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Page 22
It was a factory in which the work was new, the introduction of women was
new, and the workers strange to each other, and for the most part strange
to their employers. A small leaven of distrust on the part of the men
workers was enough, and the women were soon influenced. Luckily, the
mischief was as quickly scotched. Men and women began to do their best,
the output of the factory--which had been planned for 14,000 shells a
week--ran up to 20,000, and everything has gone smoothly since.
Let me now, however, describe another effect of Dilution--the employment
of unskilled _men_ on operations hitherto included in skilled engineering.
On the day after the factory I have just described, my journey took me to
another town close by, where my guide--a Director of one of the largest
and best-known steel and engineering works in the kingdom--showed me a new
shell factory filled with 800 to 900 men, all "medically unfit" for the
Army, and almost all drawn from the small trades and professions of the
town, especially from those which had been hard hit by the war. Among
those I talked to I found a keeper of bathing-machines, a publican's
assistant, clerks, shop assistants, three clergy--these latter going home
for their Sunday duty, and giving their wages to the Red Cross--unemployed
architects, and the like.
I cannot recall any shop which made a greater impression of energy, of a
spirit behind the work, than this shop. In its inspecting-room I found a
graduate from Yale. "I had to join in the fight," he said quietly--"this
was the best way I could think of." And it was noticeable besides for some
remarkable machines, which your country had also sent us.
In other shell factories a single lathe carries through one process,
interminably repeated, sometimes two, possibly three. But here, with the
exception of the fixing and drilling of the copper band, and a few minor
operations, one lathe _made the shell_--cut, bored, roughed, turned,
nosed, and threaded it, so that it dropped out, all but the finished
thing--minus, of course, the fuse. The steel pole introduced at the
beginning of the process made nine shells, and the average time per shell
was twenty-three minutes. No wonder that in the great warehouse adjoining
the workshop one saw the shell heaps piling up in their tens of
thousands--only to be rushed off week by week, incessantly, to the front.
The introduction of these machines had been largely the work of an able
Irish manager, who described to me the intense anxiety with which he had
watched their first putting up and testing, lest the vast expenditure
incurred should have been in any degree thrown away. His cheerful looks
and the shell warehouse told the sequel. When I next met him it was at a
northern station in company with his Director. They were then apparently
in search of new machinery! The workshop I had seen was being given over
to women, and the men were moving on to heavier work. And this is the kind
of process which is going on over the length and breadth of industrial
England.
So far, however, I have described the expansion or adaptation of firms
already existing. But the country is now being covered with another and
new type of workshop--the National Shell factories--which are founded,
financed, and run by the Ministry of Munitions. The English Government is
now by far the greatest engineering employer in the world.
Let me take an illustration from a Yorkshire town--a town where this
Government engineering is rapidly absorbing everything but the textile
factories. A young and most competent Engineer officer is the Government
head of the factory. The work was begun last July, by the help of borrowed
lathes, in a building which had been used for painting railway-carriages;
its first shell was completed last August. The staff last June was 1. It
is now about 200, and the employees nearly 2,500.
A month after the first factory was opened, the Government asked for
another--for larger shell. It was begun in August, and was in work in a
few weeks. In September a still larger factory--for still larger
shells--(how these demands illustrate the course of the war!--how they are
themselves illustrated by the history of Verdun!) was seen to be
necessary. It was begun in September, and is now running. Almost all the
machines used in the factory have been made in the town itself, and about
100 small firms, making shell parts--fuses primers, gaines, etc.--have
been grouped round the main firm, and are every day sending in their work
to the factory to be tested, put together, and delivered.
No factory made a better impression upon me than this one. The large, airy
building with its cheerful lighting; the girls in their dark-blue caps and
overalls, their long and comely lines reminding one of some processional
effect in a Florentine picture; the high proportion of good looks, even of
delicate beauty, among them; the upper galleries with their tables piled
with glittering brasswork, amid which move the quick, trained hands of
the women--if one could have forgotten for a moment the meaning of it all,
one might have applied to it Carlyle's description of a great school, as
"a temple of industrious peace."
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