Women At Work

Horowhenua Chronicle, 21 October 1916, Page 3

Women At Work

SOME MINOR WAR INDUSTRIES

(London Times Correspondent)

Within a mile radius in the East End of London, in unpretentious buildings with no soaring chimneys or roaring engines, I have lately watched girls and women in hundreds turning out artioles of war in thousands.

Here is a courtyard lined with bales of flannelette, and on the far side the two-storeyed building is full of girls making gas helmets. There are 100 girls, and each makes 100 helmets a week. They sit at machines, guidiing the material under needles that go on clicking, clicking at a furious rate, impelled by invisible electric power. It seemed odd that those bell-shaped pieces of flannelette could be helmets of any kind; but from something winch a foreman showed me I could guess their efficacy against any par-

ticular form of German brutality. And each helmet takes only four minutes to make.

In the lower room I 6aw 70 thicknesses of flannelette, which, being first marked through perforated paper in wavy lines, were turned by a single application of an electric cutter into 280 helmets. Upstairs the seaming process was equally quick. Machines in row upon row keep whirling for 9J hours a day, an<3 no wonder that girls of 15 are earning 23s a week, and older girls as much as £3. STATIONERY TAGS. •My next visit was to a queer little industry. From vast masses of flannelette I passed to bits of ,green string and snippets of tin. Thi6 is where the Government stationary tags are made. Fifty little girls were punching round tags and flat tags. Tin, cut by a lathe to uniform sizes, falls into a. groove in the machine and the girls clamp tin and string together by jerking forward an iron pully, once for each end of a tag. The machines work so quickly that a child can curve 15,000 tags a day.

Elsewhere what was once a shop is now a factory for the machining of khaki-coloured bandoliers. Hero 80 girls were turning out 00,000 bandoliers a week, and some of them are earning as much as 10s a day. Each Btrand is outlined with five pouches for cartridges, and machinists were busy sewing these up.

So far as I had seen what i« commonly considered "light" work, suitable for women and girls. My fourth visit showed what women pan achieve in replacing men at heavy manual work. The scene was a factory where shirts are made for Serbian and for British soldiers. Owing ,to the war, women are doing all the work here. They act as overseers, as packers, as haulers., iajs dispatchers', and' chauffeuses. Here were canvas-ltovered packages measuring some 3ft. by 4ft.; and I learned that three women can stitch these "parcels" at the rate of 100 an hour. But the stitching is by

no means all. When the packages are ready women hoist them into a car and a woman drives them off to the War Office. A less cheering sight met me at yet another factory. Here were soldiers' kit-bags in hundreds lying piled in a corner of the building. Why were they lying there,' useless? Because the contract for the cords had been placed in Ireland, and rebellion in Ireland meant (among other things) that these cords were delayed in delivery. The episode set me thinking on the intimate connection of war and industry, and on the many questions of to-day and to-morrow with which the things I had seen were closely linked.