Wakefield in the Great War, page 14
War workers.
The outbreak of the war affected all aspects of the economy but especially luxury goods and other services where large numbers of women were employed. Domestic servants were not only employed by the wealthy, many aspiring middle-class families had at least one servant in their home, but as men enlisted and incomes fell, they found themselves out of work. At the same time, export orders for the mills and factories were cancelled and many laid off or put on short time. Within weeks, though, orders began coming in for military uniforms and equipment, and as the men marched away, vacancies began to open up in all kinds of jobs. Women took over running small businesses and took over roles traditionally seen as ‘men’s work’, with journalists referring to ‘petrol nymphs’ working as van drivers or ‘conductorettes’ appearing on the trams.
Women with specialist medical skills came forward to volunteer for service in France but were rejected. Dr Elsie Inglis, a trained surgeon and psychiatrist was told by the War Office to ‘go home and keep quiet’ as the last thing the army needed was hysterical women in the war zone. Private enterprises arranged ambulance units and women volunteered to work alongside the French and Belgian armies, who showed a more accepting attitude but it still took some time before female volunteers reached the British army. Among them was Nellie Spindler, born in September 1891 and the daughter of Police Sergeant George and Elizabeth Spindler, of 104 Stanley Road, Wakefield. In 1911 Nellie was a hospital nurse at the City Fever Hospital on Park Lane, Wakefield and moved to the Township Infirmary in Leeds where she worked from 1912 to 1915. In November 1915 she took up a post at Whittington Military Hospital in Litchfield and worked there until the opportunity came up in May 1917 to act as a staff nurse with the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service, at Abbeville in France. That summer she moved to No. 44 Casualty Clearing Station (CCS), a British evacuation hospital at Brandhoek, in Belgium, that specialised in abdominal wounds. Because those wounds needed urgent treatment the Clearing Station was positioned close to the front and to a railway line that was the target of frequent shelling.
Nellie Spindler.
On Tuesday, 21 August 1917, the clearing station came under fire from German artillery. Kate Luard, the sister in charge of 32 CCS, which was alongside 44 CCS at the time of the attack, later wrote: ‘I expected [for one rash day] to be telling you all about Tuesday at home tomorrow, but must write it now. The business began about 10.00am. Two [shells] came pretty close after each other and both just cleared us and No. 44. The third crashed between Sister E[lizabeth Eckett]’s ward in our lines and the Sisters’ Quarters of No. 44. Bits came over everywhere, pitching at one’s feet as we rushed to the scene of the action, and one just missed one of my Night Sisters getting into bed in our Compound. I knew by the crash where it must have gone and found Sister E. as white as paper but smiling happily and comforting the terrified patients. Bits tore through her Ward but hurt no one. Having to be thoroughly jovial to the patients on these occasions helps us considerably ourselves. Then I came on to the shell-hole and the wrecked tents in the Sister’s Quarters at 44. A group of stricken [Medical Officers] were standing about and in one tent the Sister was dying. The piece went through her from back to front near her heart. She was only conscious a few minutes and only lived 20 minutes. She was in bed asleep. The Sister who shared her tent had been sent down the day before because she couldn’t stand the noise and the day and night conditions. The Sister who should have been in the tent which was nearest was out for a walk or she would have been blown to bits; everything in her tent was; so it was in my empty Ward next to Sister E. It all made one feel sick.’ Nellie’s friend, Minnie Wood, was also from Wakefield and wrote home to the Spindler family that ‘your daughter became unconscious immediately she was hit and she passed away perfectly peacefully just 20 minutes afterwards. I was with her at the time but after the first minute or two she did not know me. It was a great mercy she was oblivious to her surroundings for the shells continued to fall in for the rest of the day.’ Both Elizabeth Eckett and Minnie Wood later received the Military Medal for their bravery during the attack. Today Nellie lies as the only woman among the 10,000 men buried in Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery. There are always flowers on her grave.
