Links for the History of the Aycliffe Angels

For an interesting overview, you cannot do better than Echo Features Editor Chris Lloyd's 2020 VE Day 75th anniversary article. 

John D Clare's article for the Newton News on 'The Real Aycliffe Angels' challenges the rose-tinted reporting that some newspaper articles fall into.

If you want to study the Aycliffe Angels seriously, two recent publications provide a basic starting-point for an understanding of the Royal Ordnance Factory and its workers:

• Jacky Hyams, Bomb Girls - Britain's Secret Army: The Munitions Women of World War II (2013)
• Colin Philpott, Secret Wartime Britain, Hidden Places that Helped Win the Second World War (2018)

On the Angels specifically, Richard K Brown conducted numerous oral interviews in the late 1980s, and produced:

• Imperial War Museum Archive: R. Brown, ‘Women workers in Aycliffe Royal Ordnance Factory during the 1939-45 war’, Report to the Nuffield Foundation 1989: 11.
• Richard K Brown, World War, Women’s Work and the Gender Division of Paid Labour in Arber & Gilbert, Women and Working Lives (1992)

Although I have not been able to find any record of the work undertaken by Nick Turner and Sean Tucker in 2007, there is fascinating memo on the role of music in the workers’ lives in:

• Korczynski et al. ‘We sang ourselves through that war’: Women, music and social relations of factories in world war two (2005)

The Aycliffe Angels also feature in:

• Selina Todd, Young Women, Work and Family in England 1918-1950 (2005)

There is a single oral history on the BBC’s ‘People’s War’ website, and a few oral studies conducted at Greenfield School were filmed and are on YouTube

Finally, the most comprehensive collection of materials available is that compiled by Andrew Hutton and held at Durham County Record Office, including a pamphlet:

• Fiona Forsyth and Andrew Hutton, Royal Ordnance Factory Aycliffe, the story of the Aycliffe Angels