A City in Wartime
Page 22
Perhaps even more telling was a letter in the Irish Independent from Sergeant R. Walsh of the Royal Irish Rifles, home on leave, who expressed his disgust after attending a rally in Waterford where he saw ‘strapping fellows of respectable appearance pummelling and beating young girls, even if the girls were in the wrong,’ for heckling Redmond as he sought to simultaneously condemn the British government’s reaction to the rising and urge continuing support for the war. Sergeant Walsh added that there was plenty of fighting in Flanders for those who wanted it.6
The daily ‘roll of honour’ in the newspapers and the steady stream of casualties arriving on the hospital ships provided cogent reasons why many hesitated to volunteer, whatever their political convictions. By the end of 1916 the volume of casualties disembarking in Dublin led to sheltered gangways being built so that the wounded, and especially those who had to be brought off on stretchers, could be carried directly from the hospital ships to the ambulances without being exposed to winter weather.7
By early 1917 another problem threatening to overwhelm the medical services was the spread of consumption (TB) in the trenches. It was a health problem with which Dublin was very familiar. Although the rate of infection had fallen gradually over the previous decade, because of initiatives by Sir Charles Cameron and Lady Aberdeen’s Women’s National Health Association, it still accounted for 1,300 deaths a year in the city. Now the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Help Society appealed for assistance with men being discharged with TB, much of it the result of gas poisoning. Of 1,100 disabled soldiers and sailors on the society’s books in Dublin in February 1917, fewer than half had been found employment, and 114 of the 600 unable to find work had TB. The honorary secretary of the society, Miss P. A. White, told the Irish Times: ‘That there should be a want of means to carry on this work effectively and render less intolerable the shortened lives of those who have fought for us cannot, I am sure, be the wish of their fellow countrymen.’ One suspects that the appeal struck a chill chord among potential recruits.8
Her experience is borne out by research into First World War dead at Glasnevin Cemetery by Shane Mac Thomáis. This shows that more than half of those whose records he examined died of respiratory diseases, mainly TB and influenza, compared with fewer than one-twentieth as a result of battlefield wounds. Of course these were men who made it home to die. Like the growing number of maimed veterans who survived, they offered a warning of their possible fate to would-be recruits.9
Growing suspicion of the loyalty of Irish units by the military establishment must have had an even more insidious effect on recruitment. The poet Francis Ledwidge, who enlisted in 1914, told his brother that he didn’t want to fight the Germans any more, even if they came into his back yard. There were increasing reports of weapons and other equipment going missing. According to F. E. Whitton, historian of the Leinster Regiment, on 4 November 1917 the Irish Volunteers brought a barge up the Grand Canal to the rear of Wellington Barracks (later Griffith Barracks, now Griffith College) on the South Circular Road, and ‘every rifle’ was handed through the railings and loaded onto the vessel. While this is certainly an exaggeration, the consequences were that ‘the command decided they couldn’t trust the Irish regiments. They brought over an English regiment to replace each Irish unit and we were put back on the boats that they came over on.’10
Another reason why recruitment failed to revive after 1916 was the increasing range of employment opportunities in England. Conscription had stripped vital war industries of manpower, and the shortage was so great that in September the Army Council issued a circular that migrant workers employed in those industries would be exempt from conscription. As an added safeguard, any Irish worker who obtained a job through the labour exchange system would receive a card that would be accepted as evidence by the police and military authorities that they normally resided in Ireland. The only condition was that any man losing his job must return home. Even if other work was available he would have to reapply through his labour exchange in Ireland to retain protection from conscription.
