GIRLS MAKE BEST SPITFIRES

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 4, Issue 128, 11 July 1941, Page 3

GIRLS MAKE BEST SPITFIRES

WORK IN BIG AIRCRAFT FACTORY TAKE GREAT PRItDE IN BEATING MEN When women took thair places at the benches in one of the biggesi Spitfire factories in Britain soon af ter war was declared the foremen in the different shops said: "They'll have to be carefully watched. Can't have mistakes here." To-day it is the women who. are watching the men to see they don't make mistakes, writes Noel Monks in the Daily Mail. I have just returned from a visit to the factory, and the last words * foreman in one of the main assembly shopes said to me were: "These women are great. They seem to take a great pride in beating the men. They are as accurate in their work as any men, and it takes more than air-raid sirens to get them from their benches. "'Some of them have learned faster than men who started at the same time, and they actually show some men up at different jobs*." During last Summer's Battle of Britain the factory's motto was: "Every rivet is a nail in Hitler's cotfin, every Spitfire is a. wreath 01? Goering's grave." Jt still stands. I asked one girl jvvho had been a hairdresser's assistant what she did •vhen she heard bombs dropping, and she said: "I cluck under my lathe and carry on with an odd bit of filing or something." Entering the factory where raw strips of aluminium were being graded, I passed out, several hours later, into a hangar where completed Spitfires were standing sleek and deadly looking, rcvuly to be tested. I watched a young test pilot take r i b>*nnd new Spitfire aloft and put it through its paces. He gave the most amazing display of aerobatics I have ever seen, ranging from flying upside down across the aerodrome with flaps down, and only 30ft from the ground, to rocket loops. When he had taxied back to the hangar he jumped out and said : "She's high, wide, and handsome. Next please." Another pilot testing Spitfires at this aerodrome is a young R.A.F. flight lieutenant whom I knew in Prance where, a§ a bomber pilot in a squadron of Faircy Battles, he won the D.F.C. He told me he was "browned off" and wanted to be "having another crack at the Nazis,." He said: "These ships don't have to be tested. Thq whole world knows they are one hundred per cent perfect aircraft." A fighter pilot's tribute to the courageous men and women who make our Spitfires.