Allies would have gone under, must have gone under, at the first shock of
Germany. What the workmen of England did in the first year of the war in
her docks and shipyards, history will tell some day.
"What's wrong with the men!" cried a Glasgow employer indignantly to me,
one evening as, quite unknown the one to the other, we were nearing one of
the towns on the Clyde. "What was done on the Clyde, in the first months
of the war, should never be forgotten by this country. Working from six to
nine every day till they dropped with fatigue--and Sundays, too--drinking
just to keep themselves going--too tired to eat or sleep--that's what it
was--I saw it!"
I, too, have seen that utter fatigue stamped on a certain percentage of
faces through the Midlands, or the districts of the Tyne and the
Clyde--fatigue which is yet indomitable, which never gives way. How fresh,
beside that look, are the faces of the women, for whom workshop life is
new! In its presence one forgets all hostile criticism, all talk of
strikes and drink, of trade-union difficulties, and the endless worries of
the employers.
The English workman is not tractable material--far from it--and he is not
imaginative; except in the persons of some of his chosen leaders, he has
never seen a ruined French or Flemish village, and he was slow to realise
the bitterness of that silence of the guns on the front, when ammunition
runs short, and lives must pay. But he has sent his hundreds of thousands
to the fighting line; there are a million and a half of him now working at
munitions, and it is he, in a comradeship with the brain workers, the
scientific intelligence of the nation, closer than any he has yet known,
and lately, with the new and astonishing help of women--it is he, after
all, who is "delivering the goods," he who is now piling the great
arsenals and private works with guns and shells, with bombs, rifles, and
machine-guns, he who is working night and day in the shipyards, he who is
teaching the rising army of women their work, and making new and firm
friends, through the national emergency, whether in the trenches or the
workshops, with other classes and types in the nation, hitherto little
known to him, to whom he, too, is perhaps a revelation.
There will be a new wind blowing through England when this war is done.
Not only will the scientific intelligence, the general education, and the
industrial plant of the nation have gained enormously from this huge
impetus of war; but men and women, employers and employed, shaken perforce
out of their old grooves, will look at each other surely with new eyes, in
a world which has not been steeped for nothing in effort and sacrifice, in
common griefs and a common passion of will.
II
All over England, then, the same quadruple process has now been going on
for months:
The steady enlargement of existing armament and munition works, national
or private.
The transformation of a host of other engineering businesses into munition
works.
The co-ordination of a vast number of small workshops dealing with the
innumerable metal industries of ordinary commerce, so as to make them feed
the larger engineering works, with all those minor parts of the gun or
shell, which such shops had the power to make.
The putting up of entirely new workshops--National Workshops--directly
controlled by the new Ministry, under the Munitions Acts.
Let me take you through a few typical scenes.
It was on February 1st, the day after the Zeppelin raid of January 31st,
that I left a house in the north where I had been seeing one of the
country-house convalescent hospitals, to which Englishwomen and English
wealth are giving themselves everywhere without stint, and made my way by
train, through a dark and murky afternoon, towards a Midland town. The
news of the raid was so far vague. The newspapers of the morning gave no
names or details. I was not aware that I was passing through towns where
women and children in back streets had been cruelly and wantonly killed
the night before, where a brewery had been bombed, and the windows of a
train broken, in order that the German public might be fed on ridiculous
lies about the destruction of Liverpool docks and the wrecking of "English
industry." "English industry lies in ruins," said the _Hamburger
Nachrichten_ complacently. Marvellous paper! Just after reading its
remarks, I was driving down the streets of the great industrial centre I
had come to see--a town which the murderers of the night before would have
been glad indeed to hit. As it was, "English industry" seemed tolerably
active amid its "ruins." The clumsy falsehoods of the German official
reports and the German newspapers affect me strangely! It is not so much
their lack of truth as their lack of the ironic, the satiric sense, which
is a certain protection, after all, even amid the tragedy of war. We have
a tolerable British conceit of ourselves, no doubt, and in war we make
foolish or boasting statements about the future, because, in spite of all
our grumbling, we are at bottom a nation of optimists, and apt to see
things as we wish. But this sturdy or fatuous lying about the past--the
"sinking" of the _Lion_, the "capture" of Fort Vaux, or the "bombardment"
of Liverpool docks--is really beyond us. Our sense of ridicule, if nothing
else, forbids--the instinct of an old people with an old and humourous
literature. These leading articles of the _Hamburger Nachrichten_, the
sermons of German pastors, and those amazing manifestoes of German
professors, flying straight in the face of historic documents--"scraps of
paper"--which are there, none the less, to all time--for us, these things
are only not comic because, to the spiritual eye, they are written in
blood. But to return to the "ruins," and this "English industry" which
during the last six months has taken on so grim an aspect for Germany.
My guide, an official of the Ministry, stops the motor, and we turn down a
newly made road, leading towards a mass of spreading building on the left.
"A year ago," says my companion--"this was all green fields. Now the
company is employing, instead of 3,500 work-people, about three times the
number, of whom a large proportion are women. Its output has been
quadrupled, and the experiment of introducing women has been a complete
success."
