Dame Laura Knight Ruby Loftus screwing a Breech-ring 1943

Dimpled-cheeked and fresh-faced, her auburn curls spilling out from under a bright green hairnet, the eponymous Ruby Loftus [1] stares intently and resolutely at the complex machining work in progress. She is making the screw of the breech ring for a Bofors gun, a double-barrelled 40 mm anti-aircraft weapon [2]. Her slender oil-glistened hands rest lightly but firmly on the lathe and demonstrate her skill and authority, while the surrounding callipers, spanners, blocks and other ‘tools of the trade’ confirm her status. Behind her a dozen anonymous women are hard at work on their benches. There is one token male. Ruby's rich auburn tresses (the other women all wear red turbans or full snood caps), smooth brow, pencilled eyebrows and lipstick accentuate her femininity (no protective eyewear to spoil the impact), while her rolled-up sleeves and grubby oil stains stress the masculinity of her work. Decked out patriotically in a red neckerchief, a white apron and blue overalls, she is a pretty young woman doing a man's job—elegant and heroic at the same time. ‘Beauty as duty’ was one of the Ministry of Supply's many propaganda messages [3] and Laura Knight's Ruby Loftus was voted ‘picture of the year’ at London's Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (1943) achieving cult status as an icon of wartime endeavour [4]. Laura Knight painted life with simple and sensitive honesty and her skills in capturing movement, form and colour excel in this painting [5]. However, she makes little or no attempt at metaphor and some perceived this lack of feeling weakened the picture's powerful message. Others judged Knight's portrayal to be too feminine and to undermine Ruby's exceptional engineering skills [6]. Nevertheless, despite its ‘double entendre’ title, the painting demonstrated that both women (artist and subject) had proved themselves in a very traditional male environment, showing ‘masculine genius and feminine courage’ [7]. More than 2 million predominantly young women were recruited into jobs previously dominated by men in Britain's essential war industries [8]; and Ruby, an ordinary 21-year-old woman from an unremarkable background made such an impression at the Royal Ordnance Factory in Newport, Gwent (where 1200 women worked) that a deputation of irate male toolmakers from the Woolwich Arsenal visited Wales to confirm her skills [9]. Laura Knight was born at Long Eaton, Derbyshire (1877), in impoverished circumstances but learned to draw and paint at a very early age from her art-teacher mother and entered the Nottingham School of Art in 1890. Later with her painter husband Harold Knight, she joined artist communities in Staithes, near Whitby, Yorkshire, and afterwards at Newlyn in Cornwall. During the 1920s and 1930s, her subjects ranged from Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and Bertram Mills Circus to portraits of Anna Pavlova, George Bernard Shaw and Paul Scofield as well as ceramics for Clarice Cliff and Wedgwood and glassware for Stuart Crystal. She was the first woman artist to be appointed a Dame of the British Empire (1929) and the first to be elected a full member of the Royal Academy (1936) [5]. After the war, Dame Laura attended Nuremberg as the official war artist at the War Crime Trials [10]. After the death of her husband (1961), she still continued painting until her last days aged 92 (1970) [11]. After the war, Ruby emigrated to Canada, having turned down a British government-sponsored engineering course in favour of growing apples in Kelowna, British Colombia, Canada. She returned briefly to London in 1962 and visited the Imperial War Museum to meet with Dame Laura and to see her portrait again. She died of multiple sclerosis in 2004 aged 82. Ruby seems to have abandoned the lathe in favour of the crop sprayer but did she leave any lasting legacy? The Women's Engineering Society (through its Lady Finneston Awards) has enabled many women to take up engineering courses in British universities and colleges but <10% of UK engineers are women, and in a recent survey, 26% of male engineers thought that women did not perform as well as men in all fields and at all seniorities, while 40% thought under-representation of women did not matter [12]. As one candidate short-listed for The Young Woman Engineer of the Year Award 2006 said ‘the general attitude still remains “if you're an engineer and a woman, then you must be really good at what you do”’ [13]. The Kaiser Chiefs’ question to another Ruby seems somehow very appropriate: ‘Could it be could it be, that you're joking with me’ [14].

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