MEMORIES
AND INFORMATION - WARWICKSHIRE
KYNOCH
WORKS, BIRMINGHAM
AIR RAIDS
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Kynoch
Works was a prime target for Luftwaffe attack with its
extensive ammunition, metal and other production facilities
and its vast workforce.
An
official history of the Company states:
From the declaration
of war, Kynoch Works effectively operated to government
orders, constituting a crucial part ot the war effort.
Roland Finch, one of the two managing directors, moved
to Witton to take charge of the site with the wartime
office of factory controller: this gave him exceptional
powers to requisition labour and materials and to dispense
with peacetime regulations. He was instructed to keep
the factories working twenty-four hours a day, and to
ignore air raid warnings unless the site - a prime target
for the Luftwaffe - was directly threatened. Only then
could the thousands of workers be sent to their shelters.
To ascertain whether the works was
in immediate danger was a matter of skill and judgement.
This task was entrusted by Finch to Michael Clapham
(later Sir Michael, and a Chairman
of the Company), then in charge of the
Kynoch Press, who operated from a tower at the top
of the Research Department. He describes the first
raid when the threat was direct:
I catch the throb of
an isolated plane well east of the main attack. Ten
seconds later I'm reporting to control that it is
pretty near our line. Another twenty seconds and I've
got the line exactly. 'Tower to Control. This one's
right on line. I'm putting them down.' I press the
button as I speak, and hear the klaxon blaring in
the nearby factories as people drop their work and
troop to the shelters. 'Control. The line of approach
is east of the strip mill, about Holdford Road gate.
And it's pretty near direct for here.' This is the
gut-twisting moment of an attack: have I given them
time enough? If I don't hear a bomb whistling down
in the fifty-five seconds after I have pressed the
button, everybody will have had a full minute to get
to shelter before the explosion; and a minute is enough
- on rehearsals. It was an immense relief when Longmore
(in charge of the control centre) called up: 'Tower.
Sixty seconds gone.' Ten seconds later I heard the
familiar whine. 'Control. Bombs away.' But now there
was a novel worry: for the first time in all our raids,
the bombing line passed straight through me. One bomb
exploded just outside our Holdford Road gate, then
another. Then a menacing silence as the third was
due...
Between 1940 and 1943,
Kynoch Works received forty-seven high explosive bombs
and over four thousand incendiaries. Yet only two people
were killed (in both cases because they did not follow
the correct procedures) and the disruption to manufacturing
was kept to a minimum. Much of the credit for Witton's
wartime contribution must go to Roland Finch, a legendary
figure with his tirelessness, blunt manner of speaking,
sense of humour, scruffy appearance and foul pipe; and
to his deputy, G. H. Corner, whose thoroughness gained
him the respect, though not necessarily the liking,
of his colleagues.
©
IMI plc 2002
The attacks were
of course not limited to daylight. One young woman employed
on ammunition production was Daisy May Johnson, née
Pratt, (1915-2003). The hazards of her work, which were
by no means restricted to Luftwaffe activity alone, are
described in a section of an interesting family website,
Our
Pratt Family and War ; an extract is quoted below:
She told many stories of her time
working at Kynoch. One very sad story of how a fellow
worker was killed when a cap wasn't put squarely on
a shell and the operator was blown out of the shed.
They worked in small sheds for that reason so if a
problem occurred only one small group would be affected.
She and another girl
had to fetch powder from the arsenal in a two handed
pail carrying it along board walks back to their shed.
They had to change their clothes completely for work
passing through a clean area. They wore rubber soled
overshoes and even had to have brass hair clips, as
steel was considered hazardous since if a clip should
fall into the machinery it could cause a spark.
They took turns to go
up on to the roof to watch for possible air raids, The
search lights would swoop out a circle across the sky
to signal the sirens and the watcher on the roof would
sound an alarm in the factory gaining a few extra moments
to seek shelter.
The pay was good with extra danger money overalls provided
and laundered and every shift they had to drink a milky
drink to counter the chemical reaction of yellowing
skin. (She wasn't sure what exactly was in the drink).
Even with the drink she joked that she looked more like
a buttercup than a Daisy. (The girls at the Bridgend
Munitions factory were known as Welsh Daffodils for
the same reason).
©
The McMullin Family 2007
The Works Home Guard
involvement in night-time aerial attacks is described
in the 1942 'B' Company report (recorded in full elsewhere
within this website):
During
the winters of 1940 and 1941 the district suffered
a series of very heavy aerial bombing attacks, in
the course of which incendiary and high-explosive
bombs fell within the factory precincts, necessitating
prompt action on the part of the defence organisation,
in which the Home Guard played no small part. Incendiaries
then presented no serious difficulty, some thousands
of which fell one night, and the Home Guard not having
enough spades or other implements, just used their
steel helmets for shovelling damp earth to smother
bombs which had fallen in dangerous situations. These
raids invariably took place at night, and whether
it was the location of an exploded H.E. or the extinguishing
of incendiary bombs and fires, the Home Guard members
vied with each other in their eagerness to be of help,
often having to be forcibly restrained from endangering
themselves in their efforts to assist in the work.
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