CHAPTER II: TRAINING THE MUNITION WORKER

THE QUINTESSENCE OF THE WORK--THE INSTRUCTIONAL FACTORY--FIRST STEPS IN INDUSTRIAL LIFE

When, in answer to the demand for shells and more shells, factories were built, or adapted to the requirements of war, it was soon found that a supply of suitable labour must be ensured, if the maximum output was to be maintained. The existing practice of the engineering shops, by which a boy arrived by gradual steps, counted in years, from apprenticeship to the work of a skilled operator, was obviously impossible where an immediate demand for thousands of employees of varying efficiency had to be fulfilled. The needs of the Navy and Army further complicated the problem by the withdrawal of men of all degrees of skill from factory to battlefield.

The discovery of an untapped reservoir of labour in women's work, and the adaptation of a larger proportion of machines to a 'fool-proof' standard, certainly eased the situation, yet the problem remained of the immediate provision of workers able to undertake 'advanced', as well as simple work, in the engineering shops. Factory employers were from the outset alive to the situation, and at once adopted measures for the training of new-comers within their shops, but harassed as the managers were by the supreme need for output, it was hardly possible to develop extensive schemes for training within the factory gates. Hence, arose a movement throughout the United Kingdom among the governing bodies of many institutions of University rank, among Local Education Authorities, and among various feminist groups, to make use of existing Technical Schools and Institutions for the training of recruits in engineering work.

The effort was at first mainly confined to the instruction of men in elementary machine work, and the London County Council may fairly claim to have acted as pioneer in this connexion. Yet, as early as August 1915, a group of women connected with the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (of which Mrs. Fawcett, widow of a former Postmaster-General, is the president) decided to finance a scheme for the training of women oxy-acetylene welders, converting for this purpose a small workshop run by a woman silversmith.

It was soon observed by the Ministry of Munitions that these sporadic efforts--sometimes successful beyond expectation, and sometimes failing for want of funds, or for lack of intimacy between training-ground and factory employer--must be co-ordinated, if they were to tackle successfully the growing task imposed by war conditions. The conception of a Training Section for factory workers within the Ministry of Munitions arose, took root. The section was established in the early autumn of 1915.

In the October of that year, authority to finance approved training schemes throughout the country was given to the new department. Some fifty colleges and schools, undertaking independent schemes, were then brought into touch with the Ministry, and steps were taken to develop the existing systems. Equipment was thereby improved, recruiting of students stimulated, and a scheme for the payment of maintenance during training--such as the Manhattan Schools in New York had previously introduced to social investigators in this country--was established. The extension of the courses of training from instruction in simple processes to such advanced engineering work as lead-burning, tool-setting, and gauge-making soon followed, and was accompanied by necessary theoretical instruction in the methods of calculation of fine measurements.

_The Quintessence of the Work_

For these advanced classes, men alone were at first eligible as students, women being only instructed at the outset in elementary parts of the work. In the early days, the women were invited 'to do their bit', by learning how to bore, how to drill, how to plane, how to shape, and above all, how to work to size. The chief battle of the Training Centre with regard to the instruction of women was then, and still remains, the implanting of a feeling for exactitude in persons accustomed to measure ribbons or lace within a margin of a quarter of a yard or so, or to prepare food by a guess-work mixture of ingredients. I remember, at the beginning of a course of training for women, how an instructor at a large metropolitan Centre remarked that 'ninety-nine per cent. of the new students do not know what accuracy means', and he detailed how difficult it was to instil into their mind 'that quintessence of their work'.

Scientific methods of tuition, helped no doubt by women's proverbial patience, have, however, enabled the lesson to be learned after a few weeks' intensive training. The courses last but six to eight weeks and, at the conclusion of the carefully graduated tasks, it is not too much to say that the success of the women has been, in an overwhelming number of cases, surprising both to teachers and pupils.

I have before me a batch of letters from factory employers, written in the early period of the training schemes. They all bear testimony to the value of the outside instruction. One manager notes how the trained women from the Schools were able 'to become producers almost at once'; another states that the drafting of the women students from School to factory has enabled the work of munitions to be carried on 'with greater expedition than would otherwise have been the case', and yet another, with a scarcely concealed note of astonishment, relates that his students were able to be engaged at once on 'all kinds of machinery, capstan lathes, turning lathes, milling and wheel cutting machinery'.