In 1914, only adventurous young women from reasonably wealthy families could afford to travel out to France and Belgium to do their bit behind the lines, funding their own travel and expenses but often doing remarkable work. The First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, for example, was a distinctly upper-class paramilitary association whose women had to own or be able to hire a horse and who were admitted only on the recommendation of an existing member, but its volunteers drove ambulances and ran canteens across the Western Front, collecting an impressive number of gallantry awards in the process. Others, like Elsie Knocker and her friend Mairie Chisholm, set up and ran a small independent field hospital of their own. Not surprisingly, their adventures made for great propaganda both for the government and, more importantly, for the suffrage movement, but few could afford to follow their example. Plenty of people were needed to assist the Voluntary Aid Detachments in every town but the ‘voluntary’ part meant that not many working women could find the time to help out on a regular basis and VAD work fell to those who could afford to give their time freely. Those women without family dependants joined the various organisations that grew during the war, working as ‘lumberjills’ on forestry projects or on farms with the Women’s Land Service Corps. Some enlisted in Queen Mary’s Auxiliary Army Corps – ‘the girl behind the man behind the gun’ as their recruiting slogan ran – and went out to France as clerks, drivers and various other duties around the huge base depots established along the French coast.
At home, women were increasingly visible in all kinds of roles but one group was more obvious than others. In the heavy woollen districts, a yellow dye known as picric acid had always been treated with caution because of its explosive qualities but by 1915 it was being used as an ingredient in ‘Lyddite’, the main type of explosive used in British artillery shells. Those working with it in munitions factories found that although its use might have changed, its ability to stain had not. Over time, skin, hair and eyes absorbed small quantities of picric acid and ‘munitionettes’, as they were often known, soon acquired another nickname – ‘canaries’. Yellow-faced munitions workers were immediately identifiable in the street as they made their way to and from work. Comic though they may have looked, in fact the chemicals were slowly poisoning them. Symptoms associated with working with explosives included nose bleeds, headaches, sore throats, nausea, bowel problems, skin rashes, anorexia, drowsiness and swelling of the hands and feet. A study at the Woolwich Arsenal showed that all workers reported a bitter taste in their mouths, poor appetites and constipation whilst around a quarter of women claimed to suffer skin problems or that their periods were affected with over a third reporting feelings of depression and irritability. Some symptoms probably owed more to food shortages, family stress and long working hours but at least 349 cases of serious TNT poisoning were recorded during the war of whom 109 are known to have died.
In the initial rush to volunteer, industry had lost huge numbers of skilled men, so much so that some had to be brought back to work in uniform at their old jobs but the damage was already done. The army needed to feed its guns but at home, industry was struggling to keep up. The existing munitions factories were not enough to meet demand but the businesses switching to war production were inexperienced, leading to what became known as the ‘shell scandal’ of early 1915 when a major offensive on the Western Front failed, apparently because there were not enough shells, and so many of those actually fired failed to explode. It was hardly surprising since the skills needed to build complex ammunition took time to develop and most manufacturers were learning on the job.
Women at work at the Rhodes factory. (Courtesy of Kate Taylor)
The scandal led to the creation of the Ministry of Munitions to oversee war production and to manage the recruitment, training and management of war workers, and especially of female staff. As early as November 1914, workers at Vickers had complained about setting up machines for the first women workers, and trade unions were strongly opposed to what they called the ‘dilution’ of skilled labour, so a series of compromises were reached in March 1915 to allow women and boys to operate semi- or completely automatic machinery, on the grounds that it was not skilled work, but would allow them to do parts of a skilled man’s job but leaving the final work to him. Further moves came with the Dilution Scheme in October and the Substitution Scheme the following year, which allowed women to take on increasingly skilled tasks.
