Metadata
WORK ID: YFA 2299 (Master Record)
Title | Year | Date |
HUNSHELF GUN SITE | 1940 | 1940-01-01 |
Details
Original Format: 16mm Colour: Black & White / Colour Sound: Silent Duration: 7 mins 50 secs Credits: Willie Thorne Subject: Wartime Sport |
Summary During the Second World War, the village of Chapeltown, located near Sheffield, was home to an anti-aircraft gun site. This is a film made by Chapeltown dentist Willie Thorne that documents some of the work of the Women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service at the site and includes exercises and training with the anti-aircraft gun. |
Description
During the Second World War, the village of Chapeltown, located near Sheffield, was home to an anti-aircraft gun site. This is a film made by Chapeltown dentist Willie Thorne that documents some of the work of the Women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service at the site and includes exercises and training with the anti-aircraft gun.
The film opens with the ATS marching down a village street in Chapeltown. In the background propaganda posters hang on sides of the buildings. One asks women to...
During the Second World War, the village of Chapeltown, located near Sheffield, was home to an anti-aircraft gun site. This is a film made by Chapeltown dentist Willie Thorne that documents some of the work of the Women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service at the site and includes exercises and training with the anti-aircraft gun.
The film opens with the ATS marching down a village street in Chapeltown. In the background propaganda posters hang on sides of the buildings. One asks women to join the ATS, and another promotes the ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign.
The film then shows the gun site at Hunshelf. A woman in uniform stands at the sentry post while another two women come out of the barrack huts behind the post to change guard.
Filmed in black and white, the ATS is on exercises at the site. Then filmed again in colour, the women run through trenches up to the guns and viewing equipment that help them spot enemy aircraft. As they do this, the film shows an aeroplane flying overhead.
A member of the Royal Artillery, Anti Aircraft Command stands by some barrack huts and blows a bugle. Then a group of soldiers from the Royal Artillery, Anti Aircraft Command run to a huge anti-aircraft gun and manoeuvre it into position as if they were going to shoot a plane down. Once the exercise has been completed, they all get onto the gun and pose for the camera.
In the mess hall, some of the ATS cook and serve a roast dinner to their colleagues. Outside, three women work on the maintenance of military trucks. There is also a baseball match, possibly with some American GI’s who were based in the village. This takes place before the film closes with the men and women posing for the camera.
Context
This film was among many donated to the YFA by the Chapeltown and High Green Archive. These films were made up of three different collections: High Green Secondary School throughout the 1950s; the Willie Thorne Collection of films taken during World War Two and films from the Unit 8 and Vixen cine clubs based at Thorncliffe and Stocksbridge Steelworks – on these last see the Context for Short Stop (1959). This film was one of many made by Willie Thorne of events and activities in the...
This film was among many donated to the YFA by the Chapeltown and High Green Archive. These films were made up of three different collections: High Green Secondary School throughout the 1950s; the Willie Thorne Collection of films taken during World War Two and films from the Unit 8 and Vixen cine clubs based at Thorncliffe and Stocksbridge Steelworks – on these last see the Context for Short Stop (1959). This film was one of many made by Willie Thorne of events and activities in the Chapeltown area, on the outskirts of Sheffield, during the war. Willie Thorne was a local dentist who made both colour and black and white films on 16mm film.
At first the gun site was operated by locals before full time soldiers from the midlands and the south took over, and it was closed after two years to be transferred to the south coast where it was more needed. Not that Sheffield and its environs didn’t suffer bombing from the Luftwaffe. But although there were bombing raids intermittently throughout the war, most were concentrated in 1940 and 1941 during the blitz, especially the nights of 12th and 15th December 1940. After the blitz bombings tended to target the South East of Britain. The site for the air raid guns was located at the back of Ecclesfield School, just below Hunshelf, the ridge which stretches to Barnsley. The foundations where the guns were situated can still be made out in the ground. The Hun Site was replaced by a prison camp, and just up the road at Potters Hill there was an army base for US soldiers for before being sent off to combat. The nearby works at the Newton Chambers were a target for the Luftwaffe as evidenced by an aerial photograph retrieved form one of their planes which had 13 local targets marked no it. Just after the photograph was taken the works at Newton Chambers was extended for a purpose built unit making Churchill tanks, producing 5,000 in all. The anti-aircraft guns were of two sorts: the rapid-fire, low-calibre guns such as quad guns, and slower-firing; and the high-calibre guns such as the '88'. Although rarely registering a direct hit, they did force evasive action and cause damage through flying metal. Figures given for enemy planes shot down during the Second World War can vary enormously: even for the Battle of Britain it can vary from 1,100 to around 1,700. The propaganda war at the time meant that the figure given was much higher than it actually was. It is therefore unclear exactly how successful anti-aircraft fire was in shooting down enemy planes or as acting as a deterrence. Yet although flak – the German derived word used for anti-aircraft fire – rarely shot down many enemy planes, it affected the raids by forcing aircraft higher and thereby reducing their accuracy. The need to use extensive anti-aircraft fire in Germany did have a dramatic impact on their resources: about a third of all artillery production was dedicated to manufacturing anti-aircraft guns and ammunition, and it employed more than a million men and women, seriously hampering Germany’s ability to mount offensive action. The film has value in showing women performing traditional men’s work, in this case motor mechanics. This was in every area of work, but especially so in munitions work – see the Context for Munitions Factory. The image of women in the Second World War is usually of being fully in support of the war, and of being liberated by it. The reality wasn’t quite as straightforward as this as some women did oppose the war, or war in general. In addition, Susan Gubar argues that traditional ideas of women as being both lecherous and untrustworthy were often reinforced in wartime propaganda. She discusses the women writers during and after the war who chronicled the ways they felt that women were exploited and de-valued in the war; either explicitly or implicitly seeing war as essentially reflecting a male dominated culture. Gubar cites Mrs Laughton Matthews, the director of the Women's Royal Navy Service (WRNS), as stating that although the war had ‘shown that women can do anything’, they might still be as ‘disappointed as they were in many ways after the last war’ (see References). References Susan Gubar, ‘”This Is My Rifle, This Is My Gun”: World War II and the Blitz On Women’ in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, Margaret Higonnet et al (eds), Yale University Press, London, 1987. Arthur Marwick, The Home Front: British and the second World War, Hudson and Thames, 1976. Thread discussing Flak |