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Alejandro Molina, Toñi Navia, and Ana Medianero
The arsenal is a place where thousands of women worked to produce munitions and weapons for the front line such as bullets, canons, etc.
These women played a very important role in the First and Second War World. They supplied the troops at the front line with the armament and equipement they needed to fight. Around 95,000 Britsh women worked at the factories during the Second War World, making weapons. This type of job was well-paid but involved a lot of hours working, somentimes seven days a week. Workers were exposed to explosive material and they were at serious risk because of the machinery.
The Ministry of Munitions was in charge of the arms production and a huge number of new initiatives were soon introduced to improve the levels of production. One of them was an appeal for women to register for war services. As a result, thousands of women volunteered and they were employed in factories across the country. By the end of the Second War World, 700,000 women had become "muniotionettes".
Women whose job was filling shells were prone to suffer from TNT poisoning. TNT is an explosive which turns the skin yellow, especially on those who are always in contact with it. The workers who were affected by this were known as "canaries", due to the colour of their skin. Although the obvious effects sometines wore off, some women died because of TNT.
In addition to managing the hazardous TNT dust, munitions workers also risked their health doing other works in those busy, dangerous factories. Although the working conditions were not always the same, sometimes better and others worse, the majority of the time they had poor ventilation. Besides, they were affected as well by harmful chemicals such as asbestos.
Depending on the type of production that was being carried out, the munitions factories could be a very noisy working environments. With such heavy machines operating, workers shouting at each other and moving heavy shells and equipment around, actually, the factories were often deafening places to be.
There was a number of explosions at munitions factories during the Second World War. The massive amount of explosive material kept at the factories meant this was an enormously danger for those working at them. According to an article that we have researched on the Internet, on February 22, 1944, an explosion occurred in a factory where a girl was killed and two others were seriously injured, one fatally. The factory was badly damaged. In the investigation that followed, it was discovered that the explosion at the factory had been accidental. http://ww2today.com/22-february-1944-george-cross-following-munitions-factory-explosion
The hours of work of an ammunition worker varied according to the place where they worked, but generally they had to work long hours. The shifts lasted up to 12 hours, due to the fact that the workers had to work both day and night. Although women often earned much more money than ever, it was still much less than what men earned for doing the same jobs.
Despite such a tiring work they were doing, munitions workers did not have many breaks. Some of them remember having no breaks at all. There were some factories that had canteens, even washrooms, but these were not very common.
Working in munitions involved from cleaning, filling, and painting to weighing powder, assembling detonators, etc. It was often a repetitive work because they needed to check and meet the required standars.
At the start of the Second World War, men forced women to pass strict controls over the types of work they could have. But the raising need for more men in the war allowed women to have jobs in places mostly dominated by men. Although women had been allowed to work in factories before, they held up changes due to the economy. There was some resentment over the idea of women doing “male” work to such a point that men refused that women could earn the same salary as them.
The rules were so strick because of the fact that they were working with explosives, and regulations were enforced to avoid accidents, Some of the rules were to wear wooden clogs to avoid the sparks of the metals, or the prohibition to wear jewellery or hairpins.
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