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Page 16
"As to the women!"--he throws up his hands--"they're saving the country.
They don't mind what they do. Hours? They work ten and a half or, with
overtime, twelve hours a day, seven days a week. At least, that's what
they'd like to do. The Government are insisting on one Sunday--or two
Sundays--a month off. I don't say they're not right. But the women resent
it. '_We're_ not tired!' they say. And you look at them!--they're not
tired.
"If I go down to the shed and say: 'Girls!--there's a bit of work the
Government are pushing for--they say they must have--can you get it done?'
Why, they'll stay and get it done, and then pour out of the works,
laughing and singing. I can tell you of a surgical-dressing factory near
here, where for nearly a year the women never had a holiday. They simply
wouldn't take one. 'And what'll our men at the front do, if we go
holiday-making?'
"Last night" (the night of the Zeppelin raid) "the warning came to put out
lights. We daren't send them home. They sat in the dark among the
machines, singing, 'Keep the home fires burning,' 'Tipperary,' and the
like. I tell you, it made one a bit choky to hear them. They were thinking
of their sweethearts and husbands I'll be bound!--not of themselves."
In another minute or two we were walking through the new workshops. Often
as I have now seen this sight, so new to England, of a great engineering
workshop filled with women, it stirs me at the twentieth time little less
than it did at first. These girls and women of the Midlands and the north,
are a young and comely race. Their slight or rounded figures among the
forest of machines, the fair or golden hair of so many of them, their
grace of movement, bring a strange touch of beauty into a scene which has
already its own spell.
Muirhead Bone and Joseph Pennell have shown us what can be done in art
with these high workshops, with their intricate distances and the endless
crisscross of their belting, and their ranged machines. But the coming in
of the girls, in their close khaki caps and overalls, showing the many
pretty heads and slender necks, and the rows of light bending forms,
spaced in order beside their furnaces or lathes as far as the eye can
reach, has added a new element--something flower-like, to all this flash
of fire and steel, and to the grimness of war underlying it.
For the final meaning of it all is neither soft nor feminine! These
girls--at hot haste--are making fuses and cartridge-cases by the hundred
thousand, casting, pressing, drawing, and, in the special
danger-buildings, filling certain parts of the fuse with explosive. There
were about 4,000 of them to 5,000 men, when I saw the shop, and their
number has no doubt increased since; for the latest figures show that
about 15,000 fresh women workers are going into the munition works every
week. The men are steadily training them, and without the teaching and
co-operation of the men--without, that is, the surrender by the men of
some of their most cherished trade customs--the whole movement would have
been impossible.
As it is, by the sheer body of work the women have brought in, by the
deftness, energy, and enthusiasm they throw into the simpler but quite
indispensable processes, thereby setting the unskilled man free for the
Army, and the skilled man for work which women cannot do, Great Britain
has become possessed of new and vast resources of which she scarcely
dreamed a year ago; and so far as this war is a war of machinery--and we
all know what Germany's arsenals have done to make it so--its whole aspect
is now changing for us. The "eternal feminine" has made one more
startling incursion upon the normal web of things!
But on the "dilution" of labour, the burning question of the hour, I shall
have something to say in my next letter. Let me record another visit of
the same day to a small-arms factory of importance. Not many women here so
far, though the number is increasing, but look at the expansion figures
since last summer! A large, new factory added, on a bare field; 40,000
tons of excavation removed, two miles of new shops, sixty feet wide and
four floors high, the output in rifles quadrupled, and so on.
We climbed to the top floor of the new buildings and looked far and wide
over the town. Dotted over the tall roofs rose the national flags, marking
"controlled" factories, i.e., factories still given over a year ago to
one or other of the miscellaneous metal trades of the Midlands, and now
making fuse or shell for England's Armies, and under the control of the
British Government. One had a sudden sharp sense of the town's corporate
life, and of the spirit working in it everywhere for England's victory.
Before we descended, we watched the testing of a particular gun. I was to
hear its note on the actual battle-field a month later.
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