Sheppey Munitionesses: Women in Sheerness Dockyard in WWI

Description: Janys Thornton talks about the work undertaken by Sheppey women working in Sheerness Dockyard during the Great War, its effect on the town and the impact on them when the men returned from the front. She also looks at the leisure activities of the "Munitionesses" and the other women on the Island.

Transcript: good evening everyone I hope you're all doing fantastically thank you for joining us tonight we have for the ninth in art series of exclusive online talks for the Kent archaeological society that is nine months that we've been doing these now Jacob that's a long time actual babies have been made in that time not by us I should add but um yeah it's uh we've been doing this a bit and it's it's going fantastically so thank you all for joining us again it's great to great to see are things have been very busy at the society so I hope you've all been keeping up on our various activities check out the website for details on all that as for tonight as always we hope to avoid any technical issues but beir withs if there are any problems Jacob will expertly guide us through these uh I have no doubt if you're not a member of the society and you'd like to please do think about joining us it works out about3 P30 a month and you receive a copy of our Journal archaeology cantiana with the most current historical and archaeological research in the county you'll also receive our biannual magazine regular newsletters exclusive access to our collections conferences and selected events opportunities to get involved in excavations and research projects and you allow us to keep on putting on um talks like this so please do have a think about if you would like to become a member and check out the website for more details on that housekeeper it's the usual um the talk will last around an hour after which time we'll have uh time for questions if you have't it so please keep yourself on mute with your cameras off for the duration of the talk so that we can hear our speaker clearly during the Q&A you can either raise use the razor hand feature and we'll unmute you um or if you prefer you can type your questions into the Q&A box into the chat box and I will ask those to Janice for you hope it goes without saying but please be courteous and polite to our speaker and to each other we'll be recording the session and it may be posted to our video channels in the future but no personal data will be shared and if you ask a question but would prefer it not to be published just send us an email saying so and we'll make sure that it was not included so onto our speaker I hope I I've got this right um Janice is and I know this bit right Janice is an incredible author writing historical women's fiction she's a retired civil servant working as a viit liaison officer the department of communities and an office manager at the department for communities and local government she studied literature at the open University after retirement uh she had more time to work on writing she was part of a project to research women's lives during World War I on the aisle of sheepy and read all the local newspapers from 1914 to 19 199 and believe that there were Tales to be told since then she's published two novels I think um which are part of a series docyard teachers and are set during World War I in the naval dockyard um town of shanes her novel female remedies was published in 2024 Janice is married to Jeremy she has two dogs and a cat and volunteers as treasurer for the sheppy Little Theater she's secretary to the sheppy prominade Who Run The Rose Street Cottage of Curiosities and the annual sheepy prominade Festival uh and she was longlisted for poet of the year at the Canterbury festival for 2022 her hobbies are aerobics painting writing and visiting museums and galleries which we thoroughly encourage of all of you we're delighted to have us here with us today to discuss sheepy mun's women in sheerness dockyard in World War I so Janice it is over to you oh thank you Craig um hopefully I don't waffle too much because I'm used to doing this um live and so I get a little bit more sort of um reaction from the audience as I'm going along so I I won't know if you're laughing at my jokes or not now um as Craig say I was part of a project that we did um from sheppy prominade in the rad Street Cottage of Curiosities um several um local women did various aspects of women's work my friend Rosemary did the women working in the RAF station um in East Church uh Joe did um women's land Army which started in World War One not in World War II as most people think and I looked at the women in the dockyard and we had access to school log books from the maon archive um local history Facebook pages local papers and the National Archives and and various other things that we came across so I started looking at women in uh the dockyard because obviously that was one of the biggest employers um on the island at the time and initially in World War I Jenice I'm so sorry um you haven't shared screen yet I don't know if you sorry sorry no no you're you wanted to look at I told you I'd be at this didn't I no no no it's absolutely fine it happens all the time um you get into it and right here we go there we go perfect thank you y y we can see it all fine thank you carry on right so this is the first slide anyway so um during World War I men who worked in the dockyard were in what was called a reserve occupation so they were weren't called up but during World War I there wasn't that provision when um the 1916 military Service Act was introduced uh bringing in conscription for the