It was the month of May.
The spring of 1915 was running out.
The spring offensives became summer battles. There was no end in sight.
Nothing like this war had ever been seen.
It defied prophesy, defeated understanding and had escaped man's control.
For nine months now, every human endeavour had gone awry.
For nine months, all man's reason, all his ingenuity, all his science
had produced destruction beyond imagining and sacrificed millions of lives.
1,000 years of civilisation seemed to be visibly crumbling.
The insatiable guns incessantly demanded new victims.
At sea, underwater weapons struck at the roots of a sailor's courage.
On land, the use of gas, poisoning the very air that men breathed,
seemed to reduce to nothing bravery, enterprise and skill.
Not only soldiers, awaiting the dire chances of each day in squalid trenches, felt the war's impact -
it reached into every village and street, with its demands for guns, for shells, for men.
It uprooted tradition. It brought pain, hardship, opportunity -
above all, change.
Now Britain's years of tranquil security were over.
The awakening of her people was brutal.
It took the form of a munitions scandal.
News broke of the army's shortage of shells.
The Times quoted Sir John French, commander of the British forces:
"The want of an unlimited supply of high explosive
"was a fatal bar to our success."
The mass-market Daily Mail deepened the sense of shock
by attributing the famine to the nation's idol, Lord Kitchener.
This was sacrilege, yet the British were becoming uneasy.
For months, their best manhood had poured into the recruiting offices.
It was Kitchener's own summons they answered -
the towering hero of legend, K of K, Kitchener of Khartoum.
Surely, he could not have sent the army into battle without shells?
The shell scandal was only part of a deeper unease about the war.
Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer, wrote:
"There was a sense of revolt against the attitude of the Government
"and what was regarded as its leisurely and take-for-granted attitude
"in dealing with vitally serious matters -
"matters of life and death to the whole of the allies, to the British Empire
"and to hundreds of thousands of gallant young men,
"who had offered their lives to their country."
On May 26th, Britain's leadership changed.
CHEERING
Asquith remained, but his government was now a coalition of Liberals, Conservatives and Labour.
And there was another innovation.
"The Prime Minister has decided a new department shall be created
"to be called the Ministry of Munitions, charged with organising the supply of munitions of war."
"Mr Lloyd George has undertaken the formulation and direction of this department."
For the moment, the mood of 1914 resurfaced amid the facts of 1915.
Italy declared war on Austria and crowds packed the streets of London
to cheer Italians going home to join up. Cheering was not enough.
Five days into his new appointment, Lloyd George was rousing the nation to face reality.
"We are fighting against the best- organised community in the world -
"the best organised, whether for war or for peace,
"and we have been employing too much the haphazard, go-as-you-please methods,
"which would not have not enabled us to maintain our place as a nation, even in peace, much longer.
"The nation now needs all the machinery that is capable of being used
"for turning out munitions or equipment,
"all the skill that is available for that purpose,
"all the industry, all the labour
"and all the strengths, power and resource of everyone to the utmost."
War had outgrown battlefields.
It had become the test of a nation's technology.
"The making of a shell case involves the metal trades,
"blast furnaces, steelworks,
"iron and steel foundries, forges,
"stamps, locks and dyes,
"rolling mills, rod and wire works
"and behind them, the colliery and the iron-ore quarry.
"It requires factories
"and these in turn require machinery-covered electrical plant,
"factory equipment and machine tools,
"engines, pumps, turbines, road and rail transport,
"boiler-making and constructional engineering work.
"The explosives for filling and propelling the shell from the gun
"involve the output of chemical works, dye works, gas works
"and a great deal of very careful laboratory experiment, investigation and testing."
Germany lacked none of those.
Her industry, like her army, was organised on the grand scale.
Her growth had been based on science and a ruthless exploitation of new ideas.
Before 1914, her chemistry supplied Britain with dyes for dresses and aspirins for headaches.
Now Britain needed her own chemical industry.
There was an explosives famine.
Without them, a shell was, as Lloyd George said, "a harmless vase".
Equally, it was harmless without a fuse.
There were more than 50 parts in a shell fuse,
parts that had to work as accurately as clockwork.
It was the big German clock and toy industries
that made the fuses for the Jack Johnsons
which crashed on the British trenches.
