Bomb Girls - Britain's Secret Army: The Munitions Women of World War II

Bomb Girls - Britain's Secret Army: The Munitions Women of World War II

Author: Jacky Hyams

Publisher: Kings Road Publishing

Published: 2013-08-05

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 1782197168

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They were the unsung heroines of World War II; the wives, mums and teenage girls, all 'doing their bit' for the war effort, clocking in daily to work in cast munitions factories, helping make the explosives, bullets and war machines that would ensure victory for Britain.It was dangerous, dirty and exhaustive work. They worked round the clock, often exposed to toxic, lethal chemicals. A factory accident could mean blindness, loss of limbs - or worse. Many went home with acid burns, yellow skin or discoloured hair. Others were forced to leave their loved ones and move to live with total strangers in unfamiliar surroundings. Frequently, their male bosses were coarse and unsympathetic.Yet this hidden army of nearly two million women toiled on regardless through the worst years of the war, cheerfully ignoring the dangers and the exhaustion, as bombing, rationing and the heartbreak of loss or separation took their toll on everyone in the country.Only now, all these years later, have they chosen to tell their remarkable stories. Here, in their own words, are the vivid wartime memories of the 'secret army' of female munitions workers, whose resilience and sheer grit in the face of danger has only now started to emerge.These are the intimate and personal stories of an unforgettable group of women, whose hard work and quiet courage made a significant contribution to Britain's war effort. They didn't fire the bullets, but they filled them up with explosives. And in doing so, they helped Britain win the war.


Army Wives

Army Wives

Author: Midge Gillies

Publisher: Aurum

Published: 2016-11-18

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 1781315515

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Most families have an army wife somewhere in their past. Over the centuries they have followed their men to the front, helped them keep order in far-flung parts of the empire or waited anxiously at home. Army Wives uses first hand accounts, letters and diaries to tell their story. We meet the wives who made the arduous journey to the Crimean war and witnessed battle at close quarters. We hear the story of life in the Raj and the, often terrifying, experiences of the women who lived through its dying days. We explore the pressures of being a modern army wife - whether living in barracks or trying to maintain a normal home life outside 'the patch'. In the twentieth century two world wars produced new generations of army wives who forged friendships that lasted into peacetime. Army Wives reveals their experience and that of a new breed of independent women who supported their men through the Cold War to the current war on terror. Midge Gillies, author of acclaimed The Barbed-Wire University, looks at how industrial warfare means husbands can survive battle with life-changing injuries that are both mental and physical - and what that means for their family. She describes how army wives communicate with their husbands - via letters and coded messages, to more immediate, but less intimate, texts and Skype. She examines bereavement, from the seances, public memorials and deaths in a foreign field of the Great War to the modern media coverage of flag-draped coffins returning home by military plane. Above all, Army Wives examines what it really means to be part of the 'army family'.


The Day War Broke Out

The Day War Broke Out

Author: Jacky Hyams

Publisher: Kings Road Publishing

Published: 2019-09-05

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 1789461464

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Sunday, 3 September 1939: the dawn of a new conflict that would engulf the world, following the words of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain: 'This country is at war with Germany'. By the time World War II ended in 1945, nearly half a million people from Britain and its empire had lost their lives, and the world had changed forever. Eighty years on, a look back at the lives of British people in September 1939 reveals a very different world from the one we know today. Unprecedented hardship lay ahead for a country where free healthcare for all was unknown: strict rationing of food and petrol, conscription for both sexes, and personal tragedy year after year amidst the chaos of Britain's bombed out cities and ports. What was it really like to be living in Britain in September 1939? The Day the War Broke Out is a fresh insight into the hearts and minds of a nation on that fateful day. With exclusive personal interviews, untold stories, wartime diaries and newspaper reports, it reveals the innermost fears and hopes of a society on the brink of war: through the eyes of young mothers fearful for their families, bewildered children painfully cut adrift from loved ones, and men of all ages, many now facing combat for the second time in their lives. These are personal, intimate snapshots from eighty years ago - when the entire world, virtually overnight, seemed to have been turned upside down - and of how a nation faced this new world with courage, humour and stoicism.


