V
THE WOMEN
Ever since I commenced my tour of the war works I have been developing a most whole-hearted admiration for the women workers, and the Front may “spring smartly to attention” and give them the full “Present arms!” salute for the way they are buckling down to their job. This applies to women of all grades and classes too. I read in a local paper the other day a brief paragraph about a presentation made by fellow-students to a girl who has apparently dropped her college career, taken a course of instruction in munition work, and had just been given a berth in a large works in a munition city. Lady S – (the widow of a brave man whose name is a “household word” throughout the Empire) is working in a munition factory, her title and position unknown to her workmates. If she drew wages according to her value, she would be getting many pounds where she gets shillings, because she has by constant talks with her workmates impressed upon them and explained to them that they are working for far more than a weekly wage, that they are backing up their men out Front, are saving British lives, are helping their fighting men to beat the Germans, are themselves fighting and racing the German workshops for the prize of final victory. The result of all her explaining is recorded in plain figures in that workroom’s output, in the increase of 30 per cent. the figures show. I met by chance at a restaurant lunch-table the other day a girl obviously of gentle birth and upbringing. She left the table at five minutes to the hour to be back to the factory when the whistle blew, and before she went she paid for her lunch about, I should estimate, as much as she would earn for her full day’s work. My being in uniform led her to ask a question and to tell about a brother at the Front and briefly what she has done and is doing – helping in the delivery of Derby “pink paper” forms, working in a soldier’s free buffet, making Red Cross supplies, and now, because she believed it to be the most useful and urgent, munition work. She starts work at 6 a.m. sharp every morning, she puts in some eighty hours’ work a week, and is openly proud of the fact that she has not “missed a quarter” on any day since she started. I am mentioning these instances, not for the honour and glory of any individual or any class, but merely to make it plain that many women are in munition works, not from any need or wish for pay, but solely and simply because “King and Country need them.” I have been told, when looking at a room filled with hundreds of women workers, that they represented every sort of class and occupation, and that every one of them was new to the workshops. There were ex-typists, milliners, cooks, housemaids, students, charwomen, theatre attendants, many wives and sisters of soldiers, many girls and women “of independent means.”
And their work is good, is, according to the opinion of every works manager I asked, excellent beyond expectation. One manager had no words sufficiently warm to praise. “Knock bottom oot o’ t’ men,” he said emphatically and repeatedly. At this particular factory women were doing the whole work of making 18-pounder shells. One girl, who a few months ago had never seen a lathe outside a picture-book, is turning the copper driving bands and does 250 bands each ten-hour shift – and that, I am told, is up to or over a good man’s average. These bands have to be pressed by a “banding press” on to the shells, and a girl puts 500 an hour through the machine. Now, without describing the operation in detail, this means that the girl lifts a shell from beside her, places it in the machine, where it gets a first squeeze, lifts it an inch or so and twists it round for a second squeeze, and lifts it out of the machine on to a table-shelf beside it. She does the three lifts – in, and twist, and out – 500 times per hour, 5,000 times a day. That is no light physical feat, and it speaks volumes for the energy and the close attention paid, without a halt or break, to her work. There are no men in that factory except a handful of skilled engineers who are kept employed on tool-making and setting, sharpening cutters, erecting machinery, and other work that only skilled men can do. There is one room full of these men – The Room of the Old Men, I called it – that I want to tell you about presently. It is a tale to be proud of. For the most part the women workers I have seen were on lighter work – shell-fuses, rifle cartridges, filling or charging, gauging – but this manager assured me there was no doubt about the women’s ability to handle anything up to the 18-pounder shell (I saw some on the heavier 4·5 shells later in another place), showed me how and where his women loaded shells from the store into the trucks on the railway siding by hand, and lifted out and up and in, and packed and stowed eight tons an hour. And, finally, he boasted with honest and legitimate pride that his girls did at least as good and, on official figures, cheaper shells than any other factory in the kingdom. And the output is to be exactly quadrupled within a few weeks – not “may be,” or “hoped to be,” mark you, but, on cut-and-dried, certain, and deliberate plans, will be.
