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Bradley & Co. Ltd (Beldray) Mount Pleasant, Bilston A short account by a former employee George Phillpott Part 2: The Second World War |
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| Come 1939 and production had to be switched to meet other
needs. Holloware continued on a much smaller scale and attention
now turned to bomb tails and other components, mortar bomb
casings, small smoke floats (used to generate smoke screens at
sea) and countless other things. This put a huge load on the tool room staff, who had to work all hours to provide new tools and equipment. The Spinning Shop, where the stretch marks resultant from pressing were removed by a method of spinning on lathes, was largely re-equipped with turret and capstan lathes, used for machining various items. Almost all of the operators were Scottish girls, brought from north of the border, and there was a Scottish tool setter who was inevitably known as Jock. There were also several Irish people who had been "directed", as it was called, to Bradley's. And, if this were not a sufficiently polyglot work force, we also had Italian and German prisoners of war doing labouring and other manual work; but we never had both nationalities at the same time. Relations with them were good, particularly the Germans, and at least one of them married a local girl. This sort of thing happened up and down the country and hundreds of work places experienced similar "invasions". However I remember in particular two Czech refugees both of whom were Jewish. One was Dr Adler whose doctorate was in metallurgy, we understood. He was an engineer with an inventive turn of mind and he introduced a number of new ideas and techniques to help overcome the shortage of various materials immediately after the war. The second was Theodore Appenzeller, a young man who came to work alongside me in the tool room. |
The old offices seen from the north. The company used to own the houses on the right and they were occupied by company employees. |
| Mount Pleasant, looking north. The company may also have owned these houses. |
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Czechoslovakia, it seems, was then a country whose democratic
system and life style were very similar to England's. In fact it
was said that they were similar to us in all aspects except that
they had a President while we had the Monarchy. Their English
was excellent: Theodore told me that in most of their schools
English was a mandatory subject. On arriving in England, via
Poland and Sweden, he was puzzled, he said, by the
advertisements he saw on the buses and in the streets. He knew
what was meant when one asked "Did you clean your teeth
today?" but was completely foxed by "Did you Maclean
your teeth today?" Having always been used to
single-deckers he was initially very wary of double-decker
buses; he thought they might topple over. I was saddened nearly
twenty years later to learn that he been killed in a road
accident. |
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