Les Hills
Born in 1917 in Kent, Les worked for Shorts Brothers in Rochester. He was in the factory when it was bombed in 1940 and when the factory was built at Windermere, applied to be relocated. He worked in the jig and tools department until the factory closed in 1945.
Les lived in a billet in Ambleside until he was allocated a house at 17 Park Hill Road on the Calgarth estate in 1942. He moved to the Droomer estate in Windermere in about 1958.
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- Ref. Number: FB012LH
- Date: 1.3.07
- Interviewer (I): Liz Rice
- Subject: Factory work and life on Calgarth
- Period: 1941-1958
L
There was an advert from Rochester from Shorts Brothers in Ireland and I always wanted to work with boats, I have (?), I love the idea of working with boats or that type of thing. Something different, not just rough joinery or anything like that, so I applied and I got the job and I was put onto jigs and tools department and I started at Rochester and then they built a factory, and I’m not sure, but I think it was on higher ground further, just a little bit out of Rochester. I can’t remember its name, but anyway it eventually got severely bombed and nobody could work there of course, so I was sent down to the river again, which we used to call it, back to work down there, and then this advert came in for Windermere, the Lake District- that was another place I had not visited, I’d been most places, but that was one I wanted to see, I had always wanted to see it and I came up here.
I
Can you sort of explain to me what your job was there?
L
Well the jigs and tools department we made the templates, as they called them, for the pieces of the (?), there are dozens and hundreds of pieces of metal in it and shapes, different shapes, and we would make that in steel about quarter of an inch thick, something like that, three sixteenths, and to the actual shape of the metal that it is with, all the holes in it which had to be drilled and then of course that would go to that kind of thing. And sometimes it was a much bigger thing, of course, well panel beating and all that sort of thing, we made the shape of the actual object. Like the nacelle, as they called the engine cowling you know that shape, things like that.
I
Right, so it was all the patterns?
L
All the patterns, that’s right, that was my job.
I
And where did those patterns go to?
L
Well, they went to another, to the panel beater, and templates and all that sort of thing went to a lot of the girls really. They used to use that as a pattern and they could drill through the holes that we had made in our metal.
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