Blodwen Owen, Voices from the Factory Floor
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Blodwen was born on 20th August 1925. She is originally from Llanfrothen. Her mother was a house wife and her father was a quarry worker in Croesor who moved to the South for a while to work in the coal mines after the quarry closed. The family didn’t go with him. There were seven children in the family and Blodwen was the youngest but one. She went to school in Llanfrothen and then on to Ysgol Sir Porthmadog and left when she was fifteen or sixteen years old because the family couldn’t afford to pay her bus fare to school or for her books. The family lived on her father’s wage. Blodwen helped her mother at home and then went to work in a hotel in Llanfrothen for ten shillings a week. Her brother went away to work and then went to war. Blodwen worked in the hotel until she got work in Cookes. She got the job through a friend and didn’t need to have an interview – she just asked in the office.
She travelled from Llanfrothen to Penrhyndeudraeth by bike. She was fifteen years old when she started at Cookes wasn’t nervous at all as she had many friends there. Her job was making paper bags into some sort of cartridge for the powder and gelignite, and wasn’t dangerous. When the girls were eighteen they had to go to work in the sheds with the dangerous material. The work was monotonous and was based on piece work, and hard work was required to earn your wage.
7.15 She worked eight until five with half an hour for lunch. The wage increased after going to work in the sheds but not by much. Her first wage was three pounds and went up to just under seven pounds. The factory wasn’t a comfortable place to work, especially during the war when they were making hand grenades. The girls’ hands turned yellow and there was a bad smell because of the TNT. Blodwen had a stand and would put the grenade on it and then push the powder in. Somebody else would paint the outside red or green and they couldn’t touch them when the paint was wet. After the paint had dried they put the grenades into the holder in order to fill them with TNT. Some of the girls would supervise them to ensure that the grenades had been filled with enough powder. If they were rejected they had to be re-filled so Blodwen would try to fill them properly.
At the end of every shift the workers had to water down the floor to ensure there was no friction when it was brushed, as this could cause an explosion. For the same reason, the girls weren’t allowed to wear clips in their hair.
She wore a uniform which protected her skin but didn’t wear a mask. RT Cooke owned the factory but after the large explosion ICI took over and things changed.
Blodwen lost her sister Elizabeth in the big explosion in 1957. Blodwen had just finished work in shed P3 where they did the sheathing and her sister was on the powder in shed P1. “And then I said, ‘I’m off, the hooter is going’”. There was an almighty bang, and she was thrown across the bench and knocked out. She was in shock so she didn’t know how many or who had been killed that day. Her sister was 45 years old and lived at home at the time, whereas Blodwen was 32 years old, married and was living in Porthmadog. Four were killed on that day – three women and one man. The inquest concluded: 'No negligence on the part of the company'. Blodwen remembers that one of the foremen had warned the girls shortly before the explosion not to walk down a particular part of the factory. When Blodwen asked why, the foreman told her he had seen blue flashes there. People were angry that the families of the victims weren’t compensated and the official line was that the mice upstairs had chewed through the wires and. Her sister was unmarried and didn’t have dependents and the company only paid for the funeral.
15.00 Blodwen was off work for six months. In the end the manager persuaded her to come back. It was very difficult for her but they moved her from the scene of the accident to the other side of the site. They eventually re-built that shed. Blodwen’s work was then in the packing house where they packed the cartridges. They’d stopped making grenades by then as the war had ended. ICI took over during the war and built high mounds around every shed in order to minimise the effects of any explosion. More health and safety rules were introduced. After the war they made explosives for the coal industry.
The workers in packing were women apart from the man who brought the stuff in and took the explosives away. Blodwen worked in a group of five girls and one man in the packing room from 1957.
When she worked in sheathing they put the cartridges into bags with soda around them. The women wore something to protect their hair and there was a noisy machine that closed the bag. It was very hot there too, especially on the afternoon shift so she went to work in another part of the factory. There were three shifts: six until two, two until ten, and eight until five. During the war she worked on the night shift which she didn’t like but workers couldn’t chose which shift they worked. She travelled to work by bike, whether it was day or night. There also girls from Llanfrothen working there.