first world war men were called up whatever their um employment was and so men were volunteering from the dockyard which of course is not really what you want you don't want the men that are repairing your naval ships going off to war you want people to repair your naval ships however because there was um such a demand for men to be at the front they did a pro project which they called dilution and dilution um was like a time and motion study where they looked at the roles that men did and saw what parts of those roles could be done by women um unskilled or able to learn some of that work without a seven-year apprenticeship to start with so um that's when the docyard first started taking women in was in 1917 and one of the local papers had a report about what was called girls at the nor and this was really good for information what kind of roles the women were doing this this slide says they in the the electrical department there but the um article said that the women were doing things like making races for Torpedoes which is the fins that go on the back of the Torpedoes they were repairing propellers in The Foundry they were making the torpedo tubes they were boiler makers and the boiler makers earned higher wages they worked in the galvanizing shop and they worked in the saw mills one of the other details it tells us is that they were wearing Brown uniforms which from the pictures you'd probably think that they were going to be blue because blue is the col color of the Navy but they were wearing brown um overalls and these overalls would have also been made in the dockyard in what is called the um color Loft and I'll come back to the color Loft in a little while so one of the things that the author of this article girls at the nor said was that all the girls were very cheery especially when some goodlook blue-eyed naval officer came along and gave them the momentary glad eye if you don't know what a glad eye is this is the Glad eye and as as you can see we've got a German girl on one side and the British girl on the other and so this was quite a common thing where um what was called sweetheart cards were made with girls in military uniforms that's the Glad eye and then you may all have seen the film um made in dagam which was about the F workers the women F workers getting equal pay in the 1960s and being the first women to get equal pay however back in April 1917 the women working in the dockyard achieved equal pay and this was achieved by the national Federation of women workers who headed by a lady called Mary MacArthur and the workers union whose Chief women organizer was a lady called Julia vley and they int tempted to attempted to ensure that the dockyard workers were not left out of pay advances awarded by the munition workers under the Min Ministry of Munitions and a lady called Miss rbra who was um a lady from Gillingham was one of the deputation that went um to London to argue the case for equal pay for the women workers in the dockyards and they were actually granted equal pay however it wasn't quite as clearcut as we would like to think and they were um they had to be doing work which was exactly the same as the men did and this was a sort of get out of jail free card for the employer in that they would argue that the women weren't doing exactly the same and it would be things like fact that men could obviously carry heavier weights than women and they would argue well that woman's only carrying five pounds whereas the man is carrying 101 pounds so she's not doing the same work and and by those methods they um they kept the pay slightly below what the men heard however having said that this was a national pay award so it applied not only to JS and chattam dockyards but it also applied to Portsmouth and um Plymouth and um Penbrook and all the other dockyards around the country the women were paid on paper the same as the men so that was quite a big achievement one of the other things that was um a first was that women started working as clerical officers and this um picture is of the records for clerical officers from um the National Archive and there are some women working before um the war broke out however they weren't what was called established civil servants and the difference between being a a a non-established civil servant is the the right to a pension so once those women were taken on as established civil servants it gave them the full benefit of all the rights um as civil servants that the the men enjoyed and then um we also know that they were being paid between 17 to 25 Shillings per week and I will keep telling you how much people earned because I think obviously it's it's quite interesting to know what they earned when you compare that to other workers at the time for instance a house made might only be earn in 10 Shillings but she would get all her um her board and lodgings paid for as well when they first St started taking on the clerical officers there was an article in the in the local paper which said that the um that the management couldn't decide how to decide which women should be employed as cleric officers and they had um quite a number of women applying so they needed some kind of mechanism and so what they decided to do was to set them what was called the dockyard exam and the dockyard exam was set every year and all the um neighb dockyard towns around the country all the schooling for the boys was geared up to take the docyard exam and my my brother-in-law took the docyard exam in the 1970s in Portsmouth and what happened was that they would take the docyard exam and according to where they were placed um in the results would determine