My first job when I left school was working for the Ministry Of Defence in the offices at one of their munitions factories. It was a huge place which covered many square miles and it was so big that on pay days we had to be driven around by car to hand out the weekly wage packets at various sites around the factory.
The main gates were manned by MOD Police and there were 2 little brick buildings which were used to search people leaving the site. One building for women and one for men and as the factory emptied and the office staff left too, a male Police Officer and a Female Police Officer would randomly select people to be searched. Consequently even getting a factory pencil out the the place was nigh on impossible and seeing as they manufactured, bullets, shells, missiles, grenades and lots of other stuff we didn`t know about (it was the height of the Cold War ) there was no chance of a freebie of any description. It was where the original bouncing bombs used by the Dam busters were made and at the height of the War it employed 35,000 people mainly women.
Mind you they did arrest 2 Russian spies trying to photograph the site but they failed miserably because Hitler`s planes never found it back in the 40`s either and that was all down to parts of the factory being underground or buildings were covered with soil and grass which from the air just looked like a field and the site had zebra crossings, it`s own railway station, a listed building called Buckshaw Hall and houses for some MOD staff so once again that all made it look like a small town. It`s all gone now, it closed down around 2005, the land was decontaminated and sold off for building houses.
lol
