As we celebrate the 80th anniversary of VE Day this week, let us finally commemorate the thousands of women who picked up the tools laid down after the men went off to war, and got to work building ships. I say finally as these brave, resilient and inspirational women have been ignored these past eight decades despite the crucial wartime role they played in the often fatal and undeniably backbreaking business of building ships.

These unassuming women, who traded aprons for overalls and shoes for steel toe-capped boots, worked as welders, riveters, platers, crane operators, machinists and labourers. They often learned on the job as ships needed to be replaced as fast as they were being sunk.

This meant many worked time and a half, before heading home to care for their families. And they did so against the backdrop of bombs being dropped, for the yards were Hitler’s primary target – no ships meant no transportation of troops, arms, food, or fuel. So then, why is it these women continue to be ignored by historians, publishers, broadcasters, and TV and filmmakers?

I’ve lost count of how many books, programmes and movies have been based on all our other wartime women workers: the Land Girls, the Lumber Jills, the Bletchley Girls, but nothing about our Shipyard Girls.

Although I have written a saga series, The Shipyard Girls, about a group of women welders doing wartime work in one of the country’s shipyards, and despite the novels consistently hitting the Sunday Times bestsellers chart, and selling over half a million copies, there’s been little written about the real shipyard women.

This is not only reprehensible, but an opportunity is being missed to provide much-needed role models for today’s generation of young women – to show them how women back then upended stereotypes and defied prejudice. Many shipyards refused to employ women and were only forced to do so when they had to due to labour shortages.

But even then, the women were referred to as ‘dilutees’, the inference being that one woman could not be as productive as one man; something which was proven to be wholly misguided. An article in 1942 reads: “I have been told of one woman who produced as much work as six men in the same time. And she was a married woman who after her day’s work in the factory went home and cleaned up the house and looked after her family.”

It is, however, the true grit and spirit of these women which must surely inspire the most. During my research, I found an article about shipyard worker Florence Collard, a welder in one of the Wearside yards. It read: “Mrs Collard is nothing if not plucky…she was bombed out at Plymouth and since returning to Sunderland has been bombed out here in a recent raid.

"She was trapped in the kitchen in her home but rescued. Though suffering from shock she went to her work at the shipyard for the afternoon shift maintaining that ‘work comes first’.” If that is not an indomitable spirit, I don’t know what is. Another woman, after receiving the heartbreaking news the man she loved had been killed in action, left her job in a department store, and signed up to become a riveter – one of the hardest, most labour-intensive jobs in a shipyard.

Hearing her story gave me goosebumps. I read in awe of another shipyard worker, a 19-year-old crane driver, whose operating cab became stuck at the end of the long jib (metal operating arm). She had to inch slowly along the jib (no safety helmet or equipment) after being told “just put one foot in front of the other, and don’t look down.”

She admitted being “absolutely terrified” but that didn’t stop her from going straight back to work after the cab had been fixed. The first statue to the women has recently been unveiled in Sunderland but, that aside, these women continue to be pretty much historically invisible.

Let’s have statues or commemorative public artworks in all the towns and cities the women toiled building ships. Let’s have some books published so that children can learn about them, as they do all the other wartime women. Let’s have podcasts, exhibitions, documentaries, TV dramas and films featuring these women. But most of all, let us take inspiration from their legacy and use it to shape and better our lives in this challenging, changing, and uncertain world in which we find ourselves.