Recent by-election defeats had been attributed to the National Insurance legislation, and the immediate pre-war Budget had run into opposition on proposed grants to local authorities as a means of offsetting a rise in income tax to pay for more Admiralty expenditure. The Speaker of the Commons had even ruled that it did not appear to be a ‘money bill’ as defined by the Parliament Act. Lloyd George was no longer necessarily an automatic choice as Asquith's likely successor and, as late as May 1915, he may well have been more intent on galvanising Asquith than on displacing him. In the country as a whole, however, Lloyd George remained popular. Churchill, when writing to his brother, Jack, after his demotion from the Admiralty to Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, remarked of Lloyd George, ‘His successive failures in the Anti-Marconi, Anti-Navy, Anti-War and Prohibition operations do not seem at all to have affected his prestige or morale.’15 Lloyd George always prided himself on his ability to interpret and represent the people's will. Certainly, his eloquence and willingness to talk to anyone made him especially successful as a negotiator with employers and unions.
Facing what he saw as the ‘surly, suspicious, and hostile’ attitude of the War Office to the new creation, the Ministry of Munitions, Lloyd George himself later wrote that ‘it was for me a wilderness of risks with no oasis in sight’.16 Going to the building allocated to him, 6 Whitehall Gardens, Lloyd George found just two tables and a chair. He managed to keep the chair and one of the tables when men from the Office of Works arrived to remove even these, as not belonging to the new department. According to Lloyd George, he would work on his papers for an hour or two before breakfast, which generally served as an opportunity for meeting important visitors. He would then arrive at Whitehall Gardens at about 0900 hours to deal with correspondence, and to see departmental heads before a working lunch. Afternoons and evenings would be given over to parliamentary business, though the Cabinet would also often meet in the morning. There were also the constant tours to meet manufacturers and labour representatives around the country. No one could accuse Lloyd George of a lack of energy. One of his first decisions at the new ministry was to undertake what amounted to a mandatory industrial census, some 45,000 forms being returned to Whitehall within a month.
Despite Lloyd George's lack of office furniture, a ministry did exist in embryonic form. It was a merger between the Armaments Output Committee, the Munitions of War Committee and the War Office's Munitions Supply Organisation, over which von Donop presided as Master General of the Ordnance. As a ministry, it lacked a staff. Accordingly, it was largely manned by Lloyd George's introduction of ‘men of push and go’ and ‘hustlers’ brought from business into administration. Lloyd George first used the phrase when speaking on the amended Defence of the Realm legislation on 9 March 1915. Kitchener had begun the process, hiring figures such as George Booth and the scientist Lord Moulton, who was asked to help develop new high explosives and propellants. Lloyd George made over ninety further appointments, a system extended throughout Whitehall when he became prime minister in December 1916. Given Lloyd George's unsystematic ways of doing business, Booth found it necessary to write down what Lloyd George said to him, and then get Lloyd George to sign his concurrence. In practice, since there were not enough civil servants available, most of the new ministry's regional and local functions were also devolved to businessmen with ten district headquarters’ offices and over fifty local boards of management that could place contracts directly with manufacturers.
Not all such businessmen were efficient administrators, and some undoubtedly forgot that they were not acting as personal representatives of either their industries or their firms. Eric Geddes, brought in from the North-Eastern Railway Company as Deputy Director of Munitions Supply, was to prove particularly successful, going on to be Director General of Transportation for the BEF in 1916, and Controller of the Navy, and then First Lord of the Admiralty in 1917. Some able civil servants were also found for the ministry, including Sir Hubert Llewellyn Smith from the Board of Trade and William Beveridge. There was certainly resentment of businessmen from Whitehall insiders. In turn, business came to question the degree to which government appeared to bow to labour demands to keep production going.
The sheer size of the bureaucracy created some confusion, compounded by the failure both to keep more than rudimentary staff records and to grade staff adequately. Responsibility for labour relations was also partly vested in the Admiralty, the War Office and the Board of Trade, as well as the new Ministry of Labour after 1916. In some respects the War Office and the ministry continued to compete for manpower until a fully fledged manpower policy was finally – and belatedly – adopted in December 1917. As an administrative machine, the ministry also worked rather better under his successors than under Lloyd George himself, for he was as improvisational as his men of ‘push and go’. Nevertheless, in the fifteen months Lloyd George was at its helm, the Ministry of Munitions developed a highly innovative approach in such areas as managerial organisation, cost accounting, pooling of industrial research, welfare provision, electrification, mass production techniques, machine tooling and automation. It encouraged a substantial increase in the number of more efficient arc furnaces within the iron and steel industry. It was responsible not just for ammunition and shells, but also for the production of weapons, and all those other commodities such as machine tools, mineral oils and building materials required for their production.
