Castle Bromwich: Inside the Spitfire Factory That Failed First

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The Castle Bromwich Spitfire factory built more of them than anywhere on earth, and for its first thirteen months it could not build one at all. I own forty-nine photographs of the place, taken for Vickers-Armstrongs and never published, and two of them record machines that appear in no history of the factory I can find. The failure, the sacking that fixed it, the presses, the women nobody named, and what is left on the site today.

The factory that could not build a Spitfire

By the middle of May 1940 the British government had spent more than four million pounds on an aircraft factory at Castle Bromwich, six miles north-east of the centre of Birmingham. The site was bigger than most towns’ worth of housing. Inside stood the newest machine tools money could buy. On the books was an order, placed thirteen months earlier, for a thousand Spitfires.

It had delivered none.

Not one. The Battle of France was collapsing, Fighter Command was losing aeroplanes faster than they could be replaced, and the largest shadow factory in the country had produced nothing at all.

I own forty-nine photographs of the Castle Bromwich Spitfire factory. They came out of an album put together for Vickers-Armstrongs after the company was handed the factory, and they are not snapshots. Each print is mounted on heavy board with a typed caption strip beneath it, and the captions were written by somebody who worked there and knew what the machines were called. AERIAL VIEW OF WORKS FROM NORTH EAST. PRESS SHOP, HEAVY PRESS BAY. DOPE ROOM, SEWING AND DOPING OF SPITFIRE RUDDERS. WORKS CANTEEN.

Castle Bromwich built more Spitfires than anywhere else on earth. Somewhere over eleven and a half thousand of them, plus three hundred Lancasters, out of a factory that in its first two years was a national embarrassment. The story of how that turned around involves a sacking conducted over the telephone, a secret report into idle men, and about twelve thousand people who mostly do not have names in the record.

A shadow in the shape of a factory

The idea behind Castle Bromwich was older than the war and it came from an industrialist rather than an airman. Lord Weir had argued in a Cabinet paper in 1934 that Britain needed what he called a shadow armaments industry, capable of expanding to meet wartime demand. Aircraft production in the mid-thirties was a cottage business by comparison with motor cars. Supermarine built Spitfires the way a good coachbuilder builds a car body, by hand, with skilled men fitting parts to each other. Morris built Morrises by the tens of thousands.

The Air Ministry took Weir’s argument and turned it into the Shadow Factory Scheme. New plants would be built at public expense alongside existing motor works, staffed with motor industry managers and motor industry methods, and run by the motor firms for a fee. The word shadow had nothing to do with secrecy. The factories stood in the shadow of the car plants next door and borrowed their people.

A Directorate of Aeronautical Production was set up in March 1936 under Sir Herbert Austin, who was made Lord Austin that July, and the first agreements were announced that same month with Austin and Rootes. Daimler, Humber, Singer, Standard, Rover and Wolseley followed. By June 1939 thirty-one shadow factories were finished or being built.

The scheme worked on a group principle. Five firms in Coventry and Birmingham each made part of a Bristol engine and the parts came together at the end. No single company had to master the whole thing.

Lord Nuffield would not have it. He objected to the group model and wanted a single plant under a single management, his own. Sir Kingsley Wood, who had taken over as Secretary of State for Air in May 1938, gave him what he asked for. Nuffield got Castle Bromwich, built and equipped by the government and run by the Nuffield Organisation, and on 12 April 1939 he got an order for a thousand Spitfires to fill it.

Work on the site had begun the previous July, with Kingsley Wood cutting the first sod. The land lay between Fort Dunlop and the old Castle Bromwich aerodrome, an airfield that had been in use since before the First World War. The budget was two million pounds. By early 1939 the cost had gone past four.

Nothing came out of it

Spitfires did not suit the methods the factory was built around, and nobody seems to have worked that out until the aeroplanes failed to appear.

A Spitfire is a stressed-skin aeroplane. Its strength lives in the surface, so the surface has to be accurate, and so does every part underneath it. Reginald Mitchell’s elliptical wing is beautiful and a nightmare to build, because almost every rib in it is a different shape. The men who built the prototypes at Woolston were toolmakers and fitters who could work to a thousandth of an inch by feel. Castle Bromwich was designed for people who had never seen an aeroplane before, working to jigs, doing one operation each.

Supermarine sent drawings and tooling to Birmingham, and Castle Bromwich management set them aside and used drawings and tooling of their own design instead. Leo McKinstry, in a widely read modern history of the Spitfire, records that even as the first aircraft were being built in June 1940 the factory was still incomplete and the drawings dispute was still running.

