NextBack"When I lost my job for singing at work Harry Taylor said, 'You go and see our Bert at Heywood Compressors'. This was in the summer of 1940 not long after the outbreak of war There was a company at Castle Bromwich who were making very compact compressors for use in fighter planes, in those days machine guns were pneumatically operated and the compressors supplied their air. Part of the policy of the time was to distribute the work of important factories over a number of diverse areas, so that if one were bombed, productivity would only be slightly affected. Heywood Compressors took over the old Britannia Batteries canteen in Glover Street and were quite new to the town. I got a job as an Assistant in the Inspection Department. The general manager was Joseph Hunt who later became Sir Joseph Hunt.”
“They had priority over anyone else in the form of recruiting skilled men and punch equipment. There had been a shipment of machinery from North America destined for France but at that point France fell to the enemy and so the shipment was diverted and found its way to Heywood. The only problem was that all the dials on the machines were metric which was like double Dutch to us and caused us many problems.”