Science was harnessed for the war effort through the Munitions Inventions Department established by Lloyd George in August 1915. Some ideas proposed, such as training cormorants to peck away the mortar on the chimneys at the Krupps armaments factory in Essen, were patently ludicrous. Subsequently, more worthwhile scientific research was undertaken, largely in collaboration with private firms, though Lloyd George tended to take credit for work already initiated by the War Office. Although initially turned down, the successful Stokes trench mortar developed by Wilfred Stokes of Ransomes & Rapier Ltd was eventually ordered by the War Office in September 1915: Lloyd George then greatly increased the orders. A better instance of the ministry's initiative was its response to the loss of German imports of optical instruments. This seriously affected production of such vital equipment as rangefinders, prompting the ministry to provide British firms with capital investment, and scientific and technical assistance sufficient to boost production. The 4 tons of optical glass a month being produced by 1918 was equivalent to twice the world's peacetime consumption four years earlier. Whole industrial sectors such as the gas, coke and dye industries were effectively taken over by requisitioning their entire output for the duration of the war.
The ministry commandeered raw materials, centralised foreign purchases and dealt in the import market, bringing in Indian mica, Greek magnesite and Swedish ball bearings. The ministry's post-war official history proclaimed that it had become the ‘largest buying and the largest selling concern in the world, with a turnover amounting to hundreds of millions yearly’.17 There were eventually over 25,000 employees in 50 departments, the majority women. By 1918, the ministry directly managed 250 government factories and supervised another 20,000 ‘controlled’ establishments, and it had spent £2 billion. New factories, specially constructed on newly acquired land, included fifteen National Projectile Factories, fifteen National Filling Factories and four National Cartridge Factories. Peaceful rural landscapes gave way to ‘an extensive industrial blistering, showing itself in acres of corrugated iron, and the gathering together of great populations engaged, as was obvious from their hands and complexions, in chemical processes quite foreign to the genius loci’.18 The National Filling Factory at Barnbow near Leeds alone covered over 400 acres, employed 16,000 workers and produced 6,000 shells a day.
Certainly, the need to find alternative sources of labour, and the resulting difficulties of dilution, meant that the restrictive practices of the pre-war skilled unions had to be tackled head on. Government determination of manpower policies, in turn, led to direc
t involvement in labour relations. War distorted the normal working of the labour market, restructuring it in complex ways, yet without changing pre-war labour cultures or organisations, and also exacerbating pre-war sources of militancy in areas such as industrial restructuring and the challenge to skills. The premium put on skilled manpower gave labour an increased bargaining position. The voluntary agreements of March 1915 were incorporated in the statutory provisions of the Munitions of War Act in June 1915, which effectively suspended trade-union rules and restrictive practices in the munitions industry for the duration. It tied workers to their place of employment, preventing them from working for six weeks unless they obtained a leaving certificate from an employer first. Trade-union leaderships were nominated as the means through which government would negotiate for dilution and changes in working practices. Strikes on war-related work were now deemed illegal, and arbitration made compulsory.
The new regulations were naturally more easily applied in the ministry's own national shell and filling factories. Ultimately, rising food prices, higher rents, restricted labour mobility and wartime profiteering all contributed to growing discontent on the factory floor. Employers were generally encouraged to buy their way out of difficulties in face of the increasing shop-floor collective action organised by shop stewards. Lloyd George readily conceded national pay bargaining to the leaders of South Wales miners, who went on strike in July 1915. In the case of unrest on the Clyde over the winter of 1915–16, the concession of rent control, in an area where labour migration had led to a housing shortage and forced up rents, isolated the Clyde Workers Committee (CWC). The fact that the Clyde engineers were widely perceived within the labour movement as an elite also helped the government break the committee by the arrest and deportation of ten of its leaders from the Clyde in March 1916. Visiting the Clyde over Christmas 1915, Lloyd George received a rowdy reception: the soon to be suppressed Independent Labour Party journal, Forward, described him as Britain's ‘best paid munitions worker’.19
Unwelcome though it may have been to employers and labour, state intervention in industry was unavoidable, and the Ministry of Munitions led the way in that process. The government fought shy of labour conscription as opposed to military conscription, but the demands placed on labour, as much as those placed on those compelled to fight, required appropriate reward to strengthen the cohesion of the ‘home front’. Here, too, the Ministry of Munitions pioneered the extension of the limited pre-war state and private welfare provision, while also bringing novel intrusions by the state into the lives of the working class as consumers, through such means as liquor control, rationing and rent control. The Factory Acts were waived for the duration of the war, but from September 1915 onwards the Health of Munitions Workers Committee of the Ministry of Munitions, chaired initially by the Quaker industrialist Seebohm Rowntree, was empowered to inspect working premises. Over 900 factory canteens were established from the proceeds of an excess profits tax. The ministry employed welfare supervisors, and also set up cloakrooms and washing facilities. There was a small number of day nurseries, since there was some ambivalence when it came to married women in work. The ministry provided facilities for its own employees, and spent some £4.3 million on housing, building 10,000 permanent homes on 38 sites such as the Well Hall estate in Woolwich, at Eltham, and at Gretna, since commercial builders had little incentive to provide low-cost housing. Women working in the production of TNT (trinitrotoluene) were provided with a free daily pint of milk in the (mistaken) belief that it nullified its toxicity.
