New Opportunities
NextBackRedditch during the war was a pleasant small town set in the rolling Worcestershire countryside, vastly different from the tangled mass of ring roads, soul less estates and shopping malls it was to become when designated as a 'New Town' in the early 1960's. The town had maintained a happy blend of ruralism and light industry, becoming world famous for sewing needles, motorcycles and quality fishing tackle, a good proportion of the latter being made at home for the various factories. As a boy I always seemed to know school friends whose mothers "dressed" fishing flies and lures or whose fathers had a lathe or 'Fly press' in the garage. Fishing reels were synonymous with Redditch, and coarse fishing was a major passion in the area, in spite of its infrastructure of light industries, life in Redditch was almost bucolic, but by the time my parents arrived there in late 1939 an inevitable metamorphosis was taking place. This was due to the proliferation of factories geared to the production of armaments and the demand for skilled workers that they created. My parents were part of the vanguard of workers and evacuees flooding into the Midlands to fuel this demand. New factories were springing up round the town, and old ones were being "re-tooled " to satisfy the growing demands of the War Office. Shortly before war broke out in 1939, two important and socially influencing factories were built in Redditch. The first, HDA, or High Duty Alloys, specializing in forgings and drop stampings of aircraft components. The second factory, BSA or British Small Arms, world famous for its motorcycles, returned to the production of machine guns and anti-aircraft guns. Both of these factories impinged on our family life as my father now worked at HDA and my mother in the canteen at BSA.
