A brief look at the design and deployment of the two-engined Vickers Wellington and the bulk of the remaining footage is given over to interviews with the now aged workers who put the bombers together.
It's touching to see these ordinary people brought together by the producers to watch a war-time morale-raising film about themselves. Some of the dozen or so in the audience had never seen the film before.
In the interviews they reminisce about how unprepared they were for the tasks they were given. Most were women and their only experience with machinery had been with sewing machines.
The experience of watching this is akin to opening a time capsule. We learn what sort of music was piped into the factory. It was peppy, not sentimental, and the name of the program was "Music While You Work." We learn the plant had its own dentist and its own barber so that work wouldn't be interrupted by absences. We learn that most of the ladies were proud to be doing something for the war effort -- or so they say now -- and they were glad to be out of the house.
Some boys as young as fourteen did menial jobs in the plant, and on weekends would bring buckets of sand to Air Raid stations, and they'd collect rose hips for use in baby foods. It resonated with me because I was a child during the war and our weekend job was collecting milkweed pods who fuzzy contents were used in making kapok life jackets.
The 1930s had been terrible in England, as it was elsewhere, because of the Great Depression, and there was a good deal of tension between the management and some of the laborers who wanted to strike for better wages -- an adhesion of values from the past.
It's not, well, EXCITING. But the work was necessary and it's good that the experiences, and the memory of those experiences, have been recorded in this documentary.
It's touching to see these ordinary people brought together by the producers to watch a war-time morale-raising film about themselves. Some of the dozen or so in the audience had never seen the film before.
In the interviews they reminisce about how unprepared they were for the tasks they were given. Most were women and their only experience with machinery had been with sewing machines.
The experience of watching this is akin to opening a time capsule. We learn what sort of music was piped into the factory. It was peppy, not sentimental, and the name of the program was "Music While You Work." We learn the plant had its own dentist and its own barber so that work wouldn't be interrupted by absences. We learn that most of the ladies were proud to be doing something for the war effort -- or so they say now -- and they were glad to be out of the house.
Some boys as young as fourteen did menial jobs in the plant, and on weekends would bring buckets of sand to Air Raid stations, and they'd collect rose hips for use in baby foods. It resonated with me because I was a child during the war and our weekend job was collecting milkweed pods who fuzzy contents were used in making kapok life jackets.
The 1930s had been terrible in England, as it was elsewhere, because of the Great Depression, and there was a good deal of tension between the management and some of the laborers who wanted to strike for better wages -- an adhesion of values from the past.
It's not, well, EXCITING. But the work was necessary and it's good that the experiences, and the memory of those experiences, have been recorded in this documentary.
