POW husband saved by German doctor
All our Women of Steel suffered hard physical conditions at work but some had to cope with emotional torture too. For five years one woman worked to help the troops knowing her own husband was a prisoner of war. Nancy Fielder reports
BATTLES on the homefront came in many forms during World War II, but the young women who kept Sheffield's steelworks producing the equipment needed on the frontline carried on no matter what they came up against.
Many had to deal with their husbands being killed in action, feared for the children's and their own safety at home as the bombs dropped, and waited for the dreadful day when a telegram brought bad news.
The wartime story of Woman of Steel Nora Naylor and her signaller husband Edwin, known as Ted, is now unimaginable to most.
Ted died in 1992 aged 81 but our Women of Steel campaign has inspired Nora to tell their story for the first time.
Nora worked at Halls and Pickles in Ecclesfield making the wire that was fitted into RAF tunics in a bid to keep the pilots warm. The wire was threaded through their outfits and plugged into the planes during their night bombing raids.
"I was on a machine full of water and we had to thread dies like a little coin. I had to wind it and wind it until it was as thin as hair but no sooner as you had set it up, it broke," she said.
"I came home depressed on the first day and had a little weep. I thought I would never settle. It was so noisy, especially when the top shop hammers were going.
"I was on nights on D-Day. We kept going out because we could hear planes going over but nobody had told us what was going on."
Nora had been married to Ted for just over a year when war broke out.
He was a welder but because he was on the reserve list, after pretending to be 18 and joining up at the age of 17, he was one of the first called up.
Ted had already served as a lance corporal in India before the couple met and was reinstated at the same rank at the start of World War II.
He was sent to France and almost immediately captured as a prisoner of war while calling for reinforcements in his role as a signaller.
In May Nora was told her husband was officially 'missing'.
"I didn't know if he was dead or alive. It was only in August when I got a letter saying he was a prisoner. It was awful. I was going out of my mind."Terrified for her husband's safety and battling to keep up payments on the couple's belongings, Nora continued to work her 12-hour shifts, six days a week.
She spent her spare time penning letters to her beloved Ted from an air-raid shelter, not knowing if the two would ever be reunited.
Now aged 91, Nora still has every letter sent to her during that unimaginably hard time.
Covered in swastika stamps and censored by the Nazis, they still bring a tear to her eye when she reads them.
Each letter has the initials EN carefully written on it. Nora assumed they represented her husband's initials - only later discovering he wrote them to represent 'Edwin and Nora' and the love they shared across the miles.
"It was so hard. He used to say in many of those letters 'keep on writing', but I was tired of writing letters. I ran out of things I wanted to say to him. The swastika stamps showed the letters were read before they were sent.
"In May, when I heard they were flying the prisoners of war home the next day, I was really looking forward to him coming home."
Most prisoners were released and did return home as expected in May, 1945, but Ted didn't make it back until two months later.
The awful truth behind the delay only became clear when Nora finally saw him for the first time in five years - at a hospital in Basingstoke.
As freedom arrived, so too did injuries so serious that nobody expected Ted to survive.
Nora said: "It was the Black March. They were being forced to march in a retreat from the advancing allied front when he sat on the side of the road, shattered and a German soldier told him to get up or he'd shoot him. Ted told him he couldn't, he'd had it. The German soldier shot him. He had a great big hole where the bullet went in and lodged beneath his heart. Then it was the American bombings that further injured my Ted. All the American planes were coming over and a bomb landed nearby and the shrapnel wounded him really badly."Ted was taken to a German field hospital by American soldiers, so badly injured they used a ladder as a stretcher to carry him.
Ted never lost consciousness and heard the Americans say: "Take his name and give him a cigarette. He has had it."
But a German doctor came to his rescue and saved his life.
He removed the bullet from his chest, cut out intestines that were beyond repair, and created a then incredibly rare colostomy bag.
He performed a live blood transfusion from American soldier Edward Woolley who lay in the bed next to Ted as the blood was pumped from one to the other, and then put leeches on him to clean up surface wounds.
"From his hospital bed he dictated a letter to me saying there wasn't much wrong with him and he'd be home soon. I was so pleased that he had just minor injuries," Nora said.
The reality was Ted was too badly injured to fly all the way home and ended up in Basingstoke Hospital.
Nora used every bit of free time from work to make the long train journey and sit at Ted's side in hospital.
Eventually Nora's brother went to Basingstoke to bring Ted home for a week's break and homecoming street party.
This was too much for him and he relapsed badly and ended up in Middlewood Hospital.
He weighed just six stone when he returned to Sheffield, and underwent numerous operations using screws, and bones from both of his legs, to rebuild his shattered arm.
He went on to suffer recurring pain throughout his life.
"When I was working nights I used to visit him every night.
"I would take days off and go and see him whenever I could," Nora said.
Nora stopped working when she had their first child in 1947 and eventually, after three years, Ted discharged himself from hospital to finally be at home with his family once again.
Ted kept in regular touch with Edward Woolley, the American soldier who helped to save his life, and met up with him again in August 1973 when Ed and his wife Mary came over to England to pay him a visit.
The story was covered in The Star at the time under the headline: "Atlantic alliance renewed in Ecclesfield."
Got a view? Add your comment below.
BUY ONLINE: Buy The Star - Monday to Saturday - for local news, sport, features and ads. Sign up on line by clicking here.
READ MORE
Main news index
Your letters
Features
South Yorkshire's environmental news
Kids Zone
More business news
More Rotherham news
More Doncaster news
More Barnsley news
Latest sport.
Email to a friend
Print this page
Looking for...
Featured advertisers
Jobs
Search for a job
Motors
Search for a car
Property
Search for a house
Weather for Sheffield
Friday 25 May 2012
Today
Sunny
Temperature: 10 C to 22 C
Wind Speed: 18 mph
Wind direction: East
Tomorrow
Sunny
Temperature: 9 C to 20 C
Wind Speed: 17 mph
Wind direction: East
