GWR Museum | Author, Jane Lark's stories

Last week I wrote about the men who returned from Dunkirk and what happened after they disembarked at Dover, but obviously one of the important things for my story, which is about women working in the Great Western Railway factory in Swindon, is to find out about what they knew and heard and the emotional situation for those at home. What were the things that impacted the women in their homes and workplaces after France was invaded, and after the men returned?

When I read the GWR staff magazine articles, personal accounts of the time, and the local paper articles for that period, firstly what came across was the anxiety people felt when Germany invaded France. Throughout the weeks the German army raced across France, emotions and fear ran particularly high in the UK. Before that, many people had thought the war would not progress, many had been calling it phoney and a load of old nonsense, for months. Then suddenly the Allied forces were losing, people’s husbands, fathers, brothers, sons, friends and boyfriends were dying and there was nothing the army could do to stop the Germans.

The hope of saving France was so slight, The King announced a day of prayer and people who never normally prayed queued in their thousands outside churches to pray for peace. Then Churchill declared the retreat and evacuation of the Allied forces…

View the 1940 Pathe film about the British Commonwealth’s National Day of Prayer

What could have been a concerning situation became joyful. The people at home were as jubilant as though the men had won the war when they saw them returning safely, even though it meant they had lost France to Hitler.

The excitement and jubilation, after days of fear, meant people broke rules to express their joy. Do you remember how bare the shop shelves were at one point at the beginning of the COVID lock down. Well people described shelves like that, with nothing left, as everything was being handed to the men on the trains. It’s nice to think that in 1940 shelves were emptied by selflessness, remembering the food was rationed so the selves were not restocked for weeks and people went without the things they gave to soldiers.

In the end, I found out about so many intense situations and events in May, June and July in 1940, the second novel in The Great Western Railway Girls, when they Do Their Bit, ended up only covering these three months because I didn’t want to leave out a single event or aspect of the experiences of the women through this period of World War Two in Swindon.

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Learn more about The Great Western Railway Girls novels here -> The Great Western Railway Girls

As I said in my previous posts, three of the things that lead me to ideas for books are people, places and pictures. Previously, I have told you about some of the people and three of the places, so let me carry on from where I left off and tell you about one last place behind the GWR Girls series, which is a very particular place, and actually may have been the first place that gave me the idea to write this series set partly in the works and partly in the railway village. This is the tunnel that runs underneath the train tracks in Swindon, enabling people to reach the works directly from the railway village where the workers houses are. This was built in 1870s, and actually highlights one the aspects of the story that I have deliberately written inaccurately (those, I will come onto in later posts). The carriage works were built on the the railway village side of the tracks in the 1860s and the tunnel goes through this building and under the tracks. Like many of the buildings in this historic area of Swindon, the building is listed, you can click on the picture above to see the Grade II listing for the works entrance.

I have walked through this underpass hundreds of times during my life, my daughter and I often used to cycle into town and used this tunnel. It is surprisingly long, and low ceilinged, and when you see the pictures of the time when this was a gate into the factory and men used it in their hundreds… Well it stirs my imagination, of the conversations and the emotions that were experienced inside this… In my books, the tunnel will also become an air raid shelter during the war.

It is a very atmospheric space, I think for me maybe because I get quite nervous within it as I am a bit claustrophobic, but even that emotion stirs up my imagination. It is odd how just these single spaces and moments can prod a novel to flow…