Truly one of the most beautiful woman ever photographed on the British Isles.

Aside from this 1941-42 beauty, the context of the picture always gets me. As these are STEN Mark 2s, I suspect this picture was taken within 18-24 months of Dunkirk. The average Brit was facing unprecedented food rationing, limited coal allotments and the fear the U-Boats would cut off the meager supply available.

My guess is this was a small garage-sized machine shop that had made bicycles or lunch boxes prewar. Now they were shifting to war work, in this case probably final assembly of parts from six or seven other small manufacturers. The UK wasn’t anywhere close to the industrial assembly line capacity of the U.S., and like Japan, Italy and other combatants was trying to take a piece-work economy into something much more integrated.

My grandmother, around the same age as this lady, spent WW2 as a nurse. She always talked about how her generation felt swept up in the war but also generationally going in the same direction-winning the war. She felt older generations had more nuanced views and experiences, but the youth were unified in a way she never saw after. My guess is this young lady felt the same way - never planned to be making machine guns, but she did her part in the war effort.