Rosie was one of the first woman brickmakers (From Echo)

Rosie was one of the first woman brickmakers

10:30pm Monday 26th October 2009 in

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THE work of the land girls who kept Britain’s farms working during the Second World War is well documented.

But it was not just on the nation’s farms women were breaking down barriers, by taking on work traditionally done by men.

Benfleet grandmother Rosie Threadgold, 85, is living proof.

Rosie, of Wincote Drive, Benfleet, moved to the town in 1977 after the death of her first husband, to be closer to daughter, Carol Hoy, 63, who lives on Canvey.

The foreman said they’d never had women working there before and the men working there had never seen women working in the brickyard. They kept coming to have a look at us.”

Rosie Threadgold

But during wartime, she found herself one of the first women to be taken on by brickmaking firm the Central, in Whittlesey, near Peterborough.

Londoner Rosie moved there with the family of her friend, Bella, to escape the bombing of her native East End.

She said: “When the war started, I was 15. We stopped in London for a year, but the bombing was awful.

“I remember standing on the doorstep with my mother when the air raid signal had gone off. These great big bombers came over, the sky was full of planes.

“When we came out of the air raid shelter, it was ghastly. The whole place around us was burning.”

Whittlesey was chosen as a safe refuge because Rosie’s mother had relatives there, but there wasn’t much work for city girls like her.

Rosie said: “We had to find some work. Around there, it was only farm work and what I knew about farm work you could fit on a postage stamp.

“We were typical Londoners. We took ourselves down to the brickyard and they gave us a job.

“The foreman said they’d never had women working there before and the men working there had never seen women working in the brickyard. They kept coming to have a look at us.”

Had it not been for the war, she and Bella would never have been had the chance to work in such a male-dominated environment.

She said: “They would never have had women working in there before the war.

“A lot of the men who had worked in the brickyards had joined the forces.”

“It was a man’s job and it was hard work. We started at 6am and worked until 5pm. Those bricks were heavy.”

Rosie’s first husband, Bill Rash, was a Whittlesey man, who’d worked in one of the area’s many brickyards before joining the Navy at the start of the war.

The couple met at a Royal British Legion dance while he was home on leave.

He asked Rosie to write to him and the pair exchanged letters for 18 months until he came home again in March 1944.

They were engaged within a month and married by July, moving back to London when he came out of the Navy in 1945.

Rosie and her friend, Bella, worked in the brickyard for about a year until they turned 17, at which point they were obliged to join the official war effort, either by enlisting, or working in a munitions factory.

Rosie quite fancied herself in uniform, but was forced to settle for factory work.

She said: “I said, ‘I think I’ll join the Wrens,’ but my father pointed out I couldn’t swim.

“So I said I might go for the air force, but he said ‘you’ve never been on a plane in your life!’”

After the war, Rosie and Bill, who died in 1977, moved back to London.

Most of the land girls left the land and many of the women went home from the factories, but in many ways, society was never quite the same.

Much has been made since of the impact of working women in the war on the subsequent sea change in attitudes towards women’s work over the following decades.

But for Rosie, feminism was the furthest thing from her mind when she pitched up, looking for work at the Central Brickyard in September 1940.

She said: “We had to live and we just wanted a job.”