Ripping England!

Ripping England!

Author: Roger Rawlings

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 2017-12-04

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1438467338

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Examines an all too often neglected period of postwar British cinema and popular culture. Ripping England! investigates a fertile moment for British satire—the period between 1947 and 1953, which produced the films Passport to Pimlico, Kind Hearts and Coronets, and The Lavender Hill Mob, as well as the seminal radio program The Goon Show. Against the postwar background of fading empire, universal rationing, and the implementation of a welfare state, these satires laid the foundation for a new British cultural identity later fleshed out by the Angry Young Men, the Movement poets, the Social Realists, and those involved in the satire boom of the 1960s, which lives on even to this day. The peculiarity of these satires and the British identity they shaped is better understood when seen in relief against postwar cinematic cultures of Italy, France, and the United States. Roger Rawlings places postwar British film in the context of contemporaneous European national film movements and contrasts it with Hollywood’s comedies and satires of the same period. British satires of the late forties and early fifties held up a mirror to a nation that was in the throes of change, moving from a colonial empire to an inward-turning island culture. Ripping England! looks at the all too often neglected miracle of postwar British cinema and popular culture.


The Bomb Girls' Secrets

The Bomb Girls' Secrets

Author: Daisy Styles

Publisher:

Published: 2019-03

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 9780750546959

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As World War Two grips Europe, Kitty boards a ship for England; leaving her cruel father to work in a munitions factory. She hadn't wanted to leave Ireland, but she really needed the money with tiny baby Billy back in Dublin without a father. In Lancashire Kitty settles into the hard work and makes new friends. Working by day and playing in the Bomb Girls Swing Band by night, life seems to be looking up. But Kitty has a secret. And when a letter arrives from home, she realises she might need her friends¿ help before it's too late and she loses her baby forever . . .


Frances Kray - The Tragic Bride: The True Story of Reggie Kray's First Wife

Frances Kray - The Tragic Bride: The True Story of Reggie Kray's First Wife

Author: Jacky Hyams

Publisher: Kings Road Publishing

Published: 2015-09-03

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 1784188360

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The first full account of the beautiful, innocent young woman who married Reggie Kray - and became trapped in the violent and terrifying world of the Kray Twins.She was young, very beautiful and had everything to live for - but the life of Frances Shea, wife of Reggie Kray, remains one of the most tragic stories of the Sixties.Courted by Reggie as a schoolgirl, Frances was lured into an outwardly glamorous world of nightclubs, expensive clothes and showbiz parties. Yet she very soon discovered the real world of the Kray Twins, the hidden, twisted world where violence, drink, drugs and terror dominated everything.Frances broke away and briefly enjoyed other relationships, struggling to maintain her freedom. Yet Reggie would never let her go. Paranoid and obsessive, he monitored her every move, stalking her night and day.By the time she married Reggie in their ‘Wedding of the Year’ in 1965, Frances and her family had become inextricably linked with the Twins’ downward spiral from gangland extortion and brutality into senseless murder and mayhem.Trapped, desperate and unable to cope, just two years later Frances died from a drug overdose.Only now, 50 years later, in a revealing and shocking examination of the facts, the truth about the life of Frances Shea and her short marriage to Reggie Kray is finally revealed in this new, revised edition. With hitherto unseen photographs, documents and revelations, the book explodes the many myths surrounding the marriage. In doing so, it uncovers the sordid reality of the Kray world - and shows how the effect of this tragic, doomed relationship haunted the lives of Frances’s loved ones right to the end.


