hen

Tough shigyard work
won women respect

Marcie Good
Contributing Writer

TO those born after World War II, it
sounds like a bizarre circus act.

Standing on a plank scarcely wider than your
shoe-length, you watch as someone below heats
small chunks of metal in a fire until they are
white-hot. Then they thing them up and you
catch them in midair with a pail. The plank that
holds you gradually gets moved up until you are
as high as a four-storev building.

That was Louise Christuffersen’s job as a rivet
catcher at the Burrard Dry Docks during the
war.

She would pick the smouldering rivet from
her pail and put it into a punched hole on the
side of the ship, fastening two steel plates togeth-
er. The worker beside her, called the holder-on,
would steady the rivet with a gun that rattled like
machine-gun fire. The man on the outside of the
ship would pound the softened metal into place.

Christoftersen, now 74, well remembers the
sting of a straying rivet when it hit her ieg and
instantly burned through her clothing. Her hand
holding the bucket would often get singed. A
few times she was hit in the face, and once a rivet
glanced off her thruat and fell down the front of
her coverails.

. “When it hits — it just goes ‘boom’ and
you've got no skin,” she recalled, describing her
first job at the North Vancouver site. “When I
think of it, I don’t know if 1 could do it now.”

Then, she loved it. ,

As a wide-eyed 17-year-old from Rocky
“Mountain House, Alta., she came west in 1942
looking for work. Her parents, having lost their
business during the Depression, were struggling
on a homestead.

Too impatient to complete her nurses’ wain-
ing, she fudged her age and went where she
heard there was monev — the shipyards. *:

Twelve women were first hired at the Surrard
Dry Docks in North Vancouver in September,
(1942. The previous year, shifts had begun: oper-
_ ating around the clock to keep up with increas-
ing orders for the North Sands ‘ype of cargo
ships. But with more men required for the tight-
ing services, the labour shortage was serous.
: Clarence Wallace, the owner of the Burrard Dry

: Dock, persuaded his general manager that the.

only solution was to hire women. f
.° The first twelve quickly proved their worth,
and only two months later the company
employed 149. At the height of the shipyards’
output, in August 1943, 330 women worked at
the North Vancouver site and made up about 8%
of the labour force. .
While many were hired as rivet passers and
- housekeepers. — sweeping up the shavings and
picking up bolts and nuts — they also learned
more skilled: jobs in the electrical department,
pipe shop; sheet metal shop, copper shop, and
boiler shop. "The company. was not unique: out
of a total B.C, workforce of about 30,000 in

SUNDAY Focus

Sunday, July 23, 2000 - North Shore News - 3

a a

NEWS photo Julle iverson

LOUISE Christoffersen beams as she recal!s her days as a worker In the Burrard shipyards on Espianade.

shipyards during World War II, about 1,495
were women. The sheer numbers of women
helped to make the transition a little easier. But
lots of people just didn't think women belonged
there. A poem written by a machinist published
in. the company newsletter, the Wallace
Shipbuilder, complained that “‘Evening in Paris’
scents the air \ That once held Lube Oil smell. \
Dve just pisked up a bobby pin \ Believe me —
war is hell.”

Louise Christoffersen met her future hus-
band, Swain, when she was put on his electrical
crew. Even he was unenthusiastic.

“He didn’t want women in the shipyard
doing men’s work. He didn’t think it was the
place. He was very respectful of women and he

thought they would hear bad language. There

were probably other men that thought the same

"they were brought up that way.”

_ There was also unease on her part. She had
heard rumours about prisoners being offered
jobs at the yards, and on her first day at work her
supervisor, Miss McGaw, told her sternly that
she was never to have anything to do with the
men.

One day after she got a particularly bad burn
on her face, she was treated with a purple anti-

Ox

ae

4 ’. - phate North Vancouver Museum and Arch!

URRARD Dry Dock shipyards 1944: Evelyn Pearce, iater MacDonald, sits in: the

front row, third from left. Lif_llan Matheson Rance is in the back row, second from left.

