Storm Jameson and the 'army of women in overalls'

Blog series English and drama

Author Michael St John-McAlister, Western Manuscripts Cataloguing Manager

In 2020 the British Library was gifted the papers of Storm Jameson and Guy Chapman (Add MS 89743). Jameson (1891–1986) was a prolific novelist and writer, President of the English branch of PEN International and an international Vice-President. Chapman (1889–1972), her husband (they married in 1926), was a historian and academic who served in both world wars, being awarded the Military Cross in the first, and who wrote a well-regarded memoir of his time in the trenches. Among the papers you would expect to find in the archive of such a couple – literary drafts, academic papers, research materials, correspondence with publishers, reviews, lecture notes, publishing contracts – was an envelope marked, intriguingly, ‘For serious article on women in industry’ containing seven groups of typed notes with the name of a factory at the top of the first page of each group (Add MS 89743/1/7).

These 77 pages are fascinating, giving an in-depth look at the lives of women working in munitions factories in World War Two, including Raleigh in Nottingham, Kynoch Works in Birmingham, Ferranti in Oldham, and the Royal Ordnance factories at Blackburn and Enfield. The notes detail the type of women employed (married or unmarried, having children or not, for example), the numbers employed, wages, unionisation, working hours, types of work undertaken, health and welfare, working conditions, and the family life of the employees. It is a small but significant piece of social history and the anecdotes and conversation Jameson recorded with women from a variety of backgrounds would not have been out of place in a Mass Observation report.

Almost as interesting as the papers themselves is the backstory and the outcome.

Jameson had been commissioned in the summer of 1940 by no less a figure than Graham Greene, then in charge of the authors’ section of the Ministry of Information, to write a sixpenny booklet of around 30,000 words about women at war, designed to attract women into the arms factories. Jameson was not keen; in fact, she called it ‘a stinking little booklet.’ She felt it would take two months and involve a lot of travelling. It would also be dangerous: ‘The very idea of visiting arms factories ... in the middle of a Blitzkrieg! ... I do wish I had boldly refused to do it.’ Even so, she felt that as she had been complaining that the Ministry was not making use of writers, she ought to do it. She was also keen to know what the women working in these factories felt and thought.

However, by October 1940 she had given up on the booklet; the Blitz had made travel onerous if not impossible and as arms factories were key targets for the Luftwaffe, visiting such sites was far too dangerous, as Jameson had anticipated. All the same, she had managed to visit seven factories from the north west to the south east, and from the east Midlands to Wales, and hoped her notes would come in handy ‘for a heavy sort of article to be written after the war’. Otherwise, Jameson felt the exercise had been a waste of time, though she had found the visits to the factories ‘passionately interesting’. The ‘heavy’ article was never written and the good novel that Jameson's biographer, Jennifer Birkett, thought might have sprung from the ‘impressions and snatches of dialogue, from women workers, ... vivid, detailed and politically tough’ never came to pass.

What did come out of the papers was a draft report (presumably intended for the Ministry of Information; the report is also in the Jameson and Chapman papers) and a different article. In the report Jameson noted that the circumstances around labour supply were so localised that a booklet on the subject would be too general to be of any use. Instead, she recommended more targeted advertising, relevant to the location, in local newspapers, cinemas, and the mass circulation national press. She advised any campaign should focus on the advantages of factory work: the gyms and tennis courts, the dances and social events, the good quality (for the times) catering, the nurses on site, and the opportunities for women to break free from the domestic drudgery to which society had assigned them. Propaganda films could be made; J.B. Priestley could be asked to talk about the subject in one of his radio broadcasts.

Jameson even made suggestions for images and text for campaign posters. She knew what she was writing about; she had worked, briefly but extremely competently, in advertising in 1919. Jameson also had some practical suggestions on how to improve life for women working in remote factories where they had to live in hostels: visiting lecturers, travelling cinema, keep fit and dance classes, house magazines, and so on.

The article that came from Jameson’s factory visits was published in February 1941 in The Atlantic Monthly, an American literary and cultural journal founded in 1857 by an illustrious group including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The article was written in the first person, with wit and compassion and in an informal, conversational, storytelling tone. Jameson used her observations and snippets of overheard dialogue to set out the extraordinary lives that fate, and war, had thrust upon thousands of ordinary women: hotel workers, shop workers, housewives, even an out of work showgirl. Some of Jameson’s 'army of women in overalls' had only just left school, some had never so much as been away from home before. Yet here they were, playing a vital part in the battle for their nation’s very survival, and being 15% to 25% quicker at the work than the men to boot.

The respect of the women’s male managers and foremen is evident: more than one said he would be happy to have the whole factory staffed by women. Another, when asked if the women earned high wages, said yes, they did, and they earned every penny. A third admired the fact that, at one factory, when asked if they’d be prepared to work through an air raid not a single women said she would not. When they did work through a raid, at intricate tasks ‘more delicate and complicated than watchmaking’ requiring careful hands and deep concentration, women were described as being steadier than men. They were also more frustrated than the men when there was no alternative but to stop work and go to the shelters.

Jameson also highlighted women’s aspirations. ‘I hope I never have to go back to trimming hats’, said one. Another woman, happily covered in oil, told her ‘I’ve always wanted to be a mechanic, and now I am.’ The women’s realism and their dark humour shine through, as does their stoicism, typified by the story of the woman who turned up for night shift the day her youngest son, serving in the RAF, was killed, and did not say a word about it.

A footnote to Jameson’s arms factory research is the split it caused with her friend, Vera Brittain, writer, pacifist, and mother of Shirley Williams. The two had known each other since 1927 and were very close; Brittain chose Jameson to act as her children’s guardian should the need arise. However, what has been described by Birkett as ‘a malicious, or perhaps simply childish gesture’ by Brittain initiated a gradual estrangement. Brittain, piqued by the government’s refusal, presumably on the grounds of her pacifism, to give her permits to visit factories for her 1940 book, England’s Hour, wrote to the Home Office to tell them that Jameson was a sponsor of the Peace Pledge Union. She queried why, if she was denied permits, Jameson, a fellow pacifist, should be granted them. Jameson’s permits were promptly rescinded and only restored after she produced her letter of resignation from the PPU. Jameson decided not to confront Brittain about it and even attempted to maintain the friendship. She put Brittain up in her Berkshire home for five months of the Blitz, well away from heavily bombed London, although they did not always find each other convivial housemates; familiarity breeding contempt, and all that. Brittain finally left Jameson’s home in February 1941 by which time the relationship was beyond repair and by May of that year Brittain had written Jameson out of her will. A cautious rapprochement began in 1954, but their relationship was never the same.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Jennifer Birkett for permission to quote from Margaret Storm Jameson: A Life and to The Atlantic for permission to quote from Storm Jameson’s article, ‘Women On The Spot’. Extracts from letters of Storm Jameson and images of material from the Storm Jameson papers reprinted by permission of Peters Fraser & Dunlop on behalf of the Estate of Storm Jameson.

Further reading

Notes on women working in factories engaged in war production, 1940–41, Add MS 89743/1/7

Jennifer Birkett, Margaret Storm Jameson: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)

Storm Jameson, ‘Women On The Spot’, The Atlantic Monthly, vol. 167, no. 2, Feb 1941, pp. 169–176

Storm Jameson, Journey From the North, 2 vols (London: Collins & Harvill, 1969–70)

Elizabeth Maslen, Life in the Writings of Storm Jameson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014)