The Ministry brought together over ninety leading businessmen to act as advisors and to create local ‘Boards’ to manage production. On 16 April 1915, Wakefield was among the first areas of the country to organise its resources when a small Munitions Committee was elected at a meeting of manufacturers convened by the Mayor of Wakefield. They immediately set to work to compile an inventory of local machinery and reported that all the firms taking part were engaged either directly or indirectly on War Office work. Ossett firms like J. Halstead & Son, J. Redgwick & Sons and Moses & Naylor all agreed to work together as part of a shell-making scheme. In 1922, the official history of the Ministry of Munitions recorded that the Wakefield Board went on to be unique in being able to produce almost every part of the 18-pdr artillery shell: ‘… to produce shell forgings’, the history recorded, ‘a large press designed for the pressing of steel boats and a 1,250-ton wagon-wheel press were adapted until such time as suitable presses could be obtained. This reason, combined with the necessity of disturbing labour as little as possible, decided the committee to promote co-operative work rather than establish a National Shell Factory, and throughout April and May they organised the former type of scheme … On 28 May, 1915, an offer to provide forgings for, machine and assemble 2,000 18-pdr. shell weekly was accepted in general terms by the Armaments Output Committee with whom the Wakefield Committee had been for some time in correspondence.’ Finally, on 12 June 1915, an agreement was signed between the new Ministry of Munitions and the Wakefield Committee and within a fortnight of signing, the Board reported that the output of forgings had already begun.
Shell factory at work.
This contract did not arrange for the filling of the shells with shrapnel bullets (each shrapnel shell contained over 300 lead balls, making it essentially like a giant shotgun) but was superseded by a new contract signed on 10 September, when this part of the operation was added. The original contract called for an initial weekly delivery of 2,000 shells, rising to 5,000 as soon as possible but the lack of specialist gauges held up progress in setting up the machinery and the first deliveries could not be made until the beginning of October. Once begun, output steadily increased and the promised 5,000 per week were being sent out by the end of 1915 and by the time of the Armistice Wakefield produced 17,016 shells in a single week.
The Wakefield Board consisted of a Co-operative Group of fifteen firms scattered over a wide district. Two contractors made the shell case forgings with the machining and filling operations (where the explosives and shrapnel were added) distributed among the other manufacturers. Finally, the completed shells were collected at two centres where government inspectors checked the supplies. Unlike most other areas, the Wakefield Board took complete responsibility for every stage of manufacture as direct contractors to the Ministry of Munitions and acted as a single Board of Directors on behalf of the whole group. It was a spectacularly successful scheme, with only two lots of 500 shells each being rejected out of a total output of 1,184,100. A failure rate of .041 per cent was regarded by the Ministry as a stunning success.
Signing the government contracts meant a massive expansion for the firms involved, and women were needed to take on jobs that would normally have gone to men, and as time went on, trained for skilled work despite the best efforts of trade unions to protect their members. The bigger firms even had to build hostels to accommodate workers brought in to keep production running 24 hours per day. In Leeds, the vast Barnbow factory had its own herd of cows to supply its canteen, and some sixty-four trains a day arrived there to move staff to and from work. Women were promised £1 as minimum wage for a 48-hour week (rising to 24s later in the war) but rates varied. Skilled women tool setters at the Woolwich Arsenal could earn £6-6s a week and £5 per week for female workers was not unusual. A special ‘leavers certificate’ prevented a worker finding work in another munitions factory for six weeks after leaving their post to prevent staff moving to higher-paid jobs. By contrast, women working in other areas of war work still had to contend with low wages. Complaints from a Belfast cotton mill claimed that women were paid just 10s-6d for a 55-hour week whilst those working on hand grenade production lines could earn as little as 2½d per hour. Sylvia Pankhurst reported a case of a woman earning just 1s-8d for inserting 400 eyelet holes in canvas used for making kitbags for soldiers, giving her an income of 5s 7d for a 47-hour week.
