Eileen Rogers
Letter thanking Eileen for her service to Erith Alarm Control on behlaf of a number of local factories.
Eileen Rogers
Recollections of wartime work as a 'spotter'.
The first day of war
Although just a fifteen year old girl living with her mother in Erith at the outbreak of war, Eileen still remembers the confusion brought about on the first day of war, ‘Everybody sort of said, ‘Where do we go?’, ‘What are we going to do?’, you know. But nobody did anything.’
'Spotting' at Fraser and Chalmers
When Eileen turned eighteen she volunteered for a position as a ‘spotter’ at the Fraser and Chalmers factory in Erith (as part of Erith Alarm Control). Attached via telephone to gun sites on the coast and equipped with a map, it was Eileen and her co-worker’s duty to warn the factory workers when enemy aircraft approached. The ‘spotters’ provided higher accuracy as to the position of aircraft than did the sirens and factory workers were only sent to the shelter if enemy aircraft were at close distance thus saving many hours of manpower. At the end of the war Eileen was made redundant but received £5 in gratitude of her work. Reflecting upon her wartime work Eileen feels that ‘I did a bit to help, you know, with the factories and that’ and is pleased with the recognition she received.
Civil defence in the aftermath of war
In the aftermath of the war Eileen joined the WVS:
We were joined with the Civil Defence and we used to go out on exercises. At that time the teaching was about nuclear so we would talk how to protect yourself and how to protect the people that were in the house and so on. We used to go on...exercises all day on a Sunday and my husband would look after — I had two children and my husband would look after them. He joined the St. John’s Ambulance so we were both working sort of wartime things after the war.