World War II Production
The new factory employed over 1,000 production workers by the outbreak of the Second World War, in September 1939.
By June 1940, the numbers employed there had risen to nearly 15,000. At its war-time peak, ROF Chorley had over 28,000 employees – a staggering figure at a time when there were only around a dozen factories in the whole of Britain with a workforce each of more than 19,000 people (four of these being the Royal Arsenal, ROF Bishopton, ROF Chorley and ROF Bridgend). ROF Chorley was the site where the bouncing bombs, designed by Barnes Wallis and famed for the Dambusters raid, were filled, the main site for the filling of large capacity aircraft bombs being ROF Glascoed.
The overall cost of the plant was £13,140,000.
Read more about this topic: ROF Chorley
Famous quotes containing the words world, war and/or production:
“An early dew woos the half-opened flowers”
—Unknown. The Thousand and One Nights.
AWP. Anthology of World Poetry, An. Mark Van Doren, ed. (Rev. and enl. Ed., 1936)
“Their bodies are buried in peace; but their name liveth for evermore.”
—Apocrypha. Ecclesiasticus, 44:14.
The line “their name liveth for evermore” was chosen by Rudyard Kipling on behalf of the Imperial War Graves Commission as an epitaph to be used in Commonwealth War Cemeteries. Kipling had himself lost a son in the fighting.
“In the production of the necessaries of life Nature is ready enough to assist man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)