actually held up for want of gauges. Mr. D. made something like 10,000, to
the great assistance of certain new Government shops. Then the Government
asked for a particular kind of gun. Mr. D. undertook 1,000, and has
already delivered 400. Tools for shell-making are _everywhere_ wanted in
the rush of the huge demand. Mr. D. has been making them diligently. This
is just one example among hundreds of how a great industry is adapting
itself to the fiery needs of war.
But the dark has come, and I must catch my train. As I speed through a
vast industrial district I find in the evening papers hideous details of
the Zeppelin raid, which give a peculiar passion and poignancy to my
recollections of a crowded day--and peculiar interest, also, to the talk
of an able representative of the Ministry of Munitions, who is travelling
with me, and endeavouring to give me a connected view of the whole new
organisation. As he speaks, my thoughts travel to the English battle-line,
to the trenches and casualty clearing-stations behind it, to distant
Russia; and I think of the Prime Minister's statement in Parliament--that
the supply of munitions, for all its marvellous increase, is not yet equal
to the demand. New shops, new workers, new efforts--England is producing
them now unceasingly, she must go on producing them. There must be no
pause or slackening. There will be none.
I am going now to see--after the Midlands--what the English and Scotch
north is doing to swell the stream. And in my next letter there will be
plenty to say about "Dilution" of labour, about wages, and drink, and some
other burning topics of the moment.
III
Dear H.
It is now three months since Mr. Lloyd George made his startling speech,
as Munitions Minister, in the House of Commons in which, as he wound up
his review of his new department, he declared: "Unless we quicken our
movements, damnation will fall on the sacred cause for which so much
gallant blood has flowed!" The passion of this peroration was like the
fret of a river in flood chafing at some obstacle in its course. Generally
speaking, the obstacle gives way. In this case Mr. George's obstacle had
begun to give way long before December 21st--the date of the speech. The
flood had been pushing at it with increasing force since the foundation of
the Ministry of Munitions in the preceding summer. But the crumbling
process was not quick enough for Great Britain's needs, or for the energy
of her Minister.
Hence the outspoken speech of December 21st, supported by Mr. Asquith's
grave words of a few weeks later. "We cannot go on," said the Prime
Minister in effect, "depending upon foreign countries for our munitions.
We haven't the ships to spare to bring them home, and the cost is too
great. We _must_ make them ourselves." "Yes--and _quicker_!" Mr. Lloyd
George had already said, with a sharp emphasis, meant to "hustle" that
portion of the nation which still required hustling; overpainting his
picture, no doubt, but with quite legitimate rhetoric, in order to produce
his effect.
The result of that fresh "hustling" was the appointment of the Dilution
Commissioners, a second Munitions Act amending the first, and a vast
expansion all over the country of the organisation which had seemed so
vast before. It was not till midwinter, in the very midst of the new and
immense effort I have been describing, that the Minister of Munitions and
those working with him convinced themselves that, without another resolute
push, the barrier across the stream of the nation's will might still
fatally hold it back. More and more men were wanted every week--in the
Army and the workshops--and there were not men to go round. The second
push had to be given--it was given--and it still firmly persists.
In the spring of 1915, the executives of the leading trade-unions had
promised the Government the relaxation of their trade rules for the period
of the war. Many of the trade-union leaders--Mr. Barnes, Mr. Henderson,
Mr. Hodge, and many others--have worked magnificently in this sense, and
many unions have been thoroughly loyal throughout their ranks to the
pledge given in their name. The iron-moulders, the shipwrights, the
brassworkers may be specially mentioned. But in the trades mostly
concerned with ammunition, there were certain places and areas where the
men themselves, as distinct from their responsible leaders, offered a
dogged, though often disguised resistance. Personally, I think that any
one at all accustomed to try and look at labour questions from the point
of view of labour will understand the men while heartily sympathising with
the Minister, who was determined to get "the goods" and has succeeded in
getting them. Here, in talking of "the men" I except that small
revolutionary element among them which has no country, and exists in all
countries. And I except, too, instances which certainly are to be found,
though rarely, of what one might call a purely mean and overreaching
temper on the part of workmen--taking advantage of the nation's need, as
some of the less responsible employers have no doubt, also, taken
advantage of it. But, in general, it seems to me, there has been an honest
struggle in the minds of thousands of workmen between what appears to them
the necessary protection of their standards of life--laboriously attained
through long effort--and the call of the war. And that the overwhelming
majority of the workmen concerned with munitions should have patriotically
and triumphantly decided this struggle as they have--under pressure, no
doubt, but under no such pressure as exists in a conscripted, still more
in an invaded, nation--may rank, I think, when all is said, with the
raising of our voluntary Armies as another striking chapter in the book of
_England's Effort_.
