OUR JOB First issue

The de Havilland organisation had to expand rapidly during the Second World War, particularly when the Mosquito went into production. It also had to adapt to working with the Air Ministry. Apart from the leisurely peace-time supply of Tiger Moths to the RAF, there had been little call for military contractual activity. Now the company had to learn how to conform to the ways of the Ministry, where paperwork was expected always to be correct and, it seemed at times, copious.

The swift increase in the number of tasks and therefore the number of personnel led to similarly swift promotion for some: chargehands became senior foremen, foremen became factory superintendents. Large numbers of women were employed in almost every department, rising to somewhere between 30% and 40% of the workforce.

Joint Production Committees, enlargements of the previous Works Committees, came into being in 1942, bringing representatives of the labour force into contact with the management.

OUR JOB first appeared in November 1941 and was terminated in July 1945, after 62 issues. They were 3.4 inch x 4.4 inch booklets, usually of eight pages, occasionally twelve. The foot of the back page noted that it was a private publication.

It was clearly a Hatfield production. It is not known if copies were distributed at all factories run by de Havilland: Stag Lane & Stonegrove, Lostock, Witney (the Oxfordshire repair workshops), Rogerstone (the Forge Company in Newport), Leavesden (then Government-owned but run by de Havilland) and the Airspeed factories at Portsmouth and Christchurch, by then controlled by de Havilland. There were also the overseas companies, although it would have been unlikely they were sent copies.

References to the Second Aircraft Production Group are to the de Havilland site at Leavesden where Mosquitoes were built. Also at Leavesden was the London Aircraft Production Group run by Handley Page for the manufacture of Halifaxes. The site was owned by the Government and leased to the companies.

As can be seen on reading through, they encouraged good working practice and emphasised areas for improvement. Reports of visits by service personnel and by high-up Ministry people were included. There were frequent mentions of individual activity, with many names mentioned and many photographs. Fund-raising and leisure activities were reported.

I was given an almost complete set of scanned prints, magnified to double size, by DHAeTSA member Tim Marwood (DHA Hatfield 1953-58). I scanned the prints to create this compendium document. A few pages had been missed, but fortunately I had some original copies of OUR JOB so could scan those pages anew; they are detectable as being of lesser quality than Tim’s set. Missing altogether was No. 58, which by chance I came across at a later date. This issue was much longer than others and was entitled “de Havilland Today”. The next issue, No. 59, was dated 16 November 1944. The final three issues are also missing.

OUR JOB can be read HERE. Bookmarks by issue have been set. Optical character recognition has been applied, but due to the low quality of the original booklets, text in italics unfortunately is rarely recognised. This is a pity as there are many photos of named people.