21.00 Blodwen got married in 1947 and had two sons and afterwards she continued to work, getting up at five o’clock if she was on the day shift. She worked there for twenty five and a half years between 1940 and 1970 with gaps in her employment to have children.
The girls who worked with the explosives would have to go to the doctor for a check-up every week. She was told she had low blood pressure and that she was to be taken off the explosives for six weeks. After a month a foreman told her to go back to the sheds to work. When the doctor found out he phoned the foreman and told him she was suffering from NG poisoning and that she would have to finish that day. Blodwen said she could not finish work but was given no choice. The NG poisoning affected the heart so Blodwen retired after twenty six years but didn’t receive any compensation for the illness. There was a union there and even though Blodwen was a member it wasn’t strong enough to help her. After losing her job Blodwen cried all the way home on the bus. She got work in a shoe shop in Porthmadog and was there until it shut. There was another woman working in the shop who had worked in Cookes – she had to finish because she was suffering with her thyroid.
Blodwen missed the other women after she left the factory. There were nearly six hundred working there. She didn’t socialise with them outside work because she had too much work to do at home looking after her husband and children. Her first son was born in 1948 when she was 23, and the second son the following year. She returned to the factory when her second son was about three years old. This was in the 1950s (before the big explosion in 1957.)
29.10 There was a lovely canteen and excellent cook in Cookes. Every Christmas the workers had free lunch. The canteen staff came in on the Sunday before Christmas to prepare it. The canteen wasn’t open during the night shift so people brought their own food. Workers clocked in and out initially although this practice was abandoned. Workers were punctual because the entrance was next door to the office.
31.30. Blodwen was elected onto the works committee and went on annual trips to the North of England for company liaison meetings with Cookes (ICI) other factory in Scotland. Blodwen shows pictures of the committee, her sister and other workers killed in August 1957, and her retirement. The company employed its own doctor. One of the managers brought in a scheme whereby workers could earn a bonus for not losing work. Blodwen got £70 for full attendance. The workers would receive sickness pay when they were off ill.
The working committee discussed ways of improving working practices. Later on they brought more machines in instead of doing things by hand. Workers disliked being timed doing their work. By the time she retired things had improved considerably in terms of the wages and increased automation. Her fingers are now swollen and she thinks this is due to the work she did.
ICI were better employers than RT Cooke in terms of health and safety but they introduced piece work. A doctor in Liverpool described what was happening at the factory, 'They are making machines out of you instead of human beings and it is wrong. Piece work is wrong. I condemn it.'
The piece work was the root of a lot of bickering in the factory and it meant that wages went up and down. There wasn’t much opportunity to talk as they worked so they would chat and sing in the canteen.
Blodwen enjoyed working in Cookes and made good friends there. She regrets that her health was affected but it was a case of going there to work or starving. The NG poisoning didn’t affect everybody. Many workers would suffer from headaches during weekends which were due to withdrawal symptom from the gelignite – so they would take a small piece of it home and sniff it. As a result the headache would disappear. The managers didn’t know about this and it was very dangerous. Blodwen never did it, but her friend did as she sufffered terribly from headaches.
At the time of the explosion in 1957 there was a lady doctor working at Cookes. She found her sister’s house key at the site of the explosion. (The house had been Blodwen’s family home although her mother and father had now died.) Blodwen still has the key which is all twisted. Blodwen’s husband went down to the factory the day after the explosion – there was glass everywhere. When he went into Elizabeth’s house and saw her slippers, and the table set for tea, he broke down crying. The date of the explosion was 28 August 1957 – Blodwen’s mother died on the same day seven year earlier.
Blodwen felt bitter on the day she retired and didn’t want a farewell party. Dr Stone gave her a clock that day. There was a party when they were giving everybody a watch. She received a silver watch – a good time-keeper – but would have had a gold one if she’d been there another three years. She still wears it.
Blodwen told a story after the recording about one the girls who wrote a note with her name and address on it and put it in a box of grenades during the war. A soldier got in touch with her. After the war he came to Penrhyndeudraeth and they got married.
Duration: 50 minutes.