Table 7
Recruitment to British armed forces and war industries after Irish labourers given protection from conscription
Even so, rumours abounded that ‘hundreds of men’ were being arrested. At Alfie Byrne’s insistence, the corporation made ‘an emphatic protest’ to the British government at these alleged breaches of the guarantee that excluded Irish workers from the Military Service Act.11 Some migrant workers returned anyway because of the public hostility they encountered after the rising, especially Dubliners in Liverpool and seasonal workers in Scotland.12
Neil O’Flanagan suggests, from an examination of labour exchange records, that between forty and fifty thousand workers, the great majority of them men, migrated to Britain for work. In December 1916, by which time the scheme providing protection from conscription was in full swing, Dublin labour exchanges were providing 30 per cent of total Irish manpower to the British war economy. In 1917 the city provided 5,023 out of 19,551 Irish workers, or 26 per cent; in 1918 it provided 3,370 out of 14,656, or 23 per cent. By contrast, there were 3,089 enlistments in 1917 and 3,990 in 1918. The increase in recruitment in 1918 is probably attributable in part to declining opportunities for war work but also to the potential new employment opportunities available to men enlisting in specialist units, such as signals, transport and the Royal Flying Corps (in 1918 reconstituted as the Royal Air Force). Here they could learn a useful trade without being shot at. There was a saying in the Dublin building trades that it was easier for a brickie’s labourer to become Lord Mayor than to become a bricklayer. This nepotistic culture made access to the trades a closely guarded privilege. The British army provided an escape route from permanent membership of the ranks of the unskilled.
Another reason for the declining numbers seeking war work in Britain was that by 1918 Dublin had finally secured some war industries of its own.
It had been a long struggle. Unlike Belfast, there was little in the way of industry suitable for conversion to war work in 1914. As late as 1917 pressure was being exerted by labour exchanges on unemployed workers to accept jobs in Britain. In December 1916 the Dublin Trades Council complained that unemployed craft workers were being denied benefit unless they were willing to work in war industries as labourers.13
The obvious question was why Dublin did not get its ‘fair share’ of war industries. A number of enthusiasts, including the economist E. J. Riordan, involved themselves in the All-Ireland Munitions Committee but found it as difficult to arouse Irish manufacturers to exploit opportunities as it was for the War Office to offer them. When a conference was organised for saddlery and harness firms in Dublin in September 1914 only seven out of a possible twenty companies attended. All seven landed lucrative contracts.
Another problem was that Irish samples and supplies had to be sent to Britain, adding to transport and marketing costs. The Dublin Chamber of Commerce raised the matter with the War Office in March 1915, but progress was slow, and the chamber itself did not establish an Armaments Committee to lobby for war contracts until June 1915.14 A samples depot was not established until December 1916, operating from the Irish War Office in Dawson Street; a receiving depot for Irish war supplies did not materialise in Dublin until the war was nearly over, in October 1918.
The Minister of Munitions, David Lloyd George, was far more dynamic in providing war work for Dublin—in the shape of a munitions factory—than Irish businesses were in seeking it out, making a commitment to build a munitions factory even before he met a deputation from the Dublin Armaments Committee headed by Patrick Leonard, president of the chamber of commerce, in March 1916.15 Nor did he allow the rising to disrupt his production schedule. By June 1916 the large-scale production of 9.2-inch shells and fuses had begun at the National Shell Factory in Parkgate Street. In August the committee was informed that full production would be achieved by October. In September the Ministry of Munitions established a branch office in Dublin to co-or
dinate Irish production, and the plant was meeting its initial targets shortly afterwards. The Dublin Munitions Committee now concluded that its services were no longer required, and remaining funds were used to meet the expenses of the members.
It appears that poor local management ability was a more significant problem for the minister than the rebels. Two English inspectors reported that Irish factories were poorly run and, unlike their British counterparts, could not be adapted to post-war production. As Neil O’Flanagan has pointed out, ‘the replacement of the management … by directors sent over from England added salt to the wounds.’
