Sadly, many histories of the Second World War only give a brief mention to British industries, if at all. Such an omission is a surprising one because, without factories, works and shipyards and the millions of men and women workers who stepped up to join the workforce to help meet the rigorous demands of war production, Britain’s fighting forces would not have had the weaponry, equipment and munitions to fight.

Just over a year after the outbreak of the Second World War, when the Battle of Britain was at its height, the American news magazine Time observed in its edition of 16 September 1940: This war is a war of machines. It will be won on the assembly line. How true those words were. During 1940 the world had been stunned by the new armoured warfare of the Blitzkrieg and how the most technologically advanced war to date was being fought in the air, at sea, and on land.  British factories and shipyards were not just working around the clock but against it to produce the aircraft, ships, tanks, armoured fighting vehicles, and munitions to replace losses and supply the fighting forces with the necessary vehicles, equipment and weaponry. This was not just to be able to carry on the fighting but also, in good time, would enable Britain to take the fighting back to the enemy.

It could have been a very different story if Britain had not been able to summon up the raw materials to make the items for the war effort in the first place. The u-boat campaign in the waters around Britain began from the outset of the war and thousands of tonnes of merchant shipping were soon being sunk. Imports were slashed and rapidly Britain became reliant on home supplies for raw materials such as coal, iron ore, aluminium and wood for war production.

Coal was still king and was the main fuel for factories, the generation of electricity, for domestic use in homes and on steam railways. Britain had plenty of working pits in those days with rich seams of coal to be mined. In the spring of 1940, the output of British coal mines was raised to nearly 5,000,000 tons a week and many teenage lads were taken on to work down the mines. As the war progressed more miners were required but there were simply not enough of them to meet demand. In October 1943 it was claimed Britain was down to just three weeks’ worth of coal supplies in reserve. To remedy the situation Ernest Bevin, the Minister for Labour and National Service, devised a scheme whereby a ballot took place to allocate half the intakes of conscripted men to serve down the mines rather than in the armed forces. The conscripted lads certainly did their bit down the pits and soon became known simply as ‘Bevin Boys’.

Wood, used for so many things that could be taken for granted, from building construction and ammunition boxes to railway sleepers and telegraph poles, was also plentiful, but with so many men from the countryside called to serve in the military forces, thousands of women helped to fill the gap in the labour force. Members of the Women’s Land Army had trained and worked in forestry since the beginning of the war and The Women’s Timber Corps was created as a separate arm of the Land Army in 1942. In due course, Timber Corps members, nick-named ‘Lumber Jills’, took over just about every job in the industry and it was no small thanks to these women that home timber production rose from 450,000 tons to a peak of  3,800,000 tons a year during the course of the war.

With coal and timber well in hand, the problem was that before the war Britain had relied on imports for over half of its supplies of iron, steel and aluminium. After much of Europe and the Far East had fallen into the hands of Axis occupation forces by 1942, these supplies dried up. The deficit would be made up by the first national recycling campaigns in British history. Salvage schemes would be the key and from early on in the war all manner of iron objects such as garden railings, bedsteads and redundant agricultural machinery had been collected and around 600,000 tons was salvaged from bombed areas as ‘blitz scrap’ to be melted down and recast. Drives for scrap steel and aluminium also produced remarkable results that kept British wartime industries well supplied with these essential metals.

Be it uniforms, footwear, helmets, gas masks, equipment, vehicles, munitions for fighting forces around the world or civilian organisations and the population at large on the home front, British industries made the lot. The factories of Montague Burton, one of the country’s largest high street gentlemen’s outfitters, made a quarter of all the British uniforms; May Harris Gowns and The Teddy Toy Company made webbing equipment; and the Singer sewing machine company made the new ‘spike’ bayonets. Large factories were given huge government contracts to dedicate their output exclusively to aircraft or tank manufacture, while others, such as railway carriage and wagon works, were repurposed for the task. Many factories would also expand to meet growing needs. ‘Shadow Factories’ had been developed since the late 1930s, particularly to assist in aircraft production, after the dangers of the new aerial warfare became apparent. It had originally been envisaged that the new factories would be erected near the extant main works of the motor car firms in the scheme – the idea being they would be both in the ‘shadow’ of the buildings and ‘shadow’ the technical know-how of their employees. Before the outbreak of war, they were not secret as their name may infer; reports of their progress appeared in national newspapers and they received official visits from royalty, prominent politicians and dignitaries. Even General Erhard Milch, the Chief Administrator of the Luftwaffe, and his entourage of senior officers were given a tour of the shadow factories in Birmingham and Coventry during a week-long tour of RAF stations and establishments as guests of the Air Council in October 1937. Milch was certainly impressed and declared the shadow factories ‘a great innovation.’ 

Aircraft production escalated to unprecedented levels after Churchill appointed press baron Lord Beaverbrook as Minister of Aircraft Production in May 1940, and by 1944 more than 1,821,000 men and women were employed in aircraft manufacture. During the war, just about every British company, large or small, manufactured something for the war effort. There were some great innovations in the machinery for precision engineering employed and developed during the war, but in our modern age of automated manufacture it is easy to forget that on Second World War production lines, whether they were welding tanks, making airframes, installing engines, or manufacturing delicate component parts for radios, the work was carried out by hand. Often secrecy had to be maintained because of the nature of what they were making. Some small companies were given just one item to make, perhaps a part for an aircraft engine, and many of their employees would have no idea exactly what they were making or what it was used for until after the end of the war.

Wartime Industry is a small tribute to everyone who went that extra mile to meet the challenges of work in wartime. Ladies and gentlemen, we salute you!