BRAVE WOMEN.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 4, 6 January 1938, Page 8

BRAVE WOMEN.

WARTIME MEMORY.

MUNITIONS FACTORY FIRE.

THERTEEN GERUS INCINERATED

Nineteen years ago Mrs. Grace Backhouse was "'chargehand" in a munitions factory in Wood Lane, Shepherd's Bush. London. Mother of two daughters, she was glad to risk her life to earn £1 a week extra "danger money"' for their support.

In her wooden hut Mrs. Backhouse supervised 100 girls and five men making cordite charges for shells.

"It was very interesting,"" she told a reporter recently. "The cordite looked like vermicelli, and we tied it together with silk.

"One afternoon all of a sudden we heard the bell ringing in the liquid fire hut across the road. Then there was an explosion. It nearly knocked me off mv leet. I looked out and saw nothing but a sheet of flame. There was a roaring of fire, and everywhere women were screaming and running and climbing over the barricades around the hut.

"Then I though about our cordite. We had forty boxes in our hut, and in a minute the fire might be on them, I got one of our handcarts and started trundling it to the safety zone. That was about 100 yards away. One old woman stayed to help me. She was a wonderful old woman. Seventy years old. and brave. Her name was Mrs. Bond. Made Twenty Trips. "We went on trundling boxes on our handcarts until they were all underground. They were big boxes. We must have made twenty trips each. Mrs. Bond and I." But it was Mrs. Backhouse who rushed to the first-aid shack on the factory ground to find a stretcher. She could not find one, so she grabbed a screen and hurried to the blaze.

"I was too late." she said. "Those girls. thirteen of them, were nothing but cinders. They gave them a wonderful funeral, with thirteen caskets on pun carriages, and we all marched in the procession. The grave is in Hammersmith Cemetery."

Mrs. Backhouse ran a teashop in Isleworth before the war. Afterwards she and her husband went to Southend, whore she now cooks fish and chips for holiday crowds on the beach.

She never thinks about her days in the cordite hilt. She is too bus v.