Contact the Archives if you can identify the cther women in the picture.

septic. Riding on the streetcar to her horse in
Lynn Valley, wo women spoke about her so that
she would hear.

“They were saying, ‘You never know what
these young girls have got.’ I got off the street-
car thinking about how terrible } looked. I
walked home crying.”

But most of her memories are good.
Rivetting required precise teamwork, and the
men on her crew, she recalled, would look out
for her. The war fostered a spirit of unity, when
people from all backgrounds came to the indus-
tries to work for victory.

Peering through a hole in the wire fence of
the locked-up yards facing Esplanade near
Lonsdale, she points out the spot where women
used to punch in their time cards. She gets excit-
ed about seeing the building across the street,
now painted and derelict, where she used to have
lunch and put on her coveralls.

Christoffersen worked on the rivetting crew
for several months, un! a boy working near her
stepped backwards off the plank and fell to his
death. After that, her nerves got to her and she
couldn’t hold anything in her hands.

She was switched to an electrical gang, and
learned how to install wiring. After a short stint

at LaPointe Pier, another shipyard on the north :
side of the Inlet, she returned to North:
Vancouver where she worked on her future hus- :

band’s crew.

Swain, she says, was one of those people that:

could recognize ships like faces. After the war, he.
spotted one of Burrard’s Victory-type ships in
Denmark, and another one in Hawaii. Before he
died in 1995, he saw the Cape Breton, the ship

that the Museum and Archives is now trying to

save a portion of for public display.

“He told me that I worked on that ship,” she
said. “I would never have known, but he knew
every ship that came into the pier.” ;

When she came back to North Vancouver,
she asked for a raise and got it. She was making
$1.10 an hour, more than many of the men. She
also worked overtime and got extra “dirty”
money, for work like crawling into the filthy,
tight bifge to hold rivets in place.

With that, she was able to buy a $1,500-
house on Georgia Street in Vancouver for her
mother. Her home in Lynn Valley is still on one
of five lots she bought for $80 each.

But mere than the economic independence,
she remembers the people and the experience
that changed her life. ;

She saw a bit of the world in the sailors that
came into the port, like the doctor and captain of
a Russian ship — a beautiful blond woman with
a mouth full of steel teeth. There were also those
closer to home, like the “lady of the night” who

worked on her crew and gave her advice about
the way the world really worked.

By the end of the war, women had made their
mark. Mr. WJ. Wardle, the generaf manager
who was reluctant to bring them in, acknowl-
edged that “they were as good as men.” Burrard .
Dry Dock owner Clarence Wallace went further,
saying they did “an outstanding job.”

But doing their best was not enough. In
1944 orders for ships were slowing down and ~

“the company began laying off workers. The last

WANTED
15 Young Women.

“TODO 67 Oe

é A Real W ar Job [
f : ,

fg TUBRE IS AN URGENT NERD FOR PARSER GIRLS IN
s THE WOMEN'S NRVARTMENT, WOCAn, SHIPYARDS |

Agen 18 end over : I.
GOCD PAY . STEADY DAY SHIFT - KEEN WORS'.§
| Real War Job:
“Abtty Najional Soleetive Servier, North Vanes
a Unter Ne. 37020

oa Ree Se,

SPretaree sa «8:

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Oe we ee:

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THIS want ad for rivet passers -was :
published in the North Shore Press in ©
May 1943. - ; Any

women were laid offin December, 1945.
On the day when she found out the war was.’
over, Christoffersen remembers walking into the».

“women’s washroom and secing several of her co-

workers crying. 5

“] said to one of them, ‘The war is over, why ©
are you crying?’ And she said, ‘Have. you
thought about what we're going to do now?” |
And I hadn't.” ; or

Even then, she had the feeling that she was
changing history. Working in the shipyards con: -"*.
vinced many women of her generation that their.

~ children must have an education, and that their

daughters should be able to become what they: .
liked. “I think that’s when women came out of *)
their little shell, which was good. Because why: |”
did they have to be nurses or teachers or secre-.’
taries or telephone operators? That’s all there

was for women. Now we can be whatever we:

damn weil please.” ais