Nevertheless the factories provided a much-needed boost to the local economy. By March 1919 the National Shell Factory in Dublin had manufactured half a million shells, worth £569,000, and fuses worth another £98,000. It accounted for 80 per cent of all munitions produced in Irish shell factories and employed the largest proportion of their 2,148 workers, the great majority of them women.16
The other bright spot on the horizon was the Dublin Dockyard Company, run by two Scottish shipbuilders, Walter Scott and John Smellie.17 The Dublin Trades Council and the newly constituted Dublin Port and Docks Board supported the establishment of the business in 1901, both bodies being keen to promote desperately needed local employment. A wise decision to agree Glasgow rates with the unions provided a ready-made formula for pay adjustments that secured industrial peace for many years.
At first the yard provided a ship repair and overhaul service for the seven thousand vessels using the port each year. Later it began to build small to medium-sized steamers, including the fishery protection vessel Helga, converted for anti-submarine warfare after the war began but best remembered as the gunboat sent up the Liffey to shell Liberty Hall during the Easter Rising.18 With the outbreak of war the yard’s owners displayed characteristic commercial acumen by securing one of the first war contracts, on 23 September 1914. It was for the repair of Royal Navy ships and any other vessels designated by the Admiralty. Trawler patrol escorts, minesweepers, destroyers, submarines and troop transports were among the vessels serviced, and the yard expanded into supplying and fitting gun platforms, guns, wireless cabins, submarine direction-finders, minelaying appliances, depth-charge throwers, paravanes (for deflecting mines from the hulls of vessels) and battle practice targets.
Shipping losses proved good news for the yard. The Dublin Port and Docks Board provided extra workshop space and water frontage for the creation of two new building berths. This allowed the Dublin Dockyard Company to supply high-demand vessels of 3,000 to 5,000 tons to the Ministry of Shipping. The move was not without its opponents. Representatives of the shipping industry on the board strongly opposed handing over the facilities, leading to accusations from public representatives across the political spectrum that vested interests wanted to keep out competition.
The trades council threw its weight behind the proposal ‘to grant these facilities to an industry of so great an importance to Dublin and Ireland.’ The position of the shipping companies and brokers was ultimately untenable in a situation where the shortage of shipping was choking the commercial life of the city, as well as preventing the creation of badly needed jobs.19 Once the opposition was overcome, the yard’s expansion in 1917 was so successful that the company had one of its vessels, the c5 collier, adopted by the Admiralty as a standard model for other yards.20 The firm also diversified into munitions through its subsidiary, Dublin Dockyard War Munitions Company, which produced 50,000 shells for the British army’s eighteen-pounder guns.
The company gave the same care and attention to recruitment, working conditions and staff relations as it did to everything else. Within a month of the start of the war it introduced a levy on employees for the Prince of Wales National Relief Fund. This fund was established to channel all charitable donations for relieving distress into one central agency. According to Smellie, employees agreed unanimously to contribute to the fund. The amounts varied from 6d to 1s a week, depending on earnings. In some instances, where men were heavily dependent on piece work, the contribution amounted to 2½ per cent of earnings. The readiness of employees to contribute was probably due in part to supervision by a committee on which all the shipyard trades were represented. Even members of the IRB, Irish Volunteers and Citizen Army, who worked in the yard in significant numbers (and used the facilities to secretly manufacture munitions), would not have wanted to appear mean. There were also significant numbers of skilled workers from Belfast and British yards. Nor did political allegiances overrule financial sense: three times as much was subscribed by employees to war bond schemes as for relief.21
The Dublin Dockyard Company’s decision to branch out into munitions preceded the establishment of the National Shell Factory; but there was plenty of work to go round. Smellie wrote later in his history of the yard: ‘It was determined to make the factory a model one … and with this in view visits were made to several private plants in England … and the best features of each incorporated in the designs.’ The factory was built of wood, ‘with a saw-tooth roof admitting abundance of light.’ The machines were laid out in rows, with wide corridors to allow easy and rapid movement of the raw materials as they were transformed from steel bars into shells.
