Spitfire Stories: True Tales from Those Who Designed, Maintained and Flew the Iconic Plane by Jacky Hyams

Author:Jacky Hyams [Hyams, Jacky]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Michael O'Mara
Published: 2017-10-19T04:00:00+00:00

Doping the Walrus

R. J. Mitchell designed many other aircraft after the Spitfire before his death in 1937. One of these was the Walrus, a single-engine amphibian biplane that initially operated as a fleet spotter to be launched from battleships.

Increasingly, however, the Walrus was used as a rescue aircraft for downed aircrew during the war, a distant cousin of the Spitfire certainly, but no less effective as part of the war effort. Operated by the Fleet Air Arm, the Walrus also served with the RAF, the Royal Australian Airforce and the Royal New Zealand Airforce.

Two variants of the Walrus, the Mark I and Mark II, were manufactured by marine engineering company Saunders-Roe (or Saro) at Cowes, Isle of Wight, during the war years when many women, like Annie Bridges, from Newport, were employed in the company’s factories in a variety of munitions jobs. (From early 1941 it was compulsory for women aged between eighteen and sixty to register for war work. Any woman who was pregnant or had a child under fourteen was not required to register – but, like Annie, they could volunteer.)

In 1941, Annie was twenty-one, married and had one young child when she started working at Saunders-Roe as a cleaner. Part of her work involved cleaning out the Walrus biplanes after they’d returned from rescue operations. ‘I had mostly worked as a cleaner ever since I left school, for the simple reason that in those days, that was all that was available. That, and a little bit of shop work.

‘I left school at fourteen, so at one stage I did two jobs: cleaning houses and working in a little general shop called Perkins. Later on, I found work in Woolworth’s – one pound, nineteen shillings and sixpence a week. That was the best paid work on the island in those days. But after war broke out, factory work was a better bet: more than two pounds a week. And at Woolworth’s, after I got married, they wanted me to do supervisor work, bossing people about, I didn’t want to do that.

‘I went to Saunders-Roe by choice. It was munitions work but it was the best money I could get. And my sister already worked there. She worked in what they called doping. [Aircraft dope was a glue-like varnish, a plasticized lacquer applied to fabric-covered aircraft: the wings of the Walrus were covered in fabric. The dope tightened and stiffened the fabric stretched over the wings, making them weatherproof. The job of painting the dope onto the fabric was quite dangerous, because the fumes from the varnish could be toxic.] We worked in separate factories – hers was at one end of Forest Road, where they did the doping and the painting of the planes, mine was at the other end, where all the cleaning of the planes was done.

‘It was all women working where I worked, with just one man in charge of us all. The women had to do it, didn’t they, because the men had all been called up.

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