Chapter 5

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.

In July last year, for instance, munitions work in many quarters was 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.

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.