ROF Stories:
Piece Work

Born in 1921, Rene Gorman started her working life at the Santon Electrical Company. On her 19th birthday she began work at the Number 11 Royal Ordnance Factory in Newport.
This is her story.

"At the beginning I was in a group of twenty girls working in the Breech Mechanism Section on piece work. Wages were paid to each group and then the money was divided up to pay individual workers.

Some of them were more productive than others and so it was necessary to make smaller teams of workers with similar abilities, in order to share the wages more fairly.

Each shift lasted 12 hours. When I was working night shifts, my working week started at 8.00 pm on Sunday night and finished on Saturday morning at 8.00 am. I worked two weeks of nights followed by two weeks of days. There was a meal break of one hour per shift.

Boiler suits were supplied by the Factory. We bought and wore our own clogs to wade through the pools of oil and sharp metal filings on the floor.

I used to work with Ruby Loftus in the same section, screwing breech rings.

After the war I stayed on at the Factory which became Standard Telephones and Cables. In the 1950s I worked on the secret Blue Streak project, making components."

Rene Cureton (née Gorman),
November 2005

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