But in Britain, industries capable of mass-producing fuses were few
and her equipment was out of date.
While Kitchener recruited the new armies,
Lloyd George created new industry.
On May 27th, he walked into his office at the Ministry of Munitions
to attack his colossal task.
"There was a table - I forget whether there were one or two chairs -
"but by the orders of the Board of Works, there was no carpet.
"I believe I had a greater struggle over getting a carpet
"than I had over getting £50 million for munitions.
"I said to my assistant, 'Look at that table.
"'Look at those two chairs.'
"'Yes?' he said. 'What is the matter with 'em?'
"I said, 'Those are the Ministry of Munitions'."
In France, the problems at home were even worse.
A sixth of her industry lay in German hands.
Mobilisation had drained France of fit men.
More than a million of them had already been killed, wounded or posted missing.
Behind the army zone, France was now a country of women, old men and children.
Women delivered the post and papers.
They drove the massive machines that watered the Paris streets.
They swept its ancient gutters free of refuse.
Frenchmen who idolised womanhood had to get used to seeing women
in unnatural and unromantic jobs.
The women farmed the rich soil with the same love as their menfolk.
But they didn't have the strength and skill.
Land produced less food
and prices began to go up.
Only the first are served.
Fruit and vegetables are still in good supply, but dearer than last year.
Prices are much higher than last year.
Cabbages cost 60 centimes each.
Other grocery prices are increasing by leaps and bounds.
Corbie market's increase is 300%.
The burden of shortages and rising prices fell heavily on France's poor families.
Many were trying to live on a soldier's pay, or even worse, on a widow's pension.
But the nation was still welded together by the patriotic flame of the Union Sacre.
The French solved the problem of munitions with the same courage
that created victory on the Maune.
This nation of individualists submitted to government control.
By 1915, industry sent the army most of the munitions it needed.
Women were the key to success in the factories.
They adapted to this delicate work which they seemed to be suited to.
Many have accepted dangerous jobs, like the handling of fuse detonators.
Today, shells have been almost entirely finished off by women.
All working hard, many with serene looks on their faces.
Some, on the other hand, look grim.
They are probably thinking they are helping to avenge some dear victim of the war.
A few hundred miles away, German women worked with equal devotion.
The Germanic empires were a beleaguered fortress.
The British blockade cut them off from US wheatlands
and Argentine beef.
Behind the German and Austrian troops on enemy soil,
life was becoming grimmer.
Since January, bread had been rationed.
It now included potato flour.
People who had come from Berlin said no signs could be seen of a war there.
They must be blind.
Bread cards are not the only visible sign of war.
Did you ever see a private soldier accepting a few orderlies in Unter Den Linden in peacetime?
It's full of them now, not very warlike in their clothing, carriage and appearance. Many are wounded.
All of them feel and act as the chief person of the drama -
as well they might.
Vienna remains a city of pleasure,
but in its dark suburbs, misery is on the increase.
The mothers wring their hands beside the beds of their children,
because their young lives are threatened by enteritis caused by eating the horrible war bread.
The bread ticket did not favour fair shares - it was not meant to.
I had no difficulty anywhere in getting all the wheat bread I wanted.
My class did not have to eat war bread.
The British knew nothing of the horrors of occupation,
of casualties in hundreds of thousands.
But their cost of living was rising fast.
Bread was tuppence three farthings.
It's now fourpence ha'penny per loaf!
The price of meat for baking doubled in price, that of the cheapest cuts for boiling trebled.
I hardly know how to make ends meet. I have five children with another due in June.
We eat less, and have pawned things to make up the difference between prices before the war and now.
That can't go on.
In Britain, too, the burden of war fell most heavily on the poor,
including the families of soldiers.
Times was very hard.
I only had 12 and six a week, so I couldn't go out and spend like anyone else.
I used to sit at night
and try to do a bit of reading or sewing,
to pass the time away.
It was very hard, and my mind would wander.
I'd wonder what he was doing, if he was thinking about me.
I'd wonder how he was going on and when I would see him again.
Things like that.
A private's pay was small, and so were the allowances for a wife and children.
Any official delay in payment meant a trip to the pawnshop.