The Bomb Girls

The Bomb Girls

Author: Daisy Styles

Publisher:

Published: 2016-10

Total Pages: 438

ISBN-13: 9780750543460

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The heartwarming and inspiring tale of five brave women in a munitions factory during WWII. Ernest Bevin's 1941 announcement that all woman between 18 and 30 must register for war work has made Emily furious - she's just landed her dream job and the last thing she wants is to have to give it up for a bomb factory in Lancashire. The glamorous Lillian and studious Alice are not too happy either. But for downtrodden Elsie and determined Agnes, the promise of a new challenge brings renewed hope. Despite their differing outlooks, the five women forge lifelong friendships as they share experiences of love, loss, thwarted dreams and new opportunities, through the darkest of times.


The Day The War Ended

The Day The War Ended

Author: Jacky Hyams

Publisher: John Blake

Published: 2020-08-06

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 1789463505

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Tuesday, 8 May 1945: Victory in Europe Day. A day of joyous celebration, as the end of a conflict which had engulfed the world came within touching distance. Millions of people celebrated in the streets throughout Britain. Yet not all was right in the world. Struggles remained ahead - war still raged on between the Allies and Japan. Agreements and treaties were yet to be forged. Lives continued to be lost around the world. Meanwhile in Britain, although the pressure of supporting active military campaigns was reduced, lives were irrevocably changed in other ways. Bonds forged by the momentum of struggle, by hardship, unity and common purpose would begin to fade, and give way to the wounds of sorrow, upheaval and trauma that six years of conflict had riven. What was it really like to be living in Britain as the war drew to a close, giving way to a new era of hope, but also of deep uncertainty? In The Day the War Ended, bestselling author Jacky Hyams delivers a sweeping story, weaving together illuminating untold stories with contemporary records and photographs. The result is a moving, personal insight into hearts and minds across the home front right through the momentous year of 1945, as war ended and 'everything after' took root, shaping the world we know today.


Bomb Girls

Bomb Girls

Author: Barbara Dickson

Publisher: Dundurn

Published: 2015-10-03

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 1459731182

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2016 Speaker's Book Award — Shortlisted 2016 Heritage Toronto Book Award — Nominated An account of the women working in high-security, dangerous conditions making bombs in Toronto during the Second World War. What was it like to work in a Canadian Second World War munitions factory? What were working conditions like? Did anyone die? Just how closely did female employees embody the image of “Rosie the Riveter” so popularly advertised to promote factory work in war propaganda posters? How closely does the recent TV show, Bomb Girls, resemble the actual historical record of the day-to-day lives of bomb-making employees? Bomb Girls delivers a dramatic, personal, and detailed review of Canada’s largest fuse-filling munitions factory, situated in Scarborough, Ontario. First-hand accounts, technical records, photographic evidence, business documentation, and site maps all come together to offer a rare, complete account into the lives of over twenty-one thousand brave men and women who risked their lives daily while handling high explosives in a dedicated effort to help win the war.


Love Overseas

Love Overseas

Author: Michelle Cornish

Publisher: SolVin Creative

Published: 2021-05-23

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 1990221106

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Love is hard. Love and war is devastating. England, June 1940. As the war intensifies in Europe, Elizabeth Lewis is laid off from her job as a photographer's assistant. Air raids and rationing turn her thoughts to working for the war effort while her cousin Dot dreams of dances and romance with a Royal Air Force pilot despite Betsy’s warnings that a war is no time to fall in love. But when Betsy meets Leonard Wilson, a handsome serviceman from Canada, she’s instantly smitten. After witnessing the perils of war firsthand, Leonard isn’t afraid to live in the moment, and he’s eager to correspond with Betsy when he returns to the front. Betsy reluctantly agrees to continue her relationship with the good-looking private even though she fears this will only bring heartache. Against her better judgment, she takes comfort in Leonard’s letters, and after getting to know him, finds it impossible to deny her true feelings. Will Betsy disregard her fondness for Leonard to protect her heart, or will she give in and find strength in love as the war rages on? A tale of love and war and a journey halfway around the world. Inspired by true events.