Amazing images show women and boys making aircraft wings… and Hitchcock fans might recognise the building

• Women and young boys started making planes in the Hammersmith factory Waring & Gillow at the onset of WWI
• It also played a crucial role in WWII producing Mosquito bombers – the fastest aircraft in the world at the time
• The building was featured in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1936 film Secret Agent as a Swiss chocolate factory

By JESSICA CHIA FOR MAILONLINE
When John Waring and Robert Gillow set up their furniture business in 1903, little did they know that one day their factory would help Britain win both world wars.
Their factory in Hammersmith, west London, was used to manufacture cabinets and other high-end furnishings but all that changed at the outbreak of the First World War – when they instead started producing aircraft.
These amazing photographs show women and boys hard at work as they put together biplanes and triplanes.
And years later, the Waring & Gillow factory would also make the iconic Mosquito light bomber, which was put to devastating effect in the Second World War.