The jig and tool drawing office was worse. Alexander Dunbar, the Vickers man later sent in to sort the place out, wrote in July 1940 that sixty jig and tool draughtsmen were being sacked: “We have tried to find out what they are doing but the answer’s not a lemon.” Sixty draughtsmen on the payroll and nobody able to say what any of them produced.

Then there was the labour. Birmingham was a high-wage town in a tight labour market and the men knew it. The workforce never quite stopped production, but the threat of a stoppage or a slowdown hung over the place continuously while pay rates were argued. Beaverbrook eventually sent Richard Fairey, the aircraft manufacturer, to find out what was happening. Fairey’s report was secret and it did not mince words:

Labour is in a very bad state. Discipline is lacking. Men are leaving before time and coming in late, taking evenings off when they think fit. In parts of the factory I noticed that the men did not even stir themselves at the approach of the Works Manager. The labour in the Midlands is not “playing the game”. They are getting extra money and are not working in proportion for it.

Fairey was an employer writing about workmen, and Leo McKinstry, who quotes him, is arguing a case. Thirteen months after the order, zero aeroplanes.

The seventeenth of May

Churchill made Lord Beaverbrook Minister of Aircraft Production on 14 May 1940. Beaverbrook was a newspaper proprietor with no aviation background, an appalling manner and an unerring instinct for where the blockage was. Three days into the job he picked up the telephone and rang Lord Nuffield to ask why no Spitfires had left Castle Bromwich.

No transcript survives. Nuffield’s biographers have it that he was needled into offering to give up control of the factory, and that Beaverbrook said he accepted and put the phone down.

Nuffield complained to Churchill. Beaverbrook sent in Fairey. Management of the plant passed to Vickers-Armstrongs, Supermarine’s parent company, and experienced Supermarine people were moved to Birmingham to run it. One of Beaverbrook’s first acts was to cancel every bomber contract Castle Bromwich held, which at that point included Halifaxes and Wellingtons. In May 1940 the country needed fighters and nothing else.

The first Castle Bromwich Spitfire, a Mark IIA serialled P7280, was delivered in June 1940. Nine more followed that month. Then twenty-three in July, thirty-seven in August, fifty-six in September, during the weeks when Fighter Command needed them most.

By the end of 1941 the factory had made one thousand two hundred and ninety-eight Spitfires. At its peak it turned out three hundred and twenty a month.

The press shop, and two machines nobody has written about

Six of my forty-nine photographs show the press shop, and two of them record machines that appear in no published account of Castle Bromwich.

The first caption reads SHAW 8,000 TON HYDRAULIC PRESS (FITTED WITH RUBBER PAD). Cast into the body of the machine, legible in the print, is the maker’s plate: JOHN SHAW & SONS, SALFORD.

John Shaw and Sons worked out of the Wellington Works in St Stephen Street, Salford, and had been building hydraulic presses, pumps and accumulators since at least 1873. The firm survives. It was bought by Group Rhodes in 2003, became Rhodes Interform, and still builds large forming presses for the aerospace industry today.

The second caption reads HYDRAULIC ENGINEERING CO., 2,500 TON HYDRAULIC PRESS. That firm worked from Charles Street in Chester, founded in 1869, four hundred people on the books by 1914, hydraulic cranes for Portsmouth Dockyard, lifts, pumps and presses. The works is flats now.

What eight thousand tons was actually for

Fitted with rubber pad. Those four words in brackets explain the tonnage.

Pressing sheet metal normally takes two tools, a male punch and a female die machined to mirror it, with a gap between them exactly the thickness of the metal. Tooling like that costs a fortune and only pays for itself over a very long production run. An aeroplane is the opposite case. It needs thousands of different small pressed parts in small quantities, every rib and former and bracket a slightly different shape, and matched steel dies for all of them would bankrupt you.

Henry Guerin, working at Douglas Aircraft in California, solved it by throwing away half the tool. His patent was filed in January 1939 and granted in February 1940, and it describes exactly what the caption describes: a thick block of rubber, held in a steel box, brought down onto a sheet of metal lying on a cheap male form block. Under enough pressure the rubber stops behaving like rubber and starts behaving like a fluid. It flows around the form block and drives the metal down over it. One pad of rubber works as the female die for every part you will ever make, and the form blocks can be cut from wood or zinc alloy in an afternoon.