This discovery of the employer, of the potentialities of women's work in the engineering trades, soon led to a development of the instruction of female students in the Training Centres; more advanced machine work was added to the curriculum, as well as tuition in aeroplane woodwork and construction, in core-making and moulding, in draughtsmanship and electrical work, in optical-instrument making, including the delicate and highly-skilled work of lens and prism making.

New Training Centres are constantly being opened in provincial areas, the instruction being adapted to the needs of local factories. There are now (December, 1917) over forty training schools for engineering work in Great Britain, as well as nine instructional factories and workshops, and the proportion of women to men trained in all the processes may be reckoned roughly as two to one.

The system of instruction is based, in some of the Centres, on the general principle that the School undertakes the preliminary work of tuition in the simpler engineering processes; the Instructional Factory, or workshop, specializing in the more skilled processes, acts as a clearing-house for promising students from the schools. The urgency of warfare does not, however, permit the application of any hard-and-fast rules. I have seen specimens of some of the most 'advanced' work produced in a School; indeed, the delicate work of lens polishing and centring, the intricacies of engineering draughtsmanship, the precise art of tool-setting and gauge-making have become specialisms of the Schools in certain localities.

As I write, the face of an eager girl of 21 years recurs to memory. She was showing me, the other day, a master gauge produced at a School in the Eastern counties. 'I made it all myself,' she said joyfully, 'dead exact, and all the other gauges of this size in the School are made from it. I have just been appointed assistant instructor in gauge-making.' When it is recalled that the deviation in the measurements of a gauge is only tolerated within such limits as a 3/10000 part of an inch, the production in a School of a master gauge, 'dead exact' in all its dimensions, is a proof that the student has already gone some way in the mastery of the craft of the engineer.

_The Instructional Factory_

On the other hand, the Instructional Factory is often forced by war conditions to enrol raw recruits who seem likely material for the urgent needs of surrounding factories. In such cases, the candidate is placed on trial for a week or two in the Instructional Workshop, as in the School. If, at the close of the period of probation, she is deemed unsuitable, she is advised at that preliminary stage to return to her former occupation.

Speaking generally, the rejects are extraordinarily few, and although it would be premature to draw definite conclusions, the experience of the Training Section suggests that there is considerable latent capacity for engineering work in a large number of women. A tour of the Instructional Workshops emphasizes the point; everywhere, women may be seen mastering in the short intensive course the one advanced job for which each is being trained. In the Instructional Workshop, the atmosphere of a School is exchanged for that of a factory, the conditions of a modern engineering shop being reflected within its precincts. Thus the students 'clock on and off' on arrival and on departure, observe factory shifts, work on actual commercial jobs, obtain their tools from an attached store, and so on. The work varies in these Instructional Factories as in the engineering shop of the commercial world.

In one section of such a hall of tuition you may see the women intent on the production of screws, or bolts, or nuts; in another part, such objects as fuse needles may be in the course of manufacture. You stop to see the magic which is answerable for the birth of the tiny factor which shall detonate the explosive, and you are amazed to find that a fuse needle requires six tools for its production and eight to nine gauges for testing the accuracy of its measurements. Or, you may perhaps pause before a machine which is turning out tiny grub screws. To see a rod of steel offer itself, as it were, to the rightful instruments on a complicated machine to impress the thread and slit, to watch it proceeding on its way until a tiny section is divided and a complete screw is handed over to a tray outside the machine, is, to the uninitiated, a miracle in itself.

To see the whole of these complicated processes guided and operated by a smiling girl makes one hopeful for the national industries of the future. Setters-up of tools are at work in another section of the same Instructional Factory and at other machines are students grinding, milling, or profiling.

