WAR WORKERS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 14 September 1942, Page 5

WAR WORKERS

WHO HELP TO SAVE LIFE PRODUCTION OF PARACHUTES & DINGHIES. AND OF PROTECTIVE BALLOONS. (“Times-Age” Special.) (By Maxwell Heath.) One would not think at first that vital war work is done by the people who make apparatus designed not for killing, but to save life. .Yet that is what a British Broadcasting Corporation radio reporter found on a recent tour of England to get material for overseas programmes. He was visiting a factory for all the things that are made of fabric and designed to be filled with air or gas—the balloons which, fly over cities and convoys to protect them from divebombers, the parachute which is the lifebelt of the airman, the collapsible rubber dinghy which gives that airman a chance of survival if he has to bale out over the sea.

Do you, overseas, know the barrage balloons as well as we do in London and the rest of England?—those curious looking things that are decidedly reminiscent of “Dumbo,” that go so pearly in the first light of dawn, so brilliant a crimson just after the sun has set? One would not think it to look at them, but they are actually made of cotton fabric impregnated with rubber and protected by an aluminium coating to make them waterproof —that is why they take the light so beautifully. In this factory a great part of the work on the balloons is done by an ex-tailor who uses what can only be called a flexible guillotine to cut out the parts for 75 balloons at the same time. He was a bit of an exception, though, since most of the factory is staffed with women, few of them with any pre-war experience of this particular job. They use the buffing machines which prepare the panels 1 of balloon fabric for sticking together with rubber solution; they do the checking of weak spots; they inspect the final product. They even handle the machine that inflates the finished product with air, so that several girls can scramble through the access hatch and get to work on the inside. This factory—which, by the way, has been hit in air raids and saved by its own staff —has also a shop which looks as if it was cut out of an enormous orange turned inside out. That is where they make not balloons but the rubber dinghies of the airmen. These are of-that brilliant colour in order to show up against the waste of grey water and white foam when the lifesaving aircraft or motor launches come out to look for them. As only seamen and airmen know, white at. sea is a camouflage and a reddish yellow is the most conspicuous colour. These dinghies, which, uninflated, pack into an incredibly small space, are also made by women and, like the balloons, are of rubberised fabric, not of pure rubber. Since so many nations are now engaged in the same war and so many of their men are in the Royal Air Force, the dinghies when they are sent out carry with them operating instructions in English, Polish, Dutch and French. Another of the few men in the factory we found was a sailor with 27 years at sea and a good record in the last war. Now that he has been refused for active service on account of his age, he has arrived at the factory purely for the purpose of splicing the guy ropes of the balloons and of teaching the young idea how to do it after him. At one end of the shop is a great row of these guy ropes hanging from the ceiling with a 3001 b weight attached to each of them. This is not to test them for strength, but to take the stretch out of them. But women and old men are not the only workers in this factory. That vitally important job—using vitally in its strictest sense—of attaching the wire to the pin of the parachute ripcords is done by boys of under military age. When done the cords are put into a testing machine which subjects the soldering to a strain of 320 lbs. In spite of that, not one in a thousand has to be rejected. The chief trouble with these boys, indeed, is the difficulty of keeping them. Quoting the old sailor: “As soon as I’ve got them trained, they go and join the services—well before their call-up time, too. The Navy and the R.A.F. are what attract them chiefly.”