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Published on: 24/07/2018 08:08 PMReported by: rogerblaxall
Dot Broady-Hawkes tells the fascinating story of Ellen Preece who died exactly one hundred years ago yesterday.
Ellen Preece (known as Nellie to her family) was born at 2, Emily Street, Chorley on 18th March 1895 and baptised at St George’s Church, Chorley in May 1895.
Her father John Preece was a farm labourer and her mother was Annie Ellen nee Waterhouse; the Preece family grew quite large and John moved where the work was, taking his family to Hale before settling in Bickerstaffe by 1911 at Grave Yard Cottage, John was a Horseman for Graveyard Farm.
Ellen, the second daughter of John and Annie, left home to work as a live in domestic servant for Thomas Woodcock who was just a short distance away from the family at Moss End Farm, Long Lane, Bickerstaffe, most likely when she left school at 14.
When war was declared in August 1914, Ellen was 19 years old. With men pulled away from many skilled jobs to serve in the War, women were allowed under new legislation to take on the jobs but as ‘semi-skilled temporary workers’, to allay the objections of labour unions, who felt women taking on skilled jobs would ‘dilute the value of the skills needed’.
The Ministry of Munitions had quickly established over 30 Munitions and Filling factories across the country. Following a visit by Lloyd George to Liverpool in 1915, number 2A National Filling Factory was built at Aintree. Close to the Lancashire & Liverpool Electric Railway, the factory opened in 1915 and employed over ten and a half thousand workers, of which only 497 were men. Workers were able to travel by rail from Ormskirk, Liverpool, Wallasey and all stops in between.
The factory filled various sizes of shells and cartridges with amatol, a highly explosive 20:80 mix TNT and ammonium nitrate.
Women were encouraged to take the jobs in the munitions factory where the pay was far higher than anything in the textile industry and certainly higher than that of a domestic servant - Ormskirk had a small munitions factory in Park Road, Hattersleys made war products and there was also one in Lathom. Women took jobs in these factories who might not have worked in factories before, the money and conditions were good and the work highly valued.
Ellen lived close to the railway line which would have taken her straight to the factory at Aintree, and without doubt the wages were probably very attractive to her. Working with amatol was not just hazardous it actually became absorbed by the skin and left workers with a yellowing of the skin and so they became known as ‘Canaries’.
The manufacturing at Aintree likely involved dry mixing the explosive raw materials. The hygroscopic ammonium nitrate was first dried and then milled in a multi-storey building modelled on flour mills where the ingredients were raised to the upper floors and allowed to fall by gravity. The TNT was ground and sieved in a separate building, with both components combined in a mixing house. Amatol was conveyed to press houses where the workers filled shells, which were compacted with hydraulic pressure; the filled shells were moved to a storage shed and shipped out by railcar.
On July 23rd 1918, whilst filling a six inch shell, Ellen and two other women were killed in an explosion. In August, South West Lancashire Coroner Samuel Brighouse held the inquest into Ellen’s death.
The Imperial War Museum records her death, and that of all the other women killed whilst working in British munitions factories during WW1, in a simple list under class EN1/3/DEA/001/039.
Ellen was survived by her parents and three younger brothers, John, Henry and James, and her older sister Florence, who married Joseph Farrington at Ormskirk in 1920, younger sister Elizabeth, who married Richard Moss in 1919 and lived at 20 School Lane, Skelmersdale, and younger sister Miriam, who married Samuel Lea of Ormskirk in the 1920s. Ellen’s father John died in 1945 and her mother died in 1941.
Sister Elizabeth placed a notice in the Ormskirk Advertiser a year after Ellen’s death, and she's remembered on the Aughton Civic Memorial and the Comrades Roll of Honour. She is also included as a sole woman among the names of the fallen of two wars on the Coronation Park memorial.
Follow the discussion on news at facebook.com/groups/ormskirknews
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