which roles they were offered as apprenticeships in the dockyard so those with the highest scores would be given the jobs that could lead to management such as you know they might start off as messenger boys but it would lead to management positions whereas um the lowest scor boys would get offered jobs as laborers however it would be a job for life and so it was much sought off sought after and the whole of the schooling for boys was geared up towards taking the docyard exam meanwhile the girls schooling and we got this from the um the school log books from the ma archive show that the girls curriculum was things like needle workking cooking gardening and knitting so their ability to take this doyard exam was not as good as the boys was because they just simply didn't have um the tools necessary to take the exam so 60 women took the doc exam and only six passed and I think it's amazing that six passed when you considered that none of them would have had the kind of schooling that the boys have been having since they were small however it was um after that they they obviously looked at different ways of um determining which women should get the the the employment and we've also got a thing here for lady called Sarah Jane peny and she's shown as being a female worker in the dockyard this is pensions but what we don't know is what she actually did however it does tell us that her earnings were not to exceed 18 Shillings a week so her her earnings were C so when we're talking about what people's earnings were it's you know it's quite interesting that she wasn't permitted to earn more than 18 Shillings now on May the 25th 1918 King George V came to visit the do now this photograph gra is from chatt and doyard and it's on the um chatt and doyard website um but before he arrived in chattam he came to shenis first so his his day to visit the do was visiting cheness in the morning and then he went on to chat him in the afternoon so the um the reception he got would have been very similar reviewed the troops he reviewed the Garrison and he met the women now the local paper tell us that he he meets the women in the color Loft under a lady called Mrs Evan and it reports that the color Loft uh the the workers were the widows of the men who died at the front and this was an actual tradition that women worked in the color Loft who were widows of men generally um before the war who'd worked in the dockyard and might have met with an accident as quite often happened and accidents were quite often fatal without um health and safety that we have today and the women would be offered work um in order that they could become the bread winner because initially there were no widows pensions and so the color LOF was a way of helping support the women who who' lost their husbands in the service of the dockyards um obviously by the war um pensions were introduced but the other people that he met he met um Mrs Dawson in the rigging shop he met Mrs Forester and Mrs Mayors and they were reported as making stowing spars for lighters and wire rope and wire hes he then went on to meet a Miss hod not in The Foundry and Miss hod not gave him a demonstration of um the work that she was doing this is a peace medal um which is held in the Minster um Gate House and and peace was actually declared July 1919 and almost every town and Village across the country had some kind of Celebration because the war was obviously so long and bloody and they gave out gifts to commemorate the fact that PE peace had arrived at and this is a a peace medal this is rhythm docks now Rhythm docks is not a naval dockyard it was being built um when war was declared and um it was commandeered for the war effort and what they did in ridden dock was called Salvage and they repaired and um got uniforms back ready to be worn again so the uniforms would be quite often taken off of dead soldiers and so they would be covered in blood they would have holes in from bullet wounds and they would clean the the uniforms repair the holes and make them good for some um new recruit to wear again and obviously this was not very pleasant work but um the women did their best um to bring luck to the men by sewing little messages into the hems which said things like good luck on the on the Western Front um these Salvage ports were all over the country and again there are um it's recorded in Portsmouth that there was one where they repaired Bell tents so it was um it was quite a an undertaking now one of the thing about this picture I'll show you a closeup of this picture as you can see all the women are wearing triangular badges now these triangular badges say on them on war work and each one on the reverse has got an individual number however there is no Central record of whose triangular badge was given to who so nobody knows who um you know if you've got one that says 1 two 3 four five you won't know if it belong to your grand or or a stranger entirely but the badges were issued by the ministry of Munitions um because previously they'd issued a similar badge a blue enamel badge um to the men and the men wore them at the time when you when people were giving out white feathers for men who weren't in uniform so they were wearing badges that said on war work and then when the women started joining the war effort they were given triangular Badges and you sometimes see referred to uh the Triangular badge girls and one of the interesting things I found out recently for some other research I'm doing is when the P princess Irene exploded um in the mouth of the Medway um in 1915 one of the bodies recovered the man was wearing his onw service badge and I think that's