III.—Ship-building and Dockyard Workers.
I have been asked to explain how I got rid of 6,000 redundant Dockyard workmen, when Mr. Childers nearly wrecked his Government by turning out but a few hundred. Well, this was how it was done. We brought home some 160 ships from abroad that could neither fight nor run away; enough men were thus provided for the fighting portion of the crews for all the new ships then lying in the Dockyards, which were not only deteriorating in their hulls and equipment for want of care, but were inefficient for war because officers and men must have practice in the ship they fight as much as the Bisley shot with his rifle, the jockey with his race-horse and the chef with his sauces. It is practice that makes perfect. The original plan for mobilising the Navy for war was that on the outbreak of war you disorganised the ships already fully manned and efficient by taking a portion of the trained crew, thus impairing the efficiency of that ship, and putting them into the un-manned ships and filling up both the old and the new—the former efficient ships and those in the dockyards—with men from the Reserve. So the whole Navy got disorganised. And that was what they called “Preparing for War!” By what Mr. Balfour called a courageous stroke of the pen, in his speech at Manchester, when he was Prime Minister, every vessel in the Fleet by the new system had its fighting crew complete.
Those who were to fill up the hiatus were the hewers of wood and the drawers of water. The brains were there; only the beef had to come, and the beef might have been taken from the Army.
When are we going to have the great Army and Navy Co-operative Society, which I set forth to King Edward in 1903—that the Army should be a Reserve for the Navy? When shall we be an amphibious nation? This last war has made us into a conscript Nation.
Well, to revert to the subject of how we got rid of the 6,000 redundant dockyard workmen. When that mass of Officers and men set free by the scrapping of the 160 ships that couldn’t fight nor run away came back to Chatham, Portsmouth, Devonport, Pembroke, and Queenstown, then in those dockyard towns the tradesmen had the time of their lives, for the money that had flowed into the pockets of the Chinese, the Chileans, the Peruvians, the Boers, the Brazilians, made the shopkeepers of the dockyard towns into a mass of Liptons, so that when the 6,000 Dockyard workers tried, as they had done in the time of yore (in the time of Childers), to get the dockyard tradespeople to agitate and turn out their Members of Parliament, the tradespeople simply replied, “You be damned!” and I arranged to find congenial occupation for these redundant dockyard workmen in private yards where they were much needed.
When I became Admiral Superintendent of Portsmouth Dockyard, I took another drastic step in concentrating all the workmen then leisurely building several different ships, and put them all like a hive of bees on to one ship and extended piece-work to the utmost limit that was conceivable. The result was that a battleship which would have taken three years to build was built in one year; for the work of building a ship is so interlaced, when they are working by piece-work especially, that if one man does not work his fellow workmen cannot earn so much, so this piece-work helps the overseers because the men oversee each other.
But there is another great principle which this hides. The one great secret of the fighting value of a battleship is to get her to sea quickly:—
“Build few, and build fast,
Each one better than the last.”
You will come across some idiots whose minds are so deliciously symmetrical that they would prefer ten tortoises to one greyhound to catch a hare, and it was one of the principal articles of the ancient creed that you built ships in batches. They strained at the gnat of uniformity and so swallowed the camel of inferiority. No progress—they were a batch.