Death or mutilation in the country's service could mean utter poverty for the hero's family.
A warrant issued by Kitchener said:
A pension or gratuity for the dependents of a deceased soldier shall not be granted as a right.
It shall not be granted, or continued,
when the applicant is unworthy, in the army council's opinion,
or unless the soldier's services were, in their view, such as to justify the award.
To the British upper classes,
the war was something to read about in the papers or on a poster.
The town is vibrant with the call to arms.
Posters appeal for recruits on every hoarding,
on shop windows, on omnibuses, tramcars and commercial vans.
First, it was strange to see officers in uniform on omnibuses and trams,
but the novelty of it has long since worn off.
The cartoons of Bruce Bairnsfather,
serving in France, appeared in The Bystander.
They created a new national image - Old Bill,
a long-suffering soldier whose sour humour rose above every danger.
Oh, star of Eve,
whose tender beam falls on my spirit's troubled dream.
Give it a good hard 'un, Bert. They fizzle a bit first if they're gonna explode.
Well, if you know of a better hole, go to it.
Hey, what was that, Bill? Trench mortar. Ours or theirs?
To think that it's the same dear moon that's looking down on him.
This moon will be the death of us!
Well, Alfred, how are the cakes?
As Old Bill bestowed his advice on young Bert, the newcomer,
the worse the danger, the funnier the joke became.
Soldiers laughed at the cartoons. Others found them reassuring.
The reality was a long way away.
They didn't know what it was like.
When I talked about it, my father would argue points of fact he couldn't have known,
because he wasn't there.
That was the approach of the public at large - they didn't know.
They hadn't any conception - how could they?
They knew people came back on leave covered with mud and lice, but they didn't know what danger we were in.
They felt the war was one continual cavalry charge,
that one spent all day chasing Germans or them chasing us.
Had they realised the strain of sitting waiting for something to drop on one's head,
they wouldn't have seen it as war - just play.
The idea was that England couldn't lose.
Officers on leave noted how little the middle class had been touched by war.
In spite of the number of men in uniform in the streets,
the indifference to and ignorance about the war was remarkable.
The universal catchphrase was, "Business as usual."
Against the background of "business as usual"
Lloyd George toured the country to see conditions himself
and drive on the Industrial Revolution providing shells and guns for the troops.
He used all his personal magic - all his ruthlessness.
In 1915, I drove Mr Lloyd George
when he was Minister of Munitions
on his munitions tour of Wales.
Going from town to town.
When we arrived at Newport in Monmouthshire
just as he got out of the car someone in the crowd shouted out,
"Why don't you send out some guns?"
Instantly he replied,
"Why don't you come and help?"
While Lloyd George was touring the country,
inspecting, persuading, energising,
the British mood was changing.
They were grimmer - resolved to defeat Germany no matter the cost.
The violence of war had begun to touch them too.
On May 7th, Britain was stunned by news that the great liner Lusitania
had been torpedoed and sunk with the loss of over 1,000 lives.
SEAGULLS CRY
Survivors arrived at Liverpool with stories of the ship's last moments.
There was a dull, thud-like, not very loud explosion.
As I ran up the stairs, the boat was already heeling over.
Just after I reached the deck, a stream of steerage passengers came rushing up from below.
They fought their way into the nearest boat.
They were white and terrified. They were shrieking. There was no order.
The strongest got there first. The weak were pushed aside.
No children could have lived in that throng.
A mass grave was dug for the victims in the Irish town of Cork.
Indignation at this act of German frightfulness crossed the country.
There was another side to the story.
The ship was carrying a consignment of rifles and shrapnel shells.
Her Captain ignored Admiralty instructions on avoiding dangers.
The German government had advertised
in New York papers that passengers travelled at their own risk.
Nevertheless, anti-German riots exploded in big industrial towns.
Any shop with a German-sounding name was good for looting and smashing.
GLASS SHATTERS
CROWD SHOUT
Groups began to form.
Somebody rushed round and said
Keppel's butchers shop had been broken into by a crowd of women
and all the eatables stolen.
I happened to be walking down this street
and from nowhere came a great rush of women in clogs and shawls.
They stood outside the drapers shop,
shouting and shaking their fists.