that's quite poignant this is the Triangular badge and the again there's another sweetheart um postcard here which has got the Triangular badge on it that some young lady is done with forget me kns and then I said earlier about the men um having accidents at work but accidents at work were common for um the women who were then working in the dockyard doing the men's jobs and this is a report about um Mrs Eastwood who broke her arm in The Foundry now it says at the bottom here that she had to go to Bart's hospital um at the time there was no obviously no National Health Service and the um what happens if you were not well if if you had sickness you'd go to the workhouse if you were um a man and worked in the dockyard you'd go to the naval hospital in chattam if you were a soldier you'd go to the military Hospital which which was in cheness um but members of the public if they were injured they went to St Bart's Hospital in Rochester and this is course is before um motor ambulances were were common place and so this would have meant that people would have been taken on a hand cart to the railway station and then from the railway station they would have um traveled up to Rochester where they would have been retrieved at the other end and then um you know go on to the hospital so if if you had a serious injury that was you know a pretty traumatic journey I would imagine and this is a story um about sexual harassment in the workplace yeah that sound me as a Trade union rep saying that so um we think about sexual harassment as being a sort of modern thing that's happened but this is a story about a young lady called gerre Gamblin um she was 18 years old and she was sexually assaulted um by her colleague and it doesn't tell us what actually happened um but it goes into some detail about the the conversation between her and Charles barrows and he sexually assaults her and she is so distressed by it she goes home and her mother says to him look mother says to her you've got to report this and the police brought a case on her behalf the the um court system is slightly different there wasn't the crown prosecution service at that time who would make a decision on whether or not a case should go forward you had to have a hearing at a magistrates call and then if that hearing was successful then you'd go forward to the crown call in May Stone but um she brought her case and unfortunately um the magistrate felt that there was no case to answer and said that no court in the land would convict this fine young upstanding man of of Charles barrows and so that the case was not upheld it was an unsustained charge and these are the Hyde Smiths now then um rear Admiral Edmund Hyde Smith um was the superintendent of the dockyard and the house at the top there is the superintendent's house and that's still there in shenet Stockyard and somebody very wealthy has bought it because there was a a movement to buy the houses that were inside the now commercial Port Gates and I have been in that house and it is palacial let me tell you and if you see where the steps are and the two Sailors doing the gardening with the sprinkler um that's a ballroom room those six windows are a ballroom there and it was like it like Downtown Abbey except the um Lord and L at the house was um Admiral Hy Smith and his wife now his wife is called um Fran's Hyde Smith and she was um like the lady of the Manor in sharess and she was involved in all aspects of the community she was the chair of numerous committees she was the chair of a committee called the befriend women and girls which we will come back she was the chair of the Cottage Hospital fund so they were trying to get enough money to build a hospital locally instead of people having to go to some b f she used to host Garden parties like as so you know she was Queen Elizabeth II have Garden parties for the Great and the good of the town and she would organize all kinds of um activities so she organized a women's day to celebrate the work of the women working in the do yard and the various services that were um were up and running by 1918 so the ra the Rens um the um various services that were um there and they she also had a special church service which the Archbishop came and um presided over so she was a very very important person so when you're reading through the um Source documents Mrs Hyde Smith's name appears all over the place because she was she was she didn't she wasn't employed by anybody but she was the most important woman on the a of sheepy and in the dockyard this these pink cards are from the Red Cross and the Red Cross as part of the work they did for the World War One Centenary was to digitalize all their records so these pink cards the original records and you can go onto their website and search by name or search by Place uh and find out what people did and this tells us about a lady called Alice Cavell and it tells us that she initially went to France as a as a bad which is a voluntary voluntary Aid Detachment nurse and she went to France in October 1915 and um she was invalid invalided home in 1917 was taken out of service but eventually um when she recovered she went back to work again and she was the lady superintendent in charge of the Rens um in the SI Bay in abaly house so when we talking about the women working in the dockyard you've also obviously got the ren working there and other um Services as well but she was in charge of looking after the ren so there was a lot more thought about women's welfare as well happen in at that time and this say these are the events that we know that Mrs Hyde Smith organized so we've got service of women um conducted