The Devil's Porridge Museum began The Miracle Workers Project in January 2021. Generously funded by The Dumfries and Galloway Costal Communities Benefit Fund, this project aims to find out more about the people who worked at H. M. Factory Gretna during World War One. 30,000 people worked at the factory during the war, but no extant list of all employees exists and the Museum is reliant on evidence from scattered sources and archives. This research is being conducted by volunteers, both in person and remote. The online outputs of this research are threefold:
To centralise the existing information on factory employees and the new research this project uncovers into one place; a bespoke database.
To make this database accessible, by uploading it to the Museum website and making it searchable.
To share the outputs of our research widely, thereby increasing the renown of HM Factory Gretna and the Museum's collections. This will be done via social media and blogposts, and also on Wikipedia, where biographies of the more notable people connected with the factory will be uploaded. 12,000 of the people who worked at the factory were women, and this project will go some way to addressing the gender gap on Wikipedia, and increase the representation of historical women online.[1] In addition, by teaching our volunteers to write and edit Wikipedia articles, we will be helping in the development of a digital skillset.
In addition to this, the museum will also create an exhibition and film with the research done in this project which will highlight the importance of volunteer researchers.Workers at HM Factory Gretna unloading the nitrating pans
