THE SHELL GIRLS.

Taranaki Daily News, 15 January 1916, Page 5

THE SHELL GIRLS.

2000 IN ONE SHOP I'URNACE WOMEN. (By Basil Clarke in London Daily Mail). _ , Mr. Ba&il Clarke was one of a party of journalists, English, French, American and Australian, who made a tour of the munition centres of the United Kingdom. They started from London early on Monday and spent the first (lay in the munition factories of the Birmingham district. Die first day of a tour ho strange and new as this one leaves one with impressions big and broad that quite outweigh smaller ones of detail. I have seen all the wonders of shell making': and I believe I could now go fairly closely into the question of shell and rifle cartridge manufacture in all its six hundred different processes. But wonderful as these tilings are, their wonder pales before that contained in a chance remark made by one of the shop managers, who was showing us round a works in the evening. He had led us over acres of new workshops; we'seemed to have walked miles —miles past whirring lathes and squeezing presses and guttering furnaces, miles past workers, men and women, busy in all the conceivable minutios of mechanical activity. And then as we paused for a minute overlooking a great sea of work and workers, he said, "Yes, all this place was green fields not. many months ago!" What a picture that was! The department I have in mind was eight acres in extent without a si.jgle dividing wall —and it was merely one section of a new works of sixty-five acres. At your first peep at this department (from a raised gallery alongside) you looked down on what seemed only a medley of colour—red, white, and blue and yellow. And then you made out that, it was no giant garden or flower market, but that the colors were flags; that each flag reared its head from some machine, anil that by each machine, packed tight, row upon row, line upon line as they were, amid .thousands of lights, was man or woman, girl or lad, with head bent and fingers working, ever working, on the great war industrymunitions.

KHAICI GIRLS. Ovp|- two thousand women and girls work in that one shod alone. Each has her khaki overall and her pretty khaki cap lined with green, and each has her little flag, Belgian or French or British, pinned ever on her machine before her, as a sailor has his Hag before him. to hearten her perhaps when fingers tire and eves ache and temples throb with the beating and tlie whirr and clatter and glare that compass her about.

We left that, gallery and walked in this colored sea of industry. For some time I was unable to watch the detailed processes of munition-making with any great attention because of interest in a greater and newer phenomenon—the woman munition worker. Where were these girls a year ago? No works manager can tell you. They have just sprung into being—a new genus. Watch them as they perhaps feed piece after piece of metal into a machine with one hand, pull a lever with another, and push u third with a foot—all at a rate that makes one giddy to watch. As one of our guides would tell you, girls acquire soon a quickness and deftness and aptitude for this kind of work that few men can attain, And one great qualification they have that few men ever learn—namely, patience. "A man," said one expert, "will come to you aften ten days or so on a job of this kind and say, 'I say. mister, can't you give me a new job? I am fed up on this.' Whereas keep a girl on that job and say you're going to change her and she begs you to let her stay where she i 3 and weeps if you don't. That's the difference." We saw women with two long iron tonga placing little chunks of brass into a white-hot blast furnace, others taking them out and putting them under great steam-liammer presses that come down thump three times and squash the brass into little rimmed cups—the tops of gun shells. Other women watched turret lathes, with six-tooled turrets, each one of which puts in some new series of cuts on the shell piece that is being made. These lathe girls work in a pother of soapy, oily fluid that plays unceasingly on the cutting edges of the tools. Yet the girls keep spotless. One looked for signs of tiredness and paleness in these workers. Whether there is something specially healthful in the manufacture of munitions I cannot say, but certainly one would go far to find so many pink complexions and clear eyes under one working roof as are to be seen in the munition factories of Birmingham. That the girls are cheerful and happy is shown by their quickness to smile at you, by their chatter, and by little things like the flags which, with flowers, ornament their working places and show the interest taken in their surroundings.

DINNER-TIME. We happened to land into one of the works kitchens just about one o'clock, and even .the most up-to-date hospitals could not show better cooking appliances. The roasting joints, the big baked puddings, batter puddings, milk puddings and fruit puddings that wo saw being got ready for the one o'clock inrush of the hungry girls made me quite hungry too. They dine off tables clean as white deal can be, and. the prices paid are "bare cost" with all the Government buying privileges thrown in. One girl told me she could get a dinner cheaper at the works than she could at home. The men, of course, have separate dining-rooms just as good. Munition-making, as is shown by such care in detail as'this, is certainly on no make-shift system now. The work that has been done in a few months in organisating and arranging for the great flow of munitions now begun is just colossal. I have been provided wth sonic of the broader outlines of the Government's scheme. The whole country, is divided into areas, each with a local expert board of management in control acting under the Ministry of Munitions. The boards of management have drastic powers for taking the lathes and engineering equipment. and factories in their areas. As the Ministry of Munitions is an official for cacli local area, and at the head of the. area organisation is Mr. .1. Stevenson, a business man of wide experience, Controlled establishments now numbering 107!), employed a million workpeople. National shell factories now total twenty, chiefly situated in large centres of manufacture, while co-opera-tive. areas are arranged in more scattered districts; and there are eleven national factories manufacturing heavy