by Archbishop Randall Thomas Davidson we've got various Sports days women's day which was like a a carnival and as you can see there's all the different um Services there the Queen Mary and Alexander the ren the rap and all of these things were organized by by Mrs Hy Smith at the end of the war um we s suddenly see a rapid demobilization and this is of the international stores and this is to show you the difference between the the two sort of attitudes so on the left hand side of the screen uh we've got the international stores proudly boasting that over 2,000 members of Staff um they've released that amount of men to go to the front because they've been replaced by women and then on the other side we've got demobilization and it's talking about if the men come back then just come back to the stores and you can have your job back so women were quite quickly um stood down from working and some of it was natural wastage because obviously when their husbands came back or they got married um they might have started families or you know the bread wi was there but other times it was just that they become redundant and we got couple of incidents so from the employment committee which was like a a committee that decided on paying the equivalent of unemployment benefit the doers people used to call it them and it says that the following unemployment payments were made and it was 554 for women6 pound for girls now I don't know how old a girl was um in those records whether that was a girl of 18 or up to 21 um meanwhile only 21 was paid out in unemployment benefit to men which is quite a big difference when you're paying out 554 to to women and only 21 Men and 22 pounds to ex service men so um it was it quite a big difference um in the unemployment rates for women to men this is um a little bit about the schooling because obviously we've talked about how the schools were all geared up to get the boys to work in the dockyard but what is quite interesting about this picture if you look behind the teacher on the back wall there's All Ships around the back um so this is from Marine Town School in shess and these children they would have been Children of the dockyard workers so when you look at the numbers of people working um in the dockyard there was about 2,000 men worked in the dockyard and we know that when the um number of men eligible to vote in 1918 was published there was 3,294 so if there's 2,000 working in the dock yarden 3,000 men living in chenes that means two out of every three men is working in the doyard so these children their fathers their uncles their grandfathers would have all been working in the dockyard and it would you know it would have been all that they knew then one of the things we also see is um the change in the leisure time for the women so this is girls doing what's called Swedish drill but they called it gymnastics so although it doesn't show in this Photograph the board that's in front of the girl in the middle at the front it says um it says it's there the jum gymnastics team one of the things is they're wearing gym slips and we tend to think of gimm slips as being a school uniform but it was a a garment they could wear which was loose and allowed them to do Swedish drill and Swedish drill is this the sort of thing where you do repetitive rhythmic movements and practice with things like Indian clubs and the gym slip allowed them the freedom of movement to do that and so this was like one of the first times when women started to um do what we'd call keep fit these days swimming was also on the up and swimming was changing quite dramatically so in the bottom right hand picture we've got four young ladies here with the Union Jack on their chest and this is from 1912 when swimming became an Olympic sport for women and these four women are the the British women's Olympic relay team and they won the gold medal um and so their their costumes are quite different to what we think of as said a in swimsuits they're like bikinis little bit risque actually if you look at them closely or don't look at them closely um but they're like bikinis that they're wearing rather than the sort of pantaloons and tunics that we think of as being um swimming costumes and again it's all about freedom of movement and we see in the um top picture a lady um swimming and she was called Mrs Hilda willing and she was the first woman to swim from Rochester to cheness and she swam that in 1919 and when the women were swimming in the Olympics the um distance they swam was 200 MERS because it was felt that women couldn't swim very far whereas we see Hilda willing is swimming a distance of 16 miles down down the river Medway so all these things are sudden you know these views of what women could and couldn't do are being sort turned on their head on the left hand side we've got um from the plan of the dockyard you see that in the middle it says swimming bars and from the school log books we know that the girls from Blu toown Primary School were having swimming lessons during the school school week so again that's a change in attitudes that girls were learning to swim and participating in swimming events um there were swimming gers regularly um and that they they they therefore had a different you know um upbringing to say only 20 30 years before when swimming wasn't necessarily seen as a ladylike activity and this is a picture of the victory aquatic swimming pool and we talked about the victory being uh Victory Day being July 1919 and the swimming Galla took place on the seafront and as you can see everyone's crowded onto the seafront in front of the Catholic Church I don't know how much you'd be