MOTORS FOR SPITFIRES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 18 May 1942, Page 4

MOTORS FOR SPITFIRES

BRITAIN’S AERO-ENGINE WORKERS. (By Jack McLaren, Author of ‘“My Crowded Solitude.”) LONDON, May 14. Labelled with an identity badge I stepped into a vast factory where some thousands of men and women are producing Rolls Royce Merlin engines for Spitfires, Hurricanes, Wellingtons, Halifaxes, Beaufighters and other famous British war planes. Because of the isolation of the factory, many of these employees have to make long journeys to their work. Jean Ross, a Churchill machine tool minder, rises daily, at a quarter to five in the morning, and walks two and a half miles to a bus, and by he time she arrives at home again, at 9.45 p.m., she has travelled forty miles. Women comprise 33 per cent of the staff. ■ The manufacture of Merlin motors—the twelve-cylinder liquid cooled, best aero-engines in the world — calls for such accuracy that some of the parts must be correct to a quarter pf 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 on Sundays also. There has never been a major stoppage of work at this factory and absenteeism is rare. As elsewhere among British war workers, there are complaints about not enough coupons for work-clothes. Because of so much oil, shoes wear out particularly quickly. Most complaints in fact reveal their eagerness to get on with their jobs. When certain factory supplies have failed to arrive on time — perhaps because of the sinking of ships bringing them from the United States —work people have complained of not having enough to do, and of produc-' tion being held up. More Merlins are now made in a week than were turned out in a year before the 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 a lunch-time dance in the vast canteen theatre, one of the watching crowd, William Millar, a valve welder, 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 1936 to 1260 today, with its famous altitude performance constantly being bettered, yet all with a weight increase of only 8.5 per cent.