"The Canary Girls of Chilwell "
November 2008 Meeting Report
Speaker - Maureen Rushmore
The November meeting of the Keyworth & District Local History Society was held in The Centenary Lounge, Keyworth, on Friday 7th November. The guest speaker for the evening was Maureen Rushmore and her subject was the Canary Girls at Chilwell. Maureen began by explaining how she became interested in tonight’s subject. She had completed a part time course on local history at Nottingham University and at the end of that course it was necessary to present a dissertation on a particular subject. Maureen chose to do her dissertation on the Ordnance Depot at Chilwell and the role that it played during the Great War of 1914 – 1919.
Recently, a new Tesco supermarket had been opened at Toton on land that had lain derelict for some years. A new housing estate has also been constructed adjacent o this supermarket. It crossed Maureen’s mind that she would not care to live in one of these new houses, having discovered the nature of the land that the houses were built on. It would appear that persons living in those houses have been advised not to grow vegetables in their gardens. Indeed, the residents have been advised not to eat anything at all that comes out of the ground there. This sounds pretty alarming; but what could possibly be the cause of such a warning. The answer lies in the fact that the land was formerly the site of a munitions factory.
When the Great War commenced in 1914 Great Britain was largely unprepared for hostilities on the scale that very soon occurred. Industrial output would be a critical factor in the hostilities that had recently broken out. It had been nearly a half a century since Great Britain had last fought a European war. That war was the Crimean War and was on a much smaller scale that the Great War would prove to be. All of Great Britain’s industrial strength and capacity would need to be mobilized to meet the demands placed on the nation by military’s needs. Although the British Empire at that time was the largest empire that the world had ever known it was policed by a relatively small standing army. It was the Royal Navy that, by and large, provided Great Britain’s security. However, the war of 1914 to 1918 would prove to be a land war, fought along a massive front with huge standing armies firmly entrenched along the front lines. The perceived key to breaking these lines lay in overrunning the enemy’s trenches. An essential requirement to successfully achieve this lay, firstly, in subjecting those trenches to a massive artillery bombardment before the foot soldiers then, theoretically, stormed the shattered positions. The key to this lay in huge numbers of artillery pieces firing vast amounts of ammunition at the enemy positions. Unfortunately, when hostilities broke out Great Britain had a serious shortage of both suitable artillery and the ammunition needed to fire them.
In 1914 there were only a few ordnance factories in England manufacturing shells, the principal one being Woolwich Arsenal. However, it was simply impossible for the existing factories to meet the colossal rise in demand that the war was requiring. Great Britain and her allies were lagging, to a dangerous degree, behind Germany in the amount of guns and ammunition that could effectively be put into the field of battle. To solve this problem required the building of new, and more efficient ordnance factories. These factories needed to be built very quickly too if the Allies were not to be in real danger of losing the war.
Viscount Chetwynd was the person responsible for the construction of the new factory at Chilwell. He was appointed by the Government and given what amounted to carte blanche to get the new factory up and running in the shortest time possible. He personally chose the site at Chilwell, purchased the land with his own money (this was subsequently reimbursed by the Government), and played a major role in the design and layout of the buildings themselves. So it was that on 20th August 1915 Chetwynd took on this responsibility for the design, building and running of the factory, which was built specifically to fill large calibre shells with the requisite charge.
Work began almost immediately and on 13th September the first sod was cut. On the 8th January 1916 the first shell was filled and production commenced shortly afterwards. These are remarkable statistics and show how organized and efficient an organizer Chetwynd must have been. Chetwynd was ruthless in his determination to ensure that nothing stood in the way to delay the completion of the project. As an example he had discovered that 6,000 tons of iron and steel was lying in a dock awaiting shipment to a new hotel that was then being built in London. Iron and steel were needed in huge amounts in the new construction and Chetwynd ensured that the materials ended up at Chilwell rather than the hotel in London. The new complex was designated National Filling Factory Number 6 and Chetwynd was given the overall responsibility for managing the new complex. He even lived in premises on the site during the week, only going home to his London residence at the weekend. This may have been a shrewd public relations exercise designed to show his work-force that it must be safe to work there or he would never dream of living so close to so much explosive material himself.
Up to the outbreak of hostilities in 1914 Lyddite was the favoured charge for filling shells but this required imported raw materials in its manufacture. To solve this problem T.N.T was substituted for Lyydite. This caused a further problem in that T.N.T. was more expensive that Lyydite. Chetwynd discovered that some of the T.N.T. could be removed and Amatol used instead. He went on a fact-finding tour of various factories in the United Kingdom to see if it was possible to devise a system for successfully mixing the two materials, T.N.T. and Amatol safely together. With information that he gleaned from this tour he formulated a new, relatively safe and efficient system for mixing the two explosive materials. Once the shells had been successfully test-fired at Shoeburyness in January 1916 with this new mixture it was possible to put the new method into full-scale production. This test batch was transported all the way to Shoeburyness from Chilwell on the back of a flat-backed Barton’s lorry, which had solid tyres!
