ROF No 6

J hadn’t been out on “pippin” for three plus weeks, following her accident on the hire scooter. The bruises are starting to fade a bit, and her back is less painful, so we took ourselves to nearby Forest Park.

The park is popular with local families - play equipment for the children, open space and pitches for kickabouts, good routes for dog walkers, and there’s a community café. At this time of year there are plenty of prairie like planting schemes in full flower too, looking very attractive. The quiet and the greenery all belies the sites history.

We paused in front of a stone with a plaque, erected in recent months. There is a new information board too, detailing the history of the huge (3 sq mile) Royal Ordnance Factory Number 6. ROF No 6 had 1800 buildings and an average (largely female) workforce of 22,000, and produced approx 1.5 million bombs, shells and mines. A lot of destructive potential, and dangerous work.

As I was reading part of the board to J a passer-by came to chat to us. His grandma used to work here, bussed in from Liverpool for the first 12 months and then on-site for 3 years in barracks. Nearby was the huge USAF base at Burtonwood (the M62 is on the line of the former runway, the rest of the site is now a massive logistics hub). Weekends the young women would travel to Culcheth nearby to meet up with GI’s - I’ve come across a few Warrington people with US family as a result of those meet ups. She’d seen Glen Miller, the big band leader, give his last concert at Burtonwood before flying to France and disappearing in 1944.