SWIFT PRODUCTION

Wairarapa Times-Age, 1 July 1942, Page 4

SWIFT PRODUCTION

OF GUNSIGHTS IN PLACE OF MEDALS. CHANGE-OVER IN LONDON FACTORY. A new automatic weapon which Britain is producing in huge quantities is getting each week 30,000 gun-sights and 20,000 other parts from a factory in South London which in peace time sent millions of Coronation and Jubilee medals all over the Dominions. At first the production of the new weapon was held up by a shortage of extruded bars of mild steel from which the parts were cut and machined into shape. When the medal makers wer'e called in they demonstrated how they could stamp out the parts in exactly the same way as they had produced medals since 1840, using ordinary strips of mild steel which is easily obtainable. It was a victory for old-established craftsmanship over mass production machinery. The medal makers were

given a contract at once. They arc now doing this precision work more speedily than anyone else, with threethousandths of an inch as their nearest margin of error, and a production “bottleneck” has been completely wiped out. Unskilled labour can be trained to the job in a few hours: some of the workers are girls not yet 16 years old. The factory also makes its own gauges. At the moment the only medals they are striking are the Croix de Guerre and the Medaille Militaire for the Free French Forces in Britain. They are also making a large shield in iron and silver which the Free Polish Government'is presenting to the British forces.

In peace time they made dies for the coins of many countries in South America and for China and Siam. They have also struck medals for many of the world’s learned societies, including the Royal Academy and the Hudson’s Bay Company. The son of the present principal arranged the dies of the first two D.F.C’s —-awarded to Hawker and Grieve in the last war.