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Sportspace - Hemel Hempstead
 
 
Sunday, 1st August 2010

 
11 DICKINSON AT WAR

Apsley Mills in camouflage

ALTHOUGH paper hardly seems to be one of the crucial ingredients or bullets, bombs and rockets, Dickinson’s has a long and creditable record in helping with the defence of the realm - right from the day John Dickinson came up with that paper for cannon cartridges which was so helpful in the Peninsular War.

In the Boer War Dickinson’s raised its own company of rifle volunteers.
When the First World War began Dickinson’s, like other companies across the country, began to face a labour problem as men signed up or were called up to serve in the trenches and more and more women were taken on to do the work.

Apsley Mills was commandeered to work for the Ministry of Supplies.

At Nash Mills the women who had taken on the men’s work were soon turning out copious supplies of trench bombs and small shells.

ARP on firewatch at Apsley Mill

Employees in the services were looked after by the company with payments made to their families and in 1914 itself 50,000 packets of notepaper, postcards and pencils were dispatched as gifts to the troops.

Before the Second World War Dickinson’s were prepared with air raid precautions and quickly geared the mills to war work. But as the war gathered pace the whole of Apsley Mills had to be camouflaged.

The great contribution to the war effort by the company and its workers was acknowledged in several testaments from government ministers and at the end of the war a film called Dickinson’s In Battledress’ was made to show just what did go on between 1939 and 1945.
Again, between 1939 and 1945 there was a great intake of women to do the work of producing munitions.

One of the many women who worked making munitions at Apsley Mills during World War 2.




The war memorial at Apsley Mills pictured in 1927 in its original position beside the Guidhall. It was later moved across the mills close to the cottage and is preserved today by the Apsley Paper Trail.

To return to the John Dickinson introduction page, click below
 
 

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