Peter Hedley on Shipbuilding

There were no home comforts at all. Even to wash our hands we used to have an old drum, fill it with water and put a big piece of iron into the fire and let it heat up, pull it out and drop it into this drum of water and that’s how we washed our hands.

I can remember one of the elderly gentlemen in the Fitting Office saying to me, “If you wash your hands in that water you’ll get warts” and he was right and warts are a thing that you don’t see these days but whether that was the cause, we never did know but these warts, one had, one week you’d have warts on your hands and the next day, suddenly they’d gone but that was the reason behind it.

There was no alternative. We had this big drum of soft soap and you had to take your own towel. It was quite primitive.

The toilet systems were very, very basic. Yeah, it’s a job to think how we did get on. The place was dirty, cold, um, during the winter times it was so cold that you couldn’t hold some of the machinery which was driven by air because it was so cold you had to wrap rags round the drill or whatever you were using before you could use it because of your hands getting so cold. It was um, really very, very basic.