The Working Life of Florence Bonnett

Having visited the Museum of Lincolnshire Life, whilst on our Drift the other day, our group became particular inspired by the women at war and more importantly the women workers at war. It is a topic that I feel our group are really engaged with. So having begun researching the women workers in Lincoln, I found an article that was focused on one worker in particular. The article outlines the average work hours for women in “War Work” and tells the story of Florence Bonnett’s work and life as a Munitionette.

florence

Florence and her fiance

Florence Bonnett had left school at the age of 13 and joined the family business as a fishmonger. During which time she had signed up for “War Work” at William Fosters. She was making tracks for the first tanks and would have had to have worked 12 hour shifts. There are quite a few things in Florence’s story that I felt a connection with, firstly that my granddad, uncle’s and dad all used to be fishmongers and secondly that my grandmother’s maiden name is Bonnett. Also it was interesting to hear that Florence original lived on Monson Street, this might be something that our group could explore and see if it could be incorporated into our piece.

Florence’s story is all in the article which I will link below for my group and anyone else who would like to find out more about Florence.

Laura Swain

http://www.lincolntankmemorial.co.uk/florence_bonnet.html

2 thoughts on “The Working Life of Florence Bonnett

  1. Florence was my grandmother…….any furter information on her or her family members would be most appreciated.

  2. Laura it is good that you are feeling inspired by your findings. I think it can help to have a personal emotive connection with an element of the research, perhaps you can think about how you might weave between your personal family stories and then the story of Florence. You can use texts on developing stories and autobiographical narratives to help develop your discussion.
    A careless apostrophe in the writing ‘uncle’s’ should be uncles.

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