Getting the sack did war bride Win a favour

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WHEN wartime bride Win Pardner took a few days off work to be with her soldier husband before he was posted abroad, she promptly got the sack for breach of her employer’s rules.

More than 60 years later, Win (née Rodgers, 84), now a widow, still feels bitter at the decision of her bosses at the Aristoc factory at Langley Mill, where she had worked for seven years.

“It really wasn’t a proper thing to do, especially as we had married with only two days’ notice and then been immediately parted for three months. Harold wanted to be with me during his few days’ embarkation leave, which was understandable when we didn’t know when, or even if, we would see each other again.

“I knew about the rule but I couldn’t believe they would do it. I got my cards in the post three days later,” she said.

But her disappointment at losing her job did not last long, for the firm had inadvertently done her a favour.

Within a short time, she had been hired by Derby’s Carriage and Wagon Works to train to be a crane driver at a wage nearly five times the 25 shillings a week she was paid at the factory.

She had applied because a relative, who worked as a crane driver elsewhere, told her she could do her knitting when things were not busy.

“I thought that sounded pretty good,” laughed Win, of Mickleover, “but I soon found that you were never not very busy at the Carriage and Wagon.”

Though she rapidly became very competent and now looks back fondly to the days when she was doing a man’s job during the war, she didn’t immediately take to it.

She still recalls the day she first clambered up the ladders into the crane’s cab to learn how to operate it.

“Sitting high up in the roof, with just bars beneath my feet, trying to lift a railway carriage at precisely the same time as another crane was lifting the other end, well, that was awful. I went home that night and lay in bed feeling I was floating on a crane. My mother had to come in and hold me all night.”

But she soon learned the tricks of the trade and ended up loving the job, despite working a 12-hour day, Monday to Friday, every Saturday morning and alternate Sundays.

Six decades later, she still harbours the dream that one day she might get the chance to go back to visit U shop at the C&W works and see her old crane once more.

“I look back on it with great nostalgia, even though, sometimes, when the air raid siren sounded, the men on the ground would forget about me and dash off to the shelter, leaving me stranded high up in the roof.

“I had to sit up there until the ‘all clear’ sounded and they would return. I don’t think they meant to do it to me, but I can’t say I ever saw the inside of that shelter,” she laughed.

Win was one of six young women hired to do what had always been a man’s job until Britain went to war in 1939.

She still recalls the time she was reprimanded by the foreman for overwinding her crane one day, though, fortunately, the suspended carriage did not tip up.

Being high up, she was also given the job of look-out when there were some unauthorised activities going on.

“One of the men used to cut hair and I used to warn him when the foreman was coming so he could get rid of his cloth and scissors,” she laughed.

Win gave up the job in 1943 when she became pregnant. She often thinks of some of her friends from those days – including Margaret Green, of Allenton, who started work on the same day, girls called Milly, Alice and Emma, and Roger Gater, the chargehand who taught her how to operate the crane.

Win met Harold Pardner, a miner who worked on the surface at Pentrich Colliery, when both were teenagers and out walking in Ripley on “the monkey trot”.

“That was what we called the area in town where the boys walked one way and the girls another. We didn’t drink or dance at that time, so it was the only way to meet people.

“One day I was out with my friend, Joyce Moore, and these two lads asked for a date. As soon as I saw Harold, I knew he was the one for me. He was very handsome and a lovely chap. It really was love at first sight for both of us.”

Their first date was to go with their friends for a walk in the park and they soon became inseparable. They courted for two years before Harold “popped the question” and they became engaged the day before war broke out in Europe, in September, 1939.

Six months later, after he had been called up for war service and joined the Sherwood Foresters, he arrived home for a short leave and said he was being posted to France in a few days. They decided to marry straight away. Win’s mother made her wedding gown and dresses for the two bridesmaids in two days and they were granted a special licence.

The Army helped by granting Harold 24-hour leave for the ceremony, but only on condition that he was back with his unit by midnight on his wedding night.

He also had to swear on the Bible that he would return.

The wedding was at Mount Tabor Chapel, Ripley, at 4pm on April 24, 1940. The bridal party walked to a local photographic studio in Ripley for the pictures and, like Cinderella, Harold had gone by midnight.

Said Win: “I really wanted a nice wedding but it was all very rushed. I had no idea how to put on a veil and there were no flowers so, not surprisingly, I hated my wedding pictures. They look so bleak but we were very happy.

“Unfortunately, we never even had a chance to go upstairs but, thank goodness, Harold returned safe and sound from the war.”

His overseas posting was brief because, three months after sailing for France, he was among the thousands of British soldiers whose lives were saved when they were repatriated from Dunkirk by the armada of ships sent out by Winston Churchill.

During his stay in Britain, the couple met occasionally until Harold was posted abroad again, at short notice. It was then that Win lost her job after taking time off to see him before he left.

Their son, Allen, who also lives in Mickleover, was two years old before his father returned to take a job at Qualcast’s lawnmower division and they set up home in Derby.

Later, they moved to Darley Abbey, where they lived until Harold died nine years ago.

Author: Sarah Powlson