By March 1916 over 7,000 shells a week were being filled at the complex. This was inadequate to satisfy the huge demands that the military were making for ammunition. A shortage of skilled labour for the work force did not help either. With so many men in the armed forces manpower was at a premium. To alleviate this problem it was decided to employ female labour although Chetwynd was not over keen on this as he viewed the addition of women onto his work force as a source of much potential trouble. His own expressed view was that ‘they were a nuisance’. However, needs must and women were employed and very successfully too. Wages at the site were higher than the national average, reflecting the dangerous and unpleasant nature of the job. The average weekly wage for men was £2/-/-, whilst for women it was £1/10/-. (Or £2.00 & £1.50 respectively in decimal currency). One side effect of handling the explosives was that the skin turned yellow. This was the origin of the term ‘Chilwell Canary’. It was a fair bet that anyone seen in and around Chilwell at that time with a yellow hue to his or her skin was employed at the factory.
So successful was the new factory that by the time of the Somme offensive in 1916 virtually all of the shells used there had been filled at Chilwell. The army however complained that a high percentage of the shells that it received failed to explode when fired; they were in fact ‘duds’. No blame though was attached to Chilwell for this shortcoming, as the firing mechanisms that were fitted in the shells at Chilwell were components that were supplied to Chilwell from outside manufacturers.
When employees reported for work at the beginning of each shift they had to file past a small wooden hut, where a 14-year-old boy took any matches, cigarettes or anything else of a flammable nature from them. A small disc was given in lieu of these and the items were redeemed at the end of their shift. For those people working in the sections of the complex where the explosives were stored it was necessary to strip down to their underwear and don a one-piece overall as their working gear. This was done in front of a supervisor to ensure that no one took anything that was potentially dangerous into the factory. The penalty for circumventing the rules was usually a warning for a first offence followed by dismissal for a further transgression.
Production was maintained at excellent levels and the complex was a vital supplier of shells to the armed forces. The site had been in full production for over two years when tragedy struck on a colossal scale. The fateful day was 1st July 1918, coincidentally the 2nd anniversary of the commencement of the Battle of the Somme. It had been an exceedingly hot summer’s day and shortly after the start of the evening shift there was a massive explosion on the site. Eight tons of T.N.T. was somehow detonated and the resulting explosion laid waste large areas of the site. The sound of the explosion could be heard up to twenty miles away. Tragically one hundred and thirty four persons lost their lives in the disaster of whom only thirty-two could be positively identified. A further 250 persons were injured to varying degrees. Countless acts of bravery and heroism occurred in rescuing the injured from the devastated site. Perhaps the most unfortunate of those killed was a man named Willie Adlard who had recently been discharged from the army. He had applied for a job at the factory earlier in the day and told that he could start work at 6.30pm. The explosion occurred at 7.10pm. He had worked at the factory for a mere 40 minutes before fate dealt him the cruellest of blows.
On 13th March 1919 the Duke of Portland unveiled a memorial to the dead. That memorial was renovated for the 50th anniversary of the tragedy but, sadly, now is in urgent need of further restoration. Chetwynd suspected sabotage, possibly by a disgruntled worker or ex-worker. The police were called in to conduct a thorough investigation but no definitive solution to the cause of the explosion was ever identified. The most probable cause of the tragedy was poor safety procedures creeping in due the ever-increasing demand for more and more shells to be filled to satisfy the immense needs that the war demanded. Coupled with this was the very hot weather and the unstable nature of the explosives at those temperatures the stage was set for an unprecedented disaster.
The bodies of those killed in the accident were buried in a mass grave at Attenborough Church. Winston Churchill, then Minister for Munitions in the wartime cabinet sent a telegram to Chetwynd expressing his sympathy for all those involved in the tragedy. Likewise a telegram was received from Buckingham Palace on behalf of King George V. Notwithstanding the scale of the disaster virtually the whole of the remaining workforce turned up for work the following day! Indeed, so rapidly was normal production resumed that within one month of the explosion the factory was reported to have achieved its highest daily output of filled shells. By then however the war was reaching its end and with the signing of the Armistice hostilities ended on 11th November 1918. This signalled the end of shell filling at the site.
So successful was Chilwell that by the end of the war it had provided the military with over 19 million shells, just over half of all the shells fired during the conflict. To fill those shells over 120,000 tons of explosives were used and the finished weight of the shells was 1,100,000 tons. These are truly remarkable figures, especially bearing in mind that when war broke out the complex wasn’t even in existence. By 1919 shell-filling production had ceased and the site was taken over by the Royal Army Ordnance Corps and used as a storage depot. However, the explosives used there had heavily contaminated the land where the factory stood and this is the cause of today’s warning not to eat anything grown in the ground on the new housing estate that now occupies the land that the site used to sit on. Lord Chetwynd was created a Companion of Honour after the war in recognition of the sterling work that he had done at the complex.