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Author: Jacky Hyams
Publisher: Kings Road Publishing
ISBN: 1782197168
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 197
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Book Description
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.
Author: Jacky Hyams
Publisher: Kings Road Publishing
ISBN: 1782197168
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 197
Get Book Here
Book Description
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.
Author: Midge Gillies
Publisher: Aurum
ISBN: 1781315515
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 314
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Book Description
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'.
Author: Roger Rawlings
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438467338
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
Examines an all too often neglected period of postwar British cinema and popular culture. Ripping England! investigates a fertile moment for British satirethe 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 Hollywoods 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.
Author: Jacky Hyams
Publisher: Kings Road Publishing
ISBN: 1789461464
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 246
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Book Description
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.
Author: Jacky Hyams
Publisher: Kings Road Publishing
ISBN: 1784188360
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 247
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Book Description
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.
Author: Michelle Cornish
Publisher: SolVin Creative
ISBN: 1990221106
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 217
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Book Description
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.
Author: Jacky Hyams
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 0752481223
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 187
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Book Description
Through the darkest days of the Second World War, an elite group of courageous civilian women risked their lives as aerial courier pilots, flying Lancaster bombers, Spitfires and many other powerful war machines in thousands of perilous missions. The dangers these women faced were many: they flew unarmed, without radio and in some cases without instruments, in conditions where even unexpected cloud could mean disaster. In The Female Few, five of these astonishingly brave women tell their awe-inspiring tales of incredible risk, tenacity and sacrifice. Their spirit and fearlessness in the face of death still resonates down the years, and their accounts reveal a forgotten chapter in the history of the Second World War.
Author: Sarah Rose
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0451495098
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 418
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Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The dramatic, untold history of the heroic women recruited by Britain’s elite spy agency to help pave the way for Allied victory in World War II “Gripping. Spies, romance, Gestapo thugs, blown-up trains, courage, and treachery (lots of treachery)—and all of it true.”—Erik Larson, author of The Devil in the White City and Dead Wake In 1942, the Allies were losing, Germany seemed unstoppable, and every able man in England was on the front lines. To “set Europe ablaze,” in the words of Winston Churchill, the Special Operations Executive (SOE), whose spies were trained in everything from demolition to sharpshooting, was forced to do something unprecedented: recruit women. Thirty-nine answered the call, leaving their lives and families to become saboteurs in France. In D-Day Girls, Sarah Rose draws on recently declassified files, diaries, and oral histories to tell the thrilling story of three of these remarkable women. There’s Andrée Borrel, a scrappy and streetwise Parisian who blew up power lines with the Gestapo hot on her heels; Odette Sansom, an unhappily married suburban mother who saw the SOE as her ticket out of domestic life and into a meaningful adventure; and Lise de Baissac, a fiercely independent member of French colonial high society and the SOE’s unflappable “queen.” Together, they destroyed train lines, ambushed Nazis, plotted prison breaks, and gathered crucial intelligence—laying the groundwork for the D-Day invasion that proved to be the turning point in the war. Rigorously researched and written with razor-sharp wit, D-Day Girls is an inspiring story for our own moment of resistance: a reminder of what courage—and the energy of politically animated women—can accomplish when the stakes seem incalculably high. Praise for D-Day Girls “Rigorously researched . . . [a] thriller in the form of a non-fiction book.”—Refinery29 “Equal parts espionage-romance thriller and historical narrative, D-Day Girls traces the lives and secret activities of the 39 women who answered the call to infiltrate France. . . . While chronicling the James Bond-worthy missions and love affairs of these women, Rose vividly captures the broken landscape of war.”—The Washington Post “Gripping history . . . thoroughly researched and written as smoothly as a good thriller, this is a mesmerizing story of creativity, perseverance, and astonishing heroism.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Author: Daisy Styles
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 1405924357
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 389
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Book Description
On an ordinary day in 1941, a letter arrives on the doormats of five young women, a letter which will change everything. Lillian is distraught. And whether she tears, hides or burns the letter the words remain the same - she must register for compulsory war work. Many miles away, Emily is also furious - her dream job as a chef will have to be put on hold, whilst studious Alice must abandon her plans of college. Staring at an identical letter, Elsie feels a kindling of hope at the possibility of leaving behind her brutal father. And down in London, Agnes has her own reasons for packing her bags with a smile. Brought together at a munitions factory in a Lancashire mill town, none of them knows what lies ahead. Sharing grief and joy, lost dreams and gained opportunities, the five new bomb girls will find friendship and strength that they never before thought possible as they unite to help the country they love survive. Praise for Daisy Styles 'A great read that I think will appeal to fans of wartime sagas and authors like Donna Douglas . . . From dances to disasters, encounters with handsome Yanks, rationing and relationships, The Bomb Girls has all the ingredients of an excellent wartime drama and I thoroughly enjoyed it!' Onemorepage.com 'The story is full of drama, love, heartbreak, friendship and in some part some comedy . . . It's full of twist and turns and is a real page turner' Laurahbookblog
Author: Jacky Hyams
Publisher: Michael O'Mara Books
ISBN: 1782438173
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
Published in association with the Imperial War Museum, this is a fascinating anthology of first-hand stories from Spitfire heroes and heroines of World War II. Using documents, letters, stories, photographs and articles from the Museum's unparalleled archive, this is a tribute to the most iconic plane in aviation history - and the people behind it.