able to see and of course you know you you're fighting with the ties and all of that so it must have been quite epic to be swimming in a swimming Gala um on the sea front and this is a little bit about women's football and um with the rise of the lionesses and women's football people have sort of realized that women were um playing football during World War I it something sort been forgotten and has been revived and these are pictures I found on Facebook um for girls that played football in JS during World War I now I contacted the families and asked them what their grandmothers or great grandmothers did during the war who they were employed by but the the um people didn't know and what's interesting about Lydia Wright is that her grandson played football for sheppy and other um semi-professional teams so when he's got his football playing jeans bit like the Chon Brothers he got them from the female side rather from the male side now the only report I could find was about um the women playing against the St John's ambulance Brigade and so as you can see um it says here for the Saturday Saturday the 28th um it says football match women workers of the naval sto Storehouse versus the St John's ambulance Brigade and they played against the men of the St John's ambulance Brigade and they won and the reason for that I'm told by other people who play football is that they would have been playing as a team and they would have had tactics and they would have known each other's strengths and weaknesses whereas the St John's ambulance Brigade was probably just 11 men who thought well we can beat this bunch of girls and um set off to to play against them one of the other things that we should um note from this this is the naval Storehouse the women in the naval Storehouse which is where ger Gamblin who we spoke about who um brought the charge for sexual harassment against her colleague um she worked in the storehouse one of the things again is that girls were wearing if we go back slide course they're wearing shorts and showing their legs which again girls wouldn't have done at that time that have been wearing skirts obviously down almost to the ground and here they're showing their legs off which is perhaps one of the reasons why he might thought that she was um more interested in him than she was this is um a little aside and one of the reasons I've put this aside is because I think it's quite interesting one of the things it said in the school log book was when this uh Wild Wild West circus came to town which was just before the Advent of world war um 1 so it was in the July 1914 that no the kids sto going to school and it was really expensive if you look at the prices of admission you see it's five Shillings four Shillings three Shillings 2 Shillings one Shillings and six pence so somebody paying five Shillings for a ticket if you're only earning like we was seeing the women earning 18 that's almost like buying a ticket to go to the O2 to see the Oasis concert it's a lot of money and so if you you know you think about people having big families so even at Sixpence that's a lot of money to be paying out for a family if you've got a big family but it shows you know the fact that the dockyard workers earned quite a lot of money they were quite well paid compared to other um laboring jobs and we talked earlier about the society for befriending women and girls that Mrs Hyde Smith was um the chairman of one of the things that kept popping up in the local paper were these adverts for um things like goa's famous pills and they um if you ever suffer from female weaknesses and irregularities and so these were actually um pills to regulate your periods and um they were also used like a morning and after pill and the opposite side of taking these bills and these are quite again quite expensive because it says that the small packet is one shilling and th but an extra strong packet is four Shillings and six p and again we've just talked about the fact that you know if somebody's only earning 18 Shillings that's almost a quarter of a week's w is that one packet of of tablets but um the society for befriending women and girls their business was to find girls who were in trouble as they used to say um and either find put them into a home where they would have the babies and then the babies be adopted or do things like um send them off into the colonies into um Australia and CA and Canada to marry men out there and make um decent women of them or train them up to be um domestic servants but the the flip side of all these adverts for um these Penny rooll tablets was that under the 1913 mental deficiency act um unmarried mothers could be categorized as moral impales for having a baby out of wedlock and they could be committed to an asylum and in the Maidstone archive there is a log book from the Society of Defending women and girls and in there if you look in there it's got details of when they've decided that a woman who's had maybe two or three children with several men um they they are being assigned to um be put into an asylum for being um as say moral imbeciles then this is a little bit about the air Ag and shenice now the um across Kent there were many many Air Raids during World War I and um part of the um docy card's role was that it provided an early warning system so they would um set off the dockyard siren to warn people that the there was an airay going to happen and they also if somebody was nearby they would allow you to um shelter in the dockyard shelters but of course you had to be quite nearby and again in the school records in the school log books it talks about the the air raid drills