For 25 years, Robin Wheeldon has been a man on a mission: to find Lincolnshire’s Munitionettes.
These were the oft-unsung women who kept the World War One factories going when the region’s men were sent to war.
“It was a repetitive, boring, job but they had to do it,” the 80-year-old artist and amateur historian said. “You go into a factory like that – all the noise and the long hours – the fact you were getting covered in oil all the time. It was heavy work, operating these machines all day standing. It would’ve been a complete shock to them but they got on with it.”
Ultimately, they helped Britian win the war, he says.
Now, however, Robin is looking for young people with an interest in local history to continue his work of keeping the memory of these remarkable women alive.
“The trouble is we’re all getting old now and we need some younger ones to take an interest in it and keep the whole thing going,” he said.
The Munitonettes’ story perhaps begins in 1915 when the first tank was – famously – built by William Foster and Co in Lincoln.
Orders for these tanks came in so thick and fast that hundreds of women from Lincolnshire were hired to keep the factories running. Some 250 of them were employed from Lincoln alone. They became known as the Munitionettes.
Robin, who comes from the village of Heighington, has created an archive of this group, including everything from replicas of their outfits to 3D models of the tanks they built and cleaned-up photos of the women at work. Over the years, he has managed to identify around 35 of the women in the pictures and often meets with their families.
He said: “People were coming along [to exhibitions] and it just stopped them in their tracks. Occasionally, someone would say ‘That’s my grandma’.”
The main work of the Munitionettes depended one individual roles but would include things like making the individual plate pieces of the tank’s track. They tended to work 12 hour shifts, six days a week.
Yet despite this, Robin has found much evidence that the women were able to find joy and escape. Pictures and documents show them playing football and even racing tanks. In one episode, they painted a skull symbol as their team logo and racing the tanks round the factory yard.
He said: “During the First World War, a lot of these girls got together and played football and then when the war was finished and the blokes were coming back, it was banned.”
Life, indeed, returned to normal after the war and many of the Munitionettes were dismissed from jobs they had done heroically.
“The very sad thing is, at the end of the war, the whole thing was dropped in Lincoln,” said Robin. “All that expertise that built up over those last few years was just thrown away and it must have been so disappointing.”