Women clearly did run the risk of TNT poisoning, from which 109 died during the war. There were also industrial accidents such as the explosion at the National Filling Factory at Barnbow that killed thirty-five women on 5 December 1916. Another thirty-five women died in an explosion at Chilwell in July 1918. Some seventeen women were among the sixty-nine fatalities in a massive explosion at the Brunner Mond Chemical Works at Silvertown in East London in January 1917, though most of these were nearby residents since the explosion took place after the end of the working day. Over 1,000 people were injured, and the hot metal fragments strewn over a large area damaged an estimated 70,000 houses: it was said that the blast was heard as far away as Cambridge.
The increasing presence of women in the industrial workforce was itself also a result of the ministry's efforts. Before the war, the most common employment for women had been in domestic service, accounting for approximately a quarter of the female workforce. The majority of women who were employed were single and working class. Even among the working class, the expectation was that most women would cease employment upon marriage. The war did not immediately lead to an increase in the female workforce because the first recourse to employers, as men enlisted or war-related business expanded, was to unemployed males. Women were also worse hit than men by the initial increase in unemployment due to economic uncertainty, so that Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst organised a major ‘Women's Right to Serve’ demonstration in London on 17 July 1915 with some 30,000 participants behind banners proclaiming ‘Women's Battle Cry is Work, Work, Work’. It was the Ministry of Munitions that then championed positive recruitment of women to meet labour shortages, particularly after the introduction of military conscription in January 1916. It became almost fashionable for even middle-class and upper-class women to contemplate becoming a ‘munitionette’, although they were very much in the minority. Much of the expansion of women's employment occurred in commerce rather than industrial occupations: perhaps only 800,000 women came into the latter. Women in munitions were not necessarily new to employment, but lured from more traditional employment by the better pay. At the Gretna national cordite factory, some 80 per cent of the female labour force had been previously employed, with 36 per cent having been in domestic service. At Armstrong Whitworth's on the Tyne, 71 per cent had previously been employed, 20 per cent in domestic service. The overall increase of between 1.4 and 1.6 million women in paid employment between 1914 and 1918 also partly reflected the return of married women to work.
Wartime work, therefore, was not a novel experience for many women. Nonetheless, the disquieting flight of women from domestic service, the increased purchasing power available to ‘munitionettes’, and their working-class origins resulted in accusations of selfishness and extravagance. Wartime propaganda – as reflected in the Women's War Work Collection initiated by the Ministry of Munitions and subsequently placed in the Imperial War Museum – also exaggerated the extent of dilution. Unions and employers alike resisted dilution, and women were employed for very specific functions. It was also more widespread in controlled rather than uncontrolled establishments. Only about 23 per cent of the women who came into the munitions industry were actually doing men's work. Munitions work certainly did not mean equal pay for women, which government and unions alike also resisted. However liberating for some individual women, their wartime work was always seen as a cheap source of easily exploitable labour, which could be dispensed with in peacetime. At the end of the war, therefore, the number of women in employment declined rapidly. Two-thirds of those who had entered employment during the war had left it by 1920.
In so many ways, as the pulsating heart of a war economy, the Ministry of Munitions had transformed the relationship between state and society. Like other wartime creations, it disappeared after the war, but many of its practical industrial innovations survived, as did the memory of its achievements: in the Second World War, Beaverbrook was to model the Ministry of Aircraft Production on the Ministry of Munitions. Nor could the legacy of ‘big’ government and state intervention be entirely forgotten, even though the government was forced to keep its pledges to the unions on post-war restoration of the status quo in labour relations. The ministry's creation had not solved all the difficulties of industrial mobilisation immediately, and inevitably Lloyd George claimed credit for much that he did not initiate himself. There was no denying the ministry's overall success. From a situation in which only 500,000 shells were
produced in 1914, the British munitions industry produced 76.2 million shells in 1917. By 1916, the Ministry of Munitions could produce in just three weeks what had been a year's production of eighteen-pounder shells in 1914: a year's pre-war production of medium shells took eleven days and a year's pre-war production of heavy shells just four days. The shift in emphasis that Lloyd George had made towards the production of heavy artillery was also in itself of enormous significance in a war increasingly dominated by the guns. By 1918, 61 per cent of the entire male industrial labour force was employed on war work of some kind.
Above all, the Ministry of Munitions secured Lloyd George's reputation as a dynamic man of ‘push and go’ himself. In the spring of 1916 Asquith tasked him with trying to find a solution to the deteriorating situation in Ireland following the Easter Rising in Dublin. On 6 June 1916, Kitchener was drowned along with 643 crew members when the cruiser taking him on a diplomatic visit to Russia, HMS Hampshire, struck a mine off Marwick Head in the Orkneys. Having lost control of munitions, the Secretary of State for War had been further marginalised by the appointment of Sir William Robertson as Chief of the General Staff in December 1915, and as the Cabinet's principal strategic adviser. Asquith and his colleagues were more than happy to see a discredited Kitchener accept an invitation to visit Russia in June 1916. His successor at the War Office was Lloyd George. Six months later Asquith too had been displaced and Lloyd George was prime minister. As Lloyd George himself had remarked in the House of Commons in March 1915, ‘Instead of business as usual, we want victory as usual.’20
The Making of the First World War Page 11