that the children used to do and if um the air raid drill during World War One was that the children would run home so if the air raid warning the siren went they were supposed to run home and if they were say from one of the F farms and so therefore weren't able to run home in five minutes they were assigned a home that they were to run to so they would you know somebody else in their class would take them home and they would um shelter in their own home but during um so from May the 5th 1915 when the first day air raid was um to August the 24th 1919 there were 96 Air Raids over sheepy but not all of those Dro bombs um because obviously if you're on the coast and the plan's coming in it's got to fly over you to get somewhere else um but obviously there were casualties and there were um deaths from it this is a lady called Marian Burell and she was a tanist and on the Imperial War Museum site there's several of these tanist um across Kent who stayed at their station doing um taking tele telegrams during these Air Raids um and so they were awarded the MBE for courage and devotion during air raay and this young lady was um in the post office in shess for the duration of the war now this again is the um is the War Memorial in shess and as you can see at the bottom it's got killed an enemy aircraft raids and it names um the citizens that were killed and it includes two women there includes Mary Hubbard and Laura Cox and in that picture go back in the In This Crowd I mean you can't see it because it's too small but there's this boy with a patch on his eye and there's loads of stories in the local papers about boys um getting into scrapes and being think doing things like throwing stones and uh uh playing with air guns and several children lose an eye so what's interesting about this accident in the Sunday school is um one boy took um a Detonator to school now a Detonator is what you'd put on the railway tracks during fog and it would be put there by men working on the railway tracks so if a train comes it will explode and it will alert the train crew that men are working on the tracks but it would also alert the Train the men working on the tracks fact that a training is coming but obviously one of these detonators was missed and a boy took it into Sunday school and set it off during Sunday school and it says in this article that his hand was severely damaged well I I would believe that if your hand was severely damaged by a Detonator there wouldn't be much hand left and and of course he goes off to St Bart's hospital but fortunately he was able to go um in somebody's car where and there were lots of other children injured as well well and this is one of my last slides it's um pornography and prostitution which is another dockyard occupation shall we say so under the regulations of the defense of the ra act uh which came in which is the thing that brought in passports for sheepy I didn't put that picture up um but um there was quite a lot of restrictions on what women could do in dockyard towns because there was an awful lot of sexually transmitted diseases and there were more men in hospital in some at some points uh from having STDs than there were from injuries from um the enemy and so there were several things brought in there was a a a fine brought in so a system of fines to men in hospital so they would be fined if they'd got an STD and in order to mitigate the F they would um put the blames squarely on any young lady that they'd been with so there was a system introduced where prostitutes were checked and given certificates for whether or not they were clean or not um but the the other thing that I've mentioned here is a a story about a lady called Maria Hall and she run a news agents um in the High Street just outside where the dock gates are and she was seen to be selling obos SE postcards and these obscene postcards could be seen by members of the public from The High Street they were in the window obviously there for the sailors to to come and buy but um they was the police came seized her supply of postcards and destroyed them and she was sentenced to a fine of £25 or three months in jail for selling pornographic postcards £25 now then we know that people are earning less than 20 Shillings a week so we're talking something like six months wages just selling some postcards which is quite quite Draconian if you ask me this is my last slide and it's not really about women in the dockyard but I think it was quite an interesting um view of the of the war and what happened was um that during the Battle of heligoland um two German Sailors were rescued and and the code of the sea was that you would rescue any men in the sea um if their ship had gone down so they were rescued by a British ship and they were being brought to chattam um to become prisoners of War however they were so badly injured that they died on the ships before they actually landed so they were brought ashore at cheness and they were G in full military funerals you know with gun carriages and uh Blue Jackets as they call them to to accompany them and they were buried in the local graveyard and the town turned out and stood there um with respectfully as the gun carriages went by and of course this was September 1914 and obviously not long after the war sort of escalated and all this sort of gentlemanly behavior um was given up because there were just too many people dying um but that's the end of my talks so if anyone got any questions um Craig will take over from now hi hi Janice thank you so much that was such a a fascinating wonderful topic and and you really um made it so engaging that I really appreciate it