An old woman stepped forward out of the crowd
and threw a tin can at the window.
It bounced off harmlessly.
That might have been a signal of command.
The others threw their shawls back, produced bricks they'd hidden,
and a fusillade of these missiles crashed into the window.
Not even women were spared.
A frightened German woman came out into the street eager to get away. Her nervousness attracted attention.
Harpies jeered at her.
Tweaked at her hat. Grabbed at her purse.
Air raids sharpened the hatred of the home fronts towards the enemy.
For the first time in history,
bombing from the air threatened cities far from the battlefield.
Women and children were killed. French, German and now British.
The zeppelins first came to England on the 19th January 1915.
On 31st May they bombed London,
capital of the Empire, for the first time.
Behind their indiscriminate progress
the raiders left homes wrecked and lives shattered.
The word non-combatant had lost its meaning.
The rage against Germans mounted,
even those who were naturalized British subjects.
A hate campaign was worked up by John Bull - a magazine with the largest circulation in the country.
"By this time we begin to know our Hun.
"The Hun is always the same.
"Yes. Always the true son of Cain.
"The man of blood.
"Though his skin is white, his heart is black.
"Every employee of the state, in government or the services
"of German birth or parentage should be forced to resign.
"The innocent must suffer with the guilty."
In every country at war, hatred seems natural, even reasonable.
The enemy was portrayed as an ogre of horrifying monstrosity.
Or as a discomfited clown.
Dark neuroses lurked beneath the surface of civilian patriotism.
Yet the patriotism was real enough.
It inflamed the hearts of women as well as men.
It could be unpleasantly hysterical.
There were women who tried to force men into the services by every device of scorn and blackmail.
I went to the music hall in civilian clothes on my leave.
Whilst lined up outside,
a lady came along.
She was about 35.
She put a white feather into my hand.
I looked at it, felt very disgusted.
There wasn't much I could do about it.
As well as being given white feathers there was another method of approach.
You'd see a girl coming towards you
with a smile on her face and you'd think, "It's someone who knows me."
When she was about five or six paces from you she would suddenly freeze
and walk past you with a look of utter contempt and scorn.
If she could have spat, she would have done.
It was more hurtful than a feather.
It made you curl up and you couldn't reply as she'd gone on.
Thousands of other women
found an outlet in Lloyd George's munitions programme.
They came from domestic service,
mills and shops, mostly.
A lot of very young girls were there
and young married women
who had come principally to help keep their homes together
when their husbands were away.
Also many of them felt that they were helping the war effort.
More and more women took over from men
as this Industrial Revolution gathered speed.
By the end of 1915 there were 73 national munitions factories,
as well as the armaments firms and all the privately-owned industries
converted to war work.
American machines and British improvisation
were the tools for Lloyd George to achieve success.
The skilled craftsman was replaced by the machine minder.
Victorian methods gave way to mass production.
In the closing months of 1915,
the national factories combined output was 200,000 shells - nearly all of a lighter nature.
In the following year their total output
was nearly seven million,
more than half of which was medium and heavy shell.
Not only in munitions did women take the jobs
that had traditionally been for men.
They repaired gas holes.
They shovelled coal into the retorts that made the gas.
Heavy work. Hot and dirty.
# She's a lassie from Lancashire
# Just a lassie from Lancashire
# She's a lassie I love so dear... #
The first women conductors appeared on buses and trams.
Middle class girls left their sheltered life in the home
and worked as clerks in offices or became nurses.
For women, the war marked a social revolution.
# When the clouds roll by, I'll come to you
# Then the skies will seem more blue
# Down in Lovers Lane, my dearie
# Wedding bells...#
It was terribly hard, terribly monotonous, but we had a purpose.
We meant to do that work and we did.
There wasn't a drone in the factory.
Every girl worked and worked and worked.
I didn't hear one grumble.
And I hardly ever heard, or know of one that stayed out
because she had her man in mind, and we all had.
I myself was working with sailors' wives
from three ships that sank, and it was pitiful to see them.
If anyone had a letter from France, we just read it.
We got to know all the girls' sweethearts or husbands.
We got to know all their Christian names.
We'd say, "How's Tommy?", "How's Dick?", "Have you heard from him?"