The tonnage follows from the geometry. An ordinary press concentrates its force along the edge of the punch, so a small part needs a small press. A rubber pad presses on the whole table at once, every square inch of it, whether there is a part underneath or not. Eight thousand tons sounds absurd for aluminium sheet a few thousandths of an inch thick until you divide it by the area. The largest rubber pad press now working in the Netherlands is also an eight thousand tonne machine, and its table measures 1.10 by 2.20 metres, which is about the size you would want for laying out a tray of Spitfire ribs and pressing them all in one go.

The machine works slowly. Presses of this kind run six inches to a foot of travel and crawl the moment the metal takes the load. Somebody standing in that shop would have seen a machine taller than a house move by a hand’s breadth, hold, and open again, perhaps once a minute.

The Chester connection

On 22 October 1943 the Hydraulic Engineering Company of Chester, jointly with a man named A. R. Mangnall, applied for a British patent. Number GB 575,930. Its subject is the steel box that holds the rubber pad in a moulding press.

The firm whose name is on the second press in my album was developing Guerin tooling in the middle of the war. A decade later the American Rohr Aircraft Corporation cited the Chester patent as prior art for its own laminated Guerin box.

Neither press appears in the standard histories. The published accounts of Castle Bromwich say only that Nuffield saw to it that the most modern machine tools were provided. The photographs say which ones, and who built them, and how big they were.

Twelve thousand people, and almost no names

About twelve thousand people worked at Castle Bromwich, and at the peak the payroll reached fifteen thousand eight hundred and fifty-four. A large share of them were women. No published source gives the proportion at any date.

The dope room is where you see them.

The Spitfire had a metal airframe and fabric on some of its control surfaces, and the fabric had to be stitched on by hand and then painted with dope to shrink it drum-tight and weatherproof it. The women in that photograph are doing needlework on a fighter aircraft. Their faces are sharp enough to recognise. Not one of them is named.

Search the institutional record for the people who built Britain’s Spitfires and you get Mitchell, Nuffield, Beaverbrook, Henshaw and Quill. All men, all management or aircrew. Birmingham Museums, Solihull Council, the Warwickshire Industrial Archaeology Society, BAE Systems, the RAF Museum’s own teaching pack: the same handful of names and no workers. There appears to be no surviving workforce register for the factory at all.

A few names got through anyway.

Megan Rees

Born in Ammanford in 1921, moved to Erdington with her family in 1936, went through Valor and Dunlop and then to what everybody locally called Nuffield’s. She worked in C Block on the starboard wing, and she described the job precisely: “I worked on the starboard wings of the Spitfires. The wings of the Spitfires were built vertically in jigs.” She drilled the wing ribs by hand, then marked out hole positions, then went onto machine drilling and punching the aluminium skins, holding the dolly block while a man called Albert ran the riveting gun. Her inspector was a Mr Carter. Twelve-hour shifts, six till six.

She also said this: “I once drilled through my little finger and went to first aid with the bit of the drill still in my finger.”

And this: “The lives of pilots depended on the planes being built properly so it was very important that everyone did their job correctly.”

Winifred Gilhooly

A telephone operator, and the one woman here who exists in an official file rather than a memoir. The Treasury’s Civil Defence Awards papers at Kew, reference T 336/2/23, record her citation: having finished her shift on 27 August 1940 she volunteered for extra duty and stayed at her post through the night while bombs fell on the factory and around it. She was granted a commendation.

Her file also records a night of bombing at the factory that the histories pass over.

Lillian Gertrude Silvernie

In the London Gazette of 11 June 1942, in the King’s Birthday Honours list for the British Empire Medal, Civil Division, one line reads: “Miss Lillian Gertrude Silvernie, Press Tool Setter, Vickers-Armstrongs, Limited.”

A press tool setter sets up and aligns the tooling in a press. Skilled work, and overwhelmingly a man’s job before the war. Her family have said she was the first woman employed at Castle Bromwich and that she went on to supervise others, and a wartime newspaper report described her as a splendid example of hardworking diligence. The Gazette itself gives only the company, because the censor would not let a newspaper name an aircraft factory. The medal and the trade are certain. The rest is family memory.

And one woman with no name at all

On 28 September 1941 Churchill came to Castle Bromwich. The Imperial War Museum holds the official photograph, catalogued H 14259, and its caption reads: “Winston Churchill watches a female riveter at work on a Supermarine Spitfire at the Castle Bromwich factory in Birmingham, 28 September 1941.”

The Prime Minister is named. The riveter is not.

The night D Block was hit

The Luftwaffe found Castle Bromwich on the night of 13 August 1940. Eleven bombs hit the factory, seven people were killed and forty-one injured. Over the course of the war the site was hit by more than two hundred bombs and eleven workers died.