At another factory I stood in a glass-sided passage and looked out over a vast shop blazing with light, humming with belts and machinery, packed with lathes and their women workers, brilliant with the vivid colouring of the flags – Union Jacks and Standards – that were hoisted proudly over the head of each girl and her machine. The girls were in khaki overalls and caps, and the massed colours of the khaki, of the Allied flags’ scarlet and blue and white and orange and black, the glistening steely-blue of the machinery, the warm touches of the red copper and yellow brass, all under the bright glow of the electrics, all jostling and astir and quivering with life and animated movement, made up a picture as thrilling and alive and heart-warming as any I have seen throughout the war works. This is a brand-new factory – shops, machinery, and hands all collected and built from the foundations up since the war. There is no exact maximum output in view there, apparently. It is simply growing as fast as new shops can be built, machinery installed, hands found and taught and employed. There are 7,000 girls at work there now; they average 87½ hours’ work a week, and they are “as keen as razors, as steady as rocks, as regular and reliable as the factory hooter.”
Some of the work I have watched the women on is light and might properly be described as women’s work. In one place, for instance, there is a long row of girls sitting over a bench under the blaze of electric lamps. They were piecing together four tiny scraps of metal which at the end of the bench are being fused into one, making one whole fuse-part which when complete is about the size of a sixpence and the thickness of two pennies. One of the four pieces of metal is about as flimsy as a clipping from a lady’s little finger-nail. How exactly the fitting and brazing or soldering must be done was very clearly proved by a box full of these particular fuse-parts that was shown me. There were 40,000 of these completed parts and they were all “scrapped” as useless because through a mistake in the making of one of the gauges they were wrong by half a thousandth of an inch. It is hard to find a comparison which adequately conveys the meaning of ½ a 1,000th. Perhaps the nearest would be a fine hair-line, the upstroke of a pen. In this same works – they were originally telephone-makers, although now the original place is swamped in newly risen workshops – a large room is filled with girls gauging or measuring the various finished parts, just as in other factories I saw thousands of girls similarly engaged on all sorts and descriptions of parts from shell bodies downwards. The method of gauging is, roughly, that a girl has two gauges on which to work, a “go” and a “won’t go.” One girl gauges a part for length, say, another for width, another for depth, and if in any of these operations the part “won’t go,” won’t pass through the gauge where it should “go” or does go through the under-size or “won’t go” gauge, that part is immediately outcast and returned for alteration or to the melting-pot. In this factory there are something like 30,000 fuses on the move flowing through the works, and on each fuse and its parts there are about a hundred gaugings to be done. At another place – a motor works in pre-War days – I was told that no girl had been employed by the firm until a few months ago. Now every possible job they can handle is being given to them. Everywhere I heard the same tale from employers, managers, overseers, teachers, from every man who had had any dealings with the women workers – they are intelligent, eager and quick to learn, easy to teach; they are punctual and regular in attendance; they are tractable and obedient and don’t “raise trouble”; they are amazingly keen on their work, take an interest in it, stick closely to it, and honestly do their best all the time. For munition work which is within their handling capacity they are apparently ideal workers. From the point of view of a firm’s or an industry’s progress and advancement – this may have little to do with war work, but is, I think, interesting – most of the engineers I spoke with agreed that the women are not as good as the men, because the women have not the initiative or inventiveness, would not think of or suggest any alteration or improvement in machinery or details of their work; would, for instance, go on for ever taking ten movements of hands and arms in lifting, moving, and laying down each part if they had first been taught to do it in ten movements, and quite ignoring any discovery they themselves might make that the same thing could be done in nine moves or less. And it appears they have little ambition, don’t tire of one simple job and worry to be promoted to a less easy, higher-standard one as men do. Offsetting all this, we must remember that women are new to such work, and everyone admits it utterly surprising they should have picked it up so completely and well. For their keenness and the intelligent handling of their tools I need no hearsay evidence. I saw enough of it myself. In shop after shop I moved about amongst these women, saw them pulling levers, turning hand-wheels, sliding cutters to and from their exact positions, handling complicated-looking lathes and presses and machines as if they had been born and reared to the job, although actually 99 per cent. had never had hand on any machine more intricate than a washhouse mangle. They are doing work, too, that a good many men would hesitate about tackling. Personally, I should be sorry, for instance, to be doing the riveting on of shell base-plates with a riveting machine which delivers its hammer-blows at a rate of about 2,000 a minute, a fiercely rapid roar of jarring blows that made one’s ears and temples throb to hear for a few minutes. Yet women to whom I spoke on that work smiled cheerfully and merely remarked that “you get used to it in time.” Perhaps, but I don’t envy them the time till they do.
