A GIRL ENGINEER

Evening Star, Issue 16624, 5 January 1918, Page 5

A GIRL ENGINEER

WHO CONTROLS 6,000 WOMEN WORKERS. •One of our great engineers of tho war, a man who makes everything from a battleship to an aeroplane engino, showed me the other day his latest creation, an engineering university for women (states a correspondent of the 'Daily Mail'). Away in the hills by tho side of a tumbling, foaming salmon river a model factory has been built with its four tiers of ferro-concreto floors and great glasssided walls. Comparatively small as factories go nowadays, it is yet built with the idea .of taking 300 girl students. "We only opened eight months ago," the engineer founder told me, " and our pupils to-day number 60. It is a factory entirely for women, run by and to a "large extent managed by women. With tho exception of two men instructors the women do every bit of the work." I found the entire ground floor of the factory, which is given up to the production of parts of high-power aeroplane engines, the last word in modern "shops" and the cleanest and brightest I have ever been in. Here tho girls were working under their works' superintendent, a tall and essentially feminine woman, who took her mathematical tripos from Newnham College, was lecturer at one of our great girls' public schools, and has had much engineering experience in Canada and England since the war. " We have just the right class of girl," she told me, " all well educated, and most of them university girls. With tho exception of four or five, officers' wives who are hero for war work, all are intent upon taking up engineering as a profession. We have proved that women can set, up the most complicated machines." The workers rank as women engineer apprentices. The hours are 44 per week. The first six months are probationary, with remuneration at 20s a week. An agreement for three years is then entered upon, and the wages begin at 25s a week, and afterwards 5s a week increase as tho result of examination. " This college is the result of the enthusiasm of a young girl for her father's profession," the founder told me. Later in the day I saw this girl in her parent's home in the Scottish bills, haying her first week-end home for many months. Now only 23, sihe is controlling 6,000 women at a certain place in England far from here.' Her women are working on submarines, 'guns, aircraft ,and all manners of munitions of war. The daughter of English and French parents, brought up in the environment of engineering works of France and Scotland, she ma.de up her mind when she left school that she would bo an engineer, and begged her father, the managing director of a large works, to let her go into his shop. " I just flatly refused," said her father. "I told her that no woman could be an engineer, and that she had better learn shorthand. Well, she did that to please me—and—well, 1 had to let her go into the works to please her. That was two years before the war."