d never been in that environment.
I knew about it because my father had always worked there but I mean … and there was all these young men in the offices and eventually you get used to it and it’s all good fun and there’s banter when you go in and out and things like that.