Everywhere I saw the women, fresh young girls and elderly toil-worn women alike, closely intent on their work, wasting no fraction of a second between the completion of one tool’s cutting and its withdrawal and the substitution of the next tool – and such fractions are the more precious when their loss means waste of a valuable lathe’s time as well as the operator’s – obviously driving the work, giving hand and mind and eye to getting through it quickly and getting on to the next. Among many impressions I retain very clearly of the women’s deftness and hustling intentness there is one I remember especially. A young and pretty girl was testing shell-fuses, and as I stopped with the manager beside her she flicked one quick upward glance from her work to us and went on swiftly and steadily with her job. The manager explained to me what she was doing. A box of fuses stood at her left hand; fixed to the bench before her was an instrument which the touch on a lever set revolving rapidly, and a little to the right and beyond this stood a sort of clock-face with a pointer moving round and indicating the speed of the machine’s revolutions. The operator picked up a fuse, slipped it in the revolving-wheel centre, and started the machine. “Watch the centre of the fuse,” said the manager. I watched it spinning until it lost all shape or outline and became a mere blur. Then —click, a tiny black hole appeared in the centre, the operator switched off the current, slipped out the fuse, and put it aside as “passed correct”! “This time,” said the manager, “try to see what figure the clock-finger indicates at the instant the black hole appears.” It was harder to do than it sounds, simply because that girl was so impishly quick at seeing the two things in the same instant that the machine was slowing and the clock-finger sliding backward and slowing before I could get my eye on to it. But by watching the clock and ignoring the fuse I found the needle always went to within a shade of the same point before it checked and slowed. “The whole thing,” said the manager, “is simply a speed test of a shutter which must open only after the speed of revolutions reaches a certain number, and always before it rises to another certain number. With the shutter working correctly, the shell must be moving at a certain speed and spin before that opening comes to allow the flash to pass and burst the shell. It is a check against premature bursts, I believe.”
Through all this the girl’s flying fingers never halted or slowed, her eyes never strayed from their set lines. She appeared to be doing two things at once all the time, to be watching and catching unfailingly the flashing wink of the opening black eye in the blurring circle, the swing of the quivering needle-point, and at the same time to see where to find the next fuse, the starting lever, the place to put the fuse “passed.” Once she slipped out a fuse, prodded and fiddled at it a moment with some mysteriously appearing tools, jabbed it back in the machine, whirled it, stopped it, slid it to the “passed” side, and without pause went on to the next. “That,” said the manager, “was a ‘fault’ she spotted – shutter opened too soon or too late. Slight fault evidently she could rectify herself. If she couldn’t she’d have sent it back as a reject.”
The manager spoke to her, and she answered him without lifting her head or her eye or checking her hand an instant. And in turn I spoke to her and told her just what the work she was doing meant to the Front. At my first word she just flicked that quick glance at me again and kept on smoothly and swiftly at her work. So, without interrupting her, I went on and told her what a “premature” through a faulty fuse might mean, at our end – a high explosive bursting in the bore, blowing out the breech-block, splitting the piece, killing and wounding perhaps every other man, or every man at the gun; or a shrapnel prematuring at the muzzle, and the bullets that should have gone lifting high and clear inside the case smashing, perhaps, into the open rear of a gun-emplacement or a battery a few hundred yards in front of the prematuring gun; or a shell exploding a second or two before it should, some bare scores of yards short of where it should have burst, spilling its hundreds of bullets down into our own trenches instead of the enemy’s, hindering and hurting our own men instead of helping them. If she had missed that fault she had just caught, I told her, the shell that fuse was fitted to might, probably would, have done some such deadly work; and every fuse she tested and passed good was one other certain to do its proper work and help our men to storm a trench or hold off an assault.
Then I came away, and I suppose she is sitting there now, her slender fingers flying deftly to and fro, her pretty head and soft hair bent over that whirling machine, her young girl’s eyes wide and intent on the blurring fuse and the jumping needle, at either elbow a heaped pile of golden-gleaming metal that soon or late will go roaring out from the guns in flaming cordite blasts to beat a way through for the Front to take to Victory and Peace.
In a way she is typical of the women on war work, turning their skill and deftness, giving their youth and strength to “do their bit” and help the Front. She is more significant than any picture of a blood- and mud-stained fighting man, for she is emblematical of the work that must be done, and – thanks be – at last is being done, to win the War.