Tell today's young riveting story of our Shipyard Girls

AS WE celebrate the 80th anniversary of VE Day this week, let us finally commemorate the thousands of women who picked up the tools laid down after the men went off to war, and got to work building ships.

- Amanda Revell Walton

I say finally as these brave, resilient and inspirational women have been ignored these past eight decades despite the crucial wartime role they played in the often fatal and undeniably backbreaking business of building ships.

These unassuming women, who traded aprons for overalls and shoes for steel toe-capped boots, worked as welders, riveters, platers, crane operators, machinists and labourers. They often learned on the job as ships needed to be replaced as fast as they were being sunk. This meant many worked time and a half, before heading home to care for their families.

And they did so against the backdrop of bombs being dropped, for the yards were Hitler's primary target — no ships meant no transportation of troops, arms, food or fuel. So then, why is it these women continue to be ignored by historians, publishers, broadcasters, and TV and filmmakers?

I'VE LOST count of how many books, programmes and movies have been based on all our other wartime women workers: the Land Girls, the Lumber Jills, the Bletchley Girls, but nothing about our Shipyard Girls.