A QUICK glance at any of the millions of words written every day on social media will tell you that few of us post anything worth reading.

This will not come as any great revelation to my Twitter followers.

We are a generation of attention-seekers; people who will proudly Tweet a picture of a Sunday dinner, or issue press releases trumpeting an overseas jaunt which included an ‘heroic’ charity climb up Kilimanjaro.

Nothing it seems is off limits to the ‘look at me’ generation.

The contrast with the people who survived the Second World War could hardly be more pronounced.

I suppose it is understandable in the aftermath of a conflict where pretty much everybody had an amazing story to tell that people maintained a stoic silence, or preferred to talk about future plans than to relive past traumas.

I thought about this last week when I met up with Newton Aycliffe steelwork boss John Finley who has opened up a new activity centre, bar and restaurant in a converted metal works. It’s an impressive community facility but what sets it apart is that it is housed in a building where thousands of North-East people – most, but by no means all of them women - risked their lives making bullets and bombs for the war effort. The centre has been named ROF59 after the wartime ordnance factory which occupied buildings that went on to form the foundation of Aycliffe Business Park.

John Finley’s original plan was to convert the derelict Presswork Metals plant into a series of business units, but the discovery of wartime factory messages under the layers of paintwork prompted a rethink.

Once he began looking into the history of ROF59 Mr Finley also unearthed stories from his family history. It turns out that his grandmother, mother and two of his aunties worked at the munitions factory, but like most people after the war they remained tight-lipped about their heroic efforts.

They were among the 17,000 workers who became known as the Aycliffe Angels following a broadcast by the turncoat Lord Haw Haw who predicted the munitions site would be razed to the ground. Not for the first time the Nazi sympathiser was proved wrong.

If you visit the new ROF59 centre on South Durham Way you can see parts of the original walls which are emblazoned with messages dating back to the 1940s, including '4.5 shells' and 'Your air raid shelter'.

The people who worked there 70-odd years ago might have kept quiet about their achievements but our generation has a duty to tell their stories whenever we get the chance.

Follow me on Twitter @bizecho