lest we forget.
Discussion
Amazing how many of the motorcar manufacturers factories and skilled workers were called upon during the war in the governments Shadow Factory program for aircraft production.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_shadow_facto...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_shadow_facto...
GT6 Jonsey said:
Amazing how many of the motorcar manufacturers factories and skilled workers were called upon during the war in the governments Shadow Factory program for aircraft production.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_shadow_facto...
My father was working for the Austin Motor co when war broke out, like SS they also became involved in aircraft manufacture, I have some photos he took in 1939 of a royal visit and bits of aircraft are visible but unidentifiable. Very shortly after this visit he was seconded to Fairey Aviation as Chief Draughtsman where he stayed until 1944 when he moved to High Duty Alloys who were then involved in developing the first high temperature alloys to enable the transition from centrifugal gas turbines to axial flow gas turbines. I still have a couple of prototype axial flow turbine blades, tiny bronze coloured things, never machined and still with their sprue attached. After the war we used to go to Farnborough Air Show regularly, I remember well the Fairey Rotodyne and the beautiful little Fairey Deltas flown by Peter Twiss, interesting times! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_shadow_facto...
My father was working in the electricity generation industry when WW2 began at Battersea Power Station, which meant he had an exempt occupation so he didn't get called up to the forces.
He mostly worked in the control room, which was an Art Deco masterpiece - until it got bombed while he was on shift, which nearly cost him an earlobe and gave him tinnitus for many years. So when there was an "open doors" event in 2013 my sister and I just had to go there!
1st photo was pre-war, 2nd was post bombing and 3rd was as near as we could get in 2013.
He struck up a great friendship with a cousin in the RCAF he had never met before who was a navigator in a Wellington, but sadly went missing in January 1945 - it all just seems hard to comprehend these days.
He mostly worked in the control room, which was an Art Deco masterpiece - until it got bombed while he was on shift, which nearly cost him an earlobe and gave him tinnitus for many years. So when there was an "open doors" event in 2013 my sister and I just had to go there!
1st photo was pre-war, 2nd was post bombing and 3rd was as near as we could get in 2013.
He struck up a great friendship with a cousin in the RCAF he had never met before who was a navigator in a Wellington, but sadly went missing in January 1945 - it all just seems hard to comprehend these days.
9xxNick said:
Looking at the sign on the wall, the grocer's apostrophe was creeping in even then.
No! "Your Shelter's ARI A16 to A22"I don't know what "ARI" means but presume it refers to the assigned air raid shelters for those in this workshop. It abreviates, as the apostrophe usually does, the expression "The ARI of your shelter is A16 to A22".
John
Mike-tf3n0 said:
My father was working for the Austin Motor co when war broke out, like SS they also became involved in aircraft manufacture, I have some photos he took in 1939 of a royal visit and bits of aircraft are visible but unidentifiable.
They were almost certainly Fairey Battles (also relevant to your father's next career move!), since that is what the Cofton Hackett shadow factory at Longbridge was built to churn out. The Battle was one of those planes that, like the Defiant, had great things expected of it 'off the drawing board' when the shadow factories were set up but by the time the war actually began in earnest it was an obsolete deathtrap in its intended role. The royal visit was in May 1939. Longbridge kept building Battles until the contracts were ended in August 1940, with the run-out production mostly going straight off to Commonwealth nations to serve as trainers and target tugs. Longbridge then switched to making Hurricanes and then Lancasters. LordBretSinclair said:
During the war the MG factory at Abingdon built the whole front section of the Albermarle twin-engined light bomber.
This work was organised outside the shadow factory scheme by MG manager Cecil Kimber. He didn't involve Lord Nuffield in the decision, mostly because his Lordship had had a massive falling out with the Air Ministry over the non-acceptance of a proposed Wolseley aero-engine into which Nuffield had sunk a lot of effort and a lot of his own money. The ever-capricious viscount declared that he would never work with the Air Ministry again and, in an industrial equivalent of picking up his ball and going home, rebranded Wolseley Aero-Engines as Nuffield Mechanizations and insisted that he would only supply the War Office and the Admiralty. On his own initiative, using the semi-independence of MG at Abingdon as something of a world apart from the main Morris outfit up at Cowley, kIMBER decided that with the end of car production in wartime 'his' factory and workforce needed something to do and made his own overture to the Air Ministry. Given MG's skills with wooden and aluminium coachwork, production of sections for the Albermarle (intended as a bomber but only ever used as a glider tug or paratroop transport) was ideal.
Like so many other Morris managers, engineers, designers and accountants who dared display independent thought or in any way go against His Lordship's directives, Kimber (who had worked alongside and for Nuffield since 1921 when the latter was merely Mr. William Morris and had, up to that point, been a close colleague and good friend) was 'asked to resign' and so left the company he had built up almost from scratch.
2xChevrons said:
This work was organised outside the shadow factory scheme by MG manager Cecil Kimber. He didn't involve Lord Nuffield in the decision, mostly because his Lordship had had a massive falling out with the Air Ministry over the non-acceptance of a proposed Wolseley aero-engine into which Nuffield had sunk a lot of effort and a lot of his own money.
There was also the matter of the factory at Castle Bromwich which Lord Beaverbrook bounced Lord Nuffield into relinquishing. .
tapkaJohnD said:
9xxNick said:
Looking at the sign on the wall, the grocer's apostrophe was creeping in even then.
No! "Your Shelter's ARI A16 to A22"I don't know what "ARI" means but presume it refers to the assigned air raid shelters for those in this workshop. It abreviates, as the apostrophe usually does, the expression "The ARI of your shelter is A16 to A22".
John
That Battersea control room is lovely, particularly the gauges on the right of the photo. Sure, they could be simulated now, but an LCD monitor with a drawing of nice gauges isn't quite the same.
In a slightly related note, I believe (I haven't been past) that the big wall outside Crewe railway works has finally been demolished. It's related in that, though faded, you could still see the outline of pictures of houses painted on the wall to fool enemy bombers into thinking it wasn't a massive factory. There's been a bit of a local outcry as you might expect, but as I recall it the paint was almost faded to nothing.
Edited by droopsnoot on Thursday 14th November 10:33
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