THE writing was on the wall for John Finley’s new business venture before it started.

When Mr Finley bought the derelict Presswork Metals site on Aycliffe Business Park, County Durham, he saw it as an ideal space to grow his steelwork firm which helped build Hitachi’s train factory and expand Nissan Sunderland.

Those plans were ripped up after paintwork was stripped back at the old Newton Aycliffe factory, which had become a popular roosting spot for pigeons in the six years it stood vacant, to reveal some faded numbers and letters.

Closer inspection opened up a forgotten chapter from Mr Finley’s family history, and gave birth to a new activity centre, sports bar and restaurant that commemorates thousands of North-East war heroes.

Unbeknown to Mr Finley, the Presswork site had been one of Aycliffe’s wartime Royal Ordnance Factories – designated ROF59 – which played a crucial role in making bombs and bullets that helped to win the war.

In the buildings – which later became the foundation for Aycliffe Business Park – 17,000 people, 90 per cent of them women, worked three shifts around the clock. Between them, from 1941 to 1945 they filled 700,000,000 shells – many of the casings were made at the smaller ROF21 Spennymoor.

When Lord Haw-Haw, the Nazi radio broadcaster and British turncoat, heard of the work done at the County Durham factories he dubbed the workers “the Angels of Aycliffe” and warned they would be bombed into submission by the Luftwaffe. His ominous warning never came true.

After the war private firms took over the site. Many of the original ROF buildings have since been demolished or modified beyond recognition. The Presswork building was one of those that survived the bulldozers.

“When we found writing on the wall I thought we needed to start digging into it, so we got a historian from the council to come and have a look. He said – ‘that is an important piece of history, it deserves to be preserved’,” Mr Finley says during a tour around the building on Durham Way South which has undergone a dramatic transformation, but the original walls have been saved for posterity.

About £1.1m has been spent to construct a new 70,000sq ft facility. The interior fit-out, includes a trampoline park, a restaurant and sports bar – named respectively The Blitz, and The Bunker, and climbing walls, including one of the biggest in the country, standing 20 metres tall. The brightly-coloured climbing walls run by Roackantics are undeniably impressive, but the most eye-catching parts of the building are the original features which offers a glimpse into the daily life of the Aycliffe Angels. As I enter ROF59 my eyes are drawn the right where layers of paint have been scraped off brickwork to reveal the messages: ‘Your air raid shelter’ and ‘4.5 Shells’.

“At one point I was going to knock the walls down and build separate units, but I thought – you can’t do that. This is a special place and you have to keep this as it is,” says Mr Finley.

That decision was made all the more poignant following the recent discovery that among the workers who had risked life and limb at ROF59 were his grandmother Olive, mother Dorothy, and aunts Winnie and Teresa.

“It wasn’t something the family talked about. People didn’t make a big deal about what they did in the war,” said Mr Finley, who only discovered about his family’s role at the site last month when he unearthed photographs of his mother and grandmother posing with fellow Angels.

The pictures stirred memories among Mr Finley’s relatives and long-forgotten stories began to pour forth.

“My uncle Tom told me about mornings before school he’d sit on the step waiting for my gran to come home from her nightshift and seeing that her hair had gone a funny colour,” he says, referring to chemicals in the explosive compounds which dyed workers’ skin and hair yellow.

Because of the risks of working with gunpowder and cordite, putting powder into shells and bullets, and assembling detonators and fuses, Aycliffe was split in two – the “cleanway”, where the bombs and bullets were manufactured, and the “dirtyway”, where staff ate or got changed for work.

Staff in the cleanway worked in spotless uniforms with rubber buttons to minimise the chances of stray sparks causing a disaster.

Despite the precautions there were accidents. Missing fingers and thumbs were a regular occurrence. Eight women lost their lives only six days before VE Day in an explosion which The Northern Echo reported could be heard for miles around.

In another tragedy, a young woman died weeks before she was due to be married.

Staff were supposed to be under 50 to work at the factory, but many lied about their age. Mary Dillon, of Low Beechburn, Crook, who claimed she was 49 was later discovered to be 69. In June 1944, the Echo reported that Mrs Dillon – then 70 – had received notice of the award of the British Empire Medal “for services rendered to her country”.

The paper noted: “For the two-and-a half years she has been at a war factory, she has topped the attendance record, having lost only two shifts.”

To maintain morale, staff were encouraged to hold singalongs during their meal breaks and music was played to the workers. Visitors included King George V and Queen Elizabeth and in May 1942 the Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Factory worker, Gladys Stoddart gave him a gift of a cigar and a kiss.

At the end of the war, however, the Aycliffe workers did not get so much as a letter of thanks for their efforts, and the ROF59 story faded from view.

It wasn’t until The Northern Echo campaigned in the 1990s for workers to be given recognition for their heroism that they were allowed to join in Remembrance Day parades, and it was not until Tony Blair –- MP for Sedgefield – became prime minister in 1997 that the Angels received official recognition.

In 2005 Aycliffe’s Hydro Polymers, another former munitions site, held a special event and invited surviving wartime workers to see the unveiling of a permanent sculpture within its grounds. The firm also started a website www.aycliffeangels.org.uk.

In addition, a memorial garden and stained-glass window commemorating the Angels can be found at St Clare’s Church, in Aycliffe town centre.

More recently, Sedgefield MP Phil Wilson, whose grandmother Isabella Woods was an Aycliffe Angel, campaigned for a badge to be awarded to the surviving munitions workers. He argued they deserved recognition similar to that afforded to the Bevin Boys, young men conscripted to work in coal mines during the war, and the Land Girls, female farm workers who replaced men away at war.

Mr Finley’s business venture, which HAS created about 20 jobs, is the latest attempt to tell the story of sacrifices made by local women and men.

With help from the council he applied to the Ministry of Defence for permission to use the ROF59 name. He plans to expand the wartime theme at the centre by painting a huge image of a spitfire on the wall beside the trampoline park; incorporating period pictures; hosting themed events, and educating young people about this important piece of North-East history.

The project has been a labour of love for Mr Finley, who clutches a folder of newspaper clippings and treasured family photographs as we walk towards the old Eaton Axles social club, which he thinks is where the picture of his grandmother and her workmates was taken. He holds up the black and white image and looks towards a grass bank – one of the earth mounds around the site that were used to absorb blast damage – which rises towards a nondescript brick structure. It bears all the trademarks of an ROF59 building – low standing walls constructed from single rows of bricks so that in the event of an accident, they would blow outwards.

Mr Finley is keen to know more. “If anyone has information about who else is in the pictures, or has memories of ROF59, we’d love to hear from them. What went on here should never be forgotten.”