However, ‘the getting of suitable girl labour appeared in the early stages to be a difficulty of some moment, as the contract with the Ministry of Munitions permitted only 5 per cent of the total staff to be men or boys, and included in this … were shift foremen, tool setters, tool makers and any other male labour.’ Although Dublin lacked the large reservoirs of female factory labour available in British cities, the misgivings proved groundless.
The 200 girls employed soon became highly efficient, and were quick in adapting themselves to machine work, and to all the engineering operations of shell turning, including working to gauge limits of but one or two thousandths of an inch. It was perfectly amazing to note with what deftness of hand and eye a cut was made so accurate in judgement as to satisfy forthwith the limit gauges without resort to the usual trial and error process of cut upon cut.
The first batch of ‘a dozen chosen young ladies’ was sent to the Vickers plant at Barrow-in-Furness for six weeks’ instruction, then returned to train the rest of the workers. Soon productivity was so high that the output was three thousand shells per week rather than the two thousand guaranteed by the machine manufacturers. To achieve this target the women worked alternate twelve-hour shifts on piecework rates that maximised output, and they were not likely to strike.22
Despite the efforts of men like Smellie, the Dublin munitions factories failed to keep pace with best practice as advised by the Health Committee of the Ministry of Munitions. Experience showed that twelve-hour shifts lowered productivity and caused increased sickness and absenteeism, as well as putting ‘severe mental strain’ on managerial staff. Workers on long shifts also experienced an ‘increased temptation to indulge in the consumption of alcohol.’
Of course the Irish industry was much smaller than its British counterpart, and the women lived locally, unlike Britain, where they often spent up to five hours commuting. Nor do the Dublin factories appear to have experienced the same wide social mix as the British work force, which listed in its ranks ‘dress makers, laundry workers, textile workers, domestic servants, clerical workers, shop assistants, university and art students—women and girls in fact of every social grade,’ although one group that was given preferential treatment in Dublin when it came to recruitment was soldiers’ dependants, especially wives and widows.23
Far from flocking to the National Shell Factories to seek gainful employment, many middle-class Dublin women devoted themselves to charitable war work organised by the Irish Munitions Workers’ Canteen Committee; apparently the social stigma of factory work outweighed the lucrative earnings. The Canteen Committee provided subsidised meals in the Dublin Dockyard and National Shell factories. In the canteens every worker received a free cup of tea and bun at the start of each shif
t. Items such as tea, coffee, cocoa, sandwiches and sausage rolls cost 1d, while a freshly cooked salmon served on a plate with fresh vegetables cost 5d. The social work model in the factories was based on the British system. This relied on Voluntary Aid Detachment networks and ‘knitters’, who operated under Mrs Hignett, the head knitter for Dublin, who had been trained personally in England by Lady Lawrence, founder of the movement. The planning was meticulous. Based on a realisation that providing subsidised meals helped raise morale as well as reducing the absenteeism caused by malnourishment and associated health problems, it provided useful war work for VAD volunteers who lacked the skills needed for other roles.
The committees of ‘knitters’ did everything possible to make the munitions workers’ dinner hour ‘jolly,’ the Women’s Work columnist of the Irish Times reported. Before they had finished their meal the workers would be
waiting to hear the news read to them. They always clamoured for this and then listened to the gramophone or sang and danced before filing back to their war work. At tea time they were back for half an hour and it seemed no time again, so crowded with work were the hours for the canteen workers before the hot supper was ready for the new hundreds on the night shift, every one of whom knew the mighty difference between all night work on a parcel of food eaten ‘where they could’ and this new regime in which delicious meals served by devoted women in attractive canteens serve to break up the hours of hard munitions work … The steaming food, the flowers, the dance, the gramophone, and the rest when necessary, all combined to vastly increase the output of shells and cartridges. If any ladies seek employment at war work of a wholesome and ennobling character they cannot do better than enrol in Mrs. Hignett’s army of workers.24