You may then visit another Instructional Factory to find that aircraft is the specialty. I recall one such training-ground in a bay of an aeroplane factory. There the girls learn almost every part of aircraft production, from the handling of the tiny hammers used on the woodwork for the body and wings, to the assembling, or putting together the tested parts. In this training factory, a system prevails of lectures by the practical instructors on the use of necessary tools; questions from the students are encouraged at the close of the lecture, and, I was informed, when on one occasion I was one of the audience, that the saving of the instructor's time by the adoption of this method was beyond expected results.

Again, you may visit an Instructional Factory where foundry work is included in the curriculum, or where advanced machine work is a feature. I have stood in one Instructional Workshop where some 600 machines were whirring simultaneously, and where the spirit of energy and goodwill of both students and instructors seemed as tangible as the metal objects produced. In this institution all the accomplished work is for production; night as well as day shifts are worked, and the needs of our armies, or those of our Allies, are frankly discussed with the operators. There is no occasion for other incentive: raw recruits, students from the Schools, discharged soldiers from the Front, men unfit for active service, all these denizens of the training-shop vie with each other to produce a maximum output.

It speaks volumes for this workshop that in spite of the continual changes of operators--each set of students remaining only for a course of six to eight weeks--it is entirely maintained on a commercial basis. To reach such a standard in these circumstances is to imply that the heroism of the workshop has become an ingrained habit in operators and staff.

_First Steps in Industrial Life_

I remember watching in this training-ground the manufacture of small aero-engine parts, exact in dimensions to within the smallest limits of tolerance. I put a query as to the wastage of material in such an operation, when handled by comparative new-comers. 'Scrapping from this process', replied the production manager with pride, 'does not exceed a total average of one per cent.' The women at work at the time had come from the most varied occupations. A large proportion had never worked outside their own home, others were domestic servants, cooks, housemaids, and so on, others were dressmakers from small towns, and one, I recall, was an assistant from a spa, where she had been engaged handing out 'waters' to invalids. 'It is not the rank of society from which the student is drawn that matters,' remarked an instructor; 'it is the personality of the individual that counts.'

Every care has been taken by the Ministry of Munitions to make it easy for women of all classes to participate in their schemes of instruction. The middle class girl who has never undertaken independent work, the woman who has always lived and worked within the shelter of her own home, undoubtedly felt in many cases debarred from entering industrial life. The necessity of living away from her family, in order to enter a Training-School, the absence of home conditions in school or factory, the dread of an entirely masculine superintendence, all helped to strengthen artificial barriers between potential students and the needed engineering work. The Training Section, watching the development of its schemes, became aware of the necessity of making arrangements for students from the Welfare point of view, and an organization has thus developed by which the first steps in industrial life are made easy for the most apprehensive of new-comers.

Girl students by rail are met by a responsible woman official and are accompanied to suitable lodgings, or to hostels. In the event of pressure in accommodation, the new student is introduced to temporary apartments, or to a 'Clearing Hostel', where she awaits in comfort a vacancy. In the large Training Centres, a woman supervisor is in charge. She makes all arrangements as to the provision of meals, rest-rooms, cloak-rooms, First-Aid centres, and so on, and is ready to advise the women students on all points relating to their personal interests.

Women students are also enabled to wear a khaki uniform, as members of the Mechanical Unit of the Women's Legion, a privilege found to be of distinct value to girls unaccustomed to steering an independent course in the more boisterous streams of life. The appreciation of the students of the safe-guarding of their individual desires crops out in unexpected places. In a handful of correspondence from students, one gleans such remarks as the following:

'Mrs. H. never spares herself any trouble as long as she can make things pleasant for me, she considers it her "war work" to make munition workers happy, and it is very nice to meet people that appreciate what we are doing for our country.'...

'We were met at the station by the works motor. All at once we turned up an avenue of lime-trees and drew up at the door of our country estate. It is a real lovely house and we revel in the glories of fresh air, lawns and gardens, good beds and well-spread tables. We cross a field to the works. Dinner and tea await us when we get here, and there is a well-stocked vegetable garden to give us fresh vegetables, so we all feel indeed that our lines are fallen in pleasant places, and we are very grateful.'

In these ways a bridge has been built by the Ministry of Munitions between the normal life of the women in this country and the work in the munitions factory.