what a what a fascinating story there um an incredible little section of of life in in shess there um just so um just quickly to everybody if you have any uh questions please add them to the chat and um I will read them out for you or if you would rather ask them you can use the handup um icon and you are welcome to ask yourself but um I just wanted to ask um it's in relation to your your own stories that you write are you using are you using real characters that you've come across or do you kind of use the essence of characters that you you find and uh elaborate them a little I think it's a hybrid there so I find these little tip bits of stories um and then I because obviously the newspapers only give you two or three paragraphs quite often and then I just embroider it you know go on a flight of fantasy and sometimes I use names that are similar so in my books I have a character called Miss Garrett and she's the deputy head mistress and there was a story um in the papers about four teachers who go off to Switzerland in during the school holidays and if you've read the books um you know Prime M Jee Brody in that Miss Jean bro goes to to Italy for a school holidays the whole of holidays and these ladies in 1914 were Trav traving across Europe by train and going off for holidays and Wars declared and they were stuck out in in um Switzerland and when they were told come home they said oh you know we're having a lovely holiday why should we come home it's nothing to do with us and so that was like the start of one of one of the stories but you know quite often like the boy with the exploding Detonator that's woven story so all those sorts of things sort of um are they are sort of back stitches that I do and then I build up from there yeah you can add in those real moments and yeah it element of reality as well yeah fantastic um so we're getting a lot of comments saying how fascinating it was how they really enjoyed the talk um and how interesting they found it they love the social history themes and um someone has mentioned that it was particularly handy to know the different wages of the time um I have had a question through um it's are there any good museums exhibitions or online resources where we can find out more about these stories have they been contributed to anything like Kent maps online a lot of which essays is essays of prominent um persons or events but we um at the end of the um project that we did um under the gateways um project that was run by Ken and can University we we put all the research that we did onto the archive that was set up by Queen's University so our research is in there we also did produce a little booklet which um is available for sale at the R Street Cottage in cheness um it's 44 pound um I don't know if we got many left though because obviously that was back in n in 2018 um although that said we've had covid since then and nothing move for few years of it but um so we did produce a little and say Ms have some of these stories in them as well have you have you engaged with any of the relatives of people that you've researched have you come across any of them well I say I've contacted people via Facebook so if they've um contacted what we did do again in the little booklet is in the back of it I see hold on minute see you sure I can't reach I'm too small I can't reach it without making too much trouble um but in the back of it on all the names that we had because like I say in the slides if I know somebody's name I've put the name so in the back of the the booklet there is all the names of all the people that we came across and what jobs they were doing I do have a spreadsheet as well of that so if somebody was doing family history then I can always um if you give me their contact details or I can send you the um spreadsheet and send that on to you amazing well um I don't see any more questions just more thanks and um mentions of how great the talk was so um thank you again so much Janice really like appreciate you you giving us a talk it was a fascinating topic and uh I'm going to have to get down to sheerness and start looking at these do and checking it all out I think um right so uh ladies and gentlemen thank you again for attending tonight um and I hope you all enjoyed the the amazing talk we have lots more coming up so please keep an eye out for our upcoming talks on Thursday the 17th of April we've got Dr Martin Watts delivering his talk richb the secret Port uh in June we'll hear from jizelle K and Dr Emily St Campbell about their work on the positive archaeological activities of the enabled archea archaeology foundation and operation Nightingale and maybe even a little bit of time team in there so and in July Isabel diggle the fins leaon officer for Kent will be discussing a step in the right direction further discoveries of the limb lamp this is a Roman copper alloy foot-shaped oil lamp the first of its kind in Britain so um that'll be really interesting to talk as well and there's much more so if you check out the website you'll see all of our events and our affiliate events um and there's lots on there that we can do into the coming months as I mentioned earlier if you're not a member please do think about joining us it works out about 330 a month and you'll get our journal and be able to be involved in uh several of our upcoming events and excavations um and learn about everything Kent Heritage as we try and get it out to you check the for more details on these talks and a wide range of other Kent based events um and that is it for me thank you again Janice and uh I shall bid you all good night we'll see you next month good night people