1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [40]
The question of ammunition was a serious one, and for months past the sparseness of supplies reaching France had been causing Sir John French great anxiety. He was not interested in the trials and difficulties that faced the War Office, his sole concern was that supplies of guns and ammunition fell far short of the amounts that had been promised and that even if the promised supplies had been met in full they would still have fallen woefully short of the amount he required to prosecute the war with any hope of success.
It was all very well for the army to demand more guns and munitions, but it was by no means easy to supply them. For one thing, there was the question of premises. Even if empty factories were requisitioned and others turned over to the manufacture of munitions, who was to man them? In the infectious enthusiasm of early recruiting no one had stopped to reflect that the services of skilled men would be of more use to King and Country in engineering workshops than as raw recruits in the expanding ranks of the New Armies where, for want of proper weapons, the infantry was drilling with wooden rifles and would-be gunners were learning their trade on ancient artillery pieces borrowed from museums. Some were actually obliged to practise gun-drill on a home-made contrivance, the barrel represented by a tree trunk balanced on a trestle, with two cross-sections lopped from it to imitate the wheels.
Even if all the engineers who had disappeared into the army were combed out and brought back it would not be enough, or nearly enough. Rifles were needed. Guns were needed – machine-guns, fuses, shells by the thousands, bullets by the million. Large orders had been placed at the start of the war, and there was no shortage of raw materials, but even if the existing factories had been working flat out it would have been impossible to fulfil more than a fraction of them. But they were not working flat out and, worse, there was an upsurge of industrial troubles and disputes.
Many of the jobs involved in the manufacture of munitions could have been carried out by unskilled labour, but the Amalgamated Society of Engineers had absolutely vetoed this suggestion and, in the face of such union opposition, employers were forced to turn down countless volunteers. Even within the skilled workforce itself there were restrictive practices. One man per machine was the rule, even where output could have been increased by working shifts, and no doubling up of jobs would be accepted. Nor was there any question of a single-union agreement that would allow an engineer to mend a fuse, if need be, or an electrician to loosen a bolt or tighten a screw.
The attitude of the skilled men was understandable. It took seven years of hard-grafting apprenticeship, working for a pittance, to qualify as a tradesman, and even a skilled journeyman’s wage could be as little as £2 a week. The minimum wage agreement had been won only after years of struggle, and decades of exploitation in Victorian workshops were still fresh in the minds of the men who had fought for the rights and conditions they now enjoyed. Was it all to be sacrificed now? If cheap unskilled labour was swept up by the national emergency to fill the factories, might not their own jobs be swept away when the emergency was over and employers – whom they had good reason not to trust – were tempted to use the precedent to undermine the hard-won rights of skilled workers?
Employers were at the nub of the industrial trouble that came to a head in February, for the men believed that they were making huge profits from the war, and