The War on All Fronts: England's Effort Part 4

In this chapter, then, Dilution will always take a leading place.

What is Dilution?

It means, of course, that under the sharp a.n.a.lysis 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 n.o.body 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 pa.s.sed 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 ac.u.men 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 pa.s.sage 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 sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.ls 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. .h.i.therto 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 sh.e.l.l 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 a.s.sistant, clerks, shop a.s.sistants, 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 sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.l_--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 sh.e.l.ls, and the average time per sh.e.l.l was twenty-three minutes. No wonder that in the great warehouse adjoining the workshop one saw the sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.l 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 Sh.e.l.l 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.l. It was begun in August, and was in work in a few weeks. In September a still larger factory--for still larger sh.e.l.ls--(how these demands ill.u.s.trate the course of the war!--how they are themselves ill.u.s.trated 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 sh.e.l.l 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 bra.s.swork, 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 pa.s.s 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A Forest of Sh.e.l.ls in a Corner of One of England's Great Sh.e.l.l Filling Factories.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 ill.u.s.trious 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 sh.e.l.l delivered during 1915 was--in tons--fourteen times as much as that of 1914. The weight of sh.e.l.l 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 bra.s.s 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 sh.e.l.ls, 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 compet.i.tion 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 Sat.u.r.days free. To the eye of the ordinary visitor they show few signs of fatigue.

After the fuse factory we pa.s.s through the high-explosive factory, where 250 girls are at work in a number of isolated wooden sheds filling 18-pounder sh.e.l.l with high explosive. The bra.s.s cartridge-case is being filled with cordite, bundles of what look like thin brown sticks, and the sh.e.l.l itself, including its central gaine or tube, with the various deadly explosives we have seen prepared in the "danger buildings." The sh.e.l.l is fitted into the cartridge-case, the primer and the fuse screwed on. It is now ready to be fired.

I stand and look at boxes of sh.e.l.ls, packed, and about to go straight to the front. A train is waiting close by to take them the first stage on their journey. I little thought then that I should see these boxes, or their fellows, next, on the endless ranks of ammunition lorries behind the fighting lines in France, and that within a fortnight I should myself stand by and see one of those sh.e.l.ls fired from a British gun, little more than a mile from Neuve Chapelle.

But here are the women and girls trooping out to dinner. A sweet-faced Superintendent comes to talk to me. "They are not as strong as the men,"

she says, pointing to the long lines of girls, "but what they lack in strength they make up in patriotic spirit." I speak to two educated women, who turn out to be High School mistresses from a town that has been several times visited by Zeppelins. "We just felt we must come and help to kill Germans," they say quietly. "All we mind is getting up at five-thirty every morning. Oh, no! it is not too tiring."

Afterwards?--I remember one long procession of stately shops, with their high windows, their floors crowded with machines, their roofs lined with cranes, the flame of the forges, and the smoke of the fizzling steel lighting up the dark groups of men, the huge howitzer sh.e.l.ls, red-hot, swinging in mid-air, and the same sh.e.l.ls, tamed and gleaming, on the great lathes that rough and bore and finish them. Here are sh.e.l.l for the _Queen Elizabeth_ guns!--the biggest sh.e.l.l made. This shop had been put up by good luck just as the war began. Its output of steel has increased from 80 tons a week to 1,040.

Then another huge fuse shop, quite new, where 1,400 girls in one shift are at work--said to be the largest fuse shop known. And on the following morning, an endless spectacle of war work--gun-carriages, naval turrets, torpedo tubes, armed railway carriages, small Hotchkiss guns for merchant ships, tool-making shops, gauge shops--and so on for ever. In the tool-making shops the output has risen from 44,000 to 3,000,000 a year!

And meanwhile I have not seen anything, and shall not have time to see anything of the famous shipyards of the firm. But with regard to them, all that it is necessary to remember is that before the war they were capable of berthing twenty ships at once, from the largest battleship downward; and we have Mr. Balfour's word for it as to what has happened, since the war, in the naval shipyards of this country. "We have added _a million tons to the Navy--and we have doubled its personnel_."

And now let me record two final sayings.

One from a manager of a department: