ROF Elstow

Royal Ordnance Factory (ROF) Elstow was one of sixteen UK Ministry of Supply, World War II, Filling Factories. It was a medium-sized filling factory, (Filling Factory No. 16), which filled and packed munitions. It was located south of the town of Bedford, between the villages of Elstow and Wilstead in Bedfordshire. It was bounded on the northeast by the A6 and on the west by a railway line. Hostels were built nearby to accommodate the workers who were mostly female.

It was built with the Ministry of Works acting as Agents; building work started in November 1940 and was completed by August 1941. It was managed as an "Agency Factory" by J. Lyons on behalf of the Ministry of Supply as, by then, the Ministry of Supply was overstretched in regards recruiting and managing the workers needed to staff these munitions factories.

It had 250 buildings and 15 miles of standard gauge railway lines. It was linked to the Midland Railway line running between London and Bedford. The site does not appear on Ordnance Survey maps made during wartime or in the postwar period.

Elstow

Coordinates: 52°06′25″N 0°27′53″W / 52.1069°N 0.4648°W / 52.1069; -0.4648

Elstow is a village and civil parish in the English county of Bedfordshire.

John Bunyan, was born here – at Bunyan's End, which lay approximately halfway between the hamlet of Harrowden and Elstow's High Street.

History

Countess Judith, niece of William the Conqueror, founded a Benedictine nunnery in Elstow in the year 1078. The Elstow nuns came from wealthy families and each came with an endowment of money and/or lands.

In 1538 Elstow Abbey was valued as being the eighth richest nunnery in England. On 26 August 1539, the Abbess was forced to surrender the Abbey, the manor of Elstow and all the Abbey's other lands and estates throughout England, to King Henry VIII, as part of his Dissolution of the Monasteries.

So large and significant was the Abbey at Elstow that, even after the dissolution, the building was being considered for elevation to cathedral status, but this never transpired.

South of the village, from 1942 to 1946, was the site of the munitions factory ROF Elstow, about which the author H.E.Bates wrote The Tinkers of Elstow (1946).