Despite the huge variations in earning potential, nationally the average wage for women rose from 13s 6d a week in 1914 to around 30–35s by the end of the war. Although rising prices ate into the increases, many women found that they had a disposable income for the first time. Respectable women began to socialise outside the home for the first time and the papers were full of the concerns of moral campaigners worried by the sight of women drinking in pubs without men to buy them their drinks – which in any case would have been illegal under wartime drinking laws. Make up and beauty products became increasingly within the price of ordinary women during 1915, at a time when shortages of material meant that hemlines rose and sleeves shortened. As more leg and underarm became visible, Gillette razors for women appeared on the market in 1915, as did Maybelline make-up, with powder, kohl eyeliner and mascara all becoming popular best sellers. Helena Rubenstein reported an upsurge in demand for face creams from wealthier women volunteering as nurses on the front. Another unexpected outcome of women’s war work was the popularisation of knickers as a standard item of clothing. The Queen Mary’s Auxiliary Army Corps offered its recruits a uniform but not underwear until it became apparent that working-class women often had none and voluminous bloomers stretching from knees to somewhere around the armpit became standard issue. Elsewhere, munitionettes were required to change out of street clothes and into work overalls before each shift so underwear became more important than in the past.
Worried by the moral risks to young women exposed to the young men in uniform (and vice versa in garrison towns), moral watchdogs claimed that the pre-war annual Territorial camps had always left behind mementos of their long summer evenings in the form of a trail of illegitimate births the following spring. Women Police Patrols were set up to scour parks, back streets, theatres and pubs in order to save young people from themselves. Passing any form of sexually transmitted disease to a serviceman was regarded as a criminal offence calculated to ‘aid the enemy’, although passing on a disease picked up in a French brothel to a girlfriend whilst on leave wasn’t. There were also calls for specialist women social workers to be formed into a department to deal with the flood of unmarried mothers that was expected to materialise at any time. Men who could be traced but who were overseas, it was suggested, could marry by post. ‘For those cases where the father, if known, is married already,’ one writer suggested, ‘if the child is healthy and free from hereditary taint, some sad and bereaved mother, herself left childless, should adopt it, either when the mother has nursed it for a few months; or, if the mother cannot nurse, it could be given at once to the foster mother. Sometimes single women long for a child of their own.’ Exactly why a single mother should be forced to give up her child to another single mother was not made clear. In the event, illegitimacy levels during the war actually fell from the rates recorded in 1911.
The war brought many changes for women and their contribution led to changes in the political system and eventually to the power to vote that the Suffrage Movement had fought for. But it came at a cost. Writing in 1916, Monica Cosens described how, for munitionettes, ‘it is not only her health she is risking, but her youth as well. As Gran’pa [the skilled supervisor at Cosens’ factory] once said: “it makes me sad to see the young girls here; they come in fresh and rosy cheeked, and before a month has passed they are pale and careworn.” Gran’pa is right. There is no doubt that the girls become shadow eyed and pale, and the effect of working through the night under the glare of electricity adds many wrinkles beneath their eyes, ageing them beyond their years’. Elsewhere, A.K. Foxwell described the lady principal overlooker at Woolwich Arsenal, who explained to prospective staff that rumours of the cemetery behind the works where explosion victims were buried were untrue. ‘We don’t have these excitements here … However, this is war work so don’t expect to get a leisurely job. Aren’t you willing to do your bit, like the soldiers in the trenches? We mustn’t expect our work to be easy.’
Children
In October 1914, the West Riding Education Committee at Wakefield heard that no fewer than eight schools in Doncaster had been taken over as billets for troops, affecting around 5000 pupils. Only by careful use of the half-time system under which children split their day between working a shift at a local factory or mill and attending school could the disruption be kept to a minimum. Any Wakefield children hoping for their own schools to be commandeered were disappointed. Men of the local Royal Army Medical Corps had lodged at St Mary’s school for a while and Clarendon Road school became a collection point for socks, scarves and other comforts for men going overseas and for clothing to help poor families and refugees but generally school life for most continued as normal. In August, the Provision of Meals (Education) Act was brought in and a Canteen Committee appointed to make sure that all local children would get at least one meal a day. A study by the local Medical Officer had shown that Wakefield children started school physically bigger than the national average but left less healthy than most. The fact that so many were from poor families and worked in demanding jobs for half the day before coming to school was not considered to be a factor.