In this chapter, then, Dilution will always take a leading place.
What is Dilution?
It means, of course, that under the sharp analysis of necessity much
engineering work, generally reckoned as "skilled" work, and reserved to
"skilled" workmen, by a number of union regulations, is seen to be capable
of solution into various processes, some of which can be sorted out from
the others as within the capacity of the unskilled or semiskilled worker.
By so dividing them up, and using the superior labour with economy, only
where it is really necessary, it can be made to go infinitely further; and
the inferior or untrained labour can then be brought into work where
nobody supposed it could be used, where, in fact, it never has been used.
Obvious enough, perhaps. But the idea had to be applied in haste to living
people--employers, many of whom shrank from reorganising their workshops
and changing all their methods at a moment's notice; and workmen looking
forward with consternation to being outnumbered, by ten to one, in their
own workshops, by women. When I was in the Midlands and the North, at the
end of January and in early February, Dilution was still an unsettled
question in some of the most important districts. One of the greatest
employers in the country writes to me to-day (March 24): "Since January,
we have passed through several critical moments, but, eventually, the
principle was accepted, and Dilution is being introduced as fast as
convenient. For this we have largely to thank an admirable Commission (Sir
Croydon Marks, Mr. Barnes, and Mr. Shackleton) which was sent down to
interview employers and employed. Their tact and acumen were remarkable.
Speaking personally, I cannot help believing that there is a better
understanding between masters and men now than has existed in my memory."
A great achievement that!--for both employers and employed--for the
Minister also who appointed the Commission and thus set the huge stone
rolling yet another leap upon its way.
It will be readily seen how much depends also on the tact of the
individual employer. That employer has constantly done best who has called
his men into council with him, and thrown himself on their patriotism and
good sense. I take the following passage from an interesting report by a
very shrewd observer,[A] printed in one of the northern newspapers. It
describes an employer as saying:
I was told by the Ministry that I should have to double my
output. Labour was scarce and I consulted a deputation of
the men about it. I told them the problem and said I should
be glad of suggestions. I told them that we should either
have to get men or women, and I asked them for their
co-operation, as there would be a great deal of teaching to
be done. "Probably," I said, "you would like to find the
men?" They agreed to try. I gave them a week, and at the end
of a week they came to me and said they would rather have
women. I said to them: "Then you must all pull together."
They gave me their word. Right from the beginning they have
done their level best to help, and things have gone on
perfectly. On one occasion, a woman complained that the man
directing her was "working against her." I called the men's
committee together, said the employer. I told them the
facts, and they have dealt with the offender themselves.
[A] _Yorkshire Observer_, February 1, 1916.
The general system now followed in the shell factories is to put so many
skilled men in charge of so many lathes worked by women workers. Each
skilled man, who teaches the women, sets the tools, and keeps the machines
in running order, oversees eight, ten, or more machines. But sometimes the
comradeship is much closer. For instance (I quote again the witness
mentioned above), in a machine tool shop, i.e., a shop for the making of
tools used in shell production, one of the most highly skilled parts of
the business, you may now see a man, with a woman to help him, operating
two lathes. If the woman falls into any difficulty the man comes to help
her. Both can earn more money than each could earn separately, and the
skilled man who formerly worked the second lathe is released. In the same
shop a woman watched a skilled man doing slot-drilling--a process in which
thousandths of an inch matter--for a fortnight. Now she runs the machine
herself by day, while the man works it on the night shift. One woman in
this shop is "able to do her own tool-setting." The observer thinks she
must be the only woman tool-setter in the country, and he drops the remark
that her capacity and will may have something to do with the fact that she
has a husband at the front! Near by, as part of the same works, which are
not specialised, but engaged in _general_ engineering, is a bomb shop
staffed by women, which is now sending 3,000 bombs a week to the trenches.
Women are also doing gun-breech work of the most delicate and responsible
kind under the guidance of a skilled overseer. One of the women at this
work was formerly a charwoman. She has never yet broken a tool. All over
the works, indeed, the labour of women and unskilled men is being utilised
in the same scientific way. Thus the area of the works has been doubled in
a few months, without the engagement of a single additional skilled man
from outside. "We have made the men take an interest in the women," say
the employers. "That is the secret of our success. We care nothing at all
about the money, we are all for the output. If the men think you are going
to exploit women and cheapen the work, the scheme is crabbed right away."
