MOTORS FOR SPITFIRES

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 5, Issue 60, 3 June 1942, Page 6

MOTORS FOR SPITFIRES

(By Jack McLaren, author of "My Crowded Solitude") Labelled with an identity badge I -stepped into a vast factory Avhere some thousands of men and women are producing Rollis Reyce Merlin engines for Spitfires, Hurricanes, We 11 i n g to n s, II a! i f ax e s, Be a u li g h t e r s and other famous; British war planes. Because ci the isolation of the factory many of tlie.se employees base to make long journeys to their work. Jean Ross, a Churchill machinc tool minder, rises daily at a quarter to five in the morning and walks two and a ha'f miles to a bus, and by the time she arrives at home again at 9.4.1 p.m. she lias travelled forty milles. Women comprise 35 per cent of the staff. The manufacture of Merlin motors)—the twelve cylinder liq-uid-cooled, best aero engines in the world —call for such accuracy that some of the parts must be correct to a quarter of a thousandth of an inch, and it is women who carry out most of the delicate inspection of the parts. In the interests of increased production the staff work twelve hours a day, many en Sundays! also. There has never been a major stoppage cf work at this factory and absenteeism is rare. As elsewhere among British war Avorkers, there are complaints about not enough coupons for work clothes. Because j

in so much oil shoes wear out particularly quickly. Most complaints in fact reveal their eagerness to get on with their jctbsi. When certain factory supplies have failed 1 to arrive on time—perhaps because of the sinking of shipsi bringing them from the United States—work people have complained of not having enough to do, and of production being hekl up.

More Merlins are now made in a week than were turned cut in a year for tlic expansion of the firm's! productive activity. Some of the machine tools are lease-lend, but most of them are British and work people are proud of their being British, just as they are proud of the Merlins themselves.

At the lunch time dance in the vast canteen theatre one of the watching crowd, William Millar, a valve Avelder, told me proudly, as though he himself had been responsible for the whole achievement, how the horse-power of the Merlin XX had been increased from 890 in 193(5 to 1260 to-day, with its 1 famous altitude performance constantly being bettered, yet all with a weight increase of only 8.5 per cent. Both peciple and the factory itself are as important military objectives as any in the war. If Hitler could only get at them.