Megan Rees arrived for the six o’clock shift the morning after one of those raids. She does not date it, and no published account dates the destruction of D Block:

I remember going to work to start the 6am shift one morning and D Block had been bombed the night before. The clothes, shoes and gas masks of the workers from D Block were piled in heaps between A and C Blocks… You could see bodies still in the girders of the roof of the factory. It is a sight that you never forget.

The shift pattern changed after the bombing, from twelve hours on and twelve off to three shifts of eight. Production was pushed out to other sites so that one raid could not stop the aeroplanes. Reid and Sigrist’s airfield at Desford in Leicestershire took Spitfire assembly and put together more than a thousand of them with a workforce of about sixty, the first one finished in February 1941. No. 9 Maintenance Unit at Cosford in Shropshire took Spitfires in and prepared them for squadron service, and some counts fold its throughput into the Castle Bromwich total. Leicestershire alone made twenty-eight thousand five hundred and sixty-seven pairs of main undercarriage legs.

Those dispersal sites are the reason the production totals for Castle Bromwich disagree with each other.

Alex Henshaw and the flight sheds

Every aeroplane that left Castle Bromwich had to be flown before it went to a squadron, and from June 1940 the man in charge of that was Alex Henshaw, aged twenty-seven, running a team of twenty-five test pilots.

Henshaw had won the King’s Cup air race before the war and had flown from England to Cape Town and back in a Percival Mew Gull, a solo round-trip record that stood for more than seventy years. At Castle Bromwich he test-flew something like two thousand three hundred and sixty individual Spitfires and Seafires, more than one in every ten ever built, and most of the three hundred Lancasters on top. On a good day he did twenty aircraft.

The aeroplanes were towed out of the erecting sheds, across the main Chester Road, and onto the airfield. A bridge over the road was drawn up and never built, so for five and a half years finished Spitfires held up the traffic.

Henshaw is the only pilot known to have barrel-rolled a Lancaster, which he did more than once with colleagues on board, and the claim rests on his own word plus witnesses rather than any official record. On 18 July 1942 the engine of the Spitfire he was testing failed over Wednesfield near Wolverhampton. He put it down on a housing estate, clipped a lamppost with a wing, and the aircraft came apart against the kitchen wall of number 468 Lichfield Road. He walked away soaked in fuel and coolant, expecting to burn. Nobody on the ground was hurt.

He flew the first Castle Bromwich Lancaster, HK535, on 22 October 1943. It went to 463 Squadron of the Royal Australian Air Force and was lost over Lille on the night of 10 May 1944, going down in the early hours of the 11th. The last Spitfire built there, a Mark 22 serialled PK614, was test-flown on 30 November 1945.

What it actually built

Castle Bromwich never built the Mark I, and the claim you sometimes read that it built every version from the Mark II onwards is wrong. The real list is narrower.

Spitfires and Seafires built at Castle Bromwich, by mark

Mark	Built at Castle Bromwich	Note
Mk IIa and IIb	921	Every one. First was P7280, June 1940
Mk Vb	2,995	Of 3,911 built anywhere
Mk Vc	1,494	Of 2,467
PR Type F	15	Photographic reconnaissance
Mk IX	5,095	Of 5,656 built anywhere
Mk XVI	1,054	Every one. First in October 1944
F Mk 21	120	Every one. First was LA187, 15 March 1944
F Mk 22	260	Of 287; Supermarine built 27 at South Marston
Seafire F Mk 45	50	Every one

Add those up and you get twelve thousand and four: eleven thousand nine hundred and thirty-nine Spitfires of the marks listed, fifty Seafires and fifteen reconnaissance aircraft.

You will see other totals. The blue plaque on the site says twelve thousand one hundred and twenty-nine. Key Aero says eleven thousand six hundred and ninety-four and states that the figure includes Cosford and Desford. The Warwickshire Industrial Archaeology Society says about eleven thousand seven hundred and fifty. Leo McKinstry says over thirteen thousand, which is higher than anybody.

The dispersal factories cause most of the spread, because a Spitfire assembled at Desford by sixty people in Leicestershire was still counted as a Castle Bromwich aircraft. The rest is a disagreement about the Mark IX, where one authority counts 5,095 from Birmingham and another counts 5,665. Five hundred and seventy aeroplanes in one production line, and the whole gap between the highest and lowest totals you will read sits inside it.

Whichever number you take, over half of every Spitfire ever built came from this factory.

