Early History
In the late 1930s leading up to the outbreak of war in 1939, the British government developed a strategy to enhance the capacity of the existing three Royal factories and to disperse armaments and munitions production away from major cities and the southeast part of England which were felt to be especially vulnerable to bombing from the air. As a result the Ministry of Supply built a number of Royal Ordnance Factories and satellite factories. ROF Chorley and ROF Bridgend were the two largest filling factories, but even before they were both finished it was realised that they would not have the necessary capacity to meet Britain's and the British Commonwealth's needs for ammunition. In all some 20 Government-owned World War II Filling Factories were built, but none was so large or employed as many people as these two.
Safety considerations were paramount. The design, style and spacing of individual production buildings meant that they were separated by wide open spaces, or depending on the application approximately 20 feet (3 m) high grassed embankments and extremely thick reinforced concrete walls and overbridges, called traverses. The purpose of the traverse was to deflect any explosion skyward rather than outward to any adjacent buildings or structures.
The site was built with extensive underground magazines, comprehensive lightning protection and individual buildings linked by paths, roads and railways.
Read more about this topic: ROF Chorley
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or history:
“They circumcised women, little girls, in Jesus’s time. Did he know? Did the subject anger or embarrass him? Did the early church erase the record? Jesus himself was circumcised; perhaps he thought only the cutting done to him was done to women, and therefore, since he survived, it was all right.”
—Alice Walker (b. 1944)
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)