WWII | Author, Jane Lark's stories

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 four of the places, so let me carry on and share some of the photographs that inspired The Great Western Railway Girls.

Note, I have used Google and Chat GPT to find these photographs and they have come from the STEAM museums picture library, flickr Local Studies Swindon Library & Information Service, and Swindon Web and some I have paid to use to be able to share on my blog, and some I have been given permission to use, so please check the copyright before you save and share any images.

The images did not start my inspirations for the GWR girls, but once I had the idea, the first thing I did was search for World War II images and stories from women who worked in GWR in Swindon. I have actually found it better to go into the STEAM museum archive to read the GWR Magazines to get the way of life stories of the workers, but images…

The images help me to see, and therefore describe, what the work environment might be like. It shows me what they wore and what the workstations were like. Also, from the perspective of writing a saga series which is a heavily character storyline lead genre, it shows how the women might be able to talk to one another at work, or not. Of course I add into this the sounds and descriptions I have discovered in the STEAM museum – and so story settings come together.

Then I can tally the dates of images with some of the information I know from the GWR magazine and other sources to be able to build accurate timelines of what the women did and when. The women were invited to start working at GWR much earlier in the war, it was not until December 1941 two years into the war that the British government conscripted all unmarried women aged between 20-30 to undertake war work. The GWR Magazine published the increasing numbers of female workers long before that. But I know when the women first started they were making new lanterns that could be used by workers on the train lines during blackout, GWR had to lower the floors in the machine shop before they could start making the bomb cases that my girls progress to making.

Some specific images, though, have actually directed aspects of the plot, these two young evacuees for one…

The images below also inspired story aspects, those of groups of women working around machines, and the image of the women working in the laundry which lead to this being where Maggie, her sisters and her friend Violet work in the beginning…

The pictures I have found that have inspired the story for book two, that follows the period of the summer of 1940, have also been fascinating, but I shan’t share those yet.

As I said in my previous post, 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 two of the places, so let me carry on from where I left off and tell you about another place behind the GWR Girls series.

The third place I will tell you about is Swindon’s Mcarthur Glen Designer Outlet. This shopping centre has been built in a large expanse of the old Great Western Railway workshops. This is another space I have walked around often in the years since it was built. I knew it was the old railway works. It has an obvious flavour of the old railway works because it still has industrial items on display and the workshop structures are left, as much as they can be, as they were. However, three years ago I joined a tour of the outlet village led by Gordon Shaw who used to work in the factory and had since spent time researching the history of the working environment and the way of life within it. This tour opened my eyes to things I had not noticed before, so, if you go to the outlet village in Swindon, look up and look around and you’ll be surprised what you see.

For instance, right in the middle of the front entrance hall, near what was the old pattern store on Rodbourne Road, is a large crane. Of course, I’ve seen the large piece of machinery that is hard not to notice, but on the floor around it you can see wooden cobbles. The cobbles in most of the workshops were made of wood, and that’s because in the workshops that were ‘hot workshops’ (that’s what the workshops containing furnaces were called then), stone flooring would have become too hot. The wood was soaked with oil during processes, so they changed the flooring once a year and men were given the wood to burn. There are so many more things I could say, but another fascinating one for me was one of the earliest cranes. The man would sit up on a crane and move it by turning the mechanism by hand so the crane slid along a system on the roof, and apparently the night shift workers would sometimes hide up on the cranes to sleep.

The old iron workshop is where the Clarks and Marks and Spencer shops are now, and in the John Lewis Outlet there’s still some equipment on display.