The Lancasters are simpler. Three hundred of them, all Mark I, starting in October 1943 and peaking at twenty-five in December 1944, the factory’s best month. The Lancaster that flies with the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight today was not one of them; PA474 was built by Vickers-Armstrongs at Broughton near Chester.

Two Castle Bromwich Spitfires are still flying. P7350, a Mark IIA and the fourteenth aeroplane the factory completed, is the only airworthy Spitfire that fought in the Battle of Britain, and it flies with the Memorial Flight. MH434, a Mark IX, was built there and test-flown by Henshaw himself.

When the last fuselage came off the line in March 1946 the workforce wrote on it:

This is the last, this is the end. After many an ache, many a bend. We pass it to you without any tears. For we may “Meteor” yet in future years.

The canteen

The site plan for Castle Bromwich lists main offices, drawing offices, tool rooms, stores for finished parts, areas for assembling wings and fuselages, dope shops, canteens, surgeries, sports and social clubs, and power generating plants. My album has photographs of most of them, including a hospital with a general surgery, and a montage page for the sports and social club with a woman throwing a ball on it.

That room emptied and filled again three times a day.

The Castle Bromwich Spitfire factory site today

Fisher and Ludlow took the works in 1946 and started pressing car bodies in it. Pressed Steel Fisher followed, then British Leyland, then Jaguar, then Ford, then Tata. The place made Jaguars for decades.

Complete car production ended in 2024. The XE, the XF and the F-Type were the last cars built there, and they were the last Jaguar model lines never offered with an electric motor driving the wheels. The site was not shut. The stamping operation was kept on and expanded, so Castle Bromwich still presses body panels, eighty years after it pressed Spitfire ribs. In June 2025 a block went up in flames and took more than fifty firefighters and eight engines to put out. The investigation found it was accidental.

Some of the wartime buildings are still standing and still in use. F Block carries the faded remains of its green camouflage paint on the roof. Every cast-iron rainwater hopper on the old buildings has a winged roundel moulded into it. None of that is open to the public, because it is inside a working plant.

What you can see, free, at any hour, is Sentinel. Tim Tolkien, great-nephew of the novelist, built three half-size Spitfires climbing away on steel vapour trails, and it stands on the roundabout where the Castle Vale estate meets the Chester Road. The roundabout is now called Spitfire Island. Alex Henshaw unveiled the sculpture on 14 November 2000.

The airfield closed in 1958 and the Castle Vale estate was built over it between 1964 and 1969. The streets carry aviation names, and a recent development on the estate added more: Alex Henshaw and R. J. Mitchell, alongside three women of the Air Transport Auxiliary who ferried the aeroplanes out, Mary Ellis, Joy Lofthouse and Eleanor Wadsworth.

For the aeroplane itself, Thinktank in Birmingham has a Spitfire hanging in its Spitfire Gallery on Level 1, with a Hurricane behind it. Millennium Point, Curzon Street, B4 7XG.

About these photographs

The album came from a private collection, and eight of its forty-nine prints are on this page. The prints were taken by a photographer recorded only as Morris, commissioned by Vickers-Armstrongs, and the internal evidence dates the set to 1943 or later, because the flight sheds caption names Spitfire Mark IXs and a Lancaster Mark I and Lancaster production did not begin until October 1943.

On copyright: photographs taken in the United Kingdom before 1 June 1957 ran for fifty years from the making of the negative under the Copyright Act 1911, and the transitional provisions of the 1956 and 1988 Acts carried that forward. A 1995 regulation can revive expired copyright in some cases and run it to the photographer’s death plus seventy years, so the fifty-year rule on its own is not the whole answer. These prints are clear because their author cannot be identified beyond a surname, which puts them in the unknown-authorship case: seventy years from creation, expired between 2013 and 2016.

Four of the photographs on this page have been brought to motion with Higgsfield. Each clip starts from the scan and runs five seconds. They are AI-generated video made from real photographs.

The tool is the best thing I have used for turning a still image into something that moves, and it costs ten credits a clip. Point it at a print from 1943 and it will do things you are not expecting. You can try it here, and that is an affiliate link, so I earn a commission if you sign up through it at no extra cost to you.

If you have an album like this in the loft

Somebody’s father worked at Castle Bromwich, or at Longbridge, or at Cosford, and there is a box of prints in the roof that nobody has looked at since the funeral. Get it digitised properly and it becomes usable, searchable and safe.