We pass up a fine oak staircase to the new offices, and I am soon
listening to the report of the works superintendent. A spare, powerful man
with the eyes of one in whom life burns fast, he leans, his hands in his
pockets, against the wall of his office, talking easily and well. He
himself has not had a day's holiday for ten months, never sleeping more
than five and a half hours, with the telephone at his bedhead, and waking
to instant work when the moment for waking comes. His view of his workmen
is critical. It is the view of one consumed with "realisation," face to
face with those who don't "realise." "But the raid will do a deal of
good," he says cheerfully.
"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.
An afternoon train takes me on to another great town, with some very
ancient institutions, which have done very modern service in the war. I
spent my evening in talking with my host, a steel manufacturer identified
with the life of the city, but serving also on one of the central
committees of the Ministry in London. Labour and politics, the chances of
the war, America and American feeling towards us, the task of the new
Minister of Munitions, the temper of English and Scotch workmen, the flux
into which all manufacturing conditions have been thrown by the war, and
how far old landmarks can be restored after it--we talked hard on these
and many other topics, till I must break it off--unwillingly!--to get some
sleep and write some notes.
Next day took me deep into the very central current of "England's
Effort"--so far as this great phase of it at any rate is concerned. In
this town, even more than in the city I had just left, one felt the throb
of the nation's rising power, concentrated, orderly, determined. Every
single engineering business in a town of engineers was working for the
war. Every manufacturer of any importance was doing his best for the
Government, some in connection with the new Ministry, some with the
Admiralty, some with the War Office. As for the leading firms of the city,
the record of growth, of a mounting energy by day and night, was nothing
short of bewildering. Take these few impressions of a long day, as they
come back to me.
First, a great steel warehouse, full of raw steel of many sorts and kinds,
bayonet steel, rifle steel, shell steel, stacked in every available corner
and against every possible wall--all sold, every bit of it, and ready to
be shipped--some to the Colonies, some to our Allies, with peremptory
orders coming in as to which the harassed head of the firm could only
shake his head with a despairing "impossible!"
Then some hours in a famous works, under the guidance of the managing
director, one of those men, shrewd, indefatigable, humane, in whose
company one learns what it is, in spite of all our supposed deficiencies,
that makes the secret of England's industrial tenacity. An elderly
Scotchman, very plainly marked by the labour and strain of the preceding
eighteen months, but still steadily keeping his head and his temper,
showing the signs of an Evangelical tradition in his strong dislike for
Sunday work, his evident care for his work-people--men and women--and his
just and sympathetic tone towards the labour with which he has to
deal--such is my companion.
He has a wonderful story to tell: "In September, 1914, we were called upon
to manufacture a large extra number of field-guns. We had neither
buildings nor machinery for the order. However, we set to work. We took
down seven dwelling-houses; in three weeks we were whitewashing the walls
of our new workshop and laying in the machinery. My idea was to make so
many guns. The Government asked for four times as many. So we took down
more houses, and built another much larger shop. The work was finished in
ten weeks. Five other large workshops were put up last year, all built
with lightning speed, and everywhere additions have been made to the
machinery in every department wherever it was possible to put machines."
As to their thousands of workmen, Mr. C. has no complaints to make.
"They have been steadily working anything from 60 to 80 hours per week;
the average is 64.29 hours per week, and the average time lost only 3.51
per cent. A little while ago, a certain union put forward a claim for an
advance in wages. We had to decline it, but as the meeting came to an end,
the trade-union secretary said:
"'Of course, we are disappointed, and we shall no doubt return to the
matter again. But whether you concede the advance of wages or not, our
members will continue to do their level best, believing that they are not
only working for themselves, but helping the Government and helping our
soldiers to wage this war to a successful conclusion.'"
And the manager adds his belief that this is the spirit which prevails
"among the work-people generally."
Before we plunge into the main works, however, my guide takes me to see a
recent venture, organised since the war, in which he clearly takes a
special interest. An old warehouse bought, so to speak, overnight, and
equipped next morning, has been turned into a small workshop for shell
production--employing between three and four hundred girls, with the
number of skilled men necessary to keep the new unskilled labour going.
These girls are working on the eight hours' shift system; and working so
well that a not uncommon wage among them--on piece-work, of course--runs
to somewhere between two and three pounds a week.
"But there is much more than money in it," says the kind-faced woman
superintendent, as we step into her little office out of the noise, to
talk a little. "The girls are perfectly aware that they are 'doing their
bit,' that they are standing by their men in the trenches."
This testimony indeed is universal. There is patriotism in this grim
work, and affection, and a new and honourable self-consciousness. Girls
and women look up and smile as a visitor passes. They presume that he
or she is there for some useful purpose connected with the war, and
their expression seems to say: "Yes, we are all in it!--we know very
well what _we_ are doing, and what a difference we are making. Go
and tell our boys ..."
