Museum
4 Base Workshop R
EME is perhaps most associated with repair but their role in keeping the punch in the Army’s fist often leads to ingenuity on unexpected fronts. You might think of course of the new designs, the improvisation (or bodging), or the UORs, but at the start of the war in the desert, REME proved their reliability and support capabilities simply by producing spares. 4 Base Workshop was originally an RAOC Base Ordnance Workshop (BOW). Formed June 1940 in Abbassia, it was indeed the very first BOW in the Middle East and became the base camp and mobilising unit of most workshop establishments formed thereafter, including for example the famous 7th Armoured Division Workshop. Although it started with a single factory, it soon grew alongside demand and took over nearby premises, some of which maintained their original form whilst others had to be converted. In 1942, 4 BOW comprised 74 officers, 1,599 OR and approximately 13,000 civilians but as this was considered slightly unwieldy, the decision was made to split the workshop into two. The split coincided roughly with the formation of REME and so 4 BOW became 4 Base Workshop, responsible for all manufacturing, whilst repair and maintenance went to 533 Base Workshop. 4 Base Workshop continued to grow however and in 1944 it had 39 officers, 740 ORs and 8,040 civilians with 14 sub-workshops. 4 Base Workshop produced everything from tank parts (both British and American) and gun gauges to cushions and “crates
(various)”. From Jan 42 to Dec 43, they produced 242,462 miscellaneous MT spares, 103,560 ammo boxes, 195,843 trestles, and 179,650 “various items in leather and canvas” - truly a remarkable spread and quantity of items. As well as these standard items, it was also involved with creating new pattern equipment such as those involved in deception and in mine detection. It should be noted that these numbers, approximately 2,473,000 items in total, may in fact be lower than the actual production figures. For starters, there’s very little mention of electrical equipment despite the fact that 15 Sub-workshop employed 381 people on electrical items from 3hp motors to electrical ovens. Furthermore, 533 Base Workshop who, as we know, were focused on maintenance and repair, manufactured over 2,000,000 items themselves - whilst these are admittedly likely to have only been small components such as nuts and bolts, it still suggests a disparity between the recorded and expected output of 4 Base Workshop. Manufacturing on this scale was required for several reasons. The main one is that equipment simply hadn’t been scaled sufficiently (in the British case) or at all (mostly with regards American equipment), which then combined with a lack of shipping space for spares - before the fall of France, troops there had priority for demands, and afterwards all space was devoted to men and equipment for the continued push, rather than spares there or
Machine Shop in No 9 Sub Workshop 42 craftsmaneditor@reme-rhq.org.uk
