Florence Collard and the Shipyard Women

During World War Two, when men joined the army and went away to fight more than 700 women stepped into their big steel toe caps, pulled on their oil-stained overalls and got to work. Sunderland was once known as ‘the largest shipbuilding town in the world’ and the ships built by women during the war were vital in carrying food and fuel supplies to Britain. America’s shipyards rusted and languished without men to run them, and people across the world looked to the fierce women mending, hammering and storming Sunderland’s docks for inspiration.

Florence Collard was living in Plymouth when her husband was called up to fight. She did her best to carry on as normal, until her house was blackened and broken into pieces by a bomb. She returned to her home in Sunderland, where she joined other women on the shipyards as they unfastened their aprons and rolled up their shirtsleeves.

The women drove cranes, welded metal, fixed rivets, painted and laboured in the freezing wind and sleeting rain. They worked 12-hour days, then went home to peel potatoes, sweep hallways and read bedtime stories to their children. They tingled with fear as the threat of bombs loomed over them. They thought of their husbands and brothers, who might never come home.

Florence worked as a welder at Bartram & Sons shipyard, and she was the first woman ever to be granted membership to the Boilermakers’ Society union. One morning as she drank a cup of tea before work, she heard a terrible explosion. The walls of her house shook, and the ceiling began to fall in. Her kitchen was filled with thick black smoke. She began to shake all over. A neighbour appeared to tell her that her house had been bombed again and led her safely out of it. Trembling, Florence looked down her street at the blitzed buildings, pulled on her coat and said, ‘I’m going to be late for work.’ She turned up for her afternoon shift at the shipyards as though nothing had happened, laughing and joking with the other women as they held the city up with their blistered hands.

Read more about the Shipyard Women