The interest of this workshop lay, of course, in the fact that it was a
sample of innumerable others, as quickly organised and as efficiently
worked, now spreading over the Midlands and the north. As to the main
works belonging to the same great firm, such things have been often
described; but one sees them to-day with new eyes, as part of a struggle
which is one with the very life of England. Acres and acres of ground
covered by huge workshops new and old, by interlacing railway lines and
moving trolleys. Gone is all the vast miscellaneous engineering work of
peace. The war has swallowed everything.
I have a vision of a great building, where huge naval guns are being
lowered from the annealing furnace above into the hardening oil-tank
below, or where in the depths of a great pit, with lights and men moving
at the bottom, I see as I stoop over the edge, a jacket being shrunk upon
another similar monster, hanging perpendicularly below me.
Close by are the forging-shops whence come the howitzers and the huge
naval shells. Watch the giant pincers that lift the red-hot ingots and
drop them into the stamping presses. Man directs; but one might think the
tools themselves intelligent, like those golden automata of old that
Hephæstus made, to run and wait upon the gods of Olympus. Down drops the
punch. There is a burst of flame, as though the molten steel rebelled, and
out comes the shell or the howitzer in the rough, nosed and hollowed, and
ready for the turning.
The men here are great, powerful fellows, blanched with heat and labour;
amid the flame and smoke of the forges one sees them as typical figures in
the national struggle, linked to those Dreadnoughts in the North Sea, and
to those lines in Flanders and Picardy where Britain holds her enemy at
bay. Everywhere the same intensity of effort, whether in the men or in
those directing them. And what delicate and responsible processes!
In the next shop, with its rows of shining guns, I stop to look at a great
gun apparently turning itself. No workman is visible for the moment. The
process goes on automatically, the bright steel emerging under the tool
that here, too, seems alive. Close to it is a man winding steel wire, or
rather braid, on a 15-inch gun; beyond again there are workmen and
inspectors testing and gauging another similar giant. Look down this
shining tube and watch the gauging, now with callipers, now with a rubber
device which takes the impression of the rifling and reveals any defect.
The gauging turns upon the ten-thousandth part of an inch, and any mistake
or flaw may mean the lives of men....
We turn out into a pale sunshine. The morning work is over, and the men
are trooping into the canteens for dinner--and we look in a moment to see
for ourselves how good a meal it is. At luncheon, afterwards, in the
Directors' Offices, I am able to talk with the leading citizens of the
great town.
One of them writes some careful notes for me. Their report of labour
conditions is excellent. "No organised strikes and few cessations of work
to report. Overtime is being freely worked. Little or no drunkenness, and
that at a time when the average earnings of many classes of workmen are
two or three times above the normal level. The methods introduced in the
twenty years before the war--conference and discussion--have practically
settled all difficulties between employers and employed, in these parts at
any rate, during this time of England's trial."
After luncheon we diverge to pay another all too brief visit to a
well-known firm. The managing director gives me some wonderful figures of
a new shell factory they are just putting up. It was begun in September,
1915. Since then 2,000 tons of steelwork has been erected, and 200 out of
1,200 machines required have been received and fixed. Four thousand to
5,000 hands will be ultimately employed.
All the actual production off the machines _will be done by women_--and
this, although the works are intended for a heavy class of shell,
60-pounder high explosive. Women are already showing their
capacity--helped by mechanical devices--to deal with this large type of
shell; and the workshop when in full working order is intended for an
output of a million shell per annum.
I drive on, overshadowed by these figures. _"Per annum!"_ The little
common words haunt the ear intolerably. Surely before one more year is
over, this horror under which we live will be lifted from Europe! Britain,
a victorious Britain, will be at peace, and women's hands will have
something else to do than making high-explosive shell. But, meanwhile,
there is no other way. The country's call has gone out, clear and stern,
and her daughters are coming in their thousands to meet it, from loom and
house and shop.
A little later, in a great board-room, I find the Munitions Committee
gathered. Its function, of course, is to help the new Ministry in
organising the war work of the town. In the case of the larger firms, the
committee has been chiefly busy in trying to replace labour withdrawn by
the war. It has been getting skilled men back from the trenches, and
advising the Ministry as to the "badging" of munition workers. It has
itself, through its command of certain scientific workshops, been
manufacturing gauges and testing materials.
It has turned the electroplate workshops of the town on to making steel
helmets, and in general has been "working in" the smaller engineering
concerns so as to make them feed the larger ones. This process here, as
everywhere, is a very educating one. The shops employed on bicycle and
ordinary motor work have, as a rule, little idea of the extreme accuracy
required in munition work. The idea of working to the thousandth of an
inch seems to them absurd; but they have to learn to work to the
ten-thousandth, and beyond! The war will leave behind it greatly raised
standards of work in England!--that every one agrees.
And I carry away with me as a last remembrance of this great town and its
activities two recollections--one of a university man doing some highly
skilled work on a particularly fine gauge: "If you ask me what I have
been doing for the last few weeks, I can only tell you that I have been
working like a nigger and have done nothing! Patience!--that's all there
is to say." And another of a "transformed" shop of moderate size, where an
active and able man, after giving up the whole of his ordinary business,
has thrown himself into the provision, within his powers, of the most
pressing war needs, as he came across them.