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Page 24
But here are some of the figures that can be given. The shop area of the
ammunition shops alone has been increased _eightfold_ since the outbreak
of war. The total weight of shell delivered during 1915 was--in
tons--fourteen times as much as that of 1914. The weight of shell
delivered per week, as between December, 1914, and December, 1915, has
risen nearly ten times. The number of work-people, in these shops, men and
women, had risen (a) as compared with the month in which war broke out, to
a figure eight times as great; (b) as compared with December, 1914, to one
between three and four times as great. And over the whole vast enterprise,
shipyards, gun shops, ammunition shops, with all kinds of naval and other
machinery used in war, the numbers of work-people employed had increased
since 1913 more than 200 per cent. They, with their families, equal the
population of a great city--you may see a new town rising to meet their
needs on the farther side of the river.
As to Dilution, it is now accepted by the men, who said when it was
proposed to them: "Why didn't you come to us six months ago?"
And it is working wonders here as elsewhere. For instance, a particular
portion of the breech mechanism of a gun used to take one hour and twenty
minutes to make. On the Dilution plan it is done on a capstan, and takes
six minutes. Where 500 women were employed before the war, there are now
close on 9,000, and there will be thousands more, requiring one skilled
man as tool-setter to about nine or ten women. In a great gun-carriage
shop, "what used to be done in two years is now done in one month." In
another, two tons of brass were used before the war; a common figure now
is twenty-one. A large milling shop, now entirely worked by men, is to be
given up immediately to women. And so on.
Dilution, it seems to me, is breaking down a number of labour conventions
which no longer answer to the real conditions of the engineering trades.
The pressure of the war is doing a real service to both employers and
employed by the simplification and overhauling it is everywhere bringing
about.
As to the problem of what is to be done with the women after the war, one
may safely leave it to the future. It is probably bound up with that other
problem of the great new workshops springing up everywhere, and the huge
new plants laid down. One thinks of the rapid recovery of French trade
after the war of 1870, and of the far more rapid rate--after forty years
of machine and transport development, at which the industry of the Allied
countries may possibly recover the ravages of the present war, when once
peace is signed. In that recovery, how great a part may yet be played by
these war workshops!--transformed to the uses of peace; by their crowds of
work-people, and by the hitherto unused intelligence they are everywhere
evoking and training among both men and women.
As for the following day, my impressions, looking back, seem to be all a
variant on a well-known Greek chorus, which hymns the amazing--the
"terrible"--cleverness of Man! Seafaring, tillage, house-building,
horse-taming, so muses Sophocles, two thousand three hundred years ago;
how did man ever find them out? "Wonders are many, but the most wonderful
thing is man! _Only against death has he no resource_."
_Intelligence_--and _death_! They are written everywhere in these endless
workshops, devoted to the fiercest purposes of war. First of all, we visit
the "danger buildings" in the fuse factory, where mostly women are
employed. About 500 women are at work here, on different processes
connected with the delicate mechanism and filling of the fuse and gaine,
some of which are dangerous. Detonator work, for instance. The Lady
Superintendent selects for it specially steady and careful women or girls,
who are paid at time-and-a-quarter rate. Only about eight girls are
allowed in each room. The girls here all wear--for protection--green
muslin veils and gloves. It gives them a curious, ghastly look, that fits
the occupation. For they are making small pellets for the charging of
shells, out of a high-explosive powder. Each girl uses a small copper
ladle to take the powder out of a box before her, and puts it into a
press which stamps it into a tiny block, looking like ivory. She holds her
hand over a little tray of water lest any of the powder should escape.
What the explosive and death-dealing power of it is, it does not do to
think about.
In another room a fresh group of girls are handling a black powder for
another part of the detonator, and because of the irritant nature of the
powder, are wearing white bandages round the nose and mouth. There is
great competition for these rooms, the Superintendent says! The girls in
them work on two shifts of ten and one-half hours each, and would resent a
change to a shorter shift. They have one hour for dinner, half an hour for
tea, a cup of tea in the middle of the morning--and the whole of Saturdays
free. To the eye of the ordinary visitor they show few signs of fatigue.
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