An interesting parcel appeared at The Devil’s Porridge Museum this week. Inside it was a signed copy of a book called ‘Magnificent Women and their Revolutionary Machines’ by Henriette Heald. The book chronicles the early days of the Women’s Engineering Society (or WES) and features biographical information about some of their influential early members (including women with local connections such as Dorothee Pullinger who built the first car ‘for ladies, by ladies’ in Dumfries and Galloway).
The book was donated to the Museum by Ceryl Evans who met Judith Hewitt, the Museum Manager in London in September at the Women’s History Network AGM. This lady spoke at the conference about a brilliant project WES had organised to celebrate the centenary of their organisation.
WES was established in 1919 to preserve the work done by women in engineering in World War One and to ensure that the gains made in women’s technical accomplishments were maintained in the post War world. We would be very interested to see if any of the women who worked at HM Factory Gretna were members and this is an area of research which we will be pursuing.
For more details on the History of WES see:
https://www.wes.org.uk/content/history
https://www.wes.org.uk/centenary-map
Twitter @WESCentenary
Instagram @wes_centenary