Prints with writing on the back are the common case and the annoying one, because the caption and the photograph live on opposite sides. An Epson FastFoto FF-680W scans a stack of prints at about one a second and captures both sides in the same pass, which is the single most useful machine for this job. It was £539 when I checked.

For negatives and mounted prints too big or too fragile to feed through anything, copying them with a camera beats a flatbed. You need a copy stand to hold the camera square to the work, a macro lens such as the Sigma 105mm f2.8 Macro, an even light, and a colour target in the first frame of each session so the tone of the prints can be matched later. For strips of film, a light panel underneath and a film holder to keep them flat.

Wex deliver within the United Kingdom only. Scan at the highest resolution the machine will give you, keep the raw files, and never work on the master.

The one thing worth more than the scanner is writing down what the pictures show while somebody is still alive who knows. My album has its captions because a typist put them there in 1943. Most albums do not.

More from the archive

If you buy or license images rather than make them, the buyer’s guide to aviation image licensing sets out what a licence has to specify and what things cost, and the guide to aviation picture research covers running one specific airframe to ground in an archive. For what you own and what you do not, there is a guide to aviation photography copyright.

On the aircraft themselves, the history of the Supermarine Spitfire covers the design that this factory mass-produced, Supermarine covers the company Vickers put in charge here, and the Avro Lancaster covers the bomber that shared the sheds. If you want to photograph the survivors, the Duxford guide and the notes on photographing aircraft in museums are the place to start, and Spitfire photographs shows what the archive holds.

The aviation archive itself is here and the licence terms are here. For general military history rather than flying, our sister site The Wartime Archive covers German official photographs of the First World War, the warship postcards of the Imperial German Navy, Operation Barbarossa and the Eastern Front situation maps.

Questions about any of this, or about the album, go to the contact page.

Questions people ask

Sources

• The eight photographs on this page are from an album of forty-nine mounted prints made for Vickers-Armstrongs, in the author’s collection. Every caption quoted in capitals is read off the typed strip beneath its print.
• Henry Guerin, Douglas Aircraft Co., US Patent 2,190,659, “Apparatus for Forming Sheet Metal”, filed 26 January 1939, granted 20 February 1940, for rubber-pad forming of aircraft sheet. patents.google.com
• Hydraulic Engineering Co. Ltd. and A. R. Mangnall, British Patent GB 575,930, applied for 22 October 1943, for the box housing the elastic pad in a moulding press. patents.google.com
• Grace’s Guide, John Shaw and Sons (Salford), for the Wellington Works, the 1908 incorporation and the hydraulic press and accumulator business. gracesguide.co.uk
• Grace’s Guide, Hydraulic Engineering Co, for the Chester works, the 1869 founding and the press business. gracesguide.co.uk
• J. F. Willock, “The Castle Bromwich Aircraft Factory”, Warwickshire Industrial Archaeology Society, January 2021, for the construction of the works and the 17 May 1940 telephone call. warwickshireias.org
• Leo McKinstry, “How labour unrest nearly lost us the Battle of Britain”, The Spectator, 14 November 2007, for the Fairey report and the Dunbar letter. The article argues a case and is cited as such. spectator.com
• “Memories 1939-1945”, History of Castle Bromwich, for Megan Rees’s account of C Block, the starboard wing and the bombing of D Block. historyofcastlebromwich.jimdofree.com
• The London Gazette, supplement to issue 35586, 11 June 1942, page 2505, for the award of the British Empire Medal to Miss Lillian Gertrude Silvernie, Press Tool Setter, Vickers-Armstrongs Limited. thegazette.co.uk
• The National Archives, T 336/2/23, Treasury Second World War Civil Defence Awards, for the commendation of Winifred Gilhooly, telephone operator at the Castle Bromwich Aeroplane Factory, for remaining at her post on the night of 27 August 1940. nationalarchives.gov.uk
• Imperial War Museums, photograph H 14259, Winston Churchill and an unnamed female riveter at Castle Bromwich, 28 September 1941. iwm.org.uk
• Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council, Castle Bromwich history, for the 1,298 aircraft by the end of 1941, the peak monthly output and the war casualty totals. solihull.gov.uk
• “Desford Airfield”, Sport in Desford, for the dispersal of Spitfire assembly to Reid and Sigrist and the Leicestershire undercarriage production. sportindesford.org
• S. E. Little and M. Grieco, “Shadow factories, shallow skills? An analysis of work organisation in the aircraft industry in the Second World War”, Labor History 52:2 (2011), for Lord Weir’s 1934 Cabinet paper and the agency model. oro.open.ac.uk