Some would shed a tear, which meant, you know, what had happened to them.
Wages were good and some of the public resented this.
They thought the girls were forgetting their place.
We, as munition workers, were heartily disliked by the public.
People would look at you and say, "Huh! One of those munition workers."
Anything derogatory that could be said about you was said about you.
It was very uncomfortable sometimes.
And, um, I think, as a rule,
the idea was that you made such enormous amounts of money,
and other people didn't.
The most dangerous work was filling shells with explosive, or making the explosive itself.
The clothing we wore was fireproof, the shoes were fireproof,
and every time we went out to a meal we had to take all our fireproof clothing off
and put on outdoor clothing, which took time from our dinner hour.
We were searched when we returned in case of cigarettes and matches,
or pins, etc.
Once or twice we heard that so-and-so had gone.
Perhaps she'd made a mistake and her eye was out.
But there wasn't any big explosion all the time I was there.
We sang, we made the little pellets. Very innocent looking,
but had there been the slightest grit in those pellets, goodbye.
We got home and we had a lovely, good wash.
And, believe me, the water was blood red, and our skin was perfectly yellow,
right down through the body, legs and toes and toenails even,
perfectly yellow.
These women were called canaries.
Their devotion was essential to the success of Lloyd George's armaments programme.
They were also the cause of one of the toughest problems in 1915.
The men, the trade unions, saw them as a threat.
A threat to privileges built up painfully over decades
and jealously guarded.
Unskilled women working machines were a threat to traditional craft skills and methods.
They were a threat to the future livelihood of men.
Employers could make huge profits out of the war.
The unions fought hard against the introduction of unskilled workers. Dilution, it was called.
Resolved: that we refuse to entertain the proposal to allow the introduction of semi-skilled workers
on work done by qualified mechanics.
Resolved: that no woman shall be put to work a lathe,
and if this is done the men will know how to protect their rights.
Each month of 1915 the number of strikes rose
from 47 in February to 63 in May.
The disputes over dilution took place again a history of 100 years of bitter industrial struggle.
For the first time, the trade unions no longer represented the underdog.
Now, there was full employment.
The workers were essential to the national effort.
For the first time, cabinet ministers negotiated as equals with trade unionists.
It was yet another revolution.
It took a firm promise that pre-war methods would be restored at the peace.
Together with an act of Parliament controlling the whole field of arms production,
before the trade unions accepted dilution.
To Lloyd George, drink was another enemy,
insidiously undermining his campaign for higher production.
Beer could be bought all day.
Was this not a peril to efficiency?
Was it not a cause of absenteeism?
A new war regulation limited pub opening hours.
And so life was changed in yet another way by the need for shells and guns.
A slow business, a hard task to uproot the habits of a nation steeped in tradition,
over-affectionate towards old customs.
Yet the King, symbol of one of Britain's most revered traditions,
helped the change forward.
He toured the industrial areas without fuss or pomp,
to persuade the workers that they were performing national service.
"Without shells, we cannot hope to win," he told them.
As an example, he signed the pledge, and alcohol vanished from the Royal household.
He visited the wounded and the homes of their families.
The King spared no effort to bind the people and monarchy together by shared experience.
But the impatient war was clamorous with needs.
Soldiers paid with their lives when design or manufacture faltered.
The money was raised by five shillings a week for everybody.
Then they introduced a bonus system.
You filled so many shells, and after that amount had been filled,
you got a bonus for how many more you filled.
This was a very bad thing really, because it led to carelessness.
People were not careful,
the shells would come back to us as either too heavy or too light.
And that was, of course, a very bad thing because they might fall short when they were fired.
Our high explosive for 18 pounders is so unreliable that we cannot use it in large quantities.
We have lost 36 guns in a month by premature explosions.
This represents the highest percentage of bursts suffered by any side in this war.
Even by the end of the year most of the shells were the result of orders placed under the war office system,
which Lloyd George had so attacked.
A third of them came from US and Canadian factories.
Not until 1916 could Lloyd George's programme produce war material in overflowing abundance.
Nevertheless, the British were rousing themselves.
Civilians and soldiers, industrial as well as military might,
the Allies were moving into total war.