https://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/history/18469751.aycliffe-angel-left-shoes-earth/?ref=rssThe Aycliffe Angel who left her shoes on Earth
By Chris Lloyd echochrislloyd
Chief Features Writer
ALL that was returned to the heartbroken family of Aycliffe Angel Edna Thompson was a cloth badge from her uniform, a little bag in which she used to keep her wages and the pair of shoes that she was wearing when an explosion ripped through her section of the Royal Ordnance Factory. It was a shift change at the shell-making factory on February 21, 1942. Edna, 31, of Pasture Row, Eldon, was entering the workshop with a colleague when the blast occurred. It killed the two of them plus the two women they were relieving in the shop. Dying with Edna that night were Irene Irvin, 24, of Codd Street, South Bank; Rhoda Alice Dixon, 22, of Ivy Place, Tantobie; and mother-of-two Phoebe Morland, 24, of Auckland Terrace, Shildon. Plus, says Betty Cook in Shildon, the blast had a terrible effect on Edna’s mother. She had not wanted Edna to leave her clothes shop job and join the Royal Ordnance Factory in the first place, and so Edna kept it from her when she decided to take extra pay to work on the “high risk†line Edna wanted the additional pennies to help her family in those cash-pressed days and buy clothes for her brothers. Betty, her niece, who was five at the time, remembers: “My grandmother was so upset at losing her daughter that she died a couple of years later from a broken heart.â€
Three months later, an inquiry into the disaster said there was “no evidence of sabotage or negligenceâ€, and that it was an accident.
“Everybody did their best under extremely difficult conditions caused by the extreme darkness and an escape of steam,†concluded the Echo’s report.
In 2011, Edna’s family gave her ROF badge and her wages’ bag to Eden Camp, the wartime museum near Malton in North Yorkshire, as a memorial to her.