I myself came across the effect of this suspicion in the minds of the
workmen in the case of a large Yorkshire shell factory, where the
employers at once detected and slew it. This great workshop, formerly used
for railway work, now employs some 1,300 women, with a small staff of
skilled men. The women work forty-five hours a week in eight-hour
shifts--the men fifty-three hours on twelve-hour shifts. There is no
difficulty whatever in obtaining a full supply of women's labour--indeed,
the factory has now a waiting-list of 500. Nor has there been any
difficulty with the men in regard to the women's work. With the exception
of two operations, which are thought too heavy for them, all the machines
are run by women.
But when the factory began, the employers very soon detected that it was
running below its possible output. There was a curious lack of briskness
in the work--a curious constraint among the new workers. Yet the employers
were certain that the women were keen, and their labour potentially
efficient. They put their heads together, and posted up a notice in the
factory to the effect that whatever might be the increase in the output of
piece-work, the piece-work rate would not be altered. Instantly the
atmosphere began to clear, the pace of the machines began to mount.
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."
Some day, perhaps, this "new industry"--as our ancestors talked of a "new
learning"--this swift, astonishing development of industrial faculty among
our people, especially among our women, will bear other and rich fruit for
England under a cleared sky. It is impossible that it should pass by
without effect, profound effect upon our national life. But at present it
has one meaning and one only--_war_!
Talk to these girls and women. This woman has lost her son--that one her
husband. This one has a brother home on leave, and is rejoicing in the
return of her husband from the trenches, as a skilled man, indispensable
in the shop; another has friends in the places and among the people which
suffered in the last Zeppelin raid. She speaks of it with tight lips. Was
it she who chalked the inscription found by the Lady Superintendent on a
lathe some nights ago--"_Done fourteen to-day. Beat that if you can, you
devils_!"
No!--under this fast-spreading industry, with its suggestion of good
management and high wages, there is the beat of no ordinary impulse. Some
feel it much more than others; but, says the clever and kindly
Superintendent I have already quoted: "The majority are very decidedly
working from the point of view of doing something for their country.... A
great many of the fuse women are earning for the first time.... The more I
see of them all, the better I like them." And then follow some interesting
comments on the relation of the more educated and refined women among them
to the skilled mechanics--two national types that have perhaps never met
in such close working contact before. One's thoughts begin to follow out
some of the possible social results of this national movement.
[Illustration: A Forest of Shells in a Corner of One of England's Great
Shell Filling Factories.]
[Illustration: A Light Railway Bringing Up Ammunition.]
II
But now the Midlands and the Yorkshire towns are behind me. The train
hurries on through a sunny afternoon, and I look through some notes sent
me by an expert in the great campaign. Some of them represent its humours.
Here is a perfectly true story, which shows an Englishman with "a move
on," not unworthy of your side of the water.
A father and son, both men of tremendous energy, were the chiefs of a very
large factory, which had been already extensively added to. The father
lived in a house alongside the works. One day business took him into the
neighbouring county, whilst the son came up to London on munition work. On
the father's return he was astonished to see a furniture van removing the
contents of his house. The son emerged. He had already signed a contract
for a new factory on the site of his father's house; the materials of the
house were sold and the furniture half gone. After a first start, the
father took it in true Yorkshire fashion--wasting no words, and
apparently proud of his son!
Here we are at last, in the true north--crossing a river, with a climbing
town beyond, its tiled roofs wreathed in smoke, through which the
afternoon lights are playing. I am carried off to a friend's house. Some
directors of the great works I am come to see look in to make a kindly
plan for the morrow, and in the evening, I find myself sitting next one of
the most illustrious of modern inventors, with that touch of _dream_ in
manner and look which so often goes with scientific discovery. The
invention of this gentle and courteous man has affected every vessel of
any size afloat, whether for war or trade, and the whole electrical
development of the world. The fact was to be driven home even to my
feminine ignorance of mechanics when, a fortnight later, the captain of a
Flag-ship and I were hanging over the huge shaft leading down to the
engine-rooms of the Super-dreadnought, and my companion was explaining to
me something of the driving power of the ship. But on this first meeting,
how much I might have asked of the kind, great man beside me, and was too
preoccupied to ask! May the opportunity be retrieved some day! My head was
really full of the overwhelming facts, whether of labour or of output,
relating to this world-famous place, which were being discussed around me.
I do not name the place, because the banishment of names, whether of
persons or places, has been part of the plan of these articles. But one
can no more disguise it by writing round it than one could disguise
Windsor Castle by any description that was not ridiculous. Many a German
officer has walked through these works, I imagine, before the war, smoking
the cigarette of peace with their Directors, and inwardly ruminating
strange thoughts. If any such comes across these